Rachelle Vessey Published in Language in Society
Associate Professor Rachelle Vessey recently co-published a new article in the leading sociolinguistics journal Language in Society, titled “A tripartite model examining language ideologies: Exploring dangerous, celebratory, and hegemonic multilingualism in United Nations language policy.”
Co-authored with British colleague Professor Lisa McEntee-Atalianis, this open-access paper shows how multilingualism has become hegemonic in United Nations language policy.
“The concepts of ‘dangerous’, ‘celebratory’, and ‘hegemonic’ multilingualism provide a valuable heuristic to explore language ideologies within supranational organizations like the United Nations. Adopting a critical stance in relation to the functions and values assigned to multilingualism and applying corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study examines three ideological manifestations: verbalizations, metapragmatic acts, and linguistic practices in United Nations debates on the 1995 multilingualism resolution. The study analyses how member state representatives index their ideological stance: metadiscursively via verbalizations within the context of language policy debates, via acts of voting, and via their use of multilingualism as positioning devices within these debates. Unlike previous investigations of language ideology which have predominantly and exclusively focussed on discursive analyses of texts, this article forwards a tripartite analytic framework. We argue that this model serves to afford a holistic examination of practised and stated attitudes towards multilingualism, which in turn have consequences for language policy outcomes.”
– From the abstract for “A tripartite model examining language ideologies: Exploring dangerous, celebratory, and hegemonic multilingualism in United Nations language policy”
You can find the full article here.