The social and political study of language Jan Blommaert The social and political study of language

Taking stock Hymes’ rejection of the Chomskyan ‘ideal speaker’ in a contextless environment Replaced by: what does language do for actual people in their actual lives? Perspective, not discipline Perspective = paradigmatic: whole new science of language possible

Ethnography became a point of convergence Interactional paradigm: Gumperz, Garfinkel, Sacks Developmental paradigm: Ervin-Tripp, Ochs, Schieffelin Neo-Whorfian paradigm: Silverstein, Haviland, Sherzer Performance paradigm: Bauman, Butler, Rampton

And had several long-term effects A re-theorization of ethnography In anthropology, interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis A focus on language as socially and culturally embedded practice Pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis A fully developed theoretical alternative for the study of language Maintained the anthropological study of language Spawned modern linguistic anthropology Educational linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis

A new vocabulary to talk about language in social life Speech versus language Ethnography of speaking Communicative competence Ways of speaking Repertoire Speech event Speech community Functional relativity poetics

A critique of several widespread notions One language-one culture assumption The uniformity of language The uniformity of social groups Monolingualism/multilingualism The potential versus actual (in)equality of languages The stability of linguistic functions Language as opportunity versus language as constraint (language as a problem)

Important The anthropological roots: comprehensiveness, function Difference between perspective and discipline The problem-orientedness and emphasis on complexity

We should not talk about languages but about specific communicative resources That are organised in repertoires That have their constraints Whenever people communicate they try to do something with their resources And that function should not be taken for granted

Hymes’ political programme “The fact that good ethnography entails trust and confidence, that it requires some narrative accounting, and that it is an extension of a universal form of personal knowledge, make me think that ethnography is peculiarly appropriate to a democratic society. It could of course be reduced to a technique for the manipulation of the masses by the elite. As envisioned here, ethnography had the potentiality for helping to overcome divisions of society into those who know and those who are known.”

A man of the left, concerned with social inequality Also in science: implicit critique of the Sapir generation (‘informants’) Anthropology (= ethnography) as the science in which the subject has voice Marxist influence: ethnography as a materialist response to Chomsky’s idealism « Linguistic theory adopted Feuerbach and rejected Marx » (1996: 189)

A genuine critical discourse analysis Theoretically very sophisticated Genuine engagement with social problems Methodologically flexible, within a robust functional perspective Taking it back to the people Asking rare questions Resources instead of languages Specific user communities instead of predefined groups

Problems Made plenty of enemies, few generous friends Never produced a grand synthesis Ethnography has become a ‘discipline’ rather than a ‘perspective’ Reduction of the theoretical scope of his concepts (e.g. S P E A K I N G) No attention to the critical potential of e.g. ethnopoetics