Linguistic Ideologies and Worldviews: Evolution, Comparisons, and Contrasts
A medium through which individuals and groups act and interact in the social world (Thompson, 1987), language is also a semiotic vehicle for the production and circulation of ideologies and worldviews. In the era of globalization, marked by an explosion of digital communication, and an unprecedented progress in information technology, linguistic ideologies and linguistic worldviews are being constructed and expressed in new contexts. This special issue invites researchers to inquire into the semiotic and socio-cultural processes on which linguistic ideologies and linguistic worldviews rely, as well as to examine their evolution through various theoretical approaches, and interdisciplinary perspectives.
This issue’s main objective is to understand how linguistic ideologies and linguistic worldviews are interrelated at the social, cultural, cognitive, and discursive levels in English-speaking contexts or their comparison and contrast with other linguistic and cultural contexts. It also seeks to explain how and to what extent globalization, along with the evolution of information technology and mass communication, have influenced language users’ cognitive and semiotic conceptualizations and discursive (re)productions of linguistic ideologies and worldviews. Authors are invited to tackle these and related questions in a synchronic or diachronic perspective. They are encouraged to study linguistic ideologies and linguistic worldviews in their relation to culture, cognition, discursive practices, power relations, politics, religion, etc., to explore the changing nature of linguistic ideologies and worldviews across time and in relation to historical and geopolitical events (colonization, the world wars, the Cold War, geopolitical conflicts, etc.) or “grand narratives” (capitalism, communism, socialism, liberalism, Marxism, etc., see Lyotard, 1979). We also welcome theoretical or empirical studies which contrast linguistic ideologies and linguistic worldviews to highlight their recurring or divergent patterns across socio-cultural, linguistic, political, and geographical spaces, as well as across various discursive genres or practices, including their expression through conceptual metaphor and metonymy (Goatly, 2007; Underhill, 2011). The concept of “linguistic ideologies” is generally traced back to Michael Silverstein, who defines it as “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein, 1979: 193). Silverstein’s definition concerns “ideologies about language”, but as Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) posit, language ideologies also relate to other social, cultural and philosophical phenomena, such as identity, aesthetics, morality, universality, authenticity, etc. Therefore, we should distinguish ideologies about language itself, from “ideologies encoded in or through language” (Woolard 2020).
Furthermore, it is theoretically relevant to underline the hypernym relation between “ideology” in general and “linguistic ideology” defined in Critical Discourse Studies as “a perspective (often one-sided), i.e. a worldview and a system composed of related mental representations, convictions, opinions, attitudes, values and evaluations, which is shared by members of a specific social group” (Reisigl and Wodak 2016: 25). Here we have an overtly expressed connection between ideology and worldview, which seems to echo Hill and Mannheim (1992: 382), who note that in many theoretical studies “where ‘world view’ would once have served, ‘ideology’ is often heard, suggesting representations that are contestable, socially positioned, and laden with political interest”. This is in line with Silverstein’s analysis (1979: 200-201), which states that the Whorfian principle of referential projection or objectification is “at the basis of what he variously calls the ‘world view,’ the ‘habitual thought patterns,’ or the ‘natural logic’ of speakers”. Silverstein describes this theoretical inclination as “the natives’ ideology” of the way their language is used as a propositional system to represent and talk about things in the world. Brown (2019: 49) characterizes a worldview as “what is believed to be true” and an ideology as “what is believed to be right”. For Głaz, (2017: 35), worldview is “the cognitive orientation of an individual or a community, an understanding of the relationship between that individual or community and the world”, while linguistic worldview refers to “the view of the world as it is entrenched in language”. In the context of those and other views, this special issue seeks to investigate to what extent language encodes the interpretations of reality to symbolize, shape, and construct speakers’ cultural and social experiences, conceptualizations of things, and the relationships between individual language users or communities.
Authors are invited to address the questions raised above, as well as the following topics, this list is not exhaustive:
The evolution of linguistic ideologies and linguistic worldviews:
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in postcolonial societies, the era of globalization, migration contexts, and geopolitical relations;
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in relation to moral, aesthetic, philosophical, religious and political representations of the nature, structure and status assigned to languages;
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in media discourse, digital interactions and on social networks;
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in relation to contemporary issues of language technology (automatic translation, machine learning, Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models).
The connection between linguistic ideologies and linguistic worldviews in the context of and in relation to:
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discourse (esp. the role of conceptual metaphor and metonymy), cognition and culture;
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identity : national, regional, ethnic, religious, social, gender, etc. ;
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multilingualism, vulnerability of languages, linguistic homogeneity vs. variation.
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The role of linguistic ideologies and linguistic worldviews:
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in forming social and political organizations, allies or coalitions;
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in discrimination, racism, prejudices, linguistic hegemony vs. vulnerability ;
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in social hierarchies, power relationships, social categorizations, political polarizations.
We invite authors to submit a 400-word abstract along with a short biographical note (150 words) – by February 15, 2025.
Book reviews of recent or understudied works that engage with the aforementioned proposals are also welcome.
Abstract submissions should follow the submission guidelines available at https://alizes.univ-reunion.fr/71 and be emailed to the editors:
The full draft papers for all accepted proposals must be submitted by October 30, 2025, and will undergo a double-blind peer review process.