“In whatever language people feel comfortable”: conflicting language ideologies in the US Southwest border

Abstract

This article explores how language ideologies about monolingualism and bilingualism are reproduced and challenged by the media in a Southwestern border community in the United States. We investigate the particular ways in which these language ideologies are constructed and reconstructed through lexicogrammatical and discursive choices that evaluate and position languages and their users. Through an appraisal analysis (Martin and White, The language of evaluation: The appraisal framework in English, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) of local newspaper articles, we show how competing language ideologies are negotiated in discourse through a configuration of linguistic resources including: concession, modality, and polarity. These discursive configurations construct different evaluations of languages and their users; monolingual ideologies are associated to individual responsibility, whereas multilingual/bilingual ideologies are associated to social responsibility. The article points to the ways in which the print media in this community reproduces the dominant monolingual English-only ideology at the same time it opens up spaces for multilingual language ideologies.