Monica Heller

Bilingualism as ideology and practice

Bilingualism is today as much a topic of academic research and public debate as it has ever been in the period since the end of World War II, as globalization and the new economy, migration and the expanded and rapid circulation of information, keep the question at the forefront of economic, political, social and educational concerns. The purpose of this book is to explore one particular set of approaches to the topic which seems particularly useful for understanding what bilingualism might mean today, in this context of social change, and how new understandings of it, as ideology and practice, also contribute to linguistic and social theory. In particular, the book aims to move the field of bilingualism studies away from a ‘common-sense’, but in fact highly ideologized, view of bilingualism as the coexistence of two linguistic systems, and to develop a critical perspective which allows for a better grasp on the ways in which language practices are socially and politically embedded. The aim is to move discussions of bilingualism away from a focus on the whole bounded units of code and community, and towards a more processual and materialist approach which privileges language as social practice, speakers as social actors and boundaries as products of social action.

Language choice, social institutions, and symbolic domination

The study of language choice and code-switching can illuminate the ways in which, through language, social institutions with ethnolinguistically diverse staff and clients exercise symbolic domination. Using the example of French-language minority education in Ontario (Canada), this article examines the ways in which ethnic and institutional relations of power overlap or crosscut, forming constraints which have paradoxical effects. In an analysis of two classrooms, it is shown how an ideology of institutional monolingualism is supported or undermined by program structure, curriculum content, and the social organization of turntaking, and how individuals use language choices and code-switching to collaborate with or resist these arrangements. The effect of these processes is to contain paradoxes and to produce new relations of power

THE POLITICS OF CODESWITCHING AND LANGUAGE CHOICE

Using data from ethnographic studies of the use of French and English in Ontario and Quebec (Canada) in a variety of settings (hospital, factory, school, etc.) over the period 1978–1990, I discuss language choice as a political strategy, especially as a strategy of ethnic mobilisation. More broadly, I argue that codeswitching must be understood in terms of individual communicative repertoires and community speech economies, particularly as these are tied to a political economic analysis of the relationship between the availability and use of linguistic varieties, on the one hand, and the production and distribution of symbolic and material resources on the other.

Crosswords: Language, Education and Ethnicity in French Ontario

This text is based on a long-term ethnographic and historical study of French-language minority education in Ontario, Canada. Heller addresses a wide range of issues of interest to those concerned with minority languages, particularly in minority language education. These issues include the role of language ideologies, language practices (especially language choice) and policies regarding language and schooling, in the unfolding of ideas about identity and of relations of power.

Alternative ideologies of la francophonie

This paper concerns current transformations in the relationship between political and linguistic ideologies of la francophonie based on a sociolinguistic ethnographic study in a French-language minority school in Canada. A dominant modernist orientation, focussing on unilingual social spaces and the authenticity and integrity of French, is being confronted by an emerging globalizing orientation which emphasizes the value of French as an economic resource, or commodity, and which values both pluralism and a common language. The result is a crisis of legitimacy for francophone institutions, struggles for voice among old and new elites, and the marginalization of the working class speakers of the ‘authentic’ vernacular.

Critique and Sociolinguistic Analysis of Discourse

My point of departure for this paper is that ‘critique’ is fundamentally about identifying and explaining the construction of relations of social difference and inequality (and then deciding what position to take about such processes, and what, if any, action that might lead to). I focus on one particular theoretical and methodological dimension of this project; namely the linkage between local linguistic practices and processes of social structuration (Giddens,1984). This discussion is based on sociolinguistic ethnographic materials exploring how some very local processes (debates over organizational structure and vision in one small community association in Ontario, Canada) are linked to broader concerns about social difference and inequality.

Distributed knowledge, distributed power : A sociolinguistics of structuration

Abstract This paper examines ways in which Cicourels approach to understanding the construction of socially distributed knowledge in workplaces and institutions opens up possibilities for examining basic processes of social structuration. I focus on one particular dimension of that problem: how what gets to count as knowledge (of different kinds) is directly implicated in the dimensions of structuration that involve the construction and definition of categories and relations of social difference and social inequality. I draw on the notions of resources, trajectories, and discursive spaces to illustrate how Cicourels ideas about distributed knowledge linking interactional orders and processes to institutional ones has allowed me to ask how distributed knowledge is linked to distributed power. I illustrate this approach with a discussion of such an analysis of categorization and stratification in a French-language minority high school in Ontario (Canada), drawing on fieldwork conducted in the early 1990s.

Treating language as an economic resource: Discourse, data and debate

Can language be a commodity? In recent years, along with other colleagues, we have developed arguments that language is increasingly treated as a commodity in late capitalism (Tan and Rubdy 2008; Heller 2010; Duchene and Heller 2012; Park and Wee 2012). This argument has been the subject of three major types of critique: The first comes from linguistic minority theorists, the second from the field of “language economics,” and the third from Marxist approaches to language and commodification. We begin by briefly summarizing our argument and by making explicit the assumptions behind it, specifically those that orient us to the material we discuss in ways which differ from those of our critics (rendering straightforward ‘debate’ actually quite difficult). We conclude with a discussion of how the consideration of whether language (or, as we prefer to say, communicative resources) can be commodified opens questions for further research. We should begin by saying that one thing that frequently arises as an issue in these debates is what idea of language underlies them. We draw on Bourdieu (1982) to argue that language can be understood as a social practice that consists of circulating communicative resources. Those resources are modes of meaning-making that include social organization and therefore lie at the heart of the ways in which the social, cultural, political, and economic are inherently intertwined. Having said that, we need to recognize that the processes of commodification we claim to observe usually are based on a quite different idea of what language is; namely, they draw on the idea of language as an autonomous system that can be constructed both as an emblem of authentic identity and as a technical skill – an idea that crystallized around industrial capitalism and its connection to the nation-state (Heller 2007). Our critics, as we shall see, themselves grapple with the question of the ontological status of language, albeit not necessarily from the same position as each other or from the position that we authors adopt. The next section details how our ideas about linguistic commodification emerged in an attempt to account for phenomena we saw emerging as we were looking at something else.

The social and historical context of minority French language education in Ontario

This paper discusses the development of the minority French‐speaking population in Ontario from its origins in the seventeenth century to the present day, focussing on the changing circumstances affecting minority French‐language education. Political, economic and demographic processes are shown to influence the role French‐language schools have been expected to and have been able to play in contributing to the maintenance of French language and culture. The authors conclude that the schools will not be able to achieve their objectives without a higher level of community and government support and without the further development of strategies adapted to the prevalent sociolinguistic reality.

The Future of ‘Bilingualism’

In the winter of 2006, I received a phone call from a journalist for the local outlet of the State-run French-language radio. She was working on a report on ‘the quality of the French spoken by francophone youth in Toronto’. She was concerned because, as a Quebecoise who had been in Toronto for six years, she noticed that she had a hard time understanding local youth; that they used a lot of English; that they didn’t seem ‘proud’ to be francophone, the way she and her classmates in Quebec had been at their age. For her, a language is ‘like a muscle; if you don’t use it, it atrophies’. That is, each person starts out with one language; bilingualism can only take away from it. You end up ‘speaking neither language properly’, and this puts you at a disadvantage in job interviews, or when you want to talk to people from other places.