prevented from going through processes of development and expansion.
The spread of English is viewed as imposing aspects of Anglo-Saxon
Judaeo-Christian culture and causing a threat to the cultures and languages
of non-English speaking countries.
see also cultural imperialismlinguistic insecurity n
a feeling of insecurity experienced by speakers or writers about some aspect
of their language use or about the variety of language they speak. This may
result, for instance, in modified speech, when speakers attempt to alter their
way of speaking in order to sound more like the speakers of a prestige variety.
see also sociolect
linguisticism n
a term sometimes used to refer to the use of ideologies, structures and
practices to legitimize and reproduce unequal divisions of power and
resources between language groups.
linguistic method n
a term used to refer to several methods of teaching first-language reading
which claim to be based on principles of linguistics, and in particular to
methods which reflect the views of two prominent American linguists of the
1940s and 1950s, Leonard Bloomfield and Charles Fries. They argued that
since the written language is based on the spoken language, the relationship
between speech and written language should be emphasized in the teaching
of reading. This led to reading materials which made use of words which
had a regular sound-spelling correspondence and in which there was a
systematic introduction to regular and irregular spelling patterns. In recent
years, applied linguists have continued to propose and advocate different
approaches to the teaching of reading and language in general, but there is
no longer any widely recognized “linguistic method.”
linguistic prescriptivismn
the prescribing of rules for the language and its use.
see also prescriptive grammar, descriptive grammar
linguistic relativity n
a belief which was held by some scholars that the way people view the world
is determined wholly or partly by the structure of their native language.
As this hypothesis was strongly put forward by the American anthropological
linguists Sapir and Whorf, it has often been called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
or Whorfian hypothesis. In recent years, study of the relationships between
linguistic insecurity