ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we look in more detail at people’s beliefs or ideologies about language (in Gee’s terminology, their discourse models of language). There are two competing models of what a language is, one of which could be referred to as the ‘popular’ model and the other as a more ‘expert’ model. The popular model differentiates between ‘languages’ and ‘dialects’, and postulates a hierarchical relation between them. An evaluative dimension is tagged on to this hierarchy, with languages being perceived as better than or superior to dialects. Moreover, a ‘language’ tends to be automatically identified with the standard (version of the) language, as described in grammars and dictionaries.
