Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life by Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine (review)

Abstract

T concept of ideology has gone out of fashion in many quarters. Already in 1991, Terry Eagleton remarked on its disappearance from the writings of social theorists. Since then, turns toward affect, materiality, ontology, and the like have moved cultural anthropology and social theory even further from the discursive, representational, subjective domain of ideology. Coincidently, around the time Eagleton was remarking on the abandonment of the concept, ideology was beginning to find its legs in the field of linguistic anthropology. Since then, the study of language ideologies— people’s conceptions of language and its use—has grown to assume a central place in the field. It has not only provided a fruitful angle for approaching longstanding concerns of linguistic anthropologists, everything from the intricacies of conversational interaction to the historical transformations of languages. It has also opened up vast new terrain for research, serving as an intellectual trading zone where linguistic anthropologists draw on and contribute to scholarship on modernity, (post)coloniality, liberal democracy, neoliberal globalization, new media, religion, education, and a host of other topics. During this time, few scholars have had more of an impact on the study of language ideologies than Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine. Their 2000 essay “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation” is already a classic in the field. Now, with Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life, we have the culmination of their decades-long investigation into the warp and woof of language ideologies. This book will be required reading