5.1 Survey Comments: Lay beliefs
5.1.2 The ideologizing process in interaction
This section presents how discourse is interpreted with established language ideologies and how established language ideologies are evaluated differently in interaction. Furthermore, these ideological differences, along with linguistic differences, are discursively constructed as binary social distinctions, a semiotic process which Gal and Irvine (2019) call ‗axis of differentiation.‘ An ideological stance is constantly connected to one or multiple attributes. A different ideological stance tends to be understood in opposition both in attitudes and in these social attributes.
The conversation (38), initiated by a proponent, centers on the practicality of English officialization.
(38)
1 Viewer A 想要跟國際競爭難道不需要學嗎？
(‗Don‘t we need to learn English if we want to connect with the world?‘)
2 Viewer B 學跟列為官方語言是兩回事
(‗Learning English is one thing and officializing it is another.‘)
…(63 words, 9 lines omitted)…
12 Viewer F 所以如果不是英國人跟美國人
(‗So people other than American and British‘)
13 學英語都自我矮化?
(‗are belittling themselves when learning English?‘)
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(‗Those who belittle themselves can go anywhere in the world.‘)
17 Viewer G 沒看到台南市官方就是用在公文上啊，
(‗Can‘t you see that offices in Tainan issue English documents?‘)
18 你不懂喪失權益就你家的事，
(‗If your rights are infringed upon because you don‘t [read English], you are responsible for that.‘)
19 像是支付命令你阿公阿罵看不懂就 GG 了。12
(‗For example, elders at home may have trouble understanding paying warrants.‘)
20 別以為那麼簡單。
(‗Don‘t oversimplify the issue‘)
21 Viewer G13 還有一些公文名詞都要英文再去官方定義，
(‗Some official terms need to be redefined in English.‘)
22 你沒再去學，
(‗If you don‘t deliberately learn about them,‘)
23 會英文也沒用，
(‗what makes you think you can read English documents?‘)
…(31 words, 3 lines omitted)…
30 Viewer H 全台灣人工作跟英文掛的上關係的有多少，
(‗How many people in Taiwan need English at work?‘)
31 你這輩子用不太到英文卻為了要和鄰居聊天而學英文……
(‗You don‘t use English extensively in your lifetime and now you‘re learning it to go global……‘)
12 阿公阿罵 is a transliteration from Taiwanese a-kong a-má to Chinese characters. Frequently coded as 阿公 阿嬤, the term refers to grandparents and elders generally. The term GG is an acronym for ―Good Game,‖ a phrase used to end a competition in online games to show good sportsmanship. It has been used to refer to end a life game and to get in trouble.
13 Based on the identical username, Viewer G left two comments consecutively.
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Viewer A takes an affirmative ideological stance of the established language ideology
―English represents competitiveness.‖ Viewer B refutes Viewer A‘s stance by distinguishing
between language learning and language officialization, though s/he probably still recognizes English learning as required. The refutation makes apparent a discrepancy concerning how an
official language is conceptualized. Simply put, Viewers A and B share the established language ideology ―English represents competitiveness‖ but conceptualize official languages
differently. Several turns of verbal abuse among viewers are omitted. Viewer F derides the view that learning English is an act of identity menace (lines 12-16). Viewer I‘s statement explicates how linguistic differences are constructed as opposing social distinctions. S/he first criticizes the view that non-American and non-British are interiorizing themselves learning English. The viewer relates language to essentialized identity (Bucholtz 2003), i.e. the
idealized one-to-one correspondence between language and nationality. S/he frames this overgeneralization as opponents‘ disapproval of legitimizing English. It remains unknown
whether Viewer F deploys this discursive strategy to make opponents seem less objective and lose their grounds. The binary distinctions stay in the later statements (lines 15 and 16). S/he pronounces that English provides a ticket to 暢行無阻 changxingwuzu ‗go anywhere in the world‘ and that without English one is geographically confined. English competence is
depicted as a criterion for mobility by Viewer F, and the global status of English is inferred.
Several contrastive pairs are constructed in the discourse. The comment starts with refuting
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contrastive pair between native language users and non-native language learners (lines 12-13), to the contrast between approval and disapproval regarding English officialization. The approving vs. disapproving contrast then maps to the contrast between mobility and confinement in his/her argument in legitimizing English (lines 15-16). Viewer G blames an excessively cheerful view on English officialization (lines 17-20) and constructs English competence as socially indicative. Elders are depicted as being less likely to acquire English
and thus at disadvantage (line 19). This opposing view to English officialization manifests the established language ideology ―An official language is a language for all.‖ In Viewer H‘s
comment, the 多少 duoshao implies that a comparatively limited number of English users.
Only the interpretation of 少 ‗few‘ is picked up. The statement that you (any individual) 這 輩子用不太到英文 zhebeizi yong bu tai dao yingwen ‗don‘t use English extensively in your lifetime‘ (line 31) explicates that English does not serve as a daily language and that the
efforts to acquire English are not well justified. The excerpt shows that viewers rely on a limited number of established language ideologies to interpret English officialization, but take diverse stances on them.
The following interaction in (39), initiated by an opponent, illustrates how shared established language ideologies critically maintain the conversation even without being made verbally explicit. The interaction starts with Viewer I challenging the usefulness of English in daily communication.
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(39)
1 Viewer I 你帄時講英文嗎?
(‗Do you speak English in daily life?‘)
2 用到時機有多少?
(‗How often do you have to speak English?‘)
3 Viewer II 用到的時機挺多的幾乎每天用
(‗I speak English frequently, almost daily.‘)
4 Viewer III 很多啊，
(‗Frequently,)
5 你要去做工地的話大概就不用天天用
(‗you probably don‘t use [English on a daily basis] if you are a construction worker.‘)
6 Viewer IV 天天寫英文信,
(‗I write mail in English every day.)
7 講中文多
(‗I speak Chinese more frequently.‘)
8 但寫英文比寫中文多,
(‗But I write in English a lot.‘)
9 另外本人多益 700 多分,
(‗By the way, I scored more than 700 at TOEIC.‘)
10 在台灣超過帄均約 300 分
(‗It‘s about 300 more than the average score in Taiwan.‘)
11 但到韓國自由行發現遇到的路人有一半英語比我好
(‗But I discovered that half of the Koreans I ran into speak better English than me when I went backpacking in Korea.‘)
12 Viewer V 上班每天都得用吧?
(‗I think we use English at work every day.‘)
13 Viewer VI 民眾也許不高，
(‗Not so common for the average public )
14 官方活動..商業貿易活動..科學研究處處需要...
(‗But it‘s necessary in official activities, business and science.‘)
15 Viewer VII 樓主你是井底之蛙吧你(笑翻)
(‗OP, you must live in your own world, (lol).‘)
16 Viewer VIII 我講英語,年薪五佰萬..
(‗I speak English. My yearly income is five million..‘)
17 Viewer IX 要嗆樓主至少也用個英文回吧!!!!
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(‗Respond to OP in English if you contradict with the opinion!
18 學校基本要教，
(‗Schools teach basics.‘)
19 要深入自由學習就好，
(‗People can decide whether to go advanced.‘)
20 有需要的自然去學。
(‗You‘ll learn English when you need it.‘)
…(37 words, 4 lines)…
(‗Because you don‘t speak the language, you don‘t think you‘ll need it‘)
Viewer I uses two rhetorical questions to state that English does not serve as a daily language.
The comment presupposes that an official language has to be used frequently. The rhetorical questions, aimed for emphasizing and aligning (Shao 2013), are deliberately answered by
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Viewer II, who claims to use English on a nearly daily basis. By answering the rhetorical questions, Viewer II distances him/herself from Viewer I. Viewer II is showing an affirmative stance to the use of English, though his/her stance to English officialization remains unknown.
Viewer III quips that a person probably does not use English daily if s/he 要去做工地 yao qu
zuo gongdi ‗is a construction worker.‘ The evaluation is rich in ideological assumptions. The
工地 gongdi, literally ‗construction site,‘ refers to blue-collar jobs. Labor-intensive jobs are
thought to be less relevant to English, which commonly indexes better paid, white-collar occupations. Put differently, the distinction between English competence and incompetence is mapped to the overgeneralized distinction between white-collar jobs and blue-collar jobs, another instance of linguistic differences to social differentiation. Viewer IV reflects on the understanding that Taiwanese generally are bad speakers of English (lines 9-11). Viewers V and VI also affirm that English is commonly used at work and in formal domains (line 12).
These viewers collectively voice the importance of English and the urge to acquire English.
Viewer VII describes Viewer I as 井底之蛙 jingdizhiwa ‗narrow-minded‘ (line 15). The
comment also reveals implicitly that recognizing English shows how one‘s ‗vision‘ is judged.
Embracing English presents a person as knowledgeable, open-minded, with an international perspective. Conversely, denial of English also denies a person from these abovementioned traits. Comment VIII sequences English proficiency and income in the way that invites causal reading of the two. Though it is unknown whether the comment is intended for irony, the
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syntactic structure reveals indexicalization of English to higher income. Comment IX believes that speakers will acquire English when they find it necessary. It reflects on the established language ideology, although less obviously, that an official language demands societal competence. Viewer IX is apparently less positive about mandated English proficiency. The ideological stance is however challenged by Viewer XI with a rhetorical question. The question voices his opinion that it is too late to learn English when the realization of its importance dawns on the viewer. Viewer XII states that English is important (line 28) and that Taiwanese should learn to know more about the world. The two statements collaboratively invite the inference that English is regarded as a medium to stay informed about the world (lines 28-31). Though this conversation thread is initiated by an opponent to English officialization, English is also co-constructed by the following viewers as an emblem for white-collar occupation, mobility, competitiveness, higher income, world vision and international perspectives. Speakers who disapprove of English officialization and who do not find English necessary are discursively presented as speakers without these aforementioned traits.
The two excerpts explicate how the policy proposal is understood with established language ideologies and how these shared established language ideologies are critiqued differently. The belief of having an official language surrounds mandated language learning.
Besides, English is perceived as a domain-specific language and this property is taken as
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advantageous socioeconomically by some and as disadvantageous in terms of daily conversation by others. Language competence and the ideological stances are both discursively constructed as binary and understood in terms of differences in social attributes.
Gal and Irvine (2019) state that qualitative contrasts anchor the meanings of each other. These qualities are mostly abstract and they are defined by projecting an image regarding what each other is not. This accounts for the observation that the differentiations are commonly discursively constructed as either-or.
This section discusses the interaction of the ideologizing process of officializing English and identifies established language ideologies and ideological stances. Several observations are noteworthy. First, established language ideologies and ideological stances present ideological processes as dynamic and heterogeneous (Kroskrity 2004). Second, language officialization is intimately associated with intensive, even successful language learning and national identity acknowledgement. Third, the distinction between English competence and incompetence is discursively constructed as binary, and mapped onto social distinction also in binary fashion (Gal & Irvine 2019). Speakers with English competence enjoy global mobility, better jobs, higher income, and wider perspectives whereas people without English competence are confined in Taiwan, narrow-minded, and keep blue-collar jobs. On this ground, incompetence is discouraged and argues for English officialization.
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However, elders are described as less likely to possess English ability. On this ground,
incompetence is presented to argue against English officialization. Viewers rely on established language ideologies, such as ―English represents competitiveness‖ and ―An official language is a language for all,‖ to comprehend English officialization. Semiotic
process of differentiation makes ideological distinction socially meaningful by both understanding differences as oppositions and extending opposition to attributes (Bishop &
Jaworski 2003; Gal & Irvine 2019). The metadiscourse regarding the proposal to officialize English is a field of ideological competition which surprisingly originates from a limited number of shared established language ideologies.