‘What sort of people can look at a chicken and think dofednod?’: Language, ideology and nationalism in public discourse

Citation

Blackledge A (2002) ‘What sort of people can look at a chicken and think dofednod?’: Language, ideology and nationalism in public discourse. Multilingua, 21 (2-3), pp. 197-226. https://doi.org/10.1515/mult.2002.009

Abstract
Until very recently the Welsh language was heading for extinction. However, the Welsh Language Act of 1993, supported by the policies of the government-sponsored Welsh Language Board, have arrested this trend. The Welsh Language Board promotes the language on several fronts, including making links between Welsh and national identity and economic capital. However, the Welsh language continues to exist in competition with its considerably more powerful neighbour, English. In the globalised market, English continues to expand, to colonise and to carry greater economic capital than any other world language. Language ideological debates on the Anglo-Welsh borders are therefore located in social, cultural, historical and economic contexts which represent relations of power between Welsh and English national and cultural identities. In this paper I identify a contemporary debate in media discourse which ironically associates the Welsh language with national and cultural identities in several ways. In the wake of anti-Welsh comments on network television, media discourses emerged in which several competing ideologies of nationalist bilingualism, nationalist monolingualism and iconic bilingualism. Based on Critical Discourse Analysis and Bakhhtinian dialogic discourse, a detailed analysis of a single newspaper item suggests categories for identifying and making plain these competing ideologies.

Journal
Multilingua: Volume 21, Issue 2-3