Sociolinguistic frontiers: Emancipation and equality

1.1 Commensuration and regimentation

Scholars working on translation (notably William Hanks in his 2010 study of the work of Franciscan missionaries in the Yucatan) have pointed out that fitting linguistic form into one system of measurement (Hanks calls this “commensuration”), while usually understood as resting on universal and neutral principles of description, can be seen instead as the construction of a frame of reference for understanding the world, which produces power effects. The desire for commensuration usually stems from specific unequal interests (in the case described by Hanks, religious conversion in the cause of imperialism). Even if, as Hanks also argues, the process is often dialectic, affecting both parties, the resulting distribution of resources, or the purposes for which commensuration is harnessed, often enhance inequality. The development of a regime of linguistic description may well have opened the door to specific understandings both of “Maya” and of “Spanish,” but it was also part of a toolbox of modes of conquest. And, it forms part of the systems of linguistic measurement that we use to this day.

To better understand these systems of description, Bonnie McElhinny and I have talked about them as techniques of regimentation as well as legitimizing discourses (Heller and McElhinny 2017). Techniques of regimentation not only make sure that linguistic material is understood to be structured fundamentally the same way, They also make it possible to mask, in the Bourdieuian sense (Bourdieu 1982), how and why such linguistic material might be hierarchically valued (as was the case for much of the time). Or, with the rise of the welfare state, why the hierarchy of values in different linguistic forms and practices ought to be construed as illegitimate – as outside the realm of scientific practice. This, flattening of value, as Bourdieu argues, can have the perverse effect of contributing to the reproduction of that hierarchy.

This is the core problem of sociolinguistics as we have inherited it. By constructing all linguistic form and practice as universally commensurate, it was possible to both push back against racial and evolutionary hierarchies in the name of Reason and Equality, and simultaneously marginalize the problem of observable value hierarchies. Sociolinguistics has struggled to explain why such value hierarchies persist when the of arguments in support of them have no scientific basis. The problem has thus been consigned to the realm of individuals’ prejudices to be eradicated via education. Questions of value hierarchies have largely remained on the periphery of the field, rather than being placed at the center of what scholars need to address if we want to take emancipation and equality seriously.

1.2 Legitimization

Underlying techniques of regimentation is the reproduction of the principles of categorization and hierarchization. Put differently, this reproduction legitimizes the social categories that are constructed to justify the unequal distribution of resources at the heart of relations of power. Racialization, feminization, sexualization, and infantilization of the other bundle the semiotic resources that have emerged from the long and complex history of capitalism and colonialism. These categories are arguably the key means we have developed to put social difference in the service of making social inequality. They underlie the categories of “us” and “other,” the boundary across which commensuration must be made in order for some to accumulate and others to either serve the process of accumulation or be removed from that process.

Race, gender, class, sexuality, all have been at the heart of the ideology of the nation, with whiteness, masculinity, middle and upper class, and heteronormativity all embedded as the signs of who legitimately sets the rules of the game. By definition then, the language of the educated and male middle/upper class – the definers of the nation and its uniformized, regimented language – becomes the standard against which other languages and language variants are made intelligible as substandard. Indeed, often the other is made intelligible as a certain form of unintelligibility (argot, jargon, childish, primitive, the list is quite long).

If emancipation from this regime of truth has long been understood as a core aim of sociolinguistics, this emancipation has not reckoned with why these categories are relevant ones. Instead, what we have is a form of identity politics that seeks to validate recognition of the language of the stigmatized other: the language of women, of Black Americans, of Indigenous peoples, of Latinx in the United States, or of beur in France (or of Kiezdeutsch in Germany or of Rinkeby Swedish in Sweden). The same dynamics of recognition is evident regarding standard, national languages (or nationalitaire “minority”/“minoritized” languages, like Catalan, Breton, or Tibetan), for whose speakers nation-state autonomy is claimed. ^[1]

Of course, these named language varieties, while the product of specific sociohistorical process, have social reality, and therefore material effects on their speakers. Yet, sociolinguistics has rarely examined how this social reality works systemically, preferring largely to defend the rationality of the language of the stigmatized other instead of studying historically contingent and semiotically substantive modes that establish linguistic hegemony, as well as how particular techniques of regimentation inscribe populations into the same (commensurable) frame, disregarding who actually benefits. Why those social categories, why there, why now (or then)? In other words, these social realities – these sociolinguistic realities – need to be understood as forms of social organization, which are productive and reproductive of particular relations of inequality; the question is both how and why. We need to understand, for example, why emancipation has really only been imagined in the form of nation-state-type sovereignty.