Monoglot “Standard” in America: Standardization and Metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony

Abstract

The evidence of societal plurilingualism is everywhere about people, on urban public transportation, in classrooms, wherever service-sector personnel are encountered, and on lettuce farms and across vast tracts set aside as reservations. This chapter discusses the linguistic anthropology of modern American society. Standardization is a phenomenon in a linguistic community in which institutional maintenance of certain valued linguistic practices—in theory, fixed—acquires an explicitly-recognized hegemony over the definition of the community&s;s norm. The linguistic community of American monoglot Standard English can thus be situated in several dimensions of contrast simultaneously. A linguistic clone is a monoglot culture, a population with a single language sheltered from alien words and alien thoughts. Its linguistic inheritance, propagated asexually from generation to generation, tends to become gradually impoverished. American unity has never rested primarily on unity of language, but rather on common political and social ideals.