The Limits of Legitimacy: Language Ideology and Shift in Contemporary Senegal

Swigart, Leigh

doi:10.1525/jlin.2000.10.1.90

Cited by 101 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…For the lower class, SA is significantly higher than MA in the overt projection of Respondents devalued MA to serve in main, functional, prestige domains. However, because of the use of MA-French codeswitching, the presence of French alongside MA imbues the latter with 'alternative legitimacy' (Swigart 2001). The injection of modernity into MA comes through its association with the French language.…”

Section: Overt Attitudes Towards Modernity and Open-mindednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Relevant here is the expansion of The Journal of North African Studies 437 Bourdieu's (1991) notion of language legitimacy to include hybrid varieties, such as Urban Wolof in Senegal, a code into which the elite class injects attributes of power and prestige despite its unofficial status (Swigart 2001). This suggests that urban languages can acquire legitimacy only through their fusion with official languages, such as French.…”

Section: Covert Attitudes Towards Modernity and Open-mindednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The impact of the ideology of modernity on language attitudes in Morocco

Chakrani¹

2013

The Journal of North African Studies

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This paper investigates how the ideology of modernity affects Moroccan youths' attitudes towards local and foreign languages. Covert attitudes data from a Matched Guise Test show the alignment of French, as compared with Moroccan Arabic (MA) and Standard Arabic (SA), with the status-bearing traits of modernity and open-mindedness. Additionally, overt data from a language attitudes questionnaire show that the higher their social class, the more likely respondents are to hold favourable attitudes towards French and the increasing use of English and move away from the local codes of MA, SA, and Berber. The impact of the ideology of modernity on Moroccan youth shows that the valorisation of Western languages, a product of the French colonial era, maintains a linguistically and socially asymmetrical position between speakers of local codes and those of foreign languages. Members of the Moroccan elite play the role of 'ideology brokers' (Jaffe 1999), whose linguistic practices, language attitudes, and ascription to the ideology of modernity serve to reinforce a system of privileges, class structure, and lines of power on the basis of linguistic segregation.

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Section: Overt Attitudes Towards Modernity and Open-mindednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Covert Attitudes Towards Modernity and Open-mindednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of the ideology of modernity on language attitudes in Morocco

Chakrani¹

2013

The Journal of North African Studies

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“…Language ideology researchers have been particularly active in communities of language contact in which a 'larger' (often colonising) language comes into contact with a 'smaller' (often indigenous) language and culture. Examples include so-called 'global' languages such as Spanish, English, and French in contact with Mexicano/Nahuatl in Mexico (Hill, 1985(Hill, , 1998Messing, 2007), Tewa in the US South-west (Kroskrity, 1998), Wolof in Senegal (Swigart, 2000), or Corsican in Corsica (Jaffe, 2003(Jaffe, , 2007. In such contexts, scholars have traditionally performed indepth, on-the-ground research in single regions or communities to understand the multiple ways in which the smaller languages can and do adapt to prolonged situations of contact with global languages.…”

Section: (Standard) Language Ideologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

From the field, to the Web, and back again: incorporating Internet methods into language ideology research

Raymond

2015

Language Awareness

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Researchers from a variety of academic disciplines have begun to incorporate Webbased methodologies in their research agendas. Nonetheless, many of those interested in language ideologies À i.e. speakers' beliefs about language, as well as their rationalisation of those beliefs À vehemently stand by site-specific ethnographic approaches. Rather than arguing for a replacement of one method by another, the present methodological analysis explores how Internet methods can be intertwined with more traditional, face-to-face techniques for data collection. Exemplifying this process by way of a three-phase project investigating Spanish-speaker opinions about various dialects of Spanish that exist in the world, we illustrate how online and offline methods can mutually inform one another, together allowing both specificity and generalisability of findings, as well as an overall more profound understanding of a given phenomenon of interest.

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“…Barton et al, 1994;Calvet, 1994;Hodge and Jones, 2000;Swigart, 2000;Scollon and Scollon, 2003;Reh, 2004;Siber, 2005;Papen, 2006;Collins and Slembrouck, 2007;Lou, 2007;Jørgensen, 2008b;Bonhomme, 2009).…”

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confidence: 99%

Multimodality and audiences: local languaging in the Gambian linguistic landscape

Juffermans

2013

Sociolinguistic Studies

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This paper is concerned with the linguistic landscape in urban Gambia. It reviews recent work done on linguistic landscapes and explores the relation between The Gambia's social and ethnolinguistic diversity and visible linguistic phenomena in the public space from an ethnographic and social semiotic perspective. It is argued that the occasional use of local languages in an otherwise English-only environment (as, e.g., 1The linguistic landscapeIn the past decade or so, linguists and other social scientists have turned their interest to visible linguistic phenomena in the public space. The object of these studies can be identified as the linguistic landscape. Most authors concerned with this field of research acknowledge that the concept of 'linguistic landscape' was coined by Landry and Bourhis (1997) in a psycholinguistic study of ethnolinguistic vitality: 'The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration ' (1997:25). The linguistic landscape here is a psychological factor among other correlatives influencing language attitudes and the (perceived) ethnolinguistic vitality of one language in the presence of another. Although Landry and Bourhis make clear that the background for their study is the situation of French-English bilingualism in Québec, they give no description of an actual linguistic landscape. Their work is less sociolinguistic than it is social psychological. This makes this early work on linguistic landscape of limited interest for an ethnographic sociolinguistic project. More interesting in this respect are the articles in Gorter (2006) and Backhaus (2007) in which the concept is further developed and coupled with a descriptive ambition. For instance, detailed quantitative descriptions are given of the relative presence of Hebrew, Arabic and English in the streets of Israel (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006), of the relative public visibility of minority languages Basque and Frisian alongside national (Spanish and Dutch) and international languages (English) in the Basque country and Friesland respectively (Cenoz and Gorter, 2006), and of the uses of multiple scripts and languages in Bangkok (Huebner, 2006) and Tokyo (Backhaus, 2006).These studies indeed open a 'new approach to multilingualism' (Gorter, 2006) and introduce several interesting concepts (e.g. the distinction between government-issued 'top-down' signs and local, often commercial 'bottom-up' signage). However, they theoretically remain somewhat unsophisticated and 'positivistic' in the sense that they are primarily concerned with counting the occurrences of different languages in a multilingual ecology in order to measure linguistic diversity or evaluate ethnolinguistic vitality -a clear legacy from the field of social psychology from where the term was borrowed. Beyond statistical assertions of the kind, 'In neighbourhood X, n % of signbo...

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The Limits of Legitimacy: Language Ideology and Shift in Contemporary Senegal

Cited by 101 publications

References 41 publications

The impact of the ideology of modernity on language attitudes in Morocco

The impact of the ideology of modernity on language attitudes in Morocco

From the field, to the Web, and back again: incorporating Internet methods into language ideology research

Multimodality and audiences: local languaging in the Gambian linguistic landscape

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