In the wake of ever tighter antidiscrimination laws, language and accent
have become an acceptable excuse to publicly turn away, to refuse to
recognize the other or acknowledge their rights. Recognition and
misrecognition are concepts that have interested philosophers for a long
time. Ricoeur (2005) notes that human beings have a common
constitution, and that our commonalities demand mutual recognition,
something that we resist. Everyone struggles “against the misrecognition
of others at the same time that it is a struggle for recognition of oneself by
others” (ibid.: 258).
Taylor describes the opposite of recognition as misrecognition:
[O]ur identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by
the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can
suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around
them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible
picture of themselves.
(1994: 25)If you look closely at language-focused discrimination, you will find that
it is not language per se that is relevant; instead we need to understand the
individual’s beliefs about language and following from those beliefs,
institutional practices. In short, these beliefs and practices are the way in
which individuals and groups are denied recognition. In this study I use
ideology as a framework to examine and understand the subordination
process. That is, I am interesting in exploring how arguments for
standardization reproduce “cultural conceptions which are partial,
contestable and contested, and interest-laden” (Woolard and Schieffelin
1994: 58; see also Schieffelin et al. 1998; Silverstein 1998; Woolard
2008).
For our purposes, ideology is defined as: “the promotion of the needs
and interests of a dominant group or class at the expense of marginalized
groups, by means of disinformation and misrepresentation of those non-
dominant groups.”
More specifically, standard language ideology (SLI) is defined as:
a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language
which is imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions and