The Everyday Language of White Racism

Discourse as virtue ethics: Muslim women in the American Southwest

“…This has been especially true in treatments of Muslim women's lives in the United States and elsewhere (for example, Nafisi, 2003;Satrapi, 2003;see also Hammer, 2012). Hill (2008) has explained this kind of effort as driven by a common referentialist language ideology, which holds that stereotypes, containing untrue language, are best combatted by presenting "true" counter-evidence. Ironically, debunking also sustains and recirculates stereotypes, and indeed, Muslim Americans find themselves locked into referentialist chains of discourse about their lives and loyalties (see the "Ask a Muslim" example which opened this article).…”

“…Related to this, studies of "mock" speech-Mock Spanish (Hill, 1993(Hill, , 2008, Mock Ebonics (Ronkin and Karn, 1999), and Mock Asian (Chun, 2004), as they have been called-have made it possible to unpack the covert "othering" that even non-serious speech can perform. I use the foundation laid by this work to argue that core halaqa members' mock Arabic and PakistaniUrdu accents, considered in the latter part of the analysis below, help construct their status as normalizers of Muslim difference.…”

“…As members of a widely surveilled minority group, even benign requests and expressions of genuine interest such as those from Nur's instructors could carry the hint of suspicion and the implicit demand to make oneself legible to members of the dominant society. As Hill (2008) has discussed, such moments are also driven by an ideology of monoglot standard speech, which holds that any language or variety other than "mainstream" American English is subject to special scrutiny.…”

“…Finally, I call for discourse scholars, particularly those devoted to ethnographic research, to consider the phronetic dimensions of language-in-use: the means by which linguistic practices themselves mediate how social values propel interaction and shape subjects' relationships to power. In this, I seek a union of insight between linguistic anthropological work which illuminates the ethical and moral capacities of linguistic form, function, and ideology (for example, Hill, 1995Hill, , 2008 and attention in ethnographic and applied social science to the Aristotelian notion of phronesis (Flyvbjerg, 2001;Jouili, 2015). Since phronesis is "practical wisdom", born of experience in the world and cultivating of a sense of responsibility both to self and to society (Flyvbjerg, 2001, 55-57), people's display and assessment of linguistic performance provides a rich point for analyzing how they negotiate the aesthetics and ethics of virtuous subjectivity-particularly when virtue is under suspicion.…”

Editorial: Language in the South African media

“…Instead, drawing upon the growing field of language ideology (see e.g. Blommaert 1999; Woolard 1998), Johnson and Ensslin (2007a or b) ask us to also explore the ways in which languages themselves become the objects of discussion in the media, such as in the case of public debates about the function and value of English vis-à-vis Spanish in the United States (US) or the ever present 'media firestorms' (Hill 2011) about multilingualism in contemporary societies (see e.g. Blackledge 2005 for an illuminating case in point in the United Kingdom (UK)).…”