Blommaert and Jef Verschueren (1998: 25) define ideology "as any constellation of

fundamental or commonsensical, and often normative ideas and at- titudes related to
some aspect(s) of social 'reality'". They bring forward other attributes, such as that
ideologies tend to persist over time, are rarely ques- tioned, but can be easily refashioned
and transferred in the form of familiar

"topoi" from one powerful group to another. Kathryn Woolard's review (1998) of
language ideologies (ideological beliefs or discourses specifically about language or
linguistic varieties - cf. Joseph and Taylor 1990; Schieffelin et al. 1998) debates the
question where we should locate them. Do they inhere in language use itself, in explicit
talk about language (that is, in metalanguage), in implicit metapragmatics (indirect
signalling within the stream of discourse), or at least partly as "doxa", "naturalized
dominant ideologies that rarely rise to discursive consciousness" (p. 9)? The answer is
surely all of these, as we have already suggested. (36 Nikolas Coupland and Adam
Jaworski)1

The concept of language ideology is the final rejection of an innocent, behavioural

account of language 37

There is no agreed methodology for studying language ideologies, although Gal and
Irvine (1995) have proposed that three semiotic processes need to be addressed. The first
and most significant is iconisation, taking a linguistic form or style to be a transparent
depiction of a social group and its members. Wool- ard (1998) gives the example of
"simple folk" being characterised iconically by "plain speech" and of the English
language being taken to be a sine qua non of democratic thought (in American language
policy discriminating in favour of "English-first" policies). 37

The other two of Gal and Irvine's processes are recursivity, whereby a meaningful
opposition at one level is transposed onto other sorts of language/ social organisation
relationship, and erasure, where specific sociolinguistic evidence is rendered invisible in
the drive to keep stereotyped generalisations intact. 37

1 Jaworski, A., Coupland, N., & Galasinski, D. (Eds.). (2004). Metalanguage : social and ideological perspectives</i>. Retrieved
from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com