who are criticizing her, in spite of their complaints. The things they say
about her language and her social allegiances make her uncomfortable and
unhappy. The things they promise her if she were to change this behavior
may be very seductive: more money, success, recognition. She may think
about trying to change the way she talks, and pay some attention to
pronunciation points which have been brought to her attention. It isn’t
clear to her that her phonology – her accent – will be very difficult to
change.
This day-by-day, persistent devaluation of her social self has
repercussions. It might eventually bring her to the point of resistance, on a
personal level. If there is a group of people like her going through the
same experience, it might bring organized resistance. There are occasional
signs of this: An accent reduction class scheduled in a South Carolina
school which must close because of lack of student interest (Riddle 1993);
a movement to validate Hawai’ian Creole in public forums (Verploegen
1988); a group in Wisconsin which publicizes their commitment to AAVE
and their wish to have it recognized for the functional language it is
(Hamblin 1995); a Cambodian-American who takes his employer to court
for telling him that to get a promotion he must “sound American” (Xieng
1991; Court case Xieng 1993: 93, see Appendix).
In the rest of this book we will see that the institutions that embody
language ideology do not let these small acts of resistance go by
unnoticed; they strike back, and strike hard. The institutions which see
themselves as protectors of the values of the nation-state work hard to
validate their favored status in that state, in part on the basis of language.
This process of resistance and counter-resistance which pits the
empowered against small groups or individuals who struggle for
recognition is an on-going process. It is reminiscent of Antonio Gramsci’s
recasting of Marxist social theory in terms of what he called hegemony, or
ideology as struggle.^4
What concerns us in the remainder of this book is the process of
linguistic domination itself. The arguments which are used to legitimize
the values of the mainstream and to devalue non-conforming language