engleski

The one and only: prescriptivism and mono- ideologies of language

Although linguists have long considered prescriptivism to be a non-scholarly approach to language, the average speaker often equates prescriptivism with linguistics. This has paved the way for the promotion of ideological conceptions of language(s) as ‘scientific’, ‘commonsensical’, and ‘neutral’, especially in usage guides and similar texts. This study is part of a larger project which focuses on the typology of language ideologies as found in Croatian, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese usage guides, as well as in other sources of prescriptivist advice. The material is examined through a critical analysis of its language planning discourse (Lo Bianco 2004, Verschueren 2012, Fairclough 2015). The initial results indicate that authors of usage guides/prescriptivists often promote as legitimate only one of several coexisting options. Such beliefs and representations can be viewed as components of the ideology of the standard language (Milroy 2001) and classified as fractally recursive (Irvine & Gal 2000) mono-ideologies, since they propagate the same contrast on multiple (extra)linguistic levels (ibid.). These ideologies include (1) the monocodal ideology or monocodia (‘only one code is needed’, i.e. the standard dialect), (2) the monoglossic ideology or monoglossia (‘codes should be used one at a time’, Bakhtin 1981, Wardhaugh & Fuller 2015), (3) the monoverbal ideology or monoverbia (‘a single word is better than a phrase’), (4) the ideology of monosemonymy (‘one form should have only one meaning and vice versa’), and (5) the ideology of monoetymy (‘all morphemes should be of one, native origin’). In order to portray these and similar ideologies as ‘objective’, the authors of the analysed texts resort to various discursive strategies resulting in the stigmatization and erasure (Irvine & Gal 2000) of non-standard or supposedly non-standard elements, which calls for a stronger promotion of scholarly views on language ideologies in the public sphere.

language ideologies ; prescriptivism ; language planning ; standard dialect

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