Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language

Abstract

This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism are traced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research.

Language ideologies and epistemic exclusion

“…As such, MT, Kiswahili, and Sheng obtain a kind of subordinate legitimacy but only to the extent that they instrumentally advance concept acquisition in English. Mr Jabari's elevated position as a teacher, and his language ideology position in the community, further embodies the kinds of differences in socioeconomic position reproduced by unequal distributions of legitimized language knowledge (Hanks 2005). Through this monolingual habitus, social reproduction and monoglossia (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990;Bunyi 2008) are maintained in this rural setting.…”

“…In this way, dispositions are generative and capable of producing a multiplicity of practices and perceptions in fields outside of where they were originally acquired (Reay 2004). Habitus, then, enables observable regularities or stabilities of practice and thus bears directly on social reproduction (Hanks 2005). It outlines not only ways of acting but also perceptions governing individual actions.…”

“…It outlines not only ways of acting but also perceptions governing individual actions. As such, the set of dispositions to use language(s) in certain, usually unexamined or unconscious, ways -especially around language-use evaluations based on socially instilled values -constitutes a habitus (Hanks 2005).…”

“…As such, while failures to align with legitimated languages may arise due to inability or inadequate access to them, such nonalignment serves as a sign of failure in general. From this failure, many negative social consequences follow (Hanks 2005) or are anxiously perceived as following inevitably (Makoe and McKinney 2014;McKinney et al 2015;Muthwii 2004;Smith 2001). …”

“…Symbolic power is the "invisible power which can be exercised only with complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it, or even that they themselves exercise it" (Bourdieu 1991, 164). This complicity lies at the heart of linguistic practice (Hanks 2005) and is explicable in terms of the structural relations between semiotic systems (including language), habitus (including the perspectives it embodies), and the field (where they occur).…”