ABSTRACT
Each of the chapters in Part I of this volume presents a provocative range of concepts and issues surrounding the significant and growing area of scholarly interest in ethnography and language policy. Prominent in each of the four chapters is a description and analysis of local language ideologies. These chapters (and those that follow) present a striking and thought-provoking comparative and contrastive continuum of ethnographic cases of language in context. The examples, drawn from global Indigenous, diaspora, and colonized communities, depict issues of complex language ideologies, explicitly articulated and behaviorally enacted, in a striking range of culturally specific sociopolitical and historical contexts. Ethnographic deliberateness at each ideological site uncovers multiple layers of subtle, nuanced, complicated, and often contradictory depth to our understanding of the complex cultural conceptions of language and “the mediating links between the social order and forms of talk” (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994, p. 55). Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) describe language ideologies in the following way:
… ideologies envision and enact links of language to group and personal identity, to aesthetics, to morality, and to epistemology. Through such linkages, they often underpin social institutions. Inequality among groups of speakers, and colonial encounters par excellence, throw language ideology into high relief.
(p. 56)