Linguistic Modernity: The Limits of Ideology and State Power in the Creation of Modern Standard Languages

• In Event: 515 - Theory Section Paper Session. Theorizing Inequalities

Abstract

This essay names and describes the concept “linguistic modernity,” which is defined as an ideological stance on language practices and also, when realized, a condition of social life. Linguistic modernity calls for modern standard languages to be at the top of language hierarchies and universalized within a given national territory, and thus a unified linguistic field in the Bourdieusian sense. Linguistic modernity distinguishes itself, therefore, from the linguistic premodernity, in which in many parts of the world, a supraregional classical language was used by a thin stratum of literate elites to communicate in government and in scholarship. I also argue that linguistic modernity is closely bound up with nationalism, which links language to national identity and thus territoriality. This picture of neatly demarcated national linguistic fields is complicated by global developments in recent decades, introducing foreign languages like English to the top of linguistic hierarchies in non-English-speaking nations. This interposing of global English is an indication of the incompleteness (and perhaps incompletableness) of the linguistic modernist vision.

Author

• Jeffrey Weng, University of California-Berkeley