The chapter I want to discuss for the next two weeks is called The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language by Pierre Bourdieu. I remember reading this chapter and feeling uncomfortable as a linguist, teacher, and even speaker. I felt uncomfortable because it had never been so apparent before how much social capital I had because of the type of English that comes out of my mouth.
This idea of language being tied to social and symbolic capital through the metaphor of a marketplace has helped me make sense of concepts, like native speakerism and a raciolinguistic perspective. Before we jump back into those topics in future weeks, Bourdieu’s paper will help us ask the question: What is legitimate language? But also, how was it created and how does it continue to exist without much conscious effort?
Do All Speakers Have Listeners?
Bourdieu begins his paper by discussing two linguists who have had huge impacts on the field of linguistics: Saussure and Chomsky. Saussure is regarded by some as the father of modern linguists and he believed there were two forms of language: langue and parole. Langue refers to the shared language of a speech community and parole refers to the actual speech that comes out of people’s mouths in actual situations. Saussure believed that linguists should study the one that is abstracted from actual situations—langue.
If the ideas sound familiar, it might be because Chomsky’s distinction of competence and performance, which we looked at a few weeks ago, is really quite similar.
Bourdieu makes that connection and he includes a Chomsky quote that I’ve put into newsletters a couple of times (because I feel like everything from native speakerism to “correct” language stems from this quote):
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with the ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant as memory limitations, distraction….
Bourdieu’s problem with Saussure’s and Chomsky’s approaches to language is not so different from my professor who used to complain about how most linguistics textbooks depict language as two heads talking to each other. On the surface, yes, language is a speaker transmitting a message to the listener who receives it and transmits another message. But if you think deeper, what’s missing from that idea?
They’re disembodied heads. Language is embodied in people who each have personal histories that are reflected in their language. Not to mention there are hundreds of signed languages. So their bodies being gone matters1.
They’re just heads communicating; there’s no sign of society. There being no social context matters.
The heads are usually a weird innocuous color like purple. A raciolinguistics perspective tells us that we cannot separate language from race. So their race being gone matters.
But to Bourdieu, there’s something else wrong with this depiction of language: there’s an assumption that when the speaker transmits the message the listener will receive the message. In other words, it’s assumed that everyone’s language is treated the same way.
To Bourdieu, viewing language as merely a vehicle of communication is to miss all of the social reasons behind why we perceive certain accents, dialects, varieties, languages the way we do.
Bourdieu believes that competence in language has nothing to do with grammaticality. Instead, for a speaker to be competent inside of society, it means that they need to know which form of language to use and when.
Which Language Should You Use And When?
Like we’ve discussed before, it’s normal to make changes to the way you speak depending on whom you’re speaking to. For example, I might speak Spanglish with my cousin, but I might only speak standard American English with work colleagues because of fear that they’d judge my Spanglish as being inappropriate.
Bourdieu goes further than merely describing this situation and asks: Why is standard English more appropriate than any other English?
He traces back the rise of standard languages in connection to the rise of nation states following the French Revolution, which I describe in this newsletter. And he discusses how standard languages gained legitimacy through governments. And governments promoted these languages through institutions, like the education system.
The speed that standard languages became normalized is interesting. But more so is the mainstream acceptance. Today, the standard has become such a norm that most parents—regardless of the version of the language they speak—fully support teachers and schools teaching their children the standard language.
Bourdieu’s point is to question how the standard became not only the norm, but more importantly, “the norm against which all linguistic practices are objectively measured.” In other words, how has the unanimous support of one language—by extension—caused the suppression of all other languages?
And who does this standard serve?
Whose Language is Labelled “Informal,”“Slang,” or “Colloquial:” A Preview of Part 2
One of Bourdieu’s main points (which is the topic of part 2) is that we judge languages through the lens of a marketplace in which some languages have more symbolic and social capital than others. Even more jarring, he says that in the marketplace languages are worth what their speakers are worth.
Thinking of people now—when we look at dictionaries, whose language is legitimate enough to not receive a special label, like informal or colloquial, in a dictionary? Conversely, whose language is so illegitimate that they need to be reminded of that illegitimacy each time they look it up in the dictionary (that is, if their language even makes it into the dictionary)?
Bourdieu paints a picture of a marketplace in which the language with the most social and symbolic capital—the standard—is protected by institutions including the education system and dictionaries. And the reason why it’s so protected is because social and symbolic capital can eventually be traded in for economic capital.
But which groups get the most shares?
Conclusion
This paper has taught me that as someone who grew up with a home language that is similar to standard American English, I have benefitted. I had huge leg up in school; my intellect was never questioned due to the variety of English that came out of my mouth. Later on as a teacher, I’ve gotten jobs because of my accent.
Ideas like standard language felt innocuous to me because I speak a language that affords me social and symbolic capital.
Prior to reading this paper, the idea of teaching the standard language so that others would have access to the social and symbolic capital seemed like an altruistic solution. But after reading this paper, I questioned that altruism.
This first part of the paper got me to go from not questioning the standard to then questioning the standard and being shocked how I had never questioned it before to then being in a huge pickle as an English teacher…but that’s for part 2 when we get into the nitty-gritty of how the linguistic marketplace works and what role the education plays in it.
P.S. I somehow only got through four pages of the chapter in part 1, but I hope this information gives a solid foundation for next week when it gets deeper into the sociology of language.
Discussion
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Work Cited
Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social science information, 16(6), 645-668.
When I say it matters, I mean it matters that the illustrators and authors believed that it didn’t matter.