Week 6—Listening for modernity

Week 6—Listening for modernity

Main reading: Inoue (2003)

Other reading: Bauman and Briggs (2003); Inoue (2002)

We continue to discuss the historical consequences of the ideological coupling of nation and language. Nation-states reinforce their legitimacy by creating and imposing standardized national languages. But this neat coupling is never perfectly realized in everyday life, because everyday life takes place in a world of different people, and is thus a world of heteroglossia (many ways of speaking). So two things happen:

• People who are committed to national identity and its expression in an ideal monoglot, standard speaker, they get very anxious. If you believe nations have languages, but no two people in one nation really do speak the same language the same way, then you might be afraid something is wrong.
• Language difference becomes a social and, indeed, a moral problem. The heteroglossia of everyday life in the real world is reinterpreted in a lens of us and them, but the them is an internal other.

So far, so good. This was Jane Hill’s point about the everyday language of white racism. This week we consider another side of national anxiety and fear of the internal other. The other is also viewed as an object. An ideology of national standard language also constructs an imaginary ideal listener who is able to judge the rightness and rationality of people’s speech.

Consider, for instance, the handwringing about so-called “vocal fry” (also known as creaky voice, an intermediate contraction of the voice box). This blog post from Science seems neutral.

Fessenden, Marissa. 2011. “‘Vocal Fry’ Creeping Into U.S. Speech.” Science News. December 9, 2011. https://www.science.org/content/article/vocal-fry-creeping-us-speech.

It even observes that some languages use creaky voice to distinguish between basic sounds that make up words (phonemes) and is not risky or dangerous. What are the ideological assumptions on which this kind of account of the vocal fry “trend” (Fessenden 2011).

Can you think of other examples?

References

Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fessenden, Marissa. 2011. “‘Vocal Fry’ Creeping Into U.S. Speech.” Science News. December 9, 2011. https://www.science.org/content/article/vocal-fry-creeping-us-speech.

Inoue, Miyako. 2002. “Gender, Language, and Modernity: Toward an Effective History of Japanese Women’s Language.” American Ethnologist 29 (2): 392–422. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2002.29.2.392.

———. 2003. “The Listening Subject of Japanese Modernity and His Auditory Double: Citing, Sighting, and Siting the Modern Japanese Woman.” Cultural Anthropology 18 (2): 156–93. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2003.18.2.156.