Ideologies of language: Authority, consensus and commonsense in Canadian talk about usage

Abstract

This study attempts to understand the tenacity of everyday talk about language and its seemingly effortless ability to present itself as commonsensical and authoritative. Focusing on Canadian public domains as important sites for the performance and play of language ideologies, this project addresses three interrelated concerns: the commonsensical character of these ideologies, the authoritative positions they offer, and the ways talk about language might manufacture consensus in the service of linguistic authority. Seeing the generic forms, vocabulary and grammar of this talk as central components of its saliency, I draw on recent research in new rhetorical genre theory and on linguistic pragmatic accounts of politeness and relevance. To examine emblematic methods of thinking and talking about language in Canadian locales, I analyze a cluster of terms that operate in an important genre related to the production of national identity: Canadian English dictionaries that market generic claims of national distinction via the codification of a national-linguistic consciousness. Inspecting the style of statements about language for evidence of a grammar of perspective and position measurable in its characteristic syntactic and pragmatic features, I examine a Canadian press style guide and letters to the editor for the ways these arbitrating texts might structure commonsense ideas about language. My analysis indicates that the authority and thus tenacity of commonplace talk relies on the invocation of doxa, the appeal to a unified opinion, a shared linguistic consciousness that must be continually renewed and calibra ted. In these locales, language itself becomes a place – or to pos – where identifications and corresponding strategies of distinction are practised and enacted. I suggest that the very style of statements about language ratifies consensus, disperses talk about language into civil and civic atmospheres where the enactment of polite social orders secures the rulings of those who make authoritative claims on and about language. This study also found that the always-already relevance of commonplace statements lies in their ability to make mutually manifest, make ‘public’, a surplus of interest and identification that encourages new strategies of distinction and therefore new routes for the traffic in commonplace ideologies to take.

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