Emili Boix-Fuster (boix@lincat.ub.es)
Centre Universitari de Sociolingüística i Comunicació (CUSC)
The opacity of certain language ideologies has led some researchers to study them by combining three approaches, namely ethnography of communication, discourse analysis and social psychological of language. The combination of these approaches tries to obtain more valid data in order to find out patterned language ideologies. Here I am not claiming that these three perspectives might allow us to make up an unified theoretical perspective, that is, a real interdisciplinary field. What I am defending is that they are complementary to each other: within an ethnographic work, discourse analysis and sociopsychological techniques (matched-guise technique, and segmented dialogue techniques, for example) are useful. I consider these approaches to be converging dimensions, which might lead researchers to raise more relevant questions, to gather more valid data, and, consequently, to obtain more valid research results. By means of recent data on current language ideologies in Catalonia I have shown how this complementary research has been carried out.
These attempts to improve our understanding of language ideologies are socially significant in societies like the Catalan where the population is extremelly complex ethnolinguistically. But, I argue, these research attempts might be salient elsewhere. In most western societies the increase of multicultural population will make the need of this combination of approaches to grow. Since more people are likely to have unstable identities, more people will become reluctant to confine themselves to determined social and ethnic identities. The contrast of different sociocultural norms might lead to open conflict, unless monolingual and monocultural ideologies ( what we have called homogenism) change. Sociolinguistic ethnographies, discourse analyses and psychosociological experiments can proporcionate means to, as Heller (1999, 258) clearly stated, " reveal ideological faultlines in order to avoid earthquakes"