Discourse and Ideology—Why Do We Need Both?

Abstract

The uneasy relationship between the concepts of discourse and ideology puzzles most scholars in critical language studies at some point in their career. Indeed, why do we have both racist ideologies and racist discourse , whereas we prefer to talk about feminist discourse rather than feminist ideology ? And while we can explain language ideologies as “cultural con- ceptions of the nature, form and purpose of language” (Gal and Woolard 1995:130), we cannot define racist ideologies as cultural conceptions of the nature, form, and purpose of racism or race—we would rather define such ideologies as, for instance, misguided cultural conceptions of the nature of humankind. Most of us accept discourse and discourses to be present in all language but many of us consider ideology or ideologies to reside with varying degrees in different discourses. And while we often find discourse to be a concept that is easier to operationalize than ideology when ana- lyzing the data, we prefer ideology as an analytical tool when that data is about language—when we examine language ideologies . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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