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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 15:4 (2016) ► pp.468–491

Making English local

Chronotopes in language policy discourse

| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This study examines the role of chronotopes in a municipal campaign to make English the official language. Drawing on theories of scale, localism, and chronotopes in discourse, this article traces how 30 town residents situated the English language in local and US history through talk and gesture. By evoking two contrasting chronotopes as they created and interpreted the language policy, people positioned monolingualism as a local tradition and multilingualism as a new, outside threat. Yet these chronotopes of local time and distant time were also recursive and fluid in two key ways. First, the US could be aligned with or against the local, which allowed English-only advocates to simultaneously criticize the nation and appeal to an idealized US past. Second, some critics of the policy reconfigured the chronotopes in order to posit multilingualism as the more authentic local tradition. These moves allowed the people involved to support, redefine and resist the English-only movement.

Keywords: Bakhtin, chronotope, English, English-only movement, discourse, gesture, language ideology, local, language policy, nationalism, scale
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Shifting scales in language policy
  • 3.Overview of the study
    • 3.1Site
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Local language policymaking in action
    • 4.1English as a local tradition
    • 4.2The city in and against the United States
    • 4.3Reconfiguring chronotopes as a mode of resistance
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15.4.05flo
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