large-scale sociopolitical in nature or more subtle, whether the approach is
coercion or consent, there are two sides to this process: first, devaluation
of all that is not (or does not seek to be) politically, culturally or socially
marked as belonging to the privileged class, and second, validation of the
social (and linguistic) values of the dominant institutions. The process of
linguistic assimilation to an abstracted standard is cast as a natural one,
necessary and positive for the greater social good.
What we do not seem to understand clearly, what is mysterious and
important, is not so much the way in which the powerful deny others
acknowledgement and permission to be heard in their own voices, but
more so how and why those groups cooperate. How do the dominant bloc
institutions manage to convince whole groups of human beings that they
do not fully or adequately possess an appropriate human language? And,
more mysteriously, why do those groups hand over this authority?
Eagleton puts a more personal face on this question when he
summarizes one way ideology works with the simple but striking
observation that critical language theory tries to understand “how people
come to invest in their own unhappiness” (Eagleton 2007: emphasis
added).^3
When speakers of devalued or stigmatized varieties of English consent
to the standard language ideology, they become complicit in its
propagation against themselves, their own interests and identities. Many
are caught in a vacuum: If an individual cannot find any social acceptance
for her language outside her own speech communities, she may come to
denigrate her own language, even while she continues to use it.
A standard language ideology provides a web of (supposedly) common-
sense arguments, in which the vernacular speaker can get tangled at every
turn: at school, in radio news, at the movies, while reading novels, at work,
she hears that the language which marks her as Chilean, Muslim, or a
native of Mississippi is ugly, unacceptable, incoherent, illogical. This is
countered, daily, by her experience: she does communicate, effectively,
with the people who are closest and most important to her, who mark their
language similarly. She even manages to communicate with the people