Language and Ideology

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

The year 2020 marked the 25th year since Bonny Norton published her influential TESOL Quarterly article, ‘Social identity, investment, and language learning’ (Norton Peirce, 1995) and the fifth year since we, Darvin and Norton (2015), co-authored ‘Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics’ in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. From the time Norton's 1995 piece was published, investment and motivation have been conceptually imbricated and often collocated, as they hold up two different lenses to investigate the same reality: why learners choose to learn an additional language (L2). In our 2015 article, we made the case that while it is important to ask the question, ‘Are students motivated to learn a language?’ it is equally productive to ask, ‘Are students invested in the language practices of the classroom or community?’ (Darvin & Norton, 2015, p. 37). We recognize that the relationship between language teachers and learners is unequal, and that teachers ...

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

The research project carried out in one primary school in Scotland was guided by an intention to discover and provide up-to-date data on what literacy teachers knew about critical literacy and whether this knowledge was promoted, achieved, and enacted in praxis. By specifically focusing on reading and teachers' approaches to texts, this study explores to what extent critical literacy makes its explicit or implicit appearance in the early years' reading classes as a result of teachers' understanding of it-their content knowledge, personal and professional beliefs. The findings have fueled the discussion about the preconditions for greater and more direct utilization of critical literacy in language classrooms. The knowledge and practices the teachers in this study revealed, reflect a promising springboard for developing new, more unified ways of teaching reading. After being reminded of and exposed to some of the central concepts of critical literacy, the teachers became more interested and confirmed that they would teach for it if they only knew how. This is also one of the main implications of the study for teacher educators, curriculum developers and researchers.

Changes associated with the post-socialist period in Albania have complicated the legacy of language ideologies grounded in Ottoman-era and socialist-era politics. In this article, I analyze two metalinguistic interviews with young adults in the Albanian capital of Tirana in order to investigate the status of standardizing and anti-standardizing language ideologies while also raising a methodological question regarding interview context and researcher role as persistent issues in sociolinguistic research. As acts of evaluation, language ideologies can be linked to interactional positionings and alignments via stance, which is significant for understanding aspects of identity and context in the interview. I argue that this framework provides a better understanding of interview dynamics than previous style shifting approaches, as any explanation of differences in interview interactions must simultaneously consider macro-level influences of ideology and micro-level interactional developments.

This article deals with identity political discourse in situations of cultural movements, precisely in situations of migration. It addresses the question of migration through the interpretation of past and in the making events. In this context, it focuses on the perception of Other, and on its representation. As such, it observes spatiotypies in their discursive specificities. Spatiotypies are attributions of power and discourse. They state, mentally and politically, the social life of individuals. The corpus is composed of French newspaper articles, from the middle of 2015 to the end of 2016. This period saw the dismantling of the "Camps de Calais" and the distribution of migrants to other locations on the French territory.

This article analyses interviews with 25 Japanese male returnees who took part in study abroad and/or working holiday maker programs. It examines the ways in which foreign language learning (specifically English) and discourses of ‘the international’ influenced the men’s choices to go abroad. It also analyses how these discourses are connected to interviewees’ lives post sojourn. Prior research about Japanese international sojourners has
primarily focused on the experiences of Japanese women and has often portrayed Japanese men as either not interested in international sojourn and language learning, or only interested in these pursuits for instrumental means. The current study, however, concludes that English
learning and a desire to be connected to ‘the international’ played a crucial role in participants’ choices to go abroad and remained an important aspect of their identity after their return to Japan. This study not only shows the complexity of the Japanese male experience abroad, but also challenges discourses of study abroad and language learning as a female activity. Lastly, this paper emphasizes interviewees’ lasting emotional connection to English and their English-speaking communities.

Jane Hill’s work on Mock Spanish (e.g., Hill, 2008) provides illuminating explanation of the appropriation of Spanish by US English speakers. She describes how speakers appropriate lexical items like cerveza (beer) to construct a positive image of themselves (e.g., as easy-going) while simultaneously indexing negative stereotypes of Spanish speakers (e.g., as lazy). Furthermore, Hill posits that Mock Spanish is a form of covert, elite racism since most instances originate among middle-class Whites, who portray themselves as “not racist” (van Dijk, 1993).

However compelling, Hill’s research has involved collecting and analyzing examples that she incidentally encountered.  Due to the limitations of this method, she has called for other approaches to answer questions like how the frequency of Mock Spanish has changed over time (Hill, 1995). We attempt to answer this call by incorporating corpus linguistics into the study of mock language (Vessey, 2014).

Our study uses the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), containing a stratified sample of texts representing different years and genres (Davies, 2010). Similar numbers of texts are taken from each year between 1990 and 2012 and from several contexts: television and radio, fiction, newspapers, magazines, and academic publications. COCA, therefore, provides an appropriate dataset to study Mock Spanish’s frequency in several domains of elite discourse and its changes over the past two decades.

In our presentation, we describe our methodology which combines computational and manual techniques to locate and examine Mock Spanish tokens. Our methods allow us to describe a larger, more comprehensive lexicon of available Mock Spanish tokens than previously reported. We also discuss the distribution of Mock Spanish across genres and over time, explaining tendencies and changes with reference to ideological conflicts in the US (e.g., over Latin American immigration). Finally, we discuss the limitations of a corpus-based investigation of Mock Spanish.

A survey of the multiple participants involved in linguistic planning of the Berber language, both in North Africa and in the diaspora: speakers, cultural associations, notable individuals, States, universities, institutions (HCA in Algeria, IRCAM in Morocco), schools, parties and movements, opposants, migrants abroad and second generations, foreign institutions (e.g. Inalco, France), foreign States, Berber associations in the world (e.g. CMA), standard-setting organizations (e.g. Unicode).

To understand Trump’s populist appeal we must go beyond linguistic form to focus on the semiotic and ideological dimensions of language use. The rise of populist and anti-intellectual discourses have many scholars and educators concerned about the state of academic freedom. Since the election of Trump, the rise of anti-intellectualism has become a more urgent reality. Unfortunately, the vast majority of political scientists and media pundits took a major credibility hit when they wrongly predicted a Trump loss. This was partially due to their narrow assumptions and methods for gauging people’s attitudes and beliefs, reflected in a restrictive
understanding about the nature and function of how language works, namely relying on linguistic form. A reliance on polls and transcript splices proved limited.

Razfar, Aria. 2017. “Process the Trump.” Anthropology News website, May 18, 2017. doi: 10.1111/AN.460

Le but de cette enquête c’est l'étude de la place qui possède l'enseignement de la langue française dans l’éducation hellénique technique (enseignement secondaire) à travers les stéréotypes qui accompagnent la langue française et sa culture.

This article presents a critical analysis of language ideologies in the instructional discourse of Spanish for heritage speakers in the United States. We focus on the discourse present in prefaces and introductions to Spanish for heritage speakers textbooks published between 1970 and 2000. Whereas previous research on language ideologies in heritage language instruction has tended to focus on standard language ideologies, in our analysis we broaden the perspective to examine a wider range of ideologies that are part of an institutionally entrenched and socially pervasive politics of knowledge. Our analysis revealed that the intertextual discourse emerging in Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) textbooks correlates with broader ideologies regarding the societal role of the university, the positioning of ethnic studies programs, and the portrayal of cultural and linguistic diversity within academia and society at large. Further, mirroring the evolution of these ideologies, we found that discourses of textbooks from the 1970s and 1980s tend to underscore access, inclusion, and representation for minority Spanish language students while textbooks published in the 1990s emphasize economic competitiveness and globalization. In our discussion of this move from the portrayal of Spanish as linked to student identity to the commodification of linguistic and cultural diversity, we underscore the multifaceted and often contradictory implications of these two ideological constructions.

Jewish Israeli grandparents are challenged by their grandchild to compose an agreed-upon version of the untold story of a large crystal mirror, taken from the Palestinian village of Zarnuqa during the Nakba - the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by the new Israeli state in the 1948 war.

The media discursive representation of participants and their roles in conflict situations is the focus of this study. The Nigeria-Cameroon clashes over the oil rich Bakassi Peninsula have been reported in newspapers from the two countries. In a bid to demonstrate how social attitudes are expressed in the discourse structure of news reports, the study analyzed news reports from four newspapers in the countries published in the heat of the armed conflicts between 2002 and 2010. The analysis focused on the thematic representations, the representation of actors in the material processes and power hierarchy. Our findings show that newspapers from each of the countries presented perspectives that seemed to favour their positive images before the entire world, each claiming victim status for their key actors. In terms of the different ideologies and values that motivate the news reports, the Nigerian newspapers adopted event-oriented reporting style, thereby appealing to the value of soci...

English holds an unparalleled place in the world as a lingua franca; no language before has been spoken by so many people. Research has found that students believe learning English is vital to their job prospects (Saraceni, 2010, p.116; Ustinova, 2011, p.72 ) and this study aimed to test whether a knowledge of English rewarded its speakers with higher wages in a non-English speaking country; Spain. Until now, there had been a lack of empirical research on the role of English for the individual in a first world country where English was not the first language; previous research had focused on the influence of English on the economy, and more specifically the relationship between proficiency as a whole and GDP, or the knowledge of English of immigrants to America and their resulting wage levels. Consequently, this study attempted to test whether English as a foreign language in Spain resulted in a higher wage for individuals.

In order to conduct the research, 398 adverts from the Spanish job site www.infojobs.net were collected; 199 were adverts that did not specifically ask for a language to be spoken and the other half of the sample specifically stated that English needed to be spoken and the wage or salary range was taken from the adverts. The research was conducted by selecting the new jobs tab. The same research method was used in a study by Marchal and Rieucau (2005) because language was not covered in their original study and it can test the linguistic imperialist hypothesis (Phillipson, 1992; Kachru, 1986) empirically. The Spanish also addressed a limitation of other studies which had used developing countries to assess the impact of English (Ramaswami et al., 2012) and in a country, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) (2006), with very low education inequality, compared to studies conducted in America (Saiz, 2002; Levitt, 2014).

The study found little suggestion that English holds a disproportionate place in Spain. The adverts which did not require English or any other language yielded an average wage of €21,193.62 at 100% and €19,586.86 at 80% compared to €20,322.18 for 100% and €19,283.65 for 80% of the sample for jobs that require English. The hypothesis that different proficiencies were rewarded with different salaries (Tupas, 2008) showed some sign of being true. The results show that the fluent proficiency category paid more than the high proficiency category, which in turn paid more than the medium proficiency category.
Accordingly, using the Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR), this equates to the difference between a C1, B2 and B1 (Intermediate) qualification being €2,000 a year in salary per proficiency level. This result is challenged by the highest proficiency level, bilingual, which was the most poorly paid of all the proficiencies in the data set. The adverts which asked for a third language in addition to Spanish and English dropped the average also to €18,229.21 from €20,860.62. The same trend was true for those who spoke French, where the mean was €17,010.53. However, for those who speak German, the average was highest of all at €21,365.44.

This paper deals with Bourdieu’s relations of power (linguistic market) and Fanon’s Zone of Being and non-Being. The article is based on recent ethnographic sociolinguistic research in Andalusia, south of Spain. In this paper, I explore ways in which the decapitalisation of Andalusian speakers is part of a global hierarchisation of inferiorization. In this way, the language is a marker. A group’s devalued variety of language in the linguistic market is explained as ideology of domination with historical basis. Therefore, it is not a product of features of the no-legitimate language.

Purpose of the study: The subject study aims at investigating the construction of diverse ideologies embedded within English textbooks used in Pakistani settings at the elementary level. The entire study is based on a comparative analysis of English textbooks of Punjab Textbook Board (PTB) and Oxford University Press (OUP) and employs a critical discourse lens for a comprehensive analysis. Methodology: Based on purposeful sampling, the study hinges on insights of Critical Discourse Studies. Out of various models available in CDA, the study employs Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model for an extensive qualitative analysis of the selected texts as it is more suited to the dynamics of the subject study. Both micro and macro dimensions of the model were employed for an enriched analysis. Main Findings: Both textbooks aimed at infusing different cultural and ideological constructions within students. Exercise of power supplemented by a specific religious perspective was also witnesse...

Het taalgebruik op televisie is in Vlaanderen geregeld voer voor verhitte debatten. Terwijl men op de monopolistische openbare omroep van weleer vaak terugblikt als een baken van volksopvoeding, wordt de huidige VRT ervan beschuldigd opvoedend ABN steeds meer in te ruilen voor een taalvorm die het midden houdt tussen standaardtaal en dialect. Vooral in fictie lijkt die ‘tussentaal’ terrein te winnen – niet voor niets wordt ze ook weleens smalend ‘soap-Vlaams’ genoemd. Dit boek onderzoekt of het taalgebruik in fictie sinds de jaren 1980 inderdaad veranderd is, en gaat op zoek naar verklaringen door fictietaal te kaderen binnen de context van standaardisering in Vlaanderen en het veranderende omroepbeleid. Daartoe wordt een kwantitatieve analyse van het taalgebruik in fictie van vroeger en nu gecombineerd met een gedetailleerde kwalitatieve analyse van de rol van taalvormen in fictionele interacties en de manier waarop hun sprekers ge(stereo)typeerd worden. Ook makers en acteurs komen aan het woord over hun taalkeuzes. Op die manier toont dit boek aan dat het gebruik van tussentaal in fictie inderdaad is toegenomen, maar ook dat het fictionele verleden van de openbare omroep minder standaardtalig is dan vaak wordt gedacht. Fictie draagt vandaag nog steeds sporen van oude standaardiseringsdiscoursen, terwijl er ook in de hoogdagen van de volksverheffing op de openbare omroep in fictie al ruimte was voor speelse tegengeluiden.

Los discursos políticos de rompimiento tienen el mérito de haber cuestionado el dogma neoliberal que elevó un paradigma económico, de entre otros posibles, al rango de ciencia exacta, por encima de consideraciones políticas o sociales. A la par, es notorio que otras discusiones han logrado trascender a la agenda pública, poniendo en jaque al statu quo. No necesariamente hay coherencia ideológica entre los distintos cuestionamientos, pero es innegable que se han visibilizado actores antes ignorados y problemáticas naturalizadas hasta hace poco.

Uno de las discusiones que necesita mayor profundidad es la crítica a la academia, como se suele conocer a la comunidad científica. Si bien es cierto que la lógica neoliberal permeó en las concepciones y prácticas dentro de las universidades, siempre es prudente recordar que esto ocurrió a la par del resto de la sociedad. Es comprensible que el cuestionamiento sea mucho más duro y reiterado en las universidades, al tratarse de espacios en los que la discusión es algo cotidiano y la juventud –así como sus inherentes expectativas de cambio– es la población que les nutre. No obstante, cuando la crítica no es contextualizada, puede caer en excesos preocupantes.

The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.

There is a rich body of literature on the experience of Japanese immigrants in the United States, and there are also numerous accounts of the cultural dislocation felt by American expats in Japan. But what happens when Japanese Americans, born and raised in the United States, are the ones living abroad in Japan?

Redefining Japaneseness chronicles how Japanese American migrants to Japan navigate and complicate the categories of Japanese and “foreigner.” Drawing from extensive interviews and fieldwork in the Tokyo area, Jane H. Yamashiro tracks the multiple ways these migrants strategically negotiate and interpret their daily interactions. Following a diverse group of subjects—some of only Japanese ancestry and others of mixed heritage, some fluent in Japanese and others struggling with the language, some from Hawaii and others from the US continent—her study reveals wide variations in how Japanese Americans perceive both Japaneseness and Americanness.

Making an important contribution to both Asian American studies and scholarship on transnational migration, Redefining Japaneseness critically interrogates the common assumption that people of Japanese ancestry identify as members of a global diaspora. Furthermore, through its close examination of subjects who migrate from one highly-industrialized nation to another, it dramatically expands our picture of the migrant experience.

Check out the website https://redefiningjapaneseness.com
Like the book on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/redefiningjapaneseness/
Watch a short interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0u43MQWZAg
See a book talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGC3D9M6GUk&feature=youtu.be

This article draws on data from an ethnographic multiple-case study on the identity, positioning, and interactions of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) students in regular Canadian high school Spanish
classes. Interview and classroom observational data are discursively analyzed to reveal the presence of a form of language ideology that equates displayed Spanish speaking ability with language proficiency and heritage. This type of language ideology particularly impacted how one SHL student, who was reluctant to speak Spanish, was positioned and treated in class in ways that not only did not acknowledge her Hispanic heritage or encourage the development
of her oral skills, but also did not recognize the usefulness of her literacy skills. This article problematizes the assumptions that HL students are typically able (and willing) to speak their HL and that this ability is viewed as their most important asset in class. The article concludes with pedagogical implications and directions for future research.

Ce qui nous rassemble aujourd'hui, indépendamment de qui nous sommes, d'où nous venons, de quelle profession nous exerçons, de notre sexe, de l'âge de la vie auquel nous appartenons, est la question de la lecture, tant nous sommes habitués à considérer la lecture des textes, tous les textes, les romans, les essais, les articles de journaux comme une activité commune à tous, un commun qui se définit par une appartenance sociale collective qui ne fait plus l'objet de discussions. La pratique de la lecture comme pratique de lecture liée à une condition sociale ou à une condition mentale, comme par exemple la condition d'un « peuple mineur », comme le XIX e siècle appelait les ouvriers, a pratiquement disparu du paysage. Si je choisis de faire ce détour contemporain pour aborder le sujet des lectures ouvrières au cours de ces premiers temps démocratiques encore fragiles, qui étaient encore des temps de luttes et de résistances, dans les années 1830-1850, quand la démocratie était seulement en progrès, avec, déjà, un suffrage, un droit de vote, des libertés publiques conquises, mais les uns et les autres toujours restreints, partiels, soumis à la suspicion, toujours soumis à des régressions, à des remises en cause brutales, policières-en témoigne l'accordéon de la censure de la presse et du théâtre, de la révolution de Juillet jusqu'au coup d'Etat du 2 décembre-c'est pour rendre perceptible qu'il ne peut exister qu'une historicisation relative de la question des lectures ouvrières dans ce passé, car cette dernière, en réalité, est difficilement envisageable « horssol », c'est-à-dire coupée des préoccupations démocratiques qui nous sont contemporaines, qui sont toujours les nôtres et c'est pour cette raison, finalement, que nous nous y intéressons toujours. Il faut poser comme hypothèse préalable que la question de la lecture ouvrière comme pratique située, liée essentiellement à ce que c'est qu'une condition singulière, celle d'être ouvrier, est une question inséparable de la question démocratique dans son ensemble, car être lecteur, pratiquer la lecture, c'est d'abord-on l'a oublié-être en mesure de jouir de droits, droit à l'instruction, droit aux libertés publiques, mais aussi droit à jouir d'un temps psychique libéré de la servitude, comme un droit lyrique et aussi, dans ce moment du XIX e siècle, défendre une démocratie sociale, autant comme un principe économique que comme code moral. Donc, ce qui est en jeu dans la pratique de la lecture, ce sont aussi dans notre histoire les valeurs cardinales de la liberté, de l'égalité et de la fraternité.

When people use a particular language or live in an environment in which a certain language is used, they create a complex system of relationships towards it, as well as perceptions, representations, and beliefs. This complex structure, which may also be termed linguistic ideology in certain circumstances, is reflected in the discourse about language shaped by individuals and the community.
Discourse about language thus reveals the individual’s and group’s relationship to a language or languages. This discourse is also found in scholarly works on language, and even in the definitions of language. It is necessary to ask to what extent and in what contexts discourse about language is ideologically conditioned—that is, when discourse about language appears and develops without facts that can be scientifically confirmed and established by experts, and becomes a means for establishing relations of power, domination/subordination, and inclusion/exclusion.
This book presents the hypothesis that ideological discourse leads to fetishizing language. That is, a language that functions as a symbol of identity becomes a fetish within a community that uses an expressly ideologically conditioned discourse about (its own) language.
The purpose of this volume is to present the ideological cores in discourse about language formed by Slovenian speakers that potentially identify with the Slovenian minority (or ethnic community) in Italy. The research is based on an analysis of material that was published in the newspaper Primorski dnevnik from January 2011 to December 2012.
Chapter one presents three dominant epistemologies that have appeared in scholarly literature at least since the beginning of the twentieth century and that define language as a system (or structure) of signs, as a means of communication, and as an identity symbol. These three definitions are not »new«; in various forms and contexts, they have appeared in the history of western linguistics from Antiquity onward. Despite the fact that none of these capture the totality and complexity of the concept of language and its phenomena, it can be asserted that together they cover a great range of language aspects and that they succeed in satisfying the epistemological need for a definition of language for scholarly purposes. These definitions are also not ideologically neutral; each of them expresses a particular »relation« to language or »representation« or »concept« of language that is not (only) scholarly, but also (originally) ideological.
Chapter two is dedicated to analyzing the material in this study. (The Slovenian) language has a specific status among members of the Slovenian minority in Italy, where the sociolinguistic position of Slovenian is more pronounced. The conceptions of this status, as created by its speakers, are also specific. Based on this, the hypothesis can be established that the linguistic ideology that developed in this environment due to the position of Slovenian influenced not only general discourse, but also scholarly discourse about language—that is, a hegemonic epistemological paradigm established itself in this space.
The need for identification led to a pronounced, and even extreme, emphasis on the symbolic function of language, whereas the other two aspects (systemic character and instrumentality) were neglected or were »reworked« according to the dominant Slovenian linguistics for the specific needs of this environment. This is less apparent in scholarly works of a theoretical character and in declarative discourse about language, and much more so in general-interest scholarship and applied discourse.
The hypothesis is tested through discourse analysis in various articles (columns, general-interest scholarship, reports, etc.) published on the topic of language in Primorski dnevnik from January 2011 to December 2012.
This chapter uses discourse analysis to examine how the concept of language is thematized in the selected texts, which declaration and interpretation processes are used, what the relations between the actants that appear in the thematization of »language« are, and, finally, what the potential functions (or goals) of such representation of language are.
The concluding essay presents the hypothesis that language has become an »identity fetish« in the context of the Slovenian community in Italy.
In the western epistemological tradition, alongside the definition that »language is a system of signs,« there also occasionally appears the definition of language as a complex structure of symbols. In addition, in the twentieth century there was substantial establishment of a definition that not only emphasized the symbolic value of linguistic phenomena, but also defines language as a symbol of identity.
Based on the material analyzed, the hypothesis can be established that, among the Slovenian speakers in Italy that potentially identify with the indigenous Slovenian minority, in addition to the symbolic function of language, there is also a fetishistic function. The concepts of the sign, symbol, and fetish are treated here from the perspective of semiotics and theory of symbols, with special emphasis on Sebeok’s and Ricoeur’s definitions.

This article proposes an interdisciplinary framework designed to analyse discourse, affect and surveillance. By revisiting the "omniopticon" (the many watching the many) and proposing “civeillance” as an affective dynamic of surveillance culture, it considers communicative mechanisms that reflect the interchangeable functions and normalisations of surveillance technologies in personal and public spaces. When 17-year-old Austin Haughwout was using his drone to film aerial shots of Hammonasset Beach in Connecticut, 23-year-old Andrea Mears accused him of photographing people on the beach. Mears physically attacked Haughwout, called the police and accused him of assault. During the attack, Haughwout used his phone to record the incident without Mears’ knowledge. The video was used by the police who arrested Mears for assault. The recording then featured in news stories online, where Mears was subjected to sexist abuse. The following analysis shows how affective practices and embodied meaning-making are personally, socially and technologically embedded within discursive processes of representation. Contrary to non-representational theories of affect, this framework sees affective-discursive practice as a multimodal complex of communicative components. Dialogical mechanisms of discourse and contextual complexities function through physical practices and cultural conducts, which are ideologically influenced by social relations and power structures. Discourse both affects, and is affected by, the feelings, emotions, minds, ideologies and interactive experiences that we have in personal spaces and social contexts.

Keywords: Discourse; affect; surveillance; gender; ideology; omniopticon; civeillance; drones

Il berbero e una lingua che difficilmente si puo definire “minore”, tanto in termini assoluti (15-20 milioni di parlanti) quanto in termini relativi (probabilmente in Marocco i berberofoni sono superiori al numero degli arabofoni). E’ tuttavia indubbio che nei paesi in cui viene parlata la lingua berbera si trova in un evidente stato di inferiorita, che risale a due tipi di cause: 1Una pesante censura di tipo ideologico da parte delle autorita statali (solo da poco si cominciano ad osservare parziali aperture e timidi “riconoscimenti”) 2Il ruolo oggettivamente “secondario” che essa ha come lingua scritta fin dai tempi di Massinissa, il che in qualche caso non appare imputabile a imposizione esterna ma sembra discendere da scelte volontarie dei locutori (quest’ultimo tipo di atteggiamento, pero, appare in netto regresso, soprattutto negli ultimi decenni). La enorme dispersione geografica (si pensi che il berbero e la lingua di un intero subcontinente, l’Africa mediterranea e saharian...

With focus on Facebook, this paper contributes to the scholarly discussion that draws from Marxist concepts to examine “labour relations” between social media organizations as capitalist enterprises and users as both free labour and unwitting commodities sold to advertisers. This critical stream of research has not yet paid much attention to the ​ideological processes that may be facilitating the establishment and maintenance of such exploitative relations. We adopt a discursive perspective and draw on linguistic pragmatics to shed light on these processes. In particular, we employ the notions of ‘relevance’ and ‘cognitive illusion’ to explore in detail the discourse that influences how the user­platform relationship is, firstly, constructed in and by Facebook’s organizational communication, and secondly, understood by social media users. We introduce a discursive process we call​context manipulation​; it is an analytical concept that helps bring to focus the discursive obscuring of...