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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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)

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

8. 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

9. 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.”

10. 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)

11. 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

12. 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