by Michelle Njuguna
Definition
Language ideologies are widely held beliefs about language use, users and practices.
Description
Language ideologies stem from different societal, cultural and personal beliefs that are spread across a community and are then implanted into other minds. The concept of language ideologies is connected to other concepts such as language policing and the linguistic marketplace.
An aspect of language ideologies is that they almost always serve the interests of a group. Which shows how language ideologies can be positive and/or negative while on one side it is negative towards one group the same ideology can positively impact another group.
Another aspect of language ideologies is that they are shared beliefs held by a large group of people. This is where the language ideologies gain their power, due to so many people believing in it, it gains a more powerful impact than if not that many people shared the belief.
There is also the aspect that language ideologies can be shared across different groups and the members of the groups can have language ideologies placed on them that do not coincide with their specific groups. This is because people can belong in many different groups at the same time meaning they hold many different language ideologies.
Application
One way that language ideologies can be seen in the world today is in the United States where there are negative language ideologies held against Spanish language speakers, especially people of color. The ideology held is that they do not belong in the United States and this leads to language policing. It leads to this because there have been incidents of people calling ICE on Latinx Spanish speakers because they believed they were illegal immigrants. It also connects to the linguistic marketplace because even though speaking more than one language is a great quality, the knowledge of English in the United States is held above the knowledge of Spanish. Knowledge of this concept helps provide insight into how different language communities see other language communities. It also shows how people connect language use to beliefs they already hold.
This ideology can be seen all across the United States such as an incident that happened in New York City. The incident occurred in a restaurant when a man was badgering the patrons and employees for conversing in Spanish. The man makes a scene by yelling unwarranted comments including “Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English”. This comment was one of many that the man had thrown at these people. These comments were based solely on his beliefs, because he had no history with the people he was yelling them at. The beliefs the man’s comments were based on were the belief that in the United States you should speak English and that being a native Spanish speaker is a bad thing. From these beliefs stemmed assumptions of a person’s life which can be seen when he says “My guess is they’re not documented. So my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country… If they have the balls to come here and live off my money, I pay for their welfare. I pay for their ability to be here. The least they can do … is speak English.”. These assumptions switch the idea of language ideologies from the language and turn them on to the speaker and their background. This is a bad way to see language ideologies because it essentializes groups, when in reality different groups can overlap and there is no distinct line separating each. This incident is a very good example of a language ideology that is used to put down one language and its users to uphold another language and its users. While the man was putting down the Spanish language he kept referring back to the English language and that being the right language. This shows that there is a definite hierarchy when it comes to languages and gives an explanation as to why English is higher in the linguistic marketplace than Spanish it the United States.
These types of incidents can be seen all across the United States the sheer number of how many times it has occurred is astonishing. One can put this all off to ignorance or lack of knowledge, that a regular person just living in the United States might not know that there are people of color who speak Spanish that are legal citizens. But that is not the case when we see people whose sole purpose is to police against people of color who speak Spanish. Although it is not in their job description, ICE is targeting Latinx people Spanish because they believe that all people of color who speak Spanish are undocumented. ICE stands for immigration and customs enforcement, their responsibilities are “to promote homeland security and public safety by enforcing U.S. federal criminal and civil laws concerning border control, customs, trade, and immigration.”. However, we have seen incidents of them targeting Spanish speakers such as the time in Montana. In this situation, we see an officer stop and detain to women for speaking Spanish. The officer said, “Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here, and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,”. This shows that not only do regular people have these language ideologies but people in positions of power do as well.
Though I would like to believe that language ideologies stem from the language and the use, most of the time it is based on the users. The speakers of a language are directly affected once they are put under a negative language ideology. Even though we know that people can fall under more than one category it is still an essentialized view. This causes incidents such as the ones seen against Latinx Spanish speakers in the United States, where there was a flat perspective on who they are based on the ideologies placed on them. From that came the discrimination they face due to the sole fact that people cannot see past the negative language ideologies. Although language ideologies are shared, they are widely spread by large institutions that can warp the ideologies to benefit their wants. This is what causes the huge amount of negative language ideologies held towards Spanish speakers in the United States. To stop language ideologies from bringing down groups, we have to start from large institutions that spread the negative language ideologies.