Journal of Political Ideologies

ISSN: 1356-9317 (Print) 1469-9613 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjpi20

Ideology and language

Deborah Cameron

To cite this article: Deborah Cameron (2006) Ideology and language, Journal of Political
Ideologies, 11:2, 141-152, DOI: 10.1080/13569310600687916

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310600687916

Published online: 23 Jan 2007.

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 Journal of Political Ideologies (June 2006),
11(2), 141152

Ideology and language

DEBORAH CAMERON

Worcester College, University of Oxford

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ABSTRACT In this paper it is suggested that while most theorists of ideology

implicitly or explicitly link it to language, the notion of language itself is often
under-theorized. In particular, discussions of its relationship to ideology often fail
to acknowledge that language is not simply a vehicle for other ideological
processes but is itself shaped by ideological processes. It is argued that many
influential accounts of the ideological and political abuse of language (e.g. the
political language criticism of Orwell and Chomsky) rely on ideological
propositions about how language works, or ought to work, which are (a) culturally
and historically specific and (b) subject to contestation in any given time and
place. The status of language in such accounts should be interrogated by
political theorists rather than treated as unproblematic.

Introduction: the place of language in the study of ideology and the place of
ideology in the study of language
Much of what goes on in the academic discipline of linguistics, and particularly in
what it thinks of as its core theoretical fields, is dominated by formalist approaches
which give little or no consideration to social or political questions about
language. Linguists who do consider those questions centrally often have an
interdisciplinary orientation, making use of theoretical frameworks developed
elsewhere in the social sciencesfor instance in critical social and political
theory. Teun van Dijk (this volume) represents one particularly well-developed,
inter- or multidisciplinary approach to which linguists have contributed along with
others, namely critical discourse analysis. Here however I will approach the issue
of language and ideology from a somewhat different angle.
The concept of ideology was developed outside the study of language, but
particularly since the so-called linguistic turn,1 most theorists of ideology take
language, or more broadly signification, to be more or less indispensable for our
understanding of what it is and how it works. While definitions typically focus first
on mental entitiesideas and beliefsthese are not seen as either pre-social, innate
ideas, or purely private and possibly idiosyncratic beliefs held by specific

Correspondence Address: Deborah Cameron, Worcester College, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1, 2HB, UK.

ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/06/02014112 q 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569310600687916
 DEBORAH CAMERON

individuals. Rather they are culturally produced and collective, from which it
follows that they must be expressed or represented in a social and public form.
Hence many or most definitions of ideology refer explicitly or implicitly to
language.
In some references language is identified as just one of a number of relevant
semiotic systems or signifying practices, but even then it is usually acknowledged as
the pre-eminent or prototypical case. For instance, Roger Griffin begins his working
definition of ideology with the formula: a relatively cohesive, dynamically evolving,
set of collectively held ideas or beliefs, whether expressed verbally or in some other
semiotic, performative, ritual, artistic or behavioural form. . ..2 Paolo Pombeni
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expounds on the centrality of political discoursethat is, text or talk directed to what
he calls the constant need [of modern governments] to communicate and explain3
for our understanding of ideology in the sphere of government, and touches on the
importance of standardized national languages as vehicles for that discourse.4 Van
Dijk asserts that people acquire and express their ideologies largely by text or talk.5
In some theorists definitions, signification explicitly takes precedence over
cognizing. The literary theorist Terry Eagleton, for example, influenced by
the writings of people like Althusser and Bourdieu, describes ideology as
a particular organization of signifying practices that goes to constitute human
beings as social subjects.6 John B. Thompson suggests it is that part of
consciousness which can be said.7 All in all, it is probably fair to say that for most
scholars there is at least implicitly a close connection between ideology and language.
Though I think few sociolinguists would dispute the existence or the closeness
of that connection, many might feel that the way it is made in general discussions
of ideology leaves important questions unanswered: language is often, at least
from a linguists perspective, a rather under-theorized notion in these discussions.
In addition, some scholars have been criticized by linguists for relying on accounts
of particular linguistic phenomena which do not acknowledge the complexity
revealed by linguistic research. A case that has attracted both types of criticism is
Benedict Andersons treatment of language in his influential work on nations as
imagined communities. In his account of the emergence of new national self-
conceptions Anderson gives considerable explanatory weight to the emergence of
national languages, which he describes as a gradual, unselfconscious, pragmatic,
not to say haphazard development.8 However, many linguists who have studied
the process he refers to regard this description as inaccurate, flawed not only by
Andersons failure to consult a fairly large body of literature by linguistic
historians, but also and more importantly by a theoretical problem. In order to
reveal nations and nationalism as ideological constructs, Anderson ends up
placing languages outside the sphere of the ideologicalimplying in effect that
whereas nations are works of the imagination, national languages are not. One
recent critic of Anderson, John Joseph, has recently summarized the point like this:
Andersons constructionist approach to nationalism is purchased at the price of an
essentialist outlook on languages. It seems a bargain to the sociologist or political scientist,
to whom it brings explanatory simplicity. . .But. . .it is a false simplicity. National identities

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and languages arise in tandem, dialectically if you like, in a complex process that ought to be
our focus of interest and study.9
It might be overly sweeping to suggest that all sociologists or political scientists
regard the reification or essentialization of language as a bargain, but I think
Joseph is right to draw attention to this as a problemand not one unique to the
work of Anderson. In many discussions of ideology, language is rather like the
mythical giant turtle that supports the world on its back, or like the god in a
machine who comes down at the last moment to extricate the protagonists of a
tragedy from whatever predicament they have got themselves into. In this
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contribution to interdisciplinary discussion I want to try to explain why from a

linguists perspective this view of language is unsatisfactory. Language should not
be treated either as pre-existing raw material for the fashioning of ideologies or as
a post-hoc vehicle for their expression. These are both idealizations of language
which overlook the fact that it is itself shaped by the same social and ideological
processes it is often invoked to explain.

Language ideologies
One way in which scholars have sought to demonstrate this point and to explore its
implications is by examining what are labelled language ideologiesideas and
beliefs about what a language is, how it works and how it should work, which are
widely accepted in particular communities and which can be shown to be
consequential for the way languages are both used and judged in the actual social
practice of those communities.10 In the community of western intellectuals, for
instance, one key language ideology is inherited from the tradition of ideas whose
major exponents include John Locke (in the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding) and Ferdinand de Saussure (in the reconstructed and
posthumously published work whose English translation is titled A Course in
General Linguistics). In this tradition, signs (or wordsthey are usually treated as
being the same thing) stand for ideas, language is the means for conveying those
ideas from one mind to another, and the process is underwritten by a sort of social
contract, whereby speakers of a given language agree to make the same signs stand
for the same ideas.
In the history of linguistic thought there have been attempts to unpick this
particular language ideology. One of the most interesting for my purposes here is
associated with the Soviet marxist linguist V.N. Voloshinov, author of Marxism
and the Philosophy of Language.11 Though Voloshinov did not use the term
ideology quite as modern scholars do, he was clearly concerned with the same
issues, and was critical of what he called the abstract objectivism of Saussure.
For Voloshinov, the idea of language as a set of correspondences between form
and meaning (signifier and signified, in Saussures terms) underwritten by social
consensus was ideological in the later Marxist sense of mystificatory.
Voloshinov argued that all signs were multiaccented, that is, inflected in actual
discourse with different and conflicting meanings by language-users who spoke

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from different social positions, experiences and interests. Capitalists and workers,
for instance, might both talk about a fair days pay for a fair days work, but each
group would inflect these terms with its own meaning and the conflict between
them would be partly about what they really meant. Dominance would be
achieved in part though the ability to naturalize or fix the meanings of words and
utterances, imposing an illusory unity or consensus and denying the reality of
continual struggle over the sign.
This Marxist tradition of commentary on the ideological nature of language has,
however, been less important for subsequent western political critique than the
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views of someone like George Orwell, to whose writings about language I will
return below. Orwellians are evidently indebted both to the Lockean view of
language and (not altogether consistently) to the 20th century inter-war tradition
of linguistic thought which today we associate particularly with the figure of
Benjamin Lee Whorf.12 Whorf was a linguistic relativist, believing that the
structures of a groups language (especially grammatical structuresfolk myths
about Eskimos and words for snow notwithstanding, he was less interested in
vocabulary) exerted a determining influence on its view of the world. One of his
most famous formulations of this argument, a 1940 essay titled Science and
linguistics, puts the point like this:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types
that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every
observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of
impressions which has to be organized by our mindsand this means largely by the linguistic
systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances
as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way an
agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our
language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are
absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and
classification of data which the agreement decrees.13

It will be noted that this passage, too, alludes to the social contract view of
language (an agreement that holds throughout our speech community). A crucial
difference between Whorfians and Marxists such as Voloshinov is that where
Whorfians posit linguistic homogeneity within one language community
differences arise only where languages are formally highly divergentMarxists
see heterogeneity and conflict over meaning arising from the material differences
that exist between groups in a single society. Or to put it another way, Whorfs
account of language tends to assume social consensus rather than social conflict as
the norm for a speech community; Voloshinovs makes the opposite assumption.
In one sense Whorf did see the dissection of nature along lines laid down by our
native languages as an ideological phenomenon: he argued that familiarity with
a diversity of languages and their different ways of cutting up the world
might enhance scientific progress by preventing certain errors that arose from
scientists unconsciously perceiving phenomena such as time and space through
the structures of their own, standard average European, languages. Whorf could

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be seen, then, as an anti-ideologist, someone who hoped to move beyond the

illusions of ideology, which is opposed in this kind of discourse to scientific truth.
But his ideas survive mainly in political discourse,14 where they underwrite the
idea of powerful interest groups manufacturing consent to oppressive social
relations by deliberately using language to obscure truth and naturalize falsehood.
Like Whorf, proponents of the concept of language ideology are particularly
interested in cultural and linguistic differences, and it is unlikely to be coincidental
that the concept has been developed most systematically in linguistic
anthropology. What motivates anthropologists interest is the observation that
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cross-cultural and historical differences in linguistic practice are not just arbitrary
variations, but can often be related systematically to differences in peoples
conceptions of language, and the values that flow from those conceptions. For
example, the view I have already critically referred to, in which language is
conceived as a container or a conduit for ideas, is part of the linguistic common
sense of the post-enlightenment west. And like other language ideologies, it is not
simply a description of the way language is taken to work, but also covertly a
normative statement about how it should ideally work. Most western societies hold
that the central purpose of language is to get ideas as exactly as possible from one
individual mind to anotherwhat Roy Harris calls the telementational view,15
classically expressed in the thought of Locke and iconically represented in
Saussures diagram of the speech circuit. Accordingly these societies value
explicitness and directness as prime linguistic virtues. Many non-western societies
on the contrary regard indirectness as a higher linguistic virtue, and some hold that
the most skilled language users make their meaning ambiguous or open-ended,
using words as much to hide as to reveal. Whereas in modern democratic cultures,
verbal facility or articulacy is generally considered necessary for members of the
class that wields political power (George W. Bush being perhaps the exception
that proves the rule), in some traditional societies, a well known example being the
Wolof in west Africa, powerful nobles assert their authority and fitness to rule
through a public display of inarticulacy or even silence.
Another area investigated by anthropologists and sociolinguists is the
ideological representations that cluster around particular languages: the conviction
of the Japanese that their language is unlearnable by foreigners, the belief that
French is clearer and more logical than other languages, the argument that English
owes its current global pre-eminence to its ability to incorporate contributions
from different linguistic sources, this free-market approach being contrasted
with the over-regulated purism of (for instance) French and German. Having
earlier referred critically to Benedict Anderson, I should reiterate that any
representation of national standard languages like Japanese, French, English
and so on depends on an idealization: sociolinguists would unhesitatingly agree
with Eric Hobsbawm that what is being invoked in the notion of a national
language is an ideological fiction, a sort of platonic idea of the language, existing
behind and above all its variants and imperfect versions.16 Even in the era of
universal education, sociolinguistic research confirms that this supposed standard
is instantiated consistently in the written output of a small elite, and in the speech

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of nobody at all.17 Yet in cultures that subscribe to the ideology of standardization,

its influence on how people understand and evaluate their own and others
linguistic behaviour can hardly be overstated.
Clearly, the kinds of beliefs about language I have just been discussing would
meet the criteria for something like Roger Griffins definition of ideology: they are
collective, relatively cohesive, and expressed both explicitly in statements about
language and more implicitly in peoples linguistic behaviour. So from one
perspective, the study of language ideologies can be seen as one specific instance
or specialist branch of the study of ideology more generally. The interest of
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sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists in language ideologies would be akin

to the interest of, say, political scientists in political ideologies: an obvious
concern for specialists in the relevant subject matter, but perhaps less obviously of
interest to others. But arguably there are two interrelated reasons why language
ideologies are or ought to be of interest to students of ideology across disciplines.
I have already alluded to the first of these reasons, and at this stage I can make
the point more explicit: where language is taken to be a significant element in
ideological processes generally, we need to resist any temptation to treat language
in aprioristic terms. Invoking language to explain ideological processes is
unsatisfactory if it fails to recognize the relevance of those very same processes to
the constitution and deployment of language itself. Above I quoted John Josephs
assertion that there was and is a dialectical relationship between the formation of
national identities and of national languagesone is not a precondition for the
other, nor is one simply the reflection or outcome of the other, they are intertwined
ideological processes working in tandem. Joseph makes the point in connection
with nationalism, but it has more general application. And that brings me to the
second reason why language ideologies are of interdisciplinary interest: just as
there is a non-arbitrary relationship between the linguistic practices and the
language ideologies of a particular community, there is also a non-arbitrary
relationship between a communitys language ideologies and its other ideologies.
As the linguistic anthropologist Susan Gal puts it, language ideologies are
systematically related to other areas of cultural discourse such as the nature of
persons, of power and of a desirable moral order.18 Thus what purport to be
representations of language may be very revealing about the other ideological
concerns for which language readily becomes a symbol or figure. The
unlearnability of Japanese, for instance, is a metaphor for the supposed
uniqueness and apartness of Japan itself, while the supposed hostility of English-
speakers to purism and academic regulation of their language symbolizes a
national or racial Anglo-Saxon character allegedly distinguished from others by
its pragmatism and commitment to individual liberty. The modern western, and
especially American, representation of the good speaker or good communicator as
articulate, honest, direct and explicit is also a representation of the good person or
the good citizen. Beliefs about how children acquire language or what
distinguishes the language of women and menthese topics also being fertile
ground for language ideologies across a wide range of societiestell us something

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not only about how language is conceptualized but also about how childhood or
gender is conceptualized.

Language ideologies and the political critique of language

I want to try to draw some of these threads together by considering in more detail a
case where language ideology and political ideology are both obviously and
intricately interwoven. As I noted above, George Orwell is probably the most
influential of all modern commentators on the politics of language. Far more than
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the high-theoretical likes of Althusser or Foucault, Orwell is responsible for the

mainstream status of the belief that language can be used, or abused, as an
instrument of political domination. His novel Nineteen Eighty-four incorporates,
in the form of the fictional language Newspeak, a powerful dystopian vision of
the abuse of language to manufacture consent to tyranny, essentially by rendering
any dissenting thought inexpressible and finally unthinkable.19 In his non-fictional
writings, particularly the 1946 essay Politics and the English language, Orwell
suggested that the actual political language of his time had been corrupted by a
combination of ideological fanaticism and simple carelessness on the part of many
language users.20 As is well known, his proposed remedy involved championing
the values of plainness and transparency: he likened good prose to a pane of glass
through which the truth could be seen without distortion, counselling writers to let
the meaning choose the word and not the other way about.
It is interesting to consider why Orwells critique of language has had, and still
continues to have, a resonance that competing accounts (Voloshinovs, for
instance) have never achieved. Partly, no doubt, it is because Orwell practised
what he preached and wrote accessibly for a mainstream audience (Politics and
the English language was originally produced for journalists.) But I think it could
also be argued that one of the keys to Orwells influence is the extent to which his
ideas encapsulate a liberal language ideology that continues to be common sense
for the western political class, and which is rarely subjected to critical scrutiny
because it is not generally apprehended as ideological.
Although, as I have pointed out, there is a Whorfian element in Orwells
critique, Whorfian linguistic determinism as expressed most radically in Nineteen
Eighty-four is actually at odds with Orwells basic argument about the proper
relationship of words to ideasthat the former exist, or should properly exist, to
make the latter transparent. This is a Lockean view, and indeed Orwells
championing of plain words might remind us of Lockes equation of rhetoric
linguistic ornamentationwith error and deceit. Let the meaning choose the
word is a thoroughly un-Whorfian injunction, presupposing as it does (a) that
ideas exist prior to and independently of the language in which they are expressed
or communicated; and (b) that there is or could be a transparent or neutral
language, in which ideas are not distorted by the words chosen to express them.
As a number of commentators have observed, such a view has obvious
connections with the classical liberal notion of the public sphere and public
discourse. Geoffrey Nunberg, for instance, has suggested that Orwells linguistic

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criticism represents a 20th-century development of a liberal tradition stretching

back more than two centuries before him:
The line of language criticism that stretches from Addison to Fowler was part of the larger
critical enterprise of articulating a body of cultural values within a relatively homogeneous
public sphere. . .But the modern view of the importance of language owes more to writers
like Orwell, whose language criticism was concerned with maintaining a coherent political
discourse in a culturally and ideologically fragmented community.21
From this perspective, the new development Orwell had to engage with was the
fragmentation (diversity or polarization of interests and experiences) that went
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along with the extension of the public sphere in the age of universal suffrage and
mass communication. But the problem he was concerned with was not in itself a
new one. Any kind of liberal democracy requires a shared public language to
function as a medium for political debate among free and rational subjects who
have differing interests and ideological positions. Ideally, then, the language will
be one that itself transcends ideological partisanship, and is equally well-suited to
the expression of all the beliefs that contend within a given polity. Orwells fear
was that the ideological and political polarization of his time had corrupted
public language and undermined its ability to fulfil its democratic function,
whether by evacuating political discourse of any coherent meaning at all (his main
complaint in Politics and the English language) or imbuing it with meanings so
fixed and so restricted as to stifle dissent (as in the fictional case of Newspeak).
Since Orwells death, the problem of ideological fragmentation or polarization
has only become more acute, and his writings on languageespecially Nineteen
Eighty-fourhave frequently been hailed as prophetic. Some commentators
during the cold-war era asserted that Orwells fictional Newspeak was an accurate
representation of the public discourse of Communist states in the 1970s and 1980s.
Since the ending of the cold war, probably the most salient public debate on
language, on the issue of so-called political correctness (PC), has seen liberals
levelling similar accusations at what they dub the PC lobby, i.e. that PC seeks to
encode into public language ideological propositions about, for instance, race,
gender, sexuality and disability. This is seen as illiberal not only because it
encroaches on individual freedom of speech (there are words and/or sentiments
people are not legally permitted to utter publicly any more), but also because it
undermines the principle that the medium for political discourse should be
separable from the message: PC language, its liberal critics fear, simply pre-
empts legitimate debate on propositions such as racism is wrong or women are
not inferior to men, by making those propositions an intrinsic part of the language
in which debate would have to be conducted.
In this context it would be a digression to explain why I believe liberal strictures
on both Communist and PC public discourse are misguided, as in many ways
was Orwell.22 For the purposes of this article, the point I am seeking to make is
that Orwells ideas about language and totalitarianism provide a good illustration
of the need to consider language ideologies in connection with political arguments
about languageto recognize, in other words, the relevance to all such arguments

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of collective ideas and beliefs about the nature of language itself, and to notice the
politically interested nature of those beliefs. (The liberal dream of a shared public
language favouring no particular constituency is no more neutral, politically
speaking, than the marxist or postmodernist denial that such a language is either
possible or desirable.23) To accept Orwells arguments (as I think it is fair to say
most people familiar with them do) it is not enough to be opposed to
totalitarianism: it is also necessary to assent to certain presuppositions about how
language works and how it ideally should work. Few political commentators
(either on Orwell or on totalitarian language) have treated these presuppositions as
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language ideologies rather than simply self-evident truths about language,

meaning and thought. The Whorfian element in Orwell is noticed and sometimes
questioned, but the Lockean element, which in fact is far more basic, remains
taken-for-granted (liberal) common sense.

Verbal hygiene
In the foregoing discussion of Orwell I emphasized the close relationship that
often exists between ideological beliefs about language and more overtly political
allegiances. In the case of Orwell, this relationship is the overt focus of his critical
writing: even if little attention is paid to the ideological nature of his arguments
about language, it is clear to any reader that he is promoting both a particular view
of what is desirable in language and a particular view of what is desirable in
politics. (It is also clear that he believes the two to be inextricably linked.) In other
cases, however, the connection of language to politics is less clear and
straightforward: language appears to be the central issue, which the writer is
broaching for its own sake and without any explicitly political agenda; but on
inspection it turns out that language is actually the symbolic arena in which some
other ideological contest is being fought out. Disputes about class, race, culture,
gender, crime, sex, religion and politics are indirectly or covertly being conducted
by way of arguments about terminology, grammar, spelling, swearing,
conversational etiquette or writing style.
This symbolic ideological dimension of linguistic conflicts is the subject of my
book Verbal Hygienea term I use to encompass all the normative metalinguistic
practices through which people attempt to clean up language in accordance with
particular value judgements on what is aesthetically, socially or morally
desirable.24 Verbal hygiene is usually presented as an intervention aimed at
improving language or communication, but a deeper analysis reveals that this is
not the whole story, or even the main plot. Linguistic values mask social and
moral ones; putting language to rights is a surrogate for putting the world to
rights.
Let me elaborate on what I mean here by giving an example. During the late
1980s, when the English national curriculum for schools was in the process of
being designed under the aegis of a right-wing conservative government, there was
an extraordinary outbreak of moral panic centring on the explicit teaching of
English grammar, a practice that had largely been abandoned in most state

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schools. Prince Charles made a speech urging that the new national curriculum
should bring back grammar teaching on a rote-learning and drilling model, to
inculcate discipline and build character. Norman Tebbit, then an MP and now a
member of the House of Lords, proclaimed that if children were not taught rules
for things like subject verb agreement or negation, they would turn up to school
filthy and have no incentive to stay out of crime. Comments of this sort make little
sense if taken at face value as statements about language and the most effective
ways of teaching it. But they make more sense if we view them as symbolic
assertions drawing on a metaphorical equationin fact one that can be traced back
to classical antiquity25of grammar, as a system for imposing order on language
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by reducing it to rule, with the social and moral order in which rules, not to
mention laws, are a defence against the constant threat of anarchy and chaos.
In this case it seems clear that the underlying anxiety or conflict was not about
language, but nor would I want to argue that this kind of verbal hygiene discourse
has nothing to do with language, that language is axiomatically just a surrogate for
something other than itself. Verbal hygiene is usually a double discourse, in
which language works at both a literal and a symbolic or metaphorical level.
Thus if one examines the reception and the ultimate consequences of 1980s right-
wing discourse on grammar, it is evident that support was mobilized for it not only
among people who shared the social vision it was used covertly to symbolize, but
also among many more peoplein this instance, more or less everyone except for
linguists and education expertswho took its linguistic presuppositions to be self-
evident common sense and thought they should be acknowledged as such in
English language education. Of course there is good and bad English; and of
course children cant learn which is which unless they are explicitly taught the
relevant rules. Actually, the first of these propositions is entirely a question of
value rather than factthe main difference between standard and non-standard
English is that non-standard dialects are more regular because their development
has not been affected by deliberate prescriptive tinkeringand the second one is
clearly false.26 But I wrote Verbal Hygiene partly in the hope of persuading my
linguist colleagues that it is no use dismissing lay language ideologies as just
ignorant and prejudiced nonsense, and expecting that position to triumph in
political arguments about language. Value judgements on language, ignorant or
not, are as real as, and often far more consequential politically than, scientific facts
about it. And in case this suggests that I am reverting to the kind of account that
opposes ideology to science, another argument of Verbal Hygiene is that linguistic
science is itself constituted in large part by its ideological stance of opposition to
the making of value-judgements on languagewhich is to my mind self-
contradictory and self-defeating, since the statement all languages and varieties
are equally good is as much a value-judgement as its opposite.

Conclusion
In the fields of inquiry I have focused on here, namely sociolinguistics and
linguistic anthropology, the main debates on ideology have not been so much

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about how to define the term as about how to connect it with language in a
theoretically satisfying wayin particular, a way that does not gloss over the
complexities of languages, their histories and the variation, not to say contestation,
that can be found in the way they are used in any given time or place. I have
emphasized in this discussion that language and language use are themselves
shaped by ideological factors, and that there is a complex but non-arbitrary
relationship between beliefs about language and beliefs about other things. From
my perspective as a sociolinguist, then, language is not the solution to the problem
of what ideology is or does (the giant turtle, the deus ex machina); it is itself an
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important problem in and for the study of ideology.

Notes and References

1. Linguistics, of course, never had a linguistic turn; though some kinds of socially-oriented linguistics have
subsequently (and many would say, belatedly) had a post-structuralist or postmodernist turn, its effect for
obvious reasons has not been to make scholars problematize language where before they had taken it to be
transparent.
2. Roger Griffin, Ideology and culture, Journal of Political Ideologies, 11, 2006, p. 81.
3. Paolo Pombeni, Ideology and government, Journal of Political Ideologies, 11, 2006, p. 62.
4. Ibid., p. 65.
5. Teun van Dijk, Ideology and discourse, Journal of Political Ideologies, 11, 2006, p. 115.
6. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 18.
7. John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge: Polity, 1984), p. 85.
8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn
(London: Verso, 1991), p. 42.
9. John Joseph, Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004), p. 124.
10. See Kathryn Woolard, Language ideology as a field of inquiry, in Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard and
Paul Kroskrity (Eds), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998).
11. V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press, 1972). I leave aside
here the continuing scholarly dispute about whether some or all of the work attributed to Voloshinov was
really written by his compatriot and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin.
12. I have never been able to find any evidence that Orwell knew the writings of Whorf, but the influence appears
so marked as to suggest that he must have encountered some version of Whorfs ideas, even if not through
Whorfs own work.
13. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Science and linguistics, reprinted in Language, Thought and Reality (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1956), pp. 21314.
14. Including, rather ironically, much of Noam Chomskys political discourseas a linguist Chomsky is
resolutely anti-Whorfian, a universalist rather than a relativist, but as a political commentator he follows in
Orwells footsteps.
15. Roy Harris, The Language Myth (London: Duckworth, 1981).
16. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programmes, Myth, Reality. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 57.
17. See James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and
Standardization, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1998).
18. Susan Gal, Between speech and silence: the problematics of research on language and gender, in Michaela
di Leonardo (ed.) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1991), p. 17.
19. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949).
20. Orwell, George, Politics and the English language, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of
George Orwell, Vol. 4: In Front of your Nose, 19451950, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Eds)
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
21. Geoffrey Nunberg, What the usage panel thinks, in Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels (Eds), The
State of the Language (London: Faber, 1990), pp. 47576.

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22. I believe that Voloshinov was right: the meanings people attach to linguistic forms are variable rather than
uniform, contested rather than consensual, inflected by language-users experiences and social positioning
rather than fixed by authority or some mysterious social contract. Consequently, just calling something by a
different name and forcing people to use that name does not automatically change the semantic
representation in the mind of every speaker. (When communism collapsed in the late 1980s this point was
dramatically illustrated, as words people had been obliged to mouth for yearscomrade, peopleswere
quickly reinflected in public use with the negative meanings they had clearly retained privately for most
speakers all along (for an insiders account of this process in Bulgaria, I am indebted to Julian Konstantinovs
unpublished, 1990 paper The breakdown of Newspeak in a former communist country, discussed further in
Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (London: Routledge, 1995).) It should be remembered, though, that
Orwells Newspeak was created as part of a work of imaginative fiction, not theory or reportage: it would be
idle to criticize the real-world implausibility of Newspeak were it not for the fact that so many commentators
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have treated it as a literal description of real-world linguistic phenomena.

23. In my own view, the liberal comparison of politically correct language to Orwells Newspeak (made, e.g. in
Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)) is theoretically
misguided (even if it has been rhetorically effective) because it overlooks the postmodernist element in PC
language politicsthe implicit and occasionally explicit rejection of the idea that language could or should
be a transparent representation of some reality external to it. Newspeak works by mobilizing its users belief
in a faithful correspondence between words and world: the problem is that in reality there is no
correspondence: the words lie about the world. PC language politics, by contrast, often entail a radical
questioning of the very concepts of truth and transparency.
24. Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene, op. cit., Ref. 22.
25. Representations of the classical curriculum often personify Grammar in the figure of a woman holding a
book in one hand and a rod or whip in the other.
26. My colleagues sometimes complain that students today do not know a noun from a verb. But while it may
be true that some students have not been formally taught definitions for the metalinguistic labels noun and
verb, it is untrue that they lack tacit knowledge of those categories and the rules for using them: in their
actual speech and writing they, along with all competent users of English, consistently demonstrate that
knowledge by, for instance, not trying to put past tense inflections on nouns or possessive inflections on
verbs. Children acquire grammatical knowledge of nouns and verbs long before anyone would think of
teaching them explicit rules or definitions.

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