The document explores how language ideologies influence linguistic differentiation and social identities through a semiotic process, detailing how ideologies shape perceptions and descriptions of languages. It presents three case studies: the adoption of click consonants in Nguni languages reflecting respect and foreignness; the racial and national ideologies affecting the perception of Senegalese languages (Fula, Wolof, Sereer); and the portrayal of Macedonian dialects influenced by Serbian nationalistic ideologies. Each case illustrates concepts of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure in understanding the complex relationships among languages and their speakers.

1. Language Ideology and Linguistic
Differentiation
Irvine and Gal

2. Aim of the Study
• How participants’ ideologies concerning
boundaries and differences may contribute to
language change?
• How the describer’s ideology shapes his or her
description of language?
• How linguistic ideologies are taken to
authorize actions on the basis of linguistic
relationship or difference?

3. Semiotic Process
• Process of linguistic differentiation and shows how
people’s ideologies affect the perception and
interpretation of linguistic differences, which are used
to construct, enact, and imagine social identities.
• Iconization – transformation of the sign relationship
between linguistic features and the social images they
are linked.
• Fractal recursivity – projection of an opposition, salient
at the same level of relationship.
Ex : Intra-group oppositions might be projected
outward onto intergroup relations, or vice versa’’.

4. • Erasure – the process of ideology, to simplify
the sociolinguistic phenomena. Facts that are
not inconsistent with the ideological scheme
go unnoticed or unexplained.
• Three different case studies to illustrate this
semiotic process.

5. First Case (Click Consonants)
• Nguni languages(Zulu and Xhosa) – acquisition
of click consonants.
• Clicks – Khoi languages branch of Bantu
language family.
• Verbal peculiarities that sounded very strange
in phonological repertoires.
• Foreignness of click were adopted into Nguni
languages – language avoidance/ respect
register (hlonipha).

6. • Prohibits utterance of certain lexical items in
everyday vocabulary out of respect for highly
regarded person.
• Use Khoi clicks instead of the prohibited
items. They were able to add effective lexical
substitutes that complement their existing
vocabulary and conform to their culture's
linguistic prohibition.
• Eg: imuubu ‘hippopotamus’ , use the term
incubu ‘hippos’

8. • Iconization - click consonants were perceived as
icons representing the idea of foreignness.
• Erasure - complex relationship between the Nguni
and the Khoi languages were clipped of significance
as an aspect of one became an integral part of the
other.
• Fractal recursivity - reflected in the way the
distinction between the Nguni and Khoi languages
was used to enhance the distinction between two
modes of communication-everyday and hlonipha-in
the Nguni language.

9. Second Case (Senegalese Languages)
• Concerns with ideologies of European linguists
towards Senegalese languages (Fula, Wolof &
Sereer).
• Ways languages identified, mappped &
relationships interpreted (influence of racial
ideology & national essences).

11. • Fula, Wolof & Sereer ( 3 distinct but related
languages forming “Senegal group”.
• Three languages have different geographical
distributions - do not sort out into neatly
discrete territories.
• 19th century – Fula, Wolof & Sereer mapped as
occupying separate territories. (not related to
each other).
• They correspond more clearly with political
and religious hierarchies

12. • Fula has strong connection with Islamic orthodoxy.
Sereer is associated with resistance to Islam.
• Wolof is dominant in the coastal kingdoms where the
French first established outposts.
• Empire of Joloff - Wolof as the language of political
administration.
• Even Joloff's southern dependencies, where much of
the population used Sereer as a language of the home,
used Wolof lexicon for political offices.
• Thus, many Sereer-speakers in the south were bilingual
in Wolof, while Wolof-speakers further north resist
acquiring Sereer.

13. • European observers :
1) A language ought to have a distinct territory
and nation (or ethnic group) associated with
it.
2) Other kinds of situations as "mixtures"
deriving from migration and conquest.
3) Black Africans as primitive and simple-
minded, knowing no social organization more
complex than the family group.

14. • Fula-speakers were supposed to be "higher" in
race and intelligence and to have brought their
"superior" religion, hierarchical social
organization, and language to bear upon the
Wolof, who in turn influenced the "simple"
Sereer.
• Linguists refused to see Fula as genetically related
to Wolof and Sereer.
• Fula’s linguistic characteristics were taken away
by scholars – signs speakers “delicacy” and
“intelligence” compared to Wolof speakers.
• Wolof language claimed to be less flexible than
Fula.
• Sereer considered as language of “primitive”.

15. • Descriptions of these languages were motivated
by notions of their distinctness.
• Differences between them were highlighted;
variation and overlap were erased. Varieties that
had to be called "mixed" .
• Lexicon deemed "borrowed" from the other
language were stripped away.
• Lamoise's descriptions of Sereer, and his text
citations, remove (among other things) much of
the political discourse and most of the lexicon
identified with Wolof.

16. • Iconization – Sereer was thought to be
“primitive” language with extremely simple
vocabulary & grammatical form, also applied
to speakers of the language.
• Erasure – ignore or simplified complex
grammatical features in Sereer (did not fit the
notion of the language as “primitive”).
• Fractal recursivity – differences among varities
of Sereer were ideologically interpreted as
replicating larger relationship between Seerer
and Wolof.

17. Third Case (Macedonian Speech
Verities)
• Western European observers saw the
southeast of the continent through the lens of
a dichotomizing, recursive orientalism.
• Southeast of the continent -was conquered for
centuries by the Ottomans, came to be seen
as oriental, undeveloped, disorganized,
unchanging: the least European part of
Europe, lacking the qualities metropolitan
Europe assigned itself.

18. • In the case of political strife between Serbs
and Macedonians in Yugoslov-ruled
Macedonia, features of Macedonians
language which are able to positively
characterize Macedonians were erased.
• Instead the Serbs focus on less positive
characters as their rationalization for
characterizing Macedonians. “uncultivated
country bumpkins”.

19. • Iconization - the way some Serbs, who dominated
the Yugoslav government between the two World
Wars, characterized Macedonians as simple country
folk having no grammar because of Macedonian's
relatively simpler nominal morphology.
• Fractal recursivity - the preference for Western
dialects in the official codification of Macedonian in
the mid-20th century was motivated in part by the
desire to differentiate Macedonian maximally from
both Bulgarian and Serbo- Croatian standards.
• Erasure - when Serbiana nd Bulgarian maps showed
Slavic language varieties as dialects belonging to
their own standard languages.