Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2016

When inspectors from the Office québécois de la langue francçaise (OQLF) objected to the use of the word "pasta" in a Montreal restaurant in February 2013 , a backlash in news and social media erupted internationally. Ensuing pressure led to the resignation of the OQLF head and a revision of OQLF language complaint procedures; the Pastagate story also contributed to mounting negativity towards the province and its language. Social media have been credited with playing a role in the proliferation of the story and its impact. Drawing on a corpus of Tweets containing PASTAGATE, this paper uses corpus-assisted discourse studies to explore language ideologies in English and French Tweets. Findings reveal divergent language ideologies and representations of the Pastagate affair. The paper concludes by suggesting that language ideological debates in a superdiverse online world may have implications for minority languages in the offline world of nation-states.

The aim of this comparative study is to detect symmetries and asymmetries in the status of two major languages taught in Israel: Hebrew in Arabic-medium schools and Arabic in Hebrew-medium schools. The teaching of these two languages offers a unique case of language education policy where categories of ideology, policy, curriculum, methods, and assessment intersect. For Arabs, Hebrew is perceived as a major tool for upward mobility, but findings show they are alienated by a curriculum embedded in the hegemonic culture and ideology, with which they can hardly identify. For Jews, Arabic is a language of low prestige, and their motivation is hindered by a curriculum which focuses mostly on formal language and security needs, and not on communicative, interactive skills. Concluding the paper, we propose an outline for the creation of alternative teaching environments that defy existing power structures and reinvent inclusive ecologies for the learning of both languages.

This paper examines how the political slogan of the “Chinese Dream”, coined and promoted by China’s president, Xi Jinping, was mediatised in the Chinese and the American media. Applying theoretical frameworks in narrative studies and concepts in mediated discourse analysis, it investigates how elements such as context, time, and space played a vital part in the construal and interpretation of the “Chinese Dream” in a nexus of media practices; as such differing characteristics of mediatisation in the Chinese and the American media emerged. These mediatising mechanisms demonstrate a constant “othering” practice of the American media in mediatising the slogan, and the “blind-to-others” practice of the Chinese media. It is suggested the nexus of the mediatising practice be changed by enhancing the mutual understanding between the two cultural systems.

This paper attempts to make a critical cognitive analysis of US strategic intelligence reports and aims at investigating language strategies and cognitive biases that occur in the reports and how the reports create the “realities” that may influence policymakers’ decisions. The data for analysis include seven reports released by US Intelligence Community which analyze, more or less, the Sino-US relations currently and in the foreseeable future as well as the implications of a rising China on US policies. The analytic framework is built up by integrating Critical Metaphor Analysis, Conceptual Blending Theory and Discourse Space Theory, each of which deal with different aspects of the discourse and on the whole provide a comprehensive analysis of it. The critical cognitive analysis of intelligence reports could disclose the views that analysts hold on particular issues, providing valuable reference for understanding or evaluating their reports’ contents, and reveal the ideology inherent in US strategic thinking, helping to estimate US strategic policies in the long term.

This study aims to explore the construction of difference in foreign news discourse on culturally similar but politically different non-Western subjects. Applying critical discourse analysis (CDA) together with a critique of Eurocentrism, the study examines difference in newspaper constructions of government supporters and oppositional groups in Venezuela. Discursive differences are evident in the strategies used for constructing the two groups with regard to political rationality and violence. Government supporters are associated with social justice, Venezuela’s poor, dogmatic behavior, and the use of political violence. The opposition, in contrast, is constructed as following a Western democratic rationale that stresses anti-authoritarianism. This group is primarily associated with victims of violence. While the opposition is conveyed as being compatible with Eurocentric values and practices, government supporters to great extent deviate from these norms. Such constructions serve to legitimize politico-ideological undercurrents of Eurocentrism, as the defense of liberalism.