Language, Ideology and the Politics of English

Posted on Oct 27, 2026 in Social sciences

What Is a Language?

What is a language? Mainstream linguistics treats languages as bounded, countable and separable objects. This is the product of two processes: nation-building (the French Revolution and German Romanticism, which saw language as the soul of the nation: different languages equal different peoples, nations and states) and standardization and schooling.

Sociolinguistic definition of language: a heterogeneous set of communicative features that has been historically and politically constructed as a “named language”. It is a tool used by people in different contexts, not fixed, constantly evolving.

Standards and Standardization

The standard is the form taught in schools and used in media and bureaucracy, tied to citizenship and modelled on writing (full sentences, “correct grammar”). It has no real existence; it is just an idealization. Non-standard structures are rule-governed, just stigmatized.

Lippi-Green states that the standard is a myth, a powerful cultural belief that motivates social behaviour, justifies ranking speakers and marginalizes those who do not speak it. The standard is constructed as unmarked, which produces the myth of non-accent.

Hudson argues that standards result from deliberate intervention by society.

Haugen’s Four Stages of Standardization

  1. Selection of a variety (often that of the powerful; Euskara Batua was built from several varieties).
  2. Codification (grammars, dictionaries).
  3. Elaboration of function (new vocabulary for more domains).
  4. Implementation (schools, bureaucracies, media).

Language Ideologies

Language ideologies are ideologies about language, not political ideologies encoded in language: sets of beliefs, feelings and received ideas. Examples include: Indian English is funny (raciolinguistics); English guarantees socioeconomic advancement (linguistic instrumentalism); one nation, one language; mixing languages is bad; native speakers know best; monolingualism is natural.

The concept was developed by linguistic anthropologists in the late 1980s (Gal, Woolard, Urla), building on Silverstein (1979). The key question: what mediates between situated language use and social structure?

Irvine (1989) defines language ideologies as morally and politically loaded representations of the nature, structure and use of languages in a social world. They always rank speakers (as better, more refined, more educated).

Properties of Language Ideologies

  • They obscure the constructed, power-influenced, historical nature of ideas about language (they de-historicize, de-socialize and de-contextualize).
  • Misrecognition (Bourdieu): subordinate speakers accept the structures that dominate them.
  • They circulate socially, as an “enactment of a collective order” (Gal and Woolard).
  • They serve the powerful and are treated as objective truths and common sense, which makes them hard to challenge.

Piller (2015) notes that language ideologies bridge language and society (Woolard). For example, Lufthansa crews must use du, assuming that informal pronouns create egalitarian structures. Indian English is an ideological label: Apu is a fiction based on a fiction, voiced by Hank Azaria.

Standard Language Ideology

This is the belief that the variety of the powerful, written-based and learned through schooling is superior. It makes exclusion seem fair. For Bourdieu, lacking the legitimate competence means exclusion or silence.

One nation, one language: Roosevelt (1919); Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act has been contested. Under neoliberalism the ideology adapts: Filipino meat workers in Australia do not need English for the job, yet permanent residency depends on an English test, which keeps them a flexible, rightless workforce.

Language Variation

Variation is routine, functional and about the speaking person, not about language alone (Lippi-Green). It carries social meaning; we use it to size up others. Types include:

  • Geographic
  • Social (age, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion)
  • Temporal
  • Contextual (register and style)

Variation is studied to understand change and to expose inequality and discrimination.

Variety, Dialect and Accent

Variety: any distinct form of a language, used neutrally (Australian English, Hong Kong English). This is the preferred term today.

Dialect: vocabulary, syntax and grammar signal regional or social background, and carries negative connotations (standard equals correct and from nowhere; dialect equals incorrect and local). Examples include Geordie and Cockney. Dialects change gradually across space.

Accent: pronunciation only, covering segmental features (sounds) and prosodic features (stress, tempo, intonation). Accents form loose bundles over geographic or social space (Lippi-Green). Variety and accent are not one-to-one.

The Myth of Non-Accent

Everyone has an accent; accents are simply “what other people have”. Lippi-Green’s sound house metaphor holds that the phonology of the first language is a house built in childhood. Adults cannot fully rebuild it; they only add an extension.

The Kahakua case (a Hawai’i Creole speaker denied a radio job) shows employers and experts treating accent as a deficit. Judgements about accent reflect listeners’ ideologies. Lippi-Green’s communicative burden describes how listeners often reject their share of the effort when communicating with stigmatized speakers.

Register, Style and Stylization

Register (Agha) is a repertoire linked culturally to social practices and persons, such as baby talk or academic and professional jargon. Its features are lexis, grammar and prosody. Speakers notice dialect more than register, yet register variation is more frequent.

Style (Eckert) is a bundle of ways of speaking, dressing and moving linked to social personae, such as the “jocks” versus “burnouts” in a Detroit school. No variant works alone.

Stylization (Rampton) refers to specially marked, exaggerated representations of varieties outside one’s repertoire, usually mocking. An example is Apu in The Simpsons.

The Native Speaker

The native speaker is treated as a superior category in language education. The myth is reinforced by socio-educational approaches that assume a childhood first language (L1) acquired in a monolingual, homogeneous environment tied to a place, and equate this with proficiency and intuition. Yet advantages come from sustained, rich exposure, not from childhood L1 socialisation.

Underlying ideas include: nativeness equals nationality (the native speaker “embodies” the nation); immobility, monolingualism and monoculturalism are treated as the default (real repertoires are truncated, Blommaert 2010); and there is a racial and ethnic imagination (white, middle class). Examples include ELT hiring practices in China and Saudi Arabia.

Acronyms

  • ENL: English as a Native Language
  • ESL: English as a Second Language
  • EFL: English as a Foreign Language
  • ELF: English as a Lingua Franca
  • EIL: English as an International Language
  • EAL: English as an Additional Language
  • ELT: English Language Teaching

1.2 Figures, Metaphors and Discourses

Figures

Native speakers: Chinese (1.39 billion), Hindi-Urdu and other languages have more speakers than English. However, learners of English number about 1.5 billion, making it the most studied foreign language. The numbers of L2 speakers and learners, not native speakers, make English exceptional.

Metaphors

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue that metaphors are everyday cognitive devices that make abstract things tangible. They are ideological because they take a view of reality for granted.

  • Metaphors of language: living organism (birth, death, endangered languages); family (parent language, offspring, family trees); plants (the Indo-European tree, branches, roots).
  • Metaphors of English: transported object (“brought to America”, Baugh and Cable 1993); moving being (“arrival”, “mobile”, Smith 2012); plant (“grows from many roots”, Rushdie); something that spreads (Trudgill 2013; germs, “spread the word”), with both positive and negative connotations.

What they naturalize: no human agency; erasure of speakers and sociopolitical processes; the sense that the influence of English is unstoppable, inevitable and natural. Crystal describes English as being in “the right place at the right time”.

Discourses on English (Pennycook)

Celebratory “neutral” discourse: English rose through its own qualities. Examples include:

  • British Council (2013), The English Effect (“UK’s greatest gift to the world”: trade, peacekeeping, lingua franca).
  • Crystal (1987): English is spoken in 60+ countries, and used for 80% of electronic information and by two-thirds of scientists.
  • Jenkins (1995): hegemony through inherent qualities such as flexibility.
  • Claiborne: the largest, most expressive vocabulary (400,000 to 600,000 words, compared with 150,000 for French).

Nineteenth-century continuity: Guest (1838) called English the great medium of civilisation; George (1867) argued that a highly civilised race has a highly accomplished language; Rolleston (1911) described English as the speech of the globe under the British flag. The tone is the same triumphalism, with different vocabulary. Metaphors of destiny and the river recur, as in The Sunday Times (1994): “English marches on”, “inevitable”.

Three Images Behind the Big-Vocabulary Argument

  1. Purity: the claim of Anglo-Saxon or even Aryan lineage. Bailey notes that a racially pure language echoes Hitler’s Reich.
  2. Borrowing as democracy and openness: words as tributaries to the river, used against the French Academy. Colonial evidence contradicts this: the British mixed little with the colonised. Bailey observes that exotic words were accepted mainly when already adopted by other Europeans, and that equality is needed for borrowing.
  3. Thought: more words mean finer distinctions, so English speakers think better.

Conclusion: contemporary discourse presents English as superior and its rise as the result of those qualities, using figures and metaphors to depoliticise and de-historicise its spread.

1.3 Politicising the Spread: Linguistic Imperialism

Phillipson’s Theory

Coined in Phillipson (1992), linguistic imperialism studies links between language policy and empires. It is a reaction against sanitised, apolitical views (Crystal, Graddol). The main claim is that English did not simply spread; it was imposed as the language of colonisation, military domination and exploitation, and its present dominance is tied to the imperial project.

  • Old empire: military domination; British exploitation colonisation of Asia and Africa; US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
  • New empire: economic and cultural domination; US influence after WWII; corporations (Hardt and Negri’s Empire); neocolonialism.

Features of Linguistic Imperialism

  • It interlocks with imperialism in culture, education, media, economy, politics and the military.
  • It concerns exploitation, injustice and hierarchy.
  • It is structural (more material resources for the dominant language).
  • It is ideological (it glorifies the dominant language, stigmatises others and rationalises hierarchy).
  • It is hegemonic (internalised and naturalised as normal).
  • It produces unequal rights.
  • It is subtractive (learning English at the expense of other languages).
  • It is a form of linguicism, and is always contested and resisted.

The hierarchy pattern works by stigmatising dominated languages (as “dialects”), glorifying the dominant one (for clarity and richness), and rationalising the relationship (as access to progress). Historical examples include Latin, Spanish (Nebrija: language as the consort of empire), French (Berlin Academy, 1782), and Welsh and Irish cases, as well as English as lingua nullius.

Effects

The effects are beneficial for the core and harmful for the periphery: marginalisation and death of languages (the “killer language” and linguistic genocide, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000); homogenisation; English as a key medium of Americanisation and Westernisation; and, in recent work, the imposition of a neoliberal agenda. Examples include Singapore (English at home), international schools, scientific publishing, the EU and the World Bank. A counter-example is Nordic language policy, which protects national languages.

Key Concepts

  • Linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994): ideologies, structures and practices that legitimate an unequal division of power and resources between groups defined by language. Examples include English-language degrees and papers being assumed better, and native speakers ranked higher.
  • Hegemony (Gramsci): domination by consent through cultural, moral and intellectual leadership rather than force alone. Dominant ideas become common sense and block alternatives.

The two were “two sides of the colonial coin” and worked together.

English and Colonialism (Pennycook)

Colonialism is also cultural, discursive and ideological: discourses produce “truths” about people and colonise bodies and minds. Coloniality refers to the continuing colonisation of the mind after political decolonisation. Pennycook argues that the most important domination was that of the mental universe of the colonised.

  • Orientalism (18th century): rule India by its customs and laws (policy 1774 to 1785); Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian education; William Jones; fascination with the “noble savage”. Yet it built knowledge that facilitated colonial rule.
  • Anglicism (19th century): rule by British customs and law (Macaulay). It was linked to Darwinism and cultural evolutionism (Tylor), which ranked cultures with Britain as the most evolved, justifying colonialism and the “white man’s burden” to civilise. The Other (backward, lazy, feminine) was set against the Self (rational, modern, male).

Macaulay’s Minute (1835)

Macaulay justified English-medium education for an elite class. English was withheld as much as it was promoted: most education took place in the vernaculars (producing a docile workforce, since English could be “a dangerous weapon”), while English was reserved for the elite. This built English’s value as prestigious and unattainable. English studies grew from Empire’s needs, and English literature was taught in Indian schools.

ELT and Soft Power

After WWII, Britain and the US used ELT as soft power: the British Council (1940), the USIA, and the Rockefeller, Ford and Fulbright programmes. Textbooks became cultural tools and teachers became cultural vehicles, so ELT was complicit with the imperial project.

Reception and Critique

Holborrow (1999) argues that the theory bolsters right-wing nationalism, and notes that most ELT teachers are unaware of its ideological groundings. Critics argue that it denies agency and makes people passive victims (Canagarajah 1999, Resisting Linguistic Imperialism). Joseph (2006) calls it “patronising to the extreme”.

Phillipson’s reply: there is no such thing as free personal choice; choices are constrained by language policy, education and labour markets. The imposition versus free choice distinction is a false dichotomy, since push and pull factors both operate. Critics, he argues, misrepresent the theory.

1.4 The Scientific Politics of English: The Birth of Applied Linguistics

Postwar Britain

English was seen as an asset for keeping influence, especially in Asia. Churchill spoke of postwar battles over people’s minds. The British Council Annual Report (1983 to 1984) called language “our greatest asset, greater than North Sea Oil”.

The British Council was founded in 1934 and named in 1940, with a royal charter to promote wider knowledge of the UK and of English abroad. From 1940 to 1945 it countered Nazi propaganda. The Drogheda Report (1954) presented English as soft power that benefits trade.

The 1956 Committee on the Teaching of English Overseas: Five Measures

  1. More teachers as cultural ambassadors.
  2. Better conditions for British teachers (the “white man’s burden” became the “native-speaking teacher’s burden”).
  3. Promotion of British textbooks.
  4. Training and research departments.
  5. Acknowledgement of, and cooperation with, the US.

The United States

During the Cold War, the US promoted English through Fulbright (1946), the USIA, and the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, which funded university departments. The Center for Applied Linguistics (1959, funded by Ford) bound ELT up with developmental aid.

Applied Linguistics

The term emerged in the 1950s, appearing in Language Learning (1948, Michigan) and in the Edinburgh School of Applied Linguistics (1957). The aim was to make ELT a scientific field. Authority over teaching theory moved from teachers to linguists. The approach was positivist and prescriptive (“method”), and it built centre-periphery relations of legitimacy.

Five Fallacies (Makerere 1961; Phillipson 1992)

  1. Monolingual fallacy: English is best taught only through English. This is false, because L2 learning benefits from L1 cognitive development (Cummins 1984). It expresses colonial power relations, devalues other languages, sanctions their use, alienates children, enforces a Eurocentric monolingual norm, and separates ELT from translation and bilingual traditions.
  2. Native speaker fallacy: the ideal teacher is a native speaker. It arose from the British applied linguistics focus on spoken language and the view of language teaching as culture teaching.
  3. Early start fallacy: the earlier, the better.
  4. Maximum exposure fallacy: the more English is taught, the better.
  5. Subtractive fallacy: using other languages lowers English standards.

2.1 World Englishes: Questioning the Monocentric Standard

Aims: to deproblematise non-native varieties, question native speakers’ ownership of English, and promote a pluricentric view. This is “liberation linguistics”, which aims to free English from its colonial heritage. A 1976 call urged native speakers to replace linguistic chauvinism with tolerance, recognising Americanness, Englishness and Indianness as a “linguistic mosaic”.

The Three Circles

  • Inner Circle (norm-providing; ENL): settler colonisation from the 15th to 18th centuries, the first diaspora; English is the main language in all domains.
  • Outer Circle (norm-developing; ESL): exploitation colonisation from the 17th to 19th centuries, the second diaspora; English is used in official and formal domains, unequally by class.
  • Expanding Circle (norm-dependent; EFL): no colonial presence, globalisation; used for international communication.

The circles represent forms of spread, patterns of acquisition and functional domains.

Features Versus Mistakes

Distinctive features come from contact with other languages, are systematic within a variety and are acceptable (Kachru 1983). The criteria are acceptability and systematicity.

Quirk Versus Kachru (English Today, early 1990s)

Quirk argued that non-native varieties are inadequately learnt native forms, recommended teaching Standard British English for freedom and career prospects, and held that non-native teachers must stay in touch with the native language. This is a deficit view. Kachru argued for difference, not deficit, held that Outer Circle realities are more complex, and noted that every position is ideological, including Quirk’s.

Monocentrism Versus Pluricentrism

Monocentrism holds that there is one English with varieties and one standard. Pluricentrism holds that there are multiple standards, “a club of equals” (McArthur). The contrast is between singularity and plurality, or monochrome and polychrome.

The model became known as World Englishes (journal founded 1982, IAWE 1992): English has multiple identities and a repertoire of cultures, with equal validity and dignity (an “egalitarian matrix”, Saraceni).

Criticisms (Jenkins 2003)

  • It is descriptive rather than explanatory.
  • It focuses too much on geographic varieties and is nationalist.
  • It oversimplifies the Outer Circle.
  • It is based on geography and history rather than on identification (Singapore versus Malaysia; Outer Circle speakers using English as an L1).
  • The circles blur (Scandinavia moving from EFL to ESL).

Limitations

The model is politically naive. The Inner Circle holds about 30% of world wealth with 6% of the population, and the Outer Circle the reverse, so difference is not equality. A deficit is built into the comparison (different from what?), and similarities are overlooked. The focus on the Outer Circle led to research on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). There is a paradox about how much difference is allowed before intelligibility breaks down, and hybrid repertoires (Bollywood, Happy New Year) make a discrete variety problematic.

Compare and Contrast

  • Crystal versus Phillipson: neutral spread (“right place, right time”) versus imposition by imperial structures. This is a contrast between the metaphor of spread and agency.
  • Pennycook versus Phillipson: both are political. Pennycook stresses discourse and continuity from colonialism and critiques the agency-denying parts of linguistic imperialism; Phillipson stresses structures and material inequality.
  • Phillipson versus Kachru: Phillipson sees English as an instrument of hierarchy; Kachru seeks liberation by legitimising local Englishes. Kachru is criticised for ignoring material inequality.
  • Quirk versus Kachru: deficit versus difference; monocentric versus pluricentric.
  • Orientalism versus Anglicism: respect for local culture (in order to rule) versus the civilising mission; both serve rule.
  • Standard language ideology (Lippi-Green, Piller) and the native speaker fallacy: both rank speakers by an idealised norm and justify exclusion.
  • Hegemony: links section 1.2 (naturalised discourse), section 1.3 (consent) and the myth of non-accent.