Monografico_2_EN_Doxa_31_Language_ideologies

1. Introduction

The ideological configuration of Spanish in contemporary Chile has a series of singularities difficult to summarise. Broadly speaking, this is fitting with how language-as-object is treated in a disciplinary moment, when attributes assigned to said object from linguistics (i.e. immobility, synchrony, internal organisation, diatopic distribution) enter, to some extent, in crisis. There is a disciplinary vision that pays increasingly more attention to mobility, temporal discontinuity, systemic instability, relocation and multipolarity of the production of discourses. In direct relation to this conception of the objects of sociolinguistic analysis as complex (Blommaert, 2014), social networks like Facebook constitute high-quality records of how socially relevant representations emerge, circulate, and are subject to debate and negotiation. This occurs largely because the Internet provides spaces where, par excellence, management and configuration of contemporary social changes take place, in the political, ideological, and social spheres (Phyak, 2015; Deumert, 2015, Blommaert et al., 2009).

This paper focuses on how notions of language and diversity are thought and challenged, thus exposing the complex ways in which they are articulated on Facebook, for and by Spanish speakers in Chile. Its main purpose is to account for the presence (or absence) of certain language ideologies in the corpus and their characteristics, in order to briefly describe their projection in the historical-political context of contemporary Chile.

The notion of linguistic ideologies ascribed here refers to “cognitive frameworks that coherently link language with an extralinguistic order, naturalising it, and normalising it” (Del Valle and Meirinho, 2016). That is, these frameworks do not only refer to language, but also to specific social and cultural orders (for example, some that refer to identity, community, nation, state, gender), which are deeply intertwined with power structures, in whose constitution and permanence actively cooperate. Arnoux and Del Valle (2010) propose that linguistic ideologies are sustained in ideologemes, “commonplaces, postulates or maxims” that operate as presuppositions of the discourse, such as, “In Chile people speak (Spanish) poorly”.

Woolard (2007) suggests that in the contemporary global world there is a prevalence of two Western-origin language ideologies that represent epistemological and moral notions. The first one, anonymity, understands a certain language as a public, de-personalised and de-localised voice and is frequent in cases of transnational hegemonic languages. English, for example, is positioned as the anonymous language by default, not only in the national states where it predominates but also in digital environments globally (Ricento 2015). Similarly, Del Valle (2007) provides evidence of contemporary hegemonic discourses around Spanish as a post-national, common, mestizo language, with privileged access to modernity, a vision common among linguistic management and planning agents, mostly from the institutionality of the Academies of the Spanish Language, but also in the publishing industry and the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language (Del Valle, 2014). Woolard (2007) suggests that recognising a language as “anonymous” requires the acceptance of the authority of such anonymity by the people, a process called méconnaissance by Bourdieu (1991), which occurs mainly at school. In this process, the dominant language variety is purged of its specific social origin and starts being imagined as a natural attribute of authority, transparent and guaranteed in social communication. From a critical perspective, this hides the fundamental fact that, inevitably, the anonymous language will necessarily belong more to some than to others, as the dominant classes typically have access and control of that language.