engleski

If they speak in dialect, knife them: Normalized aggression and (extra)linguistic conflict in promoting standard Croatian on national television

Propagating ideological views through national electronic media is arguably the most powerful method of normalizing them among the general public, i.e. turning them into dominant, ‘commonsensical’ and ‘natural’ ideas which are rarely questioned in public discourse (van Dijk 2001). Language ideologies are also regularly promoted as ‘self-evident’ and/or based on ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ scholarly work in linguistics. This paper deals with the portrayal of standard and non-standard Croatian in the language-focused program Jezik za svakoga [Language for everyone], broadcast three days a week on Croatian Radio-Television’s Channel 1 [Hrvatska radiotelevizija, HRT 1]. The program often features sketches performed by professional actors which are aimed at drawing the average speaker’s attention to ‘common errors’ in using standard Croatian and at their ‘correction’. The present study investigates all such sketches available on YouTube and in HRT’s online on-demand archive, aired between October 2014 and June 2015 (N = 20). Both the linguistic and the extralinguistic aspects of the material have been subjected to a critical analysis of discourse and ideologies (Verschueren 2012 ; Fairclough 2015). The results indicate that, even though the setting of the sketches varies considerably, their ‘stories’ and discourse steadily propagate several recognizable and interrelated types of language ideologies: (1) the ideology of the standard language (Milroy 2001), (2) the ideology of telementation by a fixed code (Harris 2003), (3) the ideology of constant standard language use, (4) the ideology of purism, (5) the ideology of discrete codes, (6) the ideology of invisible dialects, (7) the ideology of monosemy, and (8) the ideology of discrete literal and metaphorical meanings. The production of most average speakers of Croatian is stigmatized and classified as incorrect, and the sociolinguistic data presented in the program is simplified and essentialized through erasure (Gal and Irvine 1995). The sketches depict prescriptive rules as descriptive, while aggressive behavior and correction practices are presented as normal and/or entertaining. All these results point to a need for a critical reassessment of the manner in which linguistic issues are presented on national television, i.e. in which non-scholarly views and aggressive behavior are normalized as authoritative and as ‘common sense’.

multimodal critical discourse analysis ; language ideologies ; (extra)linguistic conflict ; standard dialect ; mass media ; language policy ; erasure ; aggression

nije evidentirano