This chapter introduces the study of how people conceptualise the links between language, social affiliation, and social order. The study of such links is particularly pertinent in contexts of late modern diversity, where it has been realised that social life does not come about in the unambiguous and homogeneous forms that the modernist, centralising powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have hoped for. People do not live in uniform, territorially bounded, and monolingual social worlds. Languages cannot be straightforwardly related to one group, groups do not reside in one place only, and individuals do not have only one identity. An examination of the links between the linguistic and the social has been of central interest in linguistic anthropology. It is here assumed that ideas about language tell us something about the way human beings constitute and organise social difference: a ‘definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world’ (Williams Reference Williams1977: 21). This means that the study of language concepts and indexical functions of language can be understood as a ‘doorway’ (Heller Reference Heller and Heller2007b: 341) into the social organisation of human life.

In the history of modern linguistics, language often has been understood as taking shape in ‘ready-made syntheses’ (Foucault Reference Foucault1972: 22). In extreme but influential positions, languages have been understood as represented in the ‘ideal speaker-listener’ who lives in a ‘completely homogenous speech community’ (Chomsky Reference Chomsky1965: 3). In contemporary societies, however, many local environments display high degrees of diversity. Many speakers in today’s societies have a linguistic background that is different from the official, national one. At the same time, linguistic diversity is not a new phenomenon but a reality that has been ‘erased’ (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) under the dominant discourses of nationhood. The study of discourses on language in Belize, a setting where diversity has never been erased, aims to deepen our understanding of how languages are constructed in discourse. On the theoretical level, this is based on concepts that have been developed in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics.

In the following, I introduce the study of the relationship between the linguistic and the social. The chapter is intended to be accessible also to non-linguists; therefore, it introduces basic concepts that will be familiar to those from the field. I start by elaborating on the history of the study of languages as discourse constructs. This shows that it is essentially social meanings, expressed in language, which are responsible for the establishment of these constructs. Section 2.2 introduces the study of social meaning in the history of sociolinguistics. In this discipline, central terms to conceptualise social functions of language have been developed. In Section 2.3, theoretical approaches from the tradition of language ideology research complement the understanding of social meanings of language, where the notion of social indexicality allows for a systematic study of social meanings of language. Standard languages and the prestige associated with these – viz., a specific type of indexicality – are discussed in Section 2.4. Section 2.5 focuses on posthumanist theory and inspects the role of material culture; namely, sound-based versus written communication, tangible products like printed books, and linguistic productions like grammars or dictionaries in the construction of languages, which is so far a relatively neglected topic in the study of the discursive construction of language.

2.1 Deconstructing and Reconstructing Languages

The idea that languages are constructed in social discourse is related to poststructural and discourse theoretical approaches in which social reality is conceived as created in and through discourse. The most central proposition of discourse theory is that discourses, made up of individual statements in spoken and written form, ‘systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault Reference Foucault1972, cited in Cameron Reference Cameron2001: 49). Social categories, like gender, nation, and language, are among such objects that are considered to be created in discourse, in other words, by human beings talking or writing about them (Foucault [Reference Foucault, Burke, Crowley and Girvin1970] Reference Foucault, Burke, Crowley and Girvin2000, Jaworski & Coupland Reference Jaworski, Coupland, Jaworski and Coupland2006). Discourses have been described as ‘formation systems of utterances that refer to collective, and socially stratified knowledge that make an impact on human behaviour’ (Spitzmüller & Warnke Reference Spitzmüller and Warnke2011: 9, my translation). Academic discourses are a specific type of social discourse, and they crucially contribute to the formation and establishment of categories. This also pertains to linguists. Their ideas are powerful agents and, in line with a discourse theoretical perspective, it has been assumed, for example, that ‘grammar may be a construct of the analyst rather than some system that a communicator has constructed’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene2016: 180). In this understanding, language categories are an outcome of social and academic discourses. At the same time, we should not forget that language categories and the grammatical constructs of linguists have an impact on the order of social relationships.

In line with this thought, it has been argued that languages, understood as stable systemic entities with separable boundaries and definite rules, are specific to particular social discourses that have developed in Western cultures. In these, languages are typically understood as symbolic systems that have primarily referential functions that display a one-to-one relationship to territorially bounded communities (Harris Reference Harris, Davis and Taylor1990, Joseph & Taylor Reference Joseph, Taylor, Joseph and Taylor1990, Errington Reference Errington and Duranti2001b, Pennycook Reference Pennycook2004). Linguistic anthropologically oriented approaches, and particularly those that focus on non-European or postcolonial contexts, have shown that the concept of a language, as a clearly definable system with referential functions, is a culturally contingent and predominantly Western idea. It is intrinsically related to the idea that the social world is ‘naturally’ divided into nations (Woolard Reference Woolard, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998, Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000; see also Schneider Reference Schneider2019b on methodological nationalism in linguistics).

Already in the 1960s, linguistic anthropologists empirically demonstrated that the relationship between ways of speaking and groups of people is one ‘that needs desperately to be investigated both in ethnographic depth and in comparative perspective’ (Hymes Reference Hymes and Helm1968: 24). Hymes, a key figure in the foundations of linguistic anthropology, discusses exceptions to the assumption that ‘linguistic unity and separateness coincide with cultural units’ (Hymes Reference Hymes and Helm1968: 29).Footnote ¹ Likewise, Gumperz (1968), a contemporary of Hymes, does not describe languages as expressions of homogeneous and quasi-natural social formations as they are imagined in national discourses. He argues that language boundaries are mainly defined by social norms and class struggle. Linguistic homogeneity, in Gumperz’s eyes, is based on class order:

Here, languages are not understood as effects of homogeneous groups living in geographically isolated settings but as those of social boundary construction. (See Barth (Reference Barth and Barth1969) on the same argument in relation to the emergence of ethnic groups.) In a similar vein, Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s (Reference Le Page and Tabouret-Keller1985) Acts of Identity assumes languages to be the result of group affiliation. The authors argue that languages emerge in a dialectical process, together with the formation of ethnic groups (see also Chapter 3).

The argument that languages do not emerge from given and homogeneous communities is also found in Pratt’s (Reference Pratt, Fabb, Attridge, Durant and MacCabe1987) seminal and often quoted work on linguistic utopias. She criticises what she calls the linguistics of community, which she describes as linguistic research that is based on the idea of imagined national communities (Anderson Reference Anderson1985) and considers ideological concepts of community as constitutive for the project of linguistics: ‘This prototype of the modern nation as imagined community is, I would like to suggest, mirrored in linguistics’ imagined object of study, the speech community’ (Pratt Reference Pratt, Fabb, Attridge, Durant and MacCabe1987: 50). The speech community, as some forms of structural linguistics imagine it (e.g. in Chomsky’s ‘completely homogenous speech community’ (Chomsky Reference Chomsky1965: 3)) is a ‘linguistic utopia’. Thus, according to Pratt, it only exists in the minds of language scholars. Instead, Pratt envisions a linguistics ‘that place[s] at its centre the operation of language across lines of social differentiation (p. 60), where language is not seen as unified but as a ‘site of social reproduction and struggle’ (p. 62) .

In the 1990s, with poststructural theory gaining ground in sociolinguistics, the interest in deconstructive approaches to language grew. US linguistic anthropological studies were ground-breaking, like those on constructing language and publics, appearing in a special issue in the journal Pragmatics in 1995 (Errington Reference Errington1995, Gal & Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine1995, Gal & Woolard Reference Gal and Woolard1995b, Irvine Reference Irvine1995). These contributed to an understanding of the dialectical development of national publics and standard languages. (On changes to these formations in late modern contexts, see Heyd & Schneider (Reference Heyd and Schneider2019).)

Studies on the role of English as a global language are a crucial addition to academic discourses on the deconstruction of languages, as for example in Pennycook’s publications. These have been important in mainstreaming the idea that languages are discursively constructed, bringing theoretical insight from critical theory, cultural studies, and performativity studies to the realm of sociocultural language research (Pennycook Reference Pennycook1998, Reference Pennycook2003, Reference Pennycook2004, Reference Pennycook2010). Pennycook and Makoni’s edited volume Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2007), which deconstructs languages from different angles, is one of the most explicit discussions of languages as culturally constructed.

The notion of the enregisterment – describing ‘processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’ (Agha Reference Agha2003: 231) – is another widely quoted concept that focuses on the emergence of links between the social and the linguistic. Speech styles are enregistered via discourses that contribute to interpreting specific language forms as representing particular social personae. In other words, enregisterment is the meta-semiotic process by which particular linguistic features become recognised as emblems of a particular social type (Agha Reference Agha2007: 235). In the present ethnographic study of language ideologies in a Belizean village, such processes of enregisterment appear to be multiple and even paradoxical, as different and simultaneously existing discourses determine which items are linked to which kinds of personae. The process of enregisterment thus should not be understood as a one-directional teleological trajectory.

An understanding of language as not based on given ties between language form and social personae is also found in considerations of language practices of speakers who apply diverse genres and different languages in everyday speech. Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2010) has coined the notion of truncated repertoires to refer to such fragmented and diverse practices. Despite the term’s problematic connotations, it creates a comprehensive view of language that encompasses all linguistic competences of speakers. It does not matter when, where, and how language resources have been acquired, all available resources of a speaker can and should be studied in linguistic research, not only their native languages.Footnote ² The social values that specific parts of an individual’s repertoire hold, for example ‘spoken Turkish’ vs ‘written English’, ‘formal standard German’ vs ‘colloquial Saxonian’, depend on the sociolinguistic economies of particular sociohistorical environments (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck Reference Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck2005b: 201). The sociolinguistic economy of a setting is based on historical and contemporary discourses on language, belonging, and status. It shapes the framing and ideological meaning of language in culturally specific ways.

Within such sociolinguistic economies, people orient towards particular centring institutions (Silverstein Reference Silverstein1998: 404). Centring institutions are specific actors or institutions like the state, school, authorities in popular discourse, or a group of like-minded people. These are relevant in trajectories of enregisterment as they impact on the cultural–linguistic orientations of speakers. Centring institutions create values to which speakers orient. They impact on the emergence of prestige for a particular language (variety), as speakers produce speech styles that they see as evoking the attributes that are associated with the centring institution. Ultimately, centring institutions are co-responsible for the emergence of social categories, which include languages and speech communities.

In many of today’s sociolinguistic economies, we find that people are faced with various such centring institutions. In an age of digital transnational interaction, different discourses from different institutions interact. We have to assume that the formation of homogeneity and clearly defined speech communities is trickier where several centring institutions intersect, in other words, where we are faced with polycentricity (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck Reference Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck2005a, Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010). The colonial, intrinsically transnational but also brutal histories of settings in which many creole languages have emerged imply ambivalent orientations towards institutions of power and authority (Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon1967). The notion of polycentricity is therefore particularly relevant for understanding the complex sociolinguistic economies in which creole languages are spoken.

The fact that the repertoires of speakers, and of multilingual speakers in particular, cannot be modelled as developing in separate national language ‘boxes’ is also a central point in the more recent sociolinguistic paradigm of translanguaging (see e.g. Creese & Blackledge (Reference Creese and Blackledge2010), García & Wei (Reference García and Wei2014), Canagarajah (Reference Canagarajah2013); for a history of the concept, see Jaspers (Reference Jaspers2017)). According to Jaspers (Reference Jaspers2017: 4), translanguaging and the related term languaging refer to the

The translanguaging approach has its roots in language education. According to it, the education of bilingual pupils should value ‘the full range of linguistic performances of multilingual language users for purposes that transcend the combination of structures, the alternation between systems, the transmission of information and the representation of values, identities and relationships’ (Jaspers Reference Jaspers2017: 4). While supporters of translingual education regard it as a means to bring about positive social change, equity, and decolonisation for minority language speakers, the transformative potentials of translingual education have also been critically discussed (Jaspers Reference Jaspers2017). As mentioned in Chapter 1, translingual practices do not occur in a social void. Like all other forms of language use, they are embedded in social discourses on social prestige, belonging, and normativity (consider also Cameron Reference Cameron1995 on ‘verbal hygiene’). The idea that non-standardised, hybrid languaging necessarily means social liberation has therefore been met with scepticism. Jaspers (Reference Jaspers2017: 6), for example, argues that hierarchical relations and normative discourses frame language in any setting:

In order to avoid socially naive ideas about non-standardised language practices, it is important to understand the cultural processes by which languages, that is, forms of speech enregistered as an emblem for a particular group or a particular social genre, come into being and how this typically implies the construction of social hierarchies.

As a critical note, it should be mentioned that deconstructive approaches to language have been discussed as epistemologically related to the discourses of neoliberalism (Heller & McElhinny Reference Heller and McElhinny2017: ch. 8). Concepts of the nation state, including national language norms but also institutions with socially positive impacts like the welfare state and workers’ rights, are destabilised in both deconstructivism and neoliberalism. National monolingualism is indeed not valued in neoliberal ideologies, which strive for global markets and international interaction and therefore value multilingualism. This does not mean, however, that discursive constructions of languages as nationally based entities are given up or are really deconstructed. Global market economies do not necessarily lead to a deconstruction of standardised monolingualism. Rather, they enforce the idea of language materialising in separate, regulated, and semantically transposable systems:

Overall, deconstructive approaches to languages as introduced in this section have not given reason to assume that the concept of language will disappear. It is pertinent to study how languages are discursively constructed in contexts of contact and diversity, such as the one analysed in this book. What we have learned so far is that the existence of languages is intrinsically intertwined with sociohistorical and political processes. Language is therefore not and can never be free from ideological positioning and this is evident not only in broader social discourses but also in micro-level interactions of individual speakers. The study of micro-level speech patterns and their social meanings belongs to the realm of sociolinguistics. Foundational concepts to study and theorise language as social practice stem from sociolinguistics, and this knowledge is important to understand the arguments made later on. The following section gives a brief introduction into how the discipline has interpreted the relationship between linguistic practices and social categorisation, which may be particularly useful to the reader with no linguistic background. Furthermore, the discipline’s theoretical move from essentialist to constructivist approaches helps to explain the methodological choices taken in this study.

2.2 The Role of Social Meaning in Sociolinguistics

The study of the relationships between speech practice, language variation, and the social world has its institutional grounding in the discipline of sociolinguistics. Labov’s (Reference Labov and Labov1972a) demonstration of the relationship between socio-economic class and language form as shown in salesroom clerks’ realisation of the sound [r] in three New York City department stores is probably the most often cited and most foundational study in the discipline of sociolinguistics. The study of correlations between language and social categories like nation, gender, or socio-economic class, where these are treated as givens, formed the main interest of sociolinguistics in the early years. These more essentialist approaches are today conceptualised as ‘first wave’ (Eckert Reference Eckert2012). Eckert’s ‘three wave’ taxonomy of sociolinguistics gives an outline of the disciplines’ theoretical developments, where the role of the social meaning of variation has crucially changed since the inceptions of the discipline. Labov was interested in the social meaning of variation from the beginning of his studies. Linguistic variables as performative means of constructing social positions were a central topic, for example, in his study of Martha’s Vineyard, in which he discusses the centralisation of certain vowels as indexing the social meaning of ‘authentic’ resident of the island (Labov Reference Labov1963: 307). However, the dialectical relationship between language variation and social positioning and how categories come into being was not a sociolinguistic research focus throughout the 1970s.

Approaches in early sociolinguistics often presuppose a binary image of language variation, based on the distinction between formal and informal interaction. The study of language attitudes is one example of such early accounts of the study of social meanings of language variation. Language attitude research shows that unconscious social knowledge works as a filter in the perception of language. The matched-guise test (Lambert Reference Lambert1960) demonstrates, for example, that, based on the language variety speakers employ, listeners evaluate them in terms of factors like economic success, body height, or intelligence and, on the other hand, in relation to likeability or trustworthiness. Standard varieties are typically linked to the first set of factors, while informal, non-standard varieties are associated with the latter . A related binary model of social functions of language variation is found in the concept of diglossia, in which different varieties are ascribed ‘H’ (high) or ‘L’ (low) functions (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1959, Gal Reference Gal1979). ‘H’ varieties are those that are used in formal domains, such as governmental institutions, public media, church, or education. ‘L’ varieties are associated with informal domains like family, friends, and leisure activities (on domains, see e.g. Holmes Reference Holmes2008). The distinction of overt and covert prestige of language varieties (e.g. Labov [1966] Reference Labov2006), with the former associated with formal contexts and the latter with informal ones, likewise constructs a binary view of language and its social meanings.

Binary models as found in the matched-guise technique, in diglossia models and in the distinction of overt versus covert, display the tendency of modernist, positivist science to represent the social world as neatly patterned (criticised in Williams (Reference Williams1992)). First-wave sociolinguistics has a general tendency to assume variation to be an inherently structured and ordered phenomenon:

Thus, there is an often unquestioned pre-assumption that variation is by default part of a structured system. Second, as remarked by Rampton (Reference Rampton2000a), it is often tacitly conceived that systematicity implies legitimacy for speakers.

The above sketched rather orderly and binary frames must be reassessed in an age of transnational social relationships. Social meanings of ‘H’ and ‘L’ varieties cannot be assumed to apply only within national boundaries in contexts that entail cross-national communication. (On methodological nationalism, that is, taking the nation as ‘natural’ starting point for social analysis, see Wimmer & Schiller Reference Wimmer and Schiller2002.) National standard language varieties and non-standard ones can have various social meanings outside of their national contexts (Mair Reference Mair, Schneider and Heyd2021), just as different kinds of overt and covert prestige may exist side by side in one geographical space. This brings about the realisation that social categories, including nation states, cannot be taken as given methodological anchor points in the study of languages. Overcoming strictly nationalist framings of the social is also important in the study of polities with colonial histories, where transnational ties have crucially shaped social relationships as well as sociolinguistic economies.

Problematising the link between social categorisation and language variation is crucial also to Eckert’s (Reference Eckert2012) taxonomy of three waves of sociolinguistics. As mentioned above, according to her, the ‘first wave’ of variationist sociolinguistics focuses on the covariation of linguistic features and social categories. In such conceptualisations of the relationship of the linguistic and the social, ‘social structures were usually taken as stable, constituting the independent variables, whereas linguistic forms constituted the dependent variables of the relationship’ (Coulmas Reference Coulmas, García, Flores and Spotti2017: 13). Eckert argues that in the ‘second wave’, which started roughly in the 1980s,Footnote ³ the conceptual problem of social structures as stable and independent was still reproduced. She defines ‘second wave’ sociolinguistics as employing ethnographic methods and even though these ethnographic approaches represent local and socially informed insights into language practice, ‘like studies in the first wave, second-wave studies focused on apparently static categories and equated identity with category affiliation […so that…] the first two waves viewed the meaning of variation as incidental fallout from social space’ (Eckert Reference Eckert2012: 94).

In contrast, ‘the third wave views [the social meaning of variation] as an essential feature of language’ and not as an effect of social structuration. This implies that ‘variation does not simply reflect, but also constructs, social meaning and hence is a force in social change’ (Eckert Reference Eckert2012: 94). The theoretical consequences of this claim are far-reaching and range from a different perspective on the social functions of language features and language change to a different view of community formation through language. If we no longer regard language variation to be an effect of pre-existing social positions but assume language practice to be a force in social change, this also means that language, social positioning, identity, and community formation stand in a dialectical relationship to each other. Accordingly, sociolinguistic change as discussed in the more recent literature (e.g. Coupland Reference Coupland and Coupland2016a) refers not only to the fact that language changes and varies, but also to the fact that the relationship between language and social categorisation can change and vary. Thus, social discourses, above all, those ascribing status and belonging to specific language practices, play a pivotal role in language development. This realisation is considered crucial in this book and brings about the requirement of a particular methodological toolkit in which ethnographic approaches, giving insight into the micro-practices of everyday life and into processes of meaning-making in interaction, are applied. Such approaches are pertinent for understanding the performative power of language to construct categories of social positioning (see Chapter 4).

The power of language to construct social categories has been studied in different contexts and with an elaborate terminological toolkit. Style and the related concept of register, for example, stand for sets of syntactical, phonological, and lexical variants that are related to specific genres or social positions (e.g. Coupland Reference Coupland1980, Bell Reference Bell, Coupland and Jaworski1997, Eckert & Rickford Reference Eckert and Rickford2001, Deuber Reference Deuber2014). Stances are positions expressed via language choices – for example, certainty, irony, seriousness, playfulness – that speakers take with respect to a situation, other utterances, or other speakers (e.g. Ochs Reference Ochs, Gumperz and Levison1996, Johnstone Reference Johnstone and Jaffe2009, Jaffe Reference Jaffe and Coupland2016). Indexicalities, the social, non-referential meanings of variables and styles (see Section 2.3), belong to the now established focal points of interest in a theoretically informed and socially well-grounded sociolinguistics. In this sense, sociolinguistics has overcome under-theorised notions of the social and concentrates on the performative power of language to co-construct social life and relationships. At the same time, concepts of third-wave sociolinguistics mirror theories of performativity in discourse studies and tie in with linguistic anthropological research that has long questioned a priori notions, and, like present-day sociolinguistics, regards languages and communities as an outcome of interactional social practice. In these disciplinary contexts, social indexicalities of language are understood as defined by language ideologies, which are ‘switchboards’ between the micro level of interactional practice and broader social categorisation.

2.3 Language Ideologies and Social Indexicalities of Language

Social-symbolic functions of speech have been studied as language ideologies. Due to an increased interest in the social meaning of variation as depicted in Section 2.2, language ideology research has become ‘a major paradigm’ in contemporary sociolinguistics and other sociocultural approaches to language (Coupland Reference Coupland and Coupland2016b: 10). The term ideology as used in this research paradigm is often misunderstood. It is not an opposition to non-ideological ideas about language. Rather, ideas about language can never be non-ideological; they are always intertwined with social positioning (Gal & Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine2019: ch. 1). An early mention of the term ideology in relation to language is found in Silverstein (Reference Silverstein, Clyne, Hanks and Hofbauer1979). He assumes that the idea that language forms should be regular is not universal but culturally conditioned and argues that this idea has an effect on processes of language change. The process of language becoming more regular, as Silverstein argues, cannot be understood as unrelated to social and normative discourses that assume that language should be regular. In this sense, language ideology research suggests that social ideas about language can influence grammatical structure.

Since the mid to the end of the 1980s, language ideology research has become more and more prominent. According to Gal (Reference Gal and Coupland2016: 116),

Language ideologies are thus part of a cultural model that ‘organize[s] and order[s] the normative relationships between speaking, social identity, situation and social function, as perceived by speakers’ (Gal Reference Gal and Coupland2016: 115). Speakers are often unaware of these models as they are mostly naturalised and ‘represent commonsense views of language and society that people take for granted’ (Bell Reference Bell and Coupland2016: 403). Naturalised concepts of language are closely interrelated with the discourses that construct social order and are never about language alone.

Therefore, the study of language ideologies enables insight into processes of social structuration. Being able to study social structuration and its emergence is crucial in understanding the social world beyond discourses of nationhood, if we no longer want to conceptualise the world’s social structures as ‘naturally’ made up of monolingual, culturally homogeneous nation states (Wimmer & Schiller Reference Wimmer and Schiller2002).

A common entry point into analysing language ideologies as ‘switchboards’ between level speech practice and macro-level social structuration is the study of what language choices socially index (Ochs Reference Ochs, Duranti and Goodwin1992, Reference Ochs1993, Reference Ochs, Gumperz and Levison1996, Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003, Snell Reference Snell2010). An index, in the Peircean tripartite semiotic model of icon, index, and symbol (Peirce [Reference Peirce and Peirce1902] 1931–58), is something that ‘points to’ something else.Footnote ⁴ In a linguistic understanding, ‘an index is a linguistic form that depends on the interactional context for its meaning, such as the first-person pronoun I’ (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005: 594). As mentioned in Section 2.2, we speak of social indexicality if we refer to the extra-semantic, meta-pragmatic, social meanings of language use. The social indexical functions of speech are crucial to access language ideologies, because ‘the empirical basis for … ideologies are concrete “indexicals”, that is features of communicative action pointing in nonrandom ways to salient, context-specific sociocultural meaning reservoirs, and ultimately to social structure’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2018: 22). No utterance is free from such indexicalities, since

Thus, speaking always and necessarily transports social meta-messages and any utterance conveys social meaning, indexes the social situation in which interaction takes place, and the social role the speakers occupy in a particular situation. Speech forms are therefore ‘informed by an ideologized system of representations, and no matter how instrumental they may be to some particular social goal, they also participate in the “work of representation”’ (Irvine Reference Irvine, Eckert and Rickford2001: 24).

Social indexical meanings come into being on the grounds of histories of use and cultural expectations (Ochs Reference Ochs, Gumperz and Levison1996: 418, cited in Jaffe Reference Jaffe and Coupland2016: 92) and are thus subject to continuous shift. An example is the use of gender-neutral language. While the use of forms of ‘generic he’ used to be the norm in Western societies until the 1980s (and often later), many discourses now refrain from such forms. In these contexts, the use of male-only constructions may be regarded as expressing a negative stance towards feminism and emancipation. Changes in indexical meanings of language are not only relevant in theorising language change (Eckert Reference Eckert and Coupland2016) but are, in themselves, a form of social change. At the same time, indexical meanings are multiple, shifting, and cannot be tied to one essential meaning. On these grounds, Eckert proposes to conceptualise the indexical meanings that surround a linguistic form as existing in an indexical field, which encompasses ‘ideologically related meanings, any one of which can be activated in the situated use of the variable’ (Eckert Reference Eckert2008: 454). In other words,

Indexical meanings are thus multiple and depend on context and style of use. These multiple meanings are not, however, arbitrary but relate to larger ideological framings, typically referred to as discourses in other disciplinary contexts. Eckert discusses the discursive embeddedness of indexical meanings with the example of the use of negative concords (multiple negation) in her often cited Jocks and Burnouts study (Reference Eckert1989). One indexical value of negative concord is, according to her, masculinity. Yet, it is used frequently by anti-establishment Burnout girls. The girls do not intend to index masculinity by using negative concord, however. Rather, they use it to index toughness. (This is related to Ochs’s (Reference Ochs, Duranti and Goodwin1992) discussion of indirect indexicality.) While the example demonstrates that indexical meanings can vary according to context and speaker, a fact that will be demonstrated below with regard to the choice of languages in Belize, it also shows that the social indexical values of linguistic variables are part of larger ideological frameworks. What is chosen as indexical value, toughness in the present case, is part of a discursive arrangement that constructs which social characteristics are regarded as stereotypical for defining particular social groups.

In order to specify the relationships between types of social values that are expressed indexically in language, Gal suggests the notion of axes of differentiation (Reference Gal and Coupland2016). Distinct linguistic styles are differentiated on the basis of social qualities that are picked out as ideologically relevant, for example, ‘clear’, ‘orderly’, ‘lazy’, ‘cool’, or ‘old-fashioned’. These qualities are perceived as being indexed by linguistic registers (p. 121), which in turn index specific social types. According to Gal, qualities are understood by speakers as being on an axis, that is, social qualities are seen as relating to each other. The most naturalised axis of differentiation in Western cultures is that of formality vs informality, which is a hegemonic ideological framing in the age of the nation state.

And yet, where sociopolitical conditions change, axes may shift. For example, a distinction on the quality of being ‘cool’, namely autonomous and detached from emotions, has become a relevant type of differentiation in many contemporary Western societies. In anglophone settings, it can be indexed, for example, by use of vocal fry or creaky voice (Yuasa Reference Yuasa2010, Mendoza-Denton Reference Mendoza-Denton2011, Podesva Reference Podesva2013). It is not only an opposition to being overtly formal but carries its own indexical value. In this perspective, a framing of overt vs covert prestige is overly simplistic and assumes only the binary distinction between formality and informality, while ignoring other cultural values that may come into play in the social indexicalities of language. Even though the standard–non-standard distinction remains relevant, complex social differentiations beyond nation-state binaries, which may produce multiple axes of differentiation, are characteristic of many contemporary cultures, including postcolonial ones. Given the latter’s multilingual realities and in parts contested forms of community formation, they involve more than this one frame of making sense of difference. In later chapters, I interpret the languages Kriol and English as being associated with different axes of differentiation, one that values homogeneity and formality, the other cherishing creativity and expressiveness. The two axes do relate to each other as homogeneity opposes creativity, and yet, the ability to create new, idiosyncratic, or poetic forms is not simply the act of being non-formal. It is therefore more than an antithesis to formality and forms its own axis of differentiation.

A major challenge in the study of indexicality is to ‘reconcile the contradictory nature of these multiple indexicalities’ (Jaffe Reference Jaffe and Coupland2016: 92). The multiplicity of indexical meanings is complex, sometimes paradoxical, and based on cultural histories. ‘Norms and meanings accumulate in a piecemeal fashion, are inherently multiple (and not necessarily coherent), and are anchored in different (and only partially articulated) domains of practice with different historical depth’ (Jaffe Reference Jaffe and Coupland2016: 89). Overall, it is therefore well established that ‘one “language” does not straightforwardly index one subject position, and that speakers use linguistic resources in complex, sophisticated ways to perform a range of subject positions, sometimes simultaneously’ (Blackledge & Creese Reference Blackledge and Creese2009: 458).

While the concept of social indexicality has been applied to the study of single variables, for instance sounds (Eckert Reference Eckert1989) or lexical items (Snell Reference Snell2010) and to that of styles (Coupland Reference Coupland2007), I use this theoretical framework to investigate the indexical values of what speakers conceptualise as languages. In the terminology of third-wave sociolinguistics, these can be considered as a particular type of style, namely that of a hegemonic group, often one that is associated with the centring institutions of governments and educational systems in a nation state. The specific indexical histories of standard language are discussed in Section 2.4.

2.4 Indexicalities of Standard Languages and Post-National Prestige

In many cultures, standard languages are part of a hegemonic and very influential language ideological system and particularly those standard languages associated with Western nation states have a history in which their indexical load carries the function of being ‘neutral’:

In the UK, the idea that a specific type of language represents the people of a nation state was established throughout the eighteenth century, with cultural orientations towards the speech of the aristocracy and entailing the idea that old and non-changing forms are ‘good’ (Hickey Reference Hickey and Hickey2012: 5–7). Linguistic repertoires associated with these forms were transmitted to larger parts of the population – in the UK, for example, via handbooks on linguistic conduct, mass literacy, and journals called ‘penny weeklies’ (Agha Reference Agha2003). Without going into the details of the processes of language standardisation in European nation states in early modern and modern times, it is safe to say that the concept of a stable and standardised language that is constructed as neutral ‘voice from nowhere’ (Gal & Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine1995) in a national space is a culturally specific invention of European modernity.

This is not to say that evaluative attitudes towards language exist only in Western nation states. ‘It seems to be a trait of the species that once people become aware of variants in any area of behaviour, they evaluate them. Thus do standards of behaviour come into being’ (Joseph Reference Joseph1987: 3). Yet, the idea of one (and only one) standardised language for a group of people as large as that of a nation is ‘not universal, but represent[s] a specifically Western concept that has been spread by cultural tradition’ (Joseph Reference Joseph1987: 7). Joseph therefore distinguishes between standard languages and standards of language. (On implicit linguistic norms in non-Western languages, see Deumert & Lexander (Reference Deumert and Lexander2013), Amorós-Negré (Reference Amorós-Negre2018).)

The specific prestige of Western national standard languages is associated with official and formal communication; these languages are used in education and writing and, as they are based on the speech practices of the elites in a state, they are linked to social power in national institutions. Developed within the epistemologies of European modernity, standard languages are linked to cultural ideals of clarity, purity, and stability. At the same time, the concept of the public is crucial in understanding the function of standard languages as ‘the use of language in public was an integral part of the national language complex’ (Hickey Reference Hickey and Hickey2012: 7). While written language is overtly normed either by national language academies (e.g. in France or Spain), or by publishing houses (e.g. Duden, Oxford, or Webster) and individuals, ‘spoken standards are covertly codified as public speech norms’ in national settings (Hickey Reference Hickey and Hickey2012: 16). National public spaces are therefore crucial in the emergence of national language standards and it has been argued that the two are in a dialectical relationship, that is, they constitute each other (Gal & Woolard Reference Gal and Irvine1995).

In an age of digital, globally distributed media, national public spaces are not the only social spaces which are indexically associated with prestigious language. Already in Milroy and Milroy’s (Reference Milroy and Milroy1999) model, the acquisition of prestige is described as ‘associated with the most successful people’ and these are not necessarily traditional national elites in today’s society. Language practices in, for example, global music culture, digital language technologies, or social media interaction that becomes viral, represent public language that can be prestigious. The prestige of public language in global mediated and digital publics can, however, differ from the formal prestige that has been constructed in national institutions in the age of print literacy. Formal norms of correctness as supported by national institutions (e.g. school education, language academies) may play a role in some contexts – for example, in ‘serious’ media like news or online newspapers, but less so in others (e.g. YouTube video channels, TikTok productions).

The notions of overt and covert prestige (see above) require reconsideration in transnational, digitised publics, as the prestige of non-formal ways of speaking may not at all be ‘covert’ but overtly respectable and a model for many speakers. Jamaican Creole, for example, ‘through currents of out-migration from the Caribbean to Britain, the US and Canada and through the world-wide success of Caribbean musicians in the reggae and dancehall traditions has become one of the globally relevant contact vernaculars’ (Mair Reference Mair2013: 13). The qualities associated with the prestige of Jamaican Creole in Caribbean music are clearly different from the qualities associated with a national standard but the notions of overt and covert are not entirely satisfactory to describe these differences, as speakers may overtly relate positively to forms that are not formal norms (e.g. Hinrichs Reference Hinrichs2006). We are dealing with different axes with which prestige is constructed in public language. The existence of such different axes is related to polycentric power structures (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010). The prestige of non-national public norms of language is at the same time indicative of post-national, neoliberal social power structures in which private actors have considerable agency and influence (see Bauman (Reference Bauman2012) on the privatisation of public space; Zuboff (Reference Zuboff2019) on digital surveillance capitalism as a form of privatised power).

In colonial contexts, speakers were faced with transnational and polycentric structures, too, as colonial institutions, local forms of resistance, and economic actors simultaneously functioned as powerful authorities. (On colonial social structures in Belize, see Bolland (Reference Bolland2003).) In studying postcolonial settings and global digital publics alike, we have to overcome conceptual frameworks that take the power of national institutions for granted and require a cosmopolitan epistemology that allows for grasping authority and prestige beyond national orders.

In a post-national capitalist society, for example, it is unsurprising that the ascription of prestige to a language style is linked to economic success. If speakers learn a language because they aim for increased chances on the job market, the individual may or may not be interested in the formal prestigious values of that language; what is central is the instrumental value that allows economic gains based on specific language competences. Still, the fact that some language varieties help to become economically successful adds to their prestige, and this may be of a formal or of another kind. To give an example of economic success related to the acquisition of a language not associated with formality, we can think of the German musician Gentleman, who is globally successful as a Reggae musician, not least because of his ability to perform in Jamaican Creole. Gentleman does not sing in Jamaican Creole to conform to an official standard yet substantially profits economically from his musical productions, thereby augmenting the language’s prestige.

Overall, linguistic prestige is a notion that should not be understood as limited to formal institutional norms but, in the way I apply it in this study, it is the general attribution of positive cultural values to a language variety. When referring to language used in public space in the context of Belize, I do not refer to it as standard language, as this term evokes the concept of one uniform set of lexical and syntactic rules. Rather, in describing and discussing prestigious forms of language found in non-private settings (e.g. public mass media, social media, education, research interviews), I use the term public language, and I show that this may conform to traditional standard language rules to a greater or lesser extent (see Chapter 9). This conceptual framework aspires to enrich cosmopolitan epistemologies and to contribute to ‘imagin[ing] a decolonial future for standard languages, i.e. a future in which a diversity of voices rather than a monolithic norm is the way in which we imagine the standard language’ (Deumert & Mabandla Reference Deumert, Mabandla, Lane, Costa and De Korne2018: 218). As the materialisation of language in writing and print has been a crucial factor in the history of standardising language in national publics, the following section discusses the role of material culture in its construction.

2.5 Material Culture and the Material Construction of Languages

A crucial aspect in studying how particular styles are enregistered as languages is to pay attention to their material realisation. As discussed in Chapter 1, based on my qualitative analysis of empirical data, I have identified specific material practices and discourses as contributing to the construction of languages as categories. In line with newer sociolinguistic debates (e.g. Coupland Reference Coupland2016c), I use the term materiality to refer to aspects of language that have to do with physical substance, including sound forms, writing on paper, screens, or walls (or anywhere else), policy documents and their realisation in school curricula. A previous focus on materiality is found in Cavanaugh and Shankar’s edited volume entitled Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations (Reference Cavanaugh and Shankar2017: 1) which aims to ‘theorize language materially’. A major focus of the book is to ground language processes ‘within social, cultural, political and economic structures of power’ (p. 1). Their approach is Marxist, as they are interested in how economic structures relate to language practice. This differs from my ontological considerations, which question the conception of language as an immaterial cognitive system. I submit that language is not only influenced by material culture but is itself material culture.

The concept of materiality as I use it in relation to language requires an explanation and disclaimer. My use of it includes, first of all, the practice of writing in different media, it entails the policies that influence whether and how language is used in specific places and institutions. Additionally, it entails material characteristics of speaking, such as speed, word length, and intonation, as well as discourses about these characteristics. Note that the relevance of material language culture was no a priori assumption about language ideologies but appeared during the analysis of the data, as interviewees frequently talked about material cultural practices when elaborating on different social functions of languages. Note furthermore that the boundary between material and non-material in language is not clear-cut (see below) and that my considerations on materiality entail an element of speculative contemplation. I am fully aware that I eclectically mix different levels and practices within this analytical category. Nevertheless, I find the approach fruitful to ponder the question of what language is and to explore the permeable boundary between material and immaterial. This boundary construction had a major impact on linguistic concepts during the twentieth century, which constructed language as essentially cognitive and immaterial. (For a critical history of linguistics, see Heller & McElhinny (Reference Heller and McElhinny2017).)

The material character of language has received little attention in sociolinguistics, where face-to-face interaction has been conceptualised as the primary object of research.Footnote ⁵ A definition of materiality in the context of language is not an easy one. In a sense, all language use is of material character as we require sounds to produce meaning when speaking (see Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Love and Wimsatt2019: 375 for discussion). All language is of a material kind and is mediated via different channels – ‘we use “physical technologies” to form sound waves that make sense in spoken language’ (Kristiansen Reference Kristiansen and Androutsopoulos2014, cited in Androutsopoulos Reference Androutsopoulos and Coupland2016: 287), and we use our bodies to produce these sounds. Particularly within debates on the role of mass and digital media in sociolinguistics, non-embodied kinds of media employed in communication have become a central focus (Coupland Reference Coupland and Coupland2016a). We can distinguish between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ technologies of mediation, where primary mediation is embodied and mediated through vocal cords and facial movements, or gestural and facial movements, in the case of sign languages, whereas secondary mediation depends on other tools. Secondary mediation occurs when ‘language use is based on some technology that “liberates” the transmission/construction of meaning from the contextual constraints of face-to-face interaction’ (Androutsopoulos Reference Androutsopoulos and Coupland2016: 288).

In my data, secondary mediation, particularly writing, influences ideologies regarding regularity and ‘realness’ or factuality of a language. This implies that there is a dialectical relationship between primary and secondary mediation so that spoken language cannot be seen as autonomous from the other mediational forms in which it may be embodied. Studies of human engagement with objects and technologies have generally shown that a discourse–materiality dichotomy is not straightforward. Semiosis is ‘a process that emerges in the mutually constitutive actions that take place between human bodies and the other entities with which they interact’ (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz, Hall and Coupland2016: 187). Overall, I thus propose the notion of materiality as a data-driven concept that influences how speakers understand and discursively construct language.

In Foucauldian discourse theory, material artefacts are part of what Foucault conceives of as discourse. The concept thus ‘refers to a broad conglomeration of linguistic and non-linguistic social practices and ideological assumptions’ (Schiffrin, Tannen, & Hamilton Reference Schiffrin, Tannen, Hamilton, Schiffrin, Tannen and Hamilton2001: 1). Therefore, the discursive construction of reality, in Foucauldian approaches, includes the study of material objects. The most famous example from Foucault’s writings is probably the Panopticon (Foucault Reference Foucault1991), a particular architecture of prison buildings in which the guard can observe all inmates constantly, while they are unable to see the guard (McMullan Reference McMullan2015). According to Foucault, the structure of the building relates to social discourses on the controlling and disciplining of citizens in modern states (Fink-Eitel Reference Fink-Eitel1992). Classrooms are another example that shows that the material context is in a dialectical relationship to social discourse and power structures. In a traditional classroom setting, the furniture enforces the role and power of the teacher by the way chairs and tables are positioned (Schneider Reference Schneider2011: 26). Interview data as discussed in Chapter 8 indeed illustrate this interaction of material realities and discursive concepts. In order to develop a socially oriented and anthropological view of human communication, discourses on material aspects as well as actual material practices, including writing, print books, and schooling, are highly relevant. (See Fabian (Reference Fabian and Fabian2001) on the cultural contingency of reading and writing and Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2004) on ideologies of writing.)

In language, the relationship between the symbolic, immaterial, and material levels is intricate. Language practices produce immaterial concepts and are a material reality at the same time. They therefore have been referred to as ‘hybrid technologies’: ‘In more or less the same way as computers, which deserve this name only when both their hardware and software are taken into account, languages are hybrid technologies’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Love and Wimsatt2019: 374). Even though we often conceive of spoken language as something immaterial, the sounds we produce are of a material kind (von Humboldt Reference Humboldt and Wilhelm von1836: 50–60, Volosinov [1930] Reference Volosinov1975). The fact that sound is used in many forms of interaction has an impact on the form of language as the affordances of sound practices interact with structural aspects of language and ‘grammars are in some ways consequences of the specific materials used to package information, viz., sounds or manual signs’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Love and Wimsatt2019: 377). Language, in this sense, is material and our daily interactive practices are framed in culturally embedded ideas of what constitutes the ‘normal’ sounds (or gestures) of language, which we reproduce while speaking.

In addition, in Western traditions of literacy, script is conceptualised as representing sound so that sound-based interaction and writing are not autonomous from each other. Everyday reading is ubiquitous: ‘reading [is] an activity on which many [modern and literate] humans spend more time than on eating, having sex, or participating in rituals’ (Fabian Reference Fabian and Fabian2001: 53), which probably is even more pronounced in an age of digital interaction. Our ideas about language, including our ideas on regularity, homogeneity, stability, and normativity, are not unconnected from writing traditions that are understood as representing sound in linear form (Derrida Reference Derrida1974, Ong Reference Ong1982, Abram Reference Abram1996).

In structural linguistics, language is traditionally perceived as a cognitive immaterial system. In contrast, in anthropology and education, the visual materialisation of language and the practice of writing have been described, for example, as ‘material, visible, lasting tokens of speech’, as a ‘mark on the scale of technological evolution’, or as ‘social and political ideology serving special interests’ (Street Reference Street1995, Fabian Reference Fabian and Fabian2001: 56). The relative neglect of written language and reading in linguistics is linked to a tradition that claims that speaking precedes writing, after an exclusive focus on written language in nineteenth-century historical-comparative linguistics (Arens Reference Arens1969). Still permeated with nineteenth-century concepts (e.g. the Junggrammatiker, see Osthoff & Brugmann (Reference Osthoff and Brugmann1878)), modernist linguistics argued that spoken language should be the primary focus of linguistics (e.g. Saussure Reference Saussure1913). Despite this focus on the spoken word, linguistics displays a written language bias. Linell, for example, argues that our ‘conception of linguistic behaviour is biased by a tendency to treat processes, activities, and conditions on them in terms of object-like, static, autonomous and permanent structures, i.e., as if they shared such properties with written characters, words, texts, pictures and images’ (Linell Reference Linell1982: 1–2).Footnote ⁶

In contemporary applied linguistic theories, there is a renewed interest in how material practices and cognitive concepts are entangled. This is based on a wide-reaching examination of how human as well as non-human agents interact in the construction of social reality. Debates on what is referred to as posthumanism criticise the idea that human beings hold a superior and autonomous position in the world, implying a critique of the historical discourse of humanism (Pennycook Reference Pennycook2018: ch. 1). Posthumanist discourses aim to unsettle the idea that there is a clear distinction between human and non-human as well as between the material and the immaterial. They claim that non-human agents, including nature, animals, and things, play a foundational role in the semiotic assemblages with which humans create their world. Therefore, bodies, things, spaces, and other beings, human or not, cannot be ignored in semiotic and social analyses (see, for instance, Latour’s Reference Latour2005 ‘actor–network theory’). Applying a posthumanist perspective, ‘we can come to understand how the social and the real, objects and people, are intertwined’ (Pennycook Reference Pennycook2018: 32).

In recent linguistic anthropology, such considerations suggest that linguistic signs should not be principally distinguished from other types of signs, because this ‘pre-empts the possibly quite various assumptions about communication around the globe. It favours, instead, a Western philosophical position that distinguishes between materiality and ideation, between the physical and the mental, and places language in an ideational-mental realm’ (Gal & Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine2019: 15). On a very foundational level, debates on materiality and immateriality, the body and the mind, and the physical and the mental are related to questioning the dichotomy between nature and culture. As posthumanists and scholars from related orientations would argue, the division between nature and culture is an outcome of specific cultural discourses, where the fact that humans interact with and depend on their environment has become invisible. (See in connection to this Haraway’s (Reference Haraway and Haraway1991) conception of the human as cyborg.) This also has effects on understanding the emergence and development of language, in whose analysis we should consider that ‘biology and culture are not mutually exclusive’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Love and Wimsatt2019: 367). As language is both, material and immaterial, bodily and mental, culture and nature, there is quite logically a certain degree of arbitrariness in distinguishing discourses concerned with material from those focused on immaterial aspects of language. The data I introduce in subsequent chapters show that the two sides are always entangled. Speakers in my study frequently talk about writing, reading, educational practices, or material realisations of languages. So, I consider material practices as a crucial part of humans’ constructions of language.

I close this chapter with an example of the interactive relationship between the material and the conceptual level. The following quote is by cultural anthropologist Richard Wilk,Footnote ⁷ who studies food culture in Belize. The author argues that tangible language products, especially books, may shape cultural ideologies, ideologies of fixity, and constructions of authority. The quote illustrates the discussions laid out in this chapter. It indirectly shows that the cultural and linguistic categories that co-define our social life are outcomes of collective cultural and material interactions. It also brings to the fore the claim that ‘languages are … cultural phenomena, like cooking, dwellings, clothing, religions, and a host of other cultural products’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Love and Wimsatt2019: 371).