Abstract
In this chapter the focus shifts to a discussion of hegemony and how it operates. It spells out in theoretical terms how language hegemony and political hegemony operate. This leads to a discussion of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and argues that since it does not have the customary relationship with the institutional configurations that consolidate state languages ELF cannot be considered a language in the orthodox sense.
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Notes
- 1.
The notion of technology has much in common with Heidegger’s (1978) ‘essence of technology’.
- 2.
In creating a kind of common language across a range of instiutions, such that the action of one is translatable to those of others, disciplinarity constructs society (Ewald 1989:197).
- 3.
There is a tendency among students of language for hegemony to be treated as interchangeable with power or dominance, ignoring the hegemonic processes whereby power or dominance are operationalised (cf. Grin 2015). Our focus on the role of institutions strives to overcome this limitation.
- 4.
Such techniques of domination have been widely recorded with reference to minority languages and are sometimes referred to in terms of ‘language ideology’ (Woolard 1998).
- 5.
It is many years since Raymond Williams made the argument that if ideology was a fabricated conspiracy it would require little to displace the conspirators and the associated regime (Williams 1980).
- 6.
Foucault (2000:87) called for a revision of the notion of ideology, while Deleuze (2004:36–37) argues that state hegemony, or more specifically, the diagram ‘has nothing to do with a transcendent idea or with an ideological superstructure, or even with an economic infrastructure, which is already qualified by its substance and defined by its form and use’.
- 7.
This is a point made by Le Page (1988) in stressing how linguistic theory has made a direct equation between the single nation and a people.
- 8.
The universality of a community such as a national community is mediated by a particularity such as the state language and is constituted through representation. In those states such as Switzerland where there is more than one state language the hegemonic process will be the same as where there is a single state language. The institutions will operate by reference to all state languages, giving each of them a legitimation without any sense of differentiation. Citizens will operate by reference to any of the state languages, which does imply that all citizens have an appropriate knowledge of the respective state languages.
- 9.
The contrasting of reason and emotion is evident by reference to minority languages. When bilingual education is available there is often a tendency for science subjects to be made available in the state language and the arts subjects in the minority language. Furthermore, the tendency is for women to be more likely to study the arts, and men the sciences. Superimposed on this is the rational/emotional dichotomy such that the state language is the language of reason and the minority language the emotional. Similarly women are emotional and men rational.
- 10.
This also applies to varieties of the state language that are similarly evaluated against their capacity for reason.
- 11.
Grin (2015:140) has forcefully dismissed such a view arguing that it constitutes ‘a hopelessly muddled vision whose main function seems to be what might be called “sanitization”’ in the form of a crude syllogism as follows: ‘Yes, the spread of English may be imperialistic; but ELF is not English; therefore the use of English in the form of ELF is not imperialistic.’
- 12.
All of this relates to society as a construct, a construct that cannot be permanently fixed or grounded as a fully constituted structural space.
- 13.
Of course the same principles apply to differences between the standard English of the UK and the USA.
- 14.
De Swaan (2001:19) claims that society is already transnational. We would maintain that until such time as transnational institutions exist to support the social, this assertion is incorrect.
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Williams, G., Williams, G. (2016). Disciplinarity and Language. In: Language, Hegemony and the European Union. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33416-5_4
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