Raphael Berthele

A Tool, a Bond, or a Territory: Language Ideologies in the US and in Switzerland

Series A: General & Theoretical Papers ISSN 1435-6473 Essen: LAUD 2001 (2., unveränderte Auflage 2006) Paper No. 533

Universität Duisburg-Essen

Raphael Berthele

University of Fribourg (Switzerland) & UC Berkely (USA)

A Tool, a Bond, or a Territory: Language Ideologies in the US and in Switzerland

Copyright by the author Reproduced by LAUD 2001 (2., unveränderte Auflage 2006) Linguistic Agency Series A University of Duisburg-Essen General and Theoretical FB Geisteswissenschaften Paper No. 533 Universitätsstr. 12 D- 45117 Essen

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Raphael Berthele

A Tool, a Bond, or a Territory: Language Ideologies in the US and in Switzerland*

1. Introduction In this paper, two political debates on language issues will be analyzed: "English-Only" in the US and "Early English instruction" in Switzerland. The two main goals of this attempt are firstly to come to an accurate description of the underlying folk theories of language and, sec-ondly, to show how particular tacit assumptions about the relationship of languages and socio-political entities have entailments for the ideological1 stances taken in the debate.

Since political discourse in particular tends to make extensive use of metaphorical arguing and reasoning (Glucksberg 1999), an important part of the analysis will rely on the metaphorical mappings which emerge in the debate. Metaphorical and metonymical reasoning, together with other cognitive processes such as idealization and iconization (these terms will be defined in the next section) will be shown as crucial in the two debates, and the different positions will be compared with respect to their use of similar or different sets of such processes and mappings. The target domain LANGUAGE is difficult to conceptualize, and it is well known that even lin-guists do not agree at all on what exactly the nature of language is. It is thus not far-fetched to expect a political discourse around language policy issues to be highly dependent on cognitive operations that link the complex and abstract domain (LANGUAGE) to more immediate domains (e.g. the sensory-motor realm).

In section 0 the theoretical assumptions will be laid out as well as the frameworks used. In section 0 the debate around English as the official language in the US will be taken as an ex-ample. Section 0 will focus on the political discourse around the introduction of English as the first L2 in Switzerland. Section 0 finally will compare the two debates and draw some conclu-sions about both the conceptual mechanisms involved and the usefulness of cognitive frame-works for the analysis of ideological/political discourse.

* Acknowledgement: Susan Ervin-Tripp has been extremely helpful in explaining the basics of the English-Only debate. However, I am fully accountable for possible over-simplifications of this issue.

1 In this paper, I use the word "ideology" not in the Marxist sense of false consciousness but in a broader sense of a partial and partisan point of view within a political debate. It is the nature of ideological debate that, depending on the relative positions, one particular ideology is perceived as false by opposite stand-points. Although I will not attempt to hide my own point of view concerning the political issues discussed here, I apply the term ideology to the mental representations of all sides involved.

2. Theoretical assumptions I will use two sets of analytical instruments in order to understand the linguistic ideologies in the scope of this paper. The first approach is the semiotic analysis of linguistic ideologies pro-posed by the anthropological linguists Susan Gal and Judith Irvine (Gal/Irvine 1995, Irvine/Gal 2000). One of the central claims within this framework is that, in the ideological meta-linguistic discourse, selected features of the linguistic repertoire are seen as representing the 'essence' or 'inherent nature' of the social group. The ideological representation thus is a sign and takes part in a number of characteristic semiotic processes. There are three main processes: iconization, recursiveness, and erasure. Iconization and erasure are particularly interesting for our present purpose. Iconicity refers to the principled relation between traits attributed to a particular social or ethnic group and evaluative judgments about this group's language:

Linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group's inherent nature or essence. (Irvine/Gal 2000: 37).

Linguistic features are perceived as being a surface expression of essential properties of a social group. An example of this principle will be given in this paper; it involves the iconic relation-ship between the aesthetic value of certain phonetic features of a particular language and char-acteristics attributed to the speakers of that particular language. Erasure, on the other hand, is the process across which ideology simplifies the profiled representations. If, in a particular ideological context, the focus lies on a particular social category, there is a general tendency to homogenize the features attributed to the members of this category – and simultaneously in-crease the difference between members and non-members. This last principle of erasure is closely related to another tool used in this paper, the Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) which will be discussed in a moment.

The second set of analytical tools consists of the theory of conceptual metaphor and me-tonymy (Lakoff/Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1994; Lakoff/Johnson 1999) and Idealized Cognitive Models (Lakoff 1994: 68). In this framework, metaphorical language is not a mere matter of ornamental style. On the contrary, many domains of human culture are essentially metaphorical (Lakoff/Johnson 1980: 40) and we have probably no other way of thinking and speaking about them than by using metaphors. The analysis of the metaphors in a given discourse therefore should help revealing the underlying, mostly unconscious conceptual processes. The propo-nents of the theory of conceptual metaphor make the strong claim that metaphors are quasi om-nipresent in human conceptualization:

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Most of ordinary human thought - thought carried out by real "rational animals" - is metaphoric, and hence not literal. It uses not only metaphor but also framing, me-tonymy, and prototype-based inferences. Hence it is not "logical" in the technical sense defined by the field of formal logic. It is largely unconscious. It is not tran-scendent, but fundamentally embodied. (Lakoff/Johnson 1999: 514)

The basic idea is that human cognition uses ontological and epistemic aspects of an experien-tially accessible source domain in order to understand a more complex (and sometimes more abstract) target domain. If, after a detailed explanation of a complicated problem somebody eventually calls out "Now I see!", the theory claims that this is not only some rhetorical orna-mentation but, on the contrary, that the metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING tells us something about how our mind transfers embodied experience – seeing – to abstract domains such as thinking (Lakoff/Johnson 1999: 48). The important part of this theory of conceptual metaphor is that the source domain does not merely offer a term for speaking about the target domain, but that it has important entailments for the way the target domain is conceptualized. Participants in the source domain can be mapped onto participants in the target domain, and depending on the metaphor chosen, the reasoning in the target domain can be shaped by the source domain:

The Love Is a Journey mapping does not just permit the use of travel words to speak of love. That mapping allows forms of reasoning about travel to be used in reason-ing about love. It functions so as to map inferences about travel into inferences about love, enriching the concept of love and extending it to love-as-journey. (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 65)

As an important addition to Lakoff's and Johnson's initial ideas, Grady (1997) grounds linguis-tic metaphors in early human experience. Basic aspects of human experience lead to associa-tions such as MORE IS UP or SIMILARITY IS PROXIMITY. These primary metaphors are thus a form of the embodied reasoning that underlies the suggestive power of many complex meta-phors, because the latter are constructed out of such primary metaphors (Grady 1997, Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 60ff.).

Metaphors and metonymy play an important role in the last analytical tool to be intro-duced here: Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs). ICMs are built up representations of a domain, and they are grounded in experience and in innate aspects of mental processing. Besides meta-phorical and metonymical mappings, ICMs make use of frames (Fillmore 1971) and scripts (Schank/Abelson 1977), and image-schematic structure (Langacker 1990). Lakoff illustrates the ICMs with the example of the western mental model of a week: there is no 7-day cycle out there in the real world, but we have a culturally defined frame which involves the sequence of 7

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days and which constitutes the ground on which a concept like Tuesday can make sense. ICMs do not only organize the 'noisy' socio-physical world around us, they serve as normative back-grounds, shape our expectations and in some cases even determine to which differentiations we pay attention or not. Category structures and prototype effects, as described in Lakoff 1994, are consequences of the omnipresent use of ICMs.

3. Case study I: English Only The first case to be examined here, the English-Only debate in the USA, emerged almost out of nowhere in the 1980s. Historically, the US are characterized through quite variable degree of official languages other than English: many official documents were printed in German early in the republic, and many public school systems, from Ohio to Texas, offered German medium instruction. The most coercive suppression of non-English languages undoubtedly occurred for Indians, through boarding schools where other languages were not allowed. The enabling act of Congress that gave New Mexico and Arizona statehood in 1910 specified that the schools must be conducted in English. In 1906 Congress specified that aliens could not be naturalized with-out passing a test of oral English. In the sixties, the interest in civil rights and pluralism re-versed the trend of anti-foreignism in the twenties, and created Bilingual Education.

Although the English-Only movement has proved to have ties to right-wing politics and anti-immigration groups, the support for English as the only official language in the US is not limited to extremist political circles. On the contrary, it turns out to be quite widespread, in-cluding even members of rather progressive groups, such as actors, and writers. The declared goal of the English-Only proponents is to establish English as the only official language in the US. This means that all communication with official agencies, courts, administrations on the federal and on the state level be in English. Instruction in public schools has to be in English and bilingual education must be abolished. As direct results of English-only proponents, sev-eral federal states have adopted laws that give English the status of the official language.2

Quite ironically, in a time when English rapidly increased its dominance on the interna-tional level, more and more people in the US started to fear immigrant and native languages.

2 According to Crawford (1998), the chronological order of the introduction of official-English laws is: Ne-braska (constitutional amendment, 1920); Illinois (statute, 1969); Virginia (statute, 1981); Indiana, Ken-tucky, and Tennessee (statutes, 1984); California and Georgia (constitutional amendment and ceremonial resolution, 1986); Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, and South Carolina (statutes, 1987); Arizona, Colorado, and Florida (constitutional amendments, 1988); Alabama (constitutional amend-ment, 1990); New Hampshire, Montana, and South Dakota (statutes, 1995); Wyoming (statute, 1996); and Alaska and Missouri (statutes, 1998). Arizona's Article 28 was struck down as unconstitutional in 1998, leaving a total of 22 states with active official-English laws.

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This is even more surprising if one considers that the rate of anglicization of immigrants in the US increased during the last few decades (Veltman 1983, 1988). But characteristically, politi-cal action does not require a directly connected empirical 'problem' out there in the 'real' world - it is a truism that in the socio-political realm, alleged causalities are often ideologically con-strained interpretations. The legal and socio-political issues of the debate have been widely and critically discussed elsewhere (Crawford 1992a, 1992b), and in this paper I will not try to evaluate the quality of the arguments of any of the participants in the debate. Not a single sig-nificant language or bilingualism expert came out in favor of the English-only propositions, and most scholarly critique of the movement states that its basic claims are irrational and lacking any empirical evidence (Crawford 1998).

As stated above, for the present purpose I want to focus on the conceptualizations of lan-guage which can be found in the writings of the proponents and opponents of the English-Only movement, and my aim is to show how the underlying concepts of the proponents and oppo-nents differ from each other or resemble each other. My claim here is that this analysis can help us understanding why an apparently ill-informed ideological discourse nevertheless can be very convincing to a great majority of the population – and, e.g. help to win a vote. I believe that the tools provided by cognitive linguistics allow us to make the construction of a political ideology more transparent. If my analysis is valuable, then I hope that what appeared to be politically misguided ideology and credulity might suddenly become a mental model that has significant and cognitively 'plausible' groundings in the experiential domain. And those insights could al-low for a more efficient way of handling - politically - anti-bilingualism tendencies.

3.1 English in danger: the English-Only proponents's point of view

In the texts, ads and banners provided by one of the major English-only organizations, US-English (cf. www.us-english.org), there are two main conceptualizations of language: LANGUAGE IS A BOND and LANGUAGE IS A KEY/TOOL. Let us first turn to the latter:

English is the key to opportunity in this country. It empowers immigrants and makes us truly united as a people. (www.us-english.org/inc)

Here, the English language is the key to success, a tool that allows to access the economic re-sources in the country. The LANGUAGE IS A KEY metaphor is particularly interesting, because it suggests that a person needs the right key in order to open a particular lock (i.e. to achieve a goal, a variant of the PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS metaphor Lakoff/Johnson 1999: 52). And this right key is not Mandarin or "Mexican" (GWB) or any other language than English. The LANGUAGE IS A TOOL metaphor has a similar entailment in the target domain: in order to achieve the intended goal one has to have adequate tools, and the only adequate tool in order to

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live the American Dream is the English language. Implicitly, the possiblity that English could be an add-on to the immigrant's native language is disallowed in the English-Only discourse: English can only work as a key if it is the first and native language of the members of the American society.

One of the claims of English-Only proponents is that radical immersion of immigrant children into an Anglophone environment leads automatically, quickly and without any prob-lems to the perfect acquisition of the new language. This is often called the sink-or-swim doc-trine. Ron Unz, in his fight for the California proposition 227, went as far as to claim that in an immersion environment the time span to learn English is not more than one year (Ron Unz in the California prop 227 debate, cf. Crawford 1997). This is an entailment of the source domain used: if language is an OBJECT (e.g. a TOOL or a KEY), you just have to pick it up in order to use it. This is the commonly used metaphor in talking about how children learn languages: they simply pick them up from their parents, or the parents pass the language on to the children (Preston/Niedzielski 1999: 204).3 The myth of picking up a language, maybe reinforced by a Chomsky-style idea of children learning languages quickly and effortlessly, stands in clear con-tradiction with the fact that the average time it takes for acquiring academic proficiency in a second language is four to seven years (Collier & Thomas 1989).4 Of course we all know that children are better (second) language and dialect learners, but there is no empirical basis what-soever for the claim that we just pick up a language in one year. And, of course, the idea of picking up a new language erases the problems of ethnolinguistic identity (cf. discussion in sec-tion 0 below) of immigrant populations completely - i.e. the fact that there might be other rea-sons to maintain a language than just career and success. For the English-Only advocates one thing is clear: because English is the only key to success in the US, why should anybody want to use deliberately some other (wrong) key?

The second mapping found in the quote above implies that language is also what makes the people living in the US united, i.e. the LANGUAGE IS A BOND metaphor. A quote which is often used by US-English proponents is one attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville ("The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind.", cf. Gallegos 1994: 22). The overtly presented argument is that, given the very different ethnic backgrounds of the members of the American society, there is a constant danger of lack of unity within the nation. The common language is what holds it all together:

3 This metaphor, of course, is seldom used if adults are talking about learning a second language 'perfectly'. Then, all of a sudden, language is an impediment, a huge, heavy object, ect.

4 The time and time repeated claim about the easy learning of L1 is equally problematic, since we are talking about an ability which is acquired after some 5 or 6 years of intensive learning during which the learner usually does not have to focus on earning money, caring for a family or filling out tax forms.

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What is it that has made a society out of the hodge-podge of nationalities, races and colors represented in the immigrant hordes that people our nation? It is language, of course, that has made communication among all these elements possible. It is with a common language that we have dissolved distrust and fear. It is with language that we have drawn up the understandings and agreements and social contracts that make a society possible. (Hayakawa 1994: 15)

The mapping from the source domain 'bond' (or 'tie' or 'glue') onto the target domain 'language' is not simply a mapping from a concrete source domain onto a more abstract target domain. The concept of a 'bond', 'tie' or 'glue' for the society involves another presupposed metaphorical mapping. The abstract construct 'Society' is construed as a collection of elements which needs something that holds it all together. The primary metaphor which furnishes the experiential ground for this reasoning is RELATIONSHIPS ARE ENCLOSURES (Lakoff/Johnson 1999: 53). 5 The abstract 'Relationship' between the members of a society is understood as having some common physical locus. If the society lacks this physical restraint, it is falling apart and it stops being a 'real' society. The argument which uses the LANGUAGE IS A BOND metaphor in the Eng-lish-Only debate thus firstly builds on the metaphorical plausibility of Relationships Are Enclo-sures, it assumes that a society can only be a society if there is something which holds it to-gether. Secondly, the LANGUAGE IS A BOND metaphor maps the entity which holds the society together onto language, this is why we could also call it the LANGUAGE IS PHYSICAL

ENCLOSURE. Since there is no immediately perceivable physical enclosure which holds the so-ciety together, language is argued to be the key bond within any given society. It would be wrong to maintain that the English-Only proponents exclude any other concept as potential 'glue' within the American society, but due to what is at stake in the particular debate, i.e. the question of which and how many languages merit official status in the US, the bond of lan-guage is profiled.

This mapping has one very important entailment that we can characterize as a shift in agency. The active speaker in the 'real-language' setting is overwritten in the mapping by a pas-sive undergoer who is being united with the English language community. In other words, as soon as an immigrant uses the English language, he or she is within the boundaries of the Ameri-can society, because language as an agent creates the relationship between the new member and the society. What the LANGUAGE IS A BOND metaphor probably means is that it is necessary to be potentially able to communicate with every other member of our nation, even if in reality we

5 Grady (1997), who introduced the concept of primary metaphors, does not give this primary metapor in his list. However, Grady's primary metaphor Organization Is Physical Structure has very similar entailments.

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only interact with an infinitely small part of it. It is about an imagined community, not about a real community (Anderson 1983: 15). One of the most frequently contested symptoms of offi-cial multilingualism in the US are the multilingual ballots, which shows the great importance English-Only proponents attribute to the fact that the central government be able to communi-cate only in English to ALL citizens.

Official English benefits every resident of this wonderful melting pot called Amer-ica. The melting pot works—because we have a common language. http://www.us-english.org/inc/

The LANGUAGE IS A BOND metaphor is an important part of an Idealized Cognitive Model which will be discussed extensively below, the ICM of territoriality. In the passage above it is very daring to use the LANGUAGE IS A BOND metaphor together with the melting pot, since the latter suggests a mixing of cultures, ethnic groups, and languages rather than adopting the id-iom of one of the European colonizers. And a mixed langauge is definitely not what the authors are dreaming of, as the following ad used by the US-English organization shows clearly:

Fig. 1: Anti-Mixing ad used by the US-English organization (http://www.us-english.org/). The text below this photograph continues as follows: "Will it come to this? - We hope not."

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This ad is particularly interesting because its intended effect is based on another conceptualiza-tion of language, the LANGUAGE IS A RAW MATERIAL metaphor. This metaphor is omnipresent in metalinguistic discourses and basically accounts for collocations such as "pure English", "pure dialect” (cf. Haas 1992), "corrupt (and therefore bad) language" etc. The primary meta-phor behind the LANGUAGE IS A RAW MATERIAL mapping is CATEGORIES/SETS ARE BOUNDED

SPATIAL REGIONS (Grady 1997: 283). This, for the case of languages, means that a language has to be clearly in one or the other container and cannot be in both. A real good language has to be pure, mixing is bad. The metalinguistic commonplace which uses this metaphor is the widespread opinion that language is in constant decay due to mixing, careless use, and other 'external' influences. Language used to be "pure" and "good" in earlier times and maybe still is pure (in the case of dialects) in remote, isolated communities (cf. Berthele 2001). The ad de-picted in fig. 1 above uses this metaphorical mapping in order to create a negative attitude to-wards multilingualism.

To sum up, the mental model of language which operates for English-only proponents can be analyzed as being based on metaphorical mappings from concrete source domains onto the abstract target domain "language". The most important entailments from the source domains are that one common language needs to function as a crucial bond in society, that it is easy to learn a language in an immersion setting, and that a language has to be pure, perfect, and per-fectly mastered by its speakers.6 Those metaphorical mappings all fit in well in the 19th cen-tury European model of the national state: a territory populated by one ethnic community that has one common language. A closely related model has been described by Rubba (1996: 241) as the ICM of territoriality:

The ICM of territoriality contains several maxims or principles. [...] This ICM must include some sort of definition of a culture as a group of people related by ethnicity, beliefs, language, cultural practices, etc. [...] Most directly relevant is the idea that members of the same culture live in spatial proximity to one another, and that the space they occupy is contiguous. The space they occupy is then their territory, i.e., their physical space is conceived of as belonging to them. No more than one culture can occupy a given space in the model.

The US-English ideologues can of course not assert that there is only one culture in the US. The cultural differences of the different immigrants and natives are acknowledged and in the

6 Particularly this last point arises regularly in bilingualism debates, and it is only since a couple of years that linguists emphasize the crucial role of partial (e.g. passive) competences in foreign languages (Schnei-der/North 1997).

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same time erased by the evocation of "the American Dream of economic and social advance-ment" (English Language in Public Schools 1998) or the notion of the famous "melting pot". Thus, for the campaign in favor of Official English, the ICM postulates one nation, admittedly multicultural, but bound together by common values such as the American dream, probably certain basic political beliefs, and one language.

3.2 Multiculturalism in danger: the English-Only opponents' point of view

If we look at texts produced by the opponents of English-Only measures (e.g. as collected in Gallegos 1994), the first striking thing is that metaphors are much less likely to be used. As an interesting parallel to this finding, Woolard (1990: 132) also hypothesizes that the success of the anti-bilingual proposition "O" campaign in San Francisco is based on "figurative rather than linear logic". As I will argue in section 0, this difference in the use of metaphors does not seem to be a difference in quality but rather in quantity. At this point, however, I do not know how to explain it. In fact, in the pro-bilingualism writings we do come across some metaphorical rea-soning, and the most frequent metaphor we find is again LANGUAGE IS A TOOL. An entailment of this metaphor for a part of the bilingualism-advocates is that a country with many languages is a country with more opportunities, a richer country:

Rather than eliminate the second language of our immigrants, we need to help them learn English and maintain that valuable resource they already have, the use of a second language, and we need to teach our native English speakers a second lan-guage. (Stalker 1994: 50f.) 7

Particularly when indigenous tongues are part of the argument, proponents of multilingualism argue that the English-Only policy is threatening a national 'treasure':

But preventing the extinction of indigenous tongues must be understood as preserv-ing cultural treasures that belong, in a sense, to all Americans – a public responsibil-ity. (Crawford 1992a: 260)

It is important to note that not all of the opponents of the English-Only movement are against English as the 'unofficial' official language in the US. In some cases, bilingual education is ad-

7 cf. MALDEF Resolution: "Whereas the Official English/English-Only movement seeks to restrict the non/English language resources of the nation at a time when language diversity is essential to the ability of the United States to compete in the global economy" (Crawford 1992b: 149)

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vocated as a means of transition towards English, and thus bilingualism is not a goal but a nec-essary stage in the process of acculturation (Imhoff/Bikales 1994: 75).8 Although I did not find any passage with the LANGUAGE IS A BOND metaphor its use is not in-compatible with the bilingualist's position. On the contrary, there is a parallel metonymy which is often evoked - the metonymy LANGUAGE IS CULTURE/RACE:

Opponents saw the imposition of official English as the potential destruction of their race and culture. (Gallegos 1994: 63)

Language is part of the frame of ethnicity, and the loss of language is equated with the loss of the native culture. In some cases, an extreme form of Whorfianism serves as an argument for denouncing forced English instruction as a form of mental mutilation:

A language is much more than a way to communicate. By one's own language – and on this Edward Sapir wrote much and well – one masters reality, one takes to one-self and understands all that exists. [...] "Language," said the Spanish writer Miguel Unamuno, "is the blood of the spirit." He was right. We cannot do without our own tongue without brutally mutilating our individual consciousness, without being left without blood. (Montaner 1992: 164)

Thus, language is metonymically seen as being part of the individual and the collective identity, the LANGUAGE IS THE BLOOD OF THE SPIRIT metaphor even entails that language is the essen-tial 'organ' or bodily fluid which provides the basis for the functioning (the metabolism) of the spirit. Language – again – is the essential bond within immigrant or native American communi-ties, and the preservation of the native language within the community is seen as an important part of the preservation of the community's cultural heritage. Or, to as the MALDEF resolution puts it bluntly: "language is a national origin characteristic" (Crawford 1992b: 151).

8 I am aware of the somewhat simplifying reduction to a debate between monolingualists and multilingualists. As Susan Ervin-Tripp pointed out (personal communication), there are at least three positions: There are the English first people who don't care if mother tongues get lost in the process because they think fluency in English is so important, and there are the cultural preservation people, mainly Mexican-chicano, who as-sume English will be learned anyway,and that the big battle is preserving both their language and culture. The third group is what I coin "multilingualists" many of whom are educators or linguists. As will become clear in the next section, even though these different groups' goals may vary, their underlying conceptualiza-tions of language, culture and society appear to rely on very similar basic models.

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3.3. Two positions, one set of Metaphors

As the analysis above shows, the two political sides' underlying mental models attached to lan-guage turn out to be quite similar. The proponents of multilingualism use the KEY or TOOL

metaphor in order to express their belief that a society that has many different tools is not only a more interesting but lastly also a more efficient society. The cost of bi- or multilingual institu-tions is the price the community has to pay for a sustained availability of those resources. The English-Only proponents use the TOOL metaphor in order to support only one but – in their view – the most powerful tool, the English language. Multilingualists believe that multicultural America is not united by a common language, but by common ethical values:

America is great not because we speak one language or the other, but because we are united by the fundamental principles than [sic] bind our people together: freedom, justice, equal opportunity for all, fairness, democracy. (Corrada 1992: 121)9

Monolingualists, on the other hand, believe that those values are only common if they are for-mulated in one common language.

In both views, language holds together a unit of politico-social organization. The differ-ence between them is a difference of scope: the English-Only proponents think in national terms, the bilingualism proponents in ethnic terms. Another difference between the two sub-discourses examined above is a different level of granularity: The English-Only proponents take a US-national vantage, treat the federal union as their ground and apply the mappings onto the whole population. One nation, one system of values, one language. This means that cultural differences and different ethnic traditions, be they native or immigrant, are erased in favor of a postulated uniting common culture, which is based on the common language. The multilingual-ists, on the other hand, argue on a higher level of granularity and take the ethnically defined community as their ground. It is important to note that, on the level of the ethnolinguistically defined community, the proponents of bilingualism apply an ICM of ethnicity, stating that one ethnicity – internally – has one language.10 This resembles the English-Only ICM on the na-tional level. The ICM of ethnicity erases cultural differentiations within the ethnic category, and no alternative point of view, such as creolization, mixing of culture and language, is pro-

9 Answer on http://www.aclu.org/library/pbp6.html: "The bond that unites our nation is not linguistic or ethnic homogeneity but a shared commitment to democ-

racy, liberty, and equality" 10 There are, however, other possible stances to be taken. E.g., some monolingual English-speaking parents

put their children into double immersion bilingual programs. But these positions represent by no means a majority or not even an important minority of any area in the US I am aware of.

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posed. It is very likely that both, the ICM of territoriality as well as the ICM of ethnicity are entailments of a primary metaphor discovered by Grady: since CATEGORIES ARE BOUNDED

SPATIAL REGIONS, there have to be clear-cut distinctions between socio-ethnic categories. Due to their national point of view, English-Only advocates see double linguistic category-membership as an anomaly, whereas their opponents view bilingualism as a means to maintain ethnical plurality. The English-Only proponents' mental model of langauge exposes also the very characteristic inconsistencies of folk models: on one hand, a 'replacement' langauge is as-sumed to be learned perfectly well in about a year, and on the other hand, 'real' (or so-called balanced) bilingualism is seen as cognitively impossible.11

Undoubtedly, it requires more subtle differentiations to make the point of bilingualism as a good thing for the nation. The blunt claim of One Nation – One Language is convincingly simple due to the way it appeals to the way our minds categorize the chaotic reality. The other important metaphor, LANGUAGE IS A TOOL, turns out to be used by both sides, with the mere difference of language as a singular vs. plural. This is an interesting result insofar as it shows that both discourses make use of more or less the same conceptualizations, and that the differ-ence in ideology is merely a difference in the level of granularity.

4. Case study II: English in Switzerland The second discourse to be analyzed here is the struggle for and against English as the first second language in the Zurich area (Switzerland). There are several reasons why it is interest-ing and relevant to juxtapose the Swiss case and the English-Only debate. Firstly, in both cases the current lingua franca of economy, science and mass-entertainment, English, is involved, secondly, both debates involve the question of language and national coherence, and thirdly, the example of Switzerland served as an important argument for the proponents of a multilin-gual but unified America (e.g. Leibowicz 1992: 103).12 Also, Switzerland often serves as a counterexample to the one-nation-one-language ideology, and a very common stereotype about the Swiss is that they are all at least trilingual. It seems to be much less known in the world that even though multilingualism is one of the most salient national fetishes, Switzerland's language policy is genuinely monolingual, as will be shown below.

11 A very similar argument arose in the debate between the ASL-proponents and the oralists: the oralists have claimed that a child who learns to sign will be inhibited/blocked/delayed in learning speech (Susan Ervin-Tripp, p.c.).

12 It is interesting to note that there are two ways of using other nation's multilingual settings in the American debate: the proponents of English Only use the Quebec example in order to show how different national languages divide a country, whereas their opponents use examples such as the Swiss case in order to show that a common language is not necessary for a unified nation.

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The political context of the debate analyzed here is an intended change in foreign lan-guage instruction in some areas in quadrilingual Switzerland. Here, I am not going to give a comprehensive account of the Swiss language situation, it has been described repeatedly and extensively elsewhere (e.g. Schläpfer/Bickel 2000, Rash 1998, Haas 1988, 2000, Berthele [in press]). The four national languages, German, French, Italian and Romansh, all have official status. The smallest language, Romansh, is clearly endangered, above all by a massive immi-gration of Swiss Germans into its territory. The speakers of Romansh are thus all bilingual Romansh-Swiss German. With the exception of Romansh, every language is seen as belonging to a particular territory, and the so-called 'principle of territoriality' states that within this terri-tory the dominating language is to be used in schooling and for all official purposes. This prin-ciple is of course a close relative of the ICM of territoriality introduced in section 0 above. As always, the question of what defines the ethno-linguistic attribution of a territory is a genuinely ideological issue that oscillates somewhere between (arbitrarily set) historical landmarks and demographic realities. Depending on the area, sometimes the historical and sometimes the demographic argument is used to state the official affiliation of a particular territory (Haas 1988: 1367). The application of this principle of territoriality in Switzerland makes it appropri-ate to characterize the country as a federation of genuinely monolingual territories. The whole country is divided into linguistically marked zones that are each monolingual in nature. The Swiss model of extreme federalism, of handing down the political power to the regions (can-tons) and even municipalities, leaves very little space for official multilingualism. Only on the borders between the historical ethno-linguistic territories do we find aspects of bilingual prac-tice in schools and administrations, but even there (as in the case of Fribourg, cf. Brohy 1992) the long tradition of bilingual practice does not necessarily mean that there is a coherent official policy of bilingualism.

For our present context, the most important official symptom of the nation's multilingual identity was the rule that all schoolchildren have to learn one of the non-local national lan-guages as their first L2 in school. For the vast majority of German-speaking children, this means that (from the age of 11 on) they learn French, while French-speaking children learn German. Romansh- and Italian-speaking children often learn German and French. Other for-eign languages are of course part of the curriculum, but their instruction starts later. In 1997, the head of the education department in the canton of Zurich, the demographically and eco-nomically most important area in the country, decided to launch a school reform project (called Schulprojekt 21). This project was conceived as a test for a small number of school classes. Among other things, it introduced early partial immersion in English from the beginning of the elementary school on. Thus, English would be learned before French or any other L2 is taught (cf. NZZ 24.12.1998, Mittler 1998: 11).

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The reaction across the country showed clearly that a national taboo had been broken. The following sections are an attempt to render the most important arguments from both sides, with the corresponding conceptualizations of language. Many of the metaphors encountered in the English-Only debate appear in this very different linguistic setting, which allows me to be brief about their conceptual grounding and functioning.

4.1. The Early English proponents

The KEY/TOOL metaphor is the only really important metaphor underlying the texts by propo-nents of the early English instruction. This is due to the particular modifications this project brings into the public schooling system, and it does not mean that the proponents do not share other conceptual content concerning languages. But for the present purpose we have to focus on what kind of metaphor-based arguments are profiled in the debate. Starting from the school's constitutionally anchored mission of teaching the essential abilities and knowledge for a successful life, the Zurich project aims to emphasize autonomous learning, computer knowledge and English language competences. These three aspects of the new school profile are seen as important resources, tools or keys to a success in professional life:

The mastery of computers and of the English language as well as the ability to be learning throughout the whole life are the indispensable key skills of tomorrow's so-ciety. (http://www.schulprojekt21.ch/projekt/summary.html)13

In the description of the project, there is a very general passage about the necessity to enhance the non-native linguistic abilities in the globalized "communication society" (Mittler 1998: 6). But, as the quoted passage above makes very clear, what appears to be a global appeal to multi-lingual competences is actually solely focused upon English.

In the articles and letters by proponents of this project, the main issue is the unisono evo-cation of globalized competition and the necessity to be proficient in English, the language of international economic, diplomatic and scientific exchange. If the other national languages are mentioned at all, then it is only to assure that their instruction remains inaltered or that the early teaching of English can help the subsequent acquisition of more non-native languages.

In my view, the rationale behind this point of view, with its little emphasis on national language policy issues, can be seen as a direct consequence of the monolingual principle of ter-ritoriality: since, within the German-speaking territory, German is the official language of schools and local administrations, the choice of the second foreign language has to be a rele-

13 "Die Beherrschung von Computer und Englisch sowie die Fähigkeit zum lebenslangen Lernen gehören zu den unabdingbaren Schlüsselqualifikationen der Gesellschaft von morgen"

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vant one. This is what Ernst Buschor, the head of the Zurich education department, means by promoting the "language that benefits":

The students should learn the language which serves them best in their youth. This is part of federalism. (Buschor in Weltwoche Nr. 38/00, 21.9.2000)14

Since the relations of the by far economically most powerful area of the country, the Zurich area, are overwhelmingly international (at least half of the generated revenues are generated in exchange with foreign countries), and the French-speaking territories are economically not overwhelmingly important, the English language is conceived as much more relevant than any national language.

4.2. The Early English opponents

Whereas the proponents of the Schulprojekt 21 were backgrounding the nation's linguistic heri-tage, the opponents immediately diagnosed a treason of national principles. For many journal-ists, historians, teachers and others, not only the knowledge of national partner languages was at stake, but rather the whole national coherence all of a sudden was endangered. Fiercely for-mulated letters to the major national newspapers showed that the language instruction issue points to a very vulnerable spot in the national ideology.

Let's again take a look at the conceptualization of language, in order to better understand this position. The opponents of the Schulprojekt 21 do not question the Swiss tradition of terri-toriality. When they question the lack of priority attributed to a second national language, they are invoking the BRIDGE- and BOND-metaphors, e.g. Switzerland is called the "land of official quadrilingualism and of cultural bridging" ("Land der offiziellen Viersprachigkeit und der kul-turellen Brückenschläge", NZZ 22. Dezember 1998).15 The solid knowledge of at least one ad-ditional national language is what allows building bridges across the monolingual territories within the nation. Of course, from an external, unhistorical point of view, there is no reason why English could not take over this bridging function. And this is exactly what many people seem to fear: young francophones and germanophones meeting and using English as lingua

14 "Sie [die SchülerInnen] sollen die Sprache lernen, die ihrer Jugend am meisten nützt. Das gehört zum Föderalismus."

15 A great deal of the most interesting metalinguistic statements in this debate could be found in newspaper articles and letters to the editor. In this paper however, I am using in this paper the article by Ribeaud (1998), published in Mittler (1998), since it might be difficult to access newspaper material for further in-vestigations. Ribeaud's article exposes very nicely all major arguments used by the early-English opponents.

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franca. Why is this bad? The fear seems to be grounded in the commitment to tradition as well as to some sort of folk-whorfianism, nicely expressed in the following quote:

English is not part of the Swiss identity. [...] Would we still know why we are living together, if we spoke English with each other? Where is the respect for the linguistic minorities and the cultural differences? Language is the Soul of a people. (Ribeaud (in Mittler 1998): 56)16

This quote offers several metaphorical mappings and metonymies (cf. the LANGUAGE IS

CULTURE metonymy in section 0). The Metaphor LANGUAGE IS THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE is ac-tually a conflation of two mappings. Firstly, an ethnically defined social entity, "a people", is personified as a BEING with a body and a soul. Secondly, LANGUAGE is mapped onto the SOUL

of this personified entity. Thus, this mapping does not offer a more concrete source domain for the target domain language, on the contrary, the soul is an highly abstract entity whose very existence basically depends on philosophical and religious premises. The soul-language map-ping is rather based on the ICM of ethnicity (see above) and makes use of the fact that cultures often are categorized along linguistic borders, and then it entails that a common native lan-guage is the essential part of the ethnic community.17 Another crucial entailment of this map-ping is the claim that if we want to understand a particular ethnicity, we have to speak its lan-guage, since in a country where different ethnically construed linguistic communities coexist traditionally, it is only the knowledge of the other's languages which assures mutual under-standing – and lastly, which guarantees national coherence.

In the passage above, we discover a mental model very much related to the ICM of terri-toriality described in section 3.2. This ICM is almost identical to the latter, only that there are several languages attributed to the territory in question. Thus, for a traditionally multilingual political entity like Switzerland, there are internal and external languages, and English is an ex-ternal language which is not part of the cultural heritage.

Altogether, the Swiss case as presented by the Early-English opponents offers a variant of the LANGUAGE IS A BOND metaphor, only that this time it is not one language but a historically justified set of languages, the national languages, which form this bond. Even though the Swiss are proud of their multilingual heritage, this does not mean that multilingualism per se is posi-

16 "Englisch gehört nicht zur schweizerischen Identität. [...] Würden wir noch wissen, warum wir überhaupt zusammenleben, wenn wir miteinander englisch reden? Wo bleibt da der Respekt vor den sprachlichen Minderheiten und der kulturellen Eigenart? Die Sprache ist die Seele eines Volkes."

17 An example for a metaphorical mapping without a source domain from the sensori-motor realm.

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tive: it depends on the languages involved. Immigrant languages18 and international languages such as English do not profit from the same positive evaluation of multilingualism.19

In order to understand the energetic reaction particularly from the francophone Swiss to the proposal in Schulprojekt 21 we have to lay out one important aspect of the linguistic prac-tice in the German-speaking part of the country. As is well known, even though the official language in the demographically most important part of the country is German, the use of the standard language is restricted to particular domains: writing and more or less official situa-tions. In most of everyday life, a Swiss German uses one of the various dialects, and many peo-ple claim that the dialect is even taking over some domains which were traditionally 'Standard language domains' (cf. Haas 2000: 81ff.). This is not the place to discuss the (shaky) empirical ground on which such claims generally are made, what counts for the present purpose is the undeniable fact that for most Swiss Germans, dialect is the native language and Standard High German (SHG) is often considered a foreign language with very low prestige within the com-munity. The Swiss German dialects are of course genetically related to the German Standard language, but the distance is big enough to avoid smooth communication between inexperi-enced Germans and dialect-speaking Swiss. Since the francophone and other minority children in Switzerland are learning SHG as an L2 in school, the fruit of their laborious studies has only limited communicative value in German-speaking Switzerland. This is an old issue of debate, and the propositions to change this mismatch range from forcing the Swiss-Germans to speak SHG with their fellow Swiss to teaching dialect in the L2 classrooms.

From the point of view of ideologies and attitudes, the French language community and in the Swiss-German community could not be more opposed. In the French-speaking territories, starting in the 18th century, the Parisian norm of the French standard language has completely replaced the local franco-provençal dialects, and only some minor (prosodic, phonological, lexical and grammatical) variation distinguishes the Swiss variant of the French language from the standard. But not only the Parisian language has been taken over, but also the particular atti-tude towards non-standard and non-French languages which often comes with francophony all over the world. A dialect is an improper language, and dialects have no grammar, are incorrect, rough and inelegant:

18 Switzerland has one of the highest immigration rates all over Europe. In some cities, the immigrant popula-tion makes out more than a third of the population as a whole (cf. the statistical figures on http://www.statistik.admin.ch).

19 Which languages are national languages depends on an arbitrary, ideological segmentation of history: all currently spoken languages are immigrant-languages, because the first known settlers within the territory were Celts and their language is dead for a long time. The Swiss national languages happen to be those which were important when the modern nation was founded (in 1848).

18

The Swiss German's inferiority complex is amplified if he hears the precise and ele-gant German on German and Austrian television. [...] For most of the Swiss Ger-mans it seems that the learning of correct German has no priority. (Ribeaud 1998: 48f.)20

For people unfamiliar with the strength of this normative value-system in the francophone ar-eas, this quote might appear to be a particularly exaggerating token, an unrepresentative exam-ple of the whole community. But anyone who has actually lived in the francophone area knows that the values expressed above are actually commonsense. This type of attitude towards non-standard varieties is not uncommon and can be found in many other contexts. There seems to be a widespread belief according to which non-standard languages have 'no grammar' or 'no rules', and therefore are a less valuable resource than the standard languages (Niedziel-ski/Preston 1999: 22). The following quote serves as an illustration for this point. It is a state-ment made by a white American informant, talking about African American Vernacular Eng-lish:

And so somebody got it in their head that what was actually SPOken should be the correct English. (.hhh) And then through the idea of saying well it's racist not to teach it and started pushing it, (.hhh) they tried to push that as an (deliberately) ac-tual correct way to speak. ((pause)) And thank God for most of us it died. It didn't work. Because it IS improper to say. (Preston/Niedzielksy 1999: 233)

Therefore, there is an important incompatibility of linguistic values between dialect-speaking Swiss Germans and the standard-oriented francophones. Additionally, the stereotype in the francophone community makes use of iconization (Gal/Irvine 2000: 37): the Swiss German dia-lects are a bunch of coarse, primitive means of communication within an isolated, uncultivated group of speakers. The 'guttural' sounds of the language21 are perceived as a mirror of the roughness of the people. And, if Swiss Germans use the standard language, they do it in a bar-barian way:

20 "Sein [des Deutschschweizers] Minderwertigkeitskomplex wird noch verstärkt, wenn er auf deutschen und österreichischen Fernsehkanälen ein präzises und elegantes Deutsch hört. [...]

Für sie wie für die meisten Schweizer deutscher Sprache scheint das Erlernen eines korrekten Deutsch keine Priorität zu geniessen."

21 Indeed, Swiss German has more [x] and [kx] phonemes than SHG

19

Across a barbaric pronunciation they are expressing deliberatly the antipathy they resent towards their neighbors to north of the Rhine. (Ribeaud 1998: 49)22

We have seen above that Ribeaud used the LANGUAGE IS THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE metaphor in order to claim that mutual linguistic competence strengthens the bond among the Swiss. Since the Swiss Germans consider their native dialects their first language – a fact that Ribeaud knows very well – the soul of the German-speaking community is Swiss German. But the last quote makes it clear that Ribeaud does not advocate at all the teaching of Swiss German in the other parts of the country, which would be a direct entailment from the Language-Soul-argument made above. We have to conclude that this is one of the examples where the folk the-ory lacks coherence. If we keep in mind the actual target of Ribeaud's article, it becomes clear that the point he makes is that the Swiss German majority should learn the minority's23 lan-guage as a first foreign language. The LANGUAGE IS THE SOUL metaphor serves as an important argument, but only as long as it does not mean that francophones have to learn Swiss German.

Ribeaud's text is particularly rich in metaphors for languages in general and Swiss Ger-man in particular. One of them, again preferentially applied to the Swiss German dialects, is the LANGUAGE IS A BARRIER metaphor. Because the German-speaking majority insists on the dia-lect in more and more domains, this language becomes a barrier both within the country as well as in the international context:

Thus, the persistent use of Swiss German is one of the main reasons for the interna-tional isolation of our country, and it is a dangerous weapon in the battle against joining the European Union. (Ribeaud 1998: 63)24

In the paragraph just quoted above, the dialects are even seen as a weapon against international integration of the country. From the French-speaking community's perspective, the way Swiss Germans speak SHG is seen as standing in an iconic relation to a salient attitude of the Swiss Germans: their rejection of political integration in the surrounding European Union and even the United Nations. This isolationist attitude is only held by a small minority in the Romance-

22 "Sie drücken absichtlich durch eine barbarische Aussprache – oder können sie es nicht besser? – die Antipa-thie aus, die sie gegenüber ihren Nachbarn nördlich des Rheins empfinden."

23 It is a statistically well-established fact that in this country with several minorities, there is no downward solidarity among those minorities: the Frech-speaking community does not really care about the other mi-norities (Pedretti 2000: 288).

24 "So bildet der ständige Gebrauch des Schweizerdeutschen einen der wichtigsten Gründe für die internatio-nale Isolierung des Landes und eine gefährliche Waffe gegen den Beitritt zur Europäischen Union."

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speaking parts of the country, a fact that creates a political divide along the linguistic bounda-ries. The Francophones feel particularly marginalized by a German-speaking majority that in-sists in a stubborn and anachronistic way on the special status of the Swiss confederation (‚Sonderfall Schweiz’). Needless to say, in this debate, too, we find the LANGUAGE IS A RAW MATERIAL metaphor. It is again Ribeaud who denounces that the dialects used in the mass media are not even 'pure' dia-lects, but some sort of a worthless mixture:

[...] if they don't speak Swiss German or this mixture of dialects which the media present us as "Zurich German" (Ribeaud 1998: 66)25

4.3. Comparison of the two positions

The proponents and opponents of the Schulprojekt 21 have different things in mind: the former focus on international competition and early instruction of economically valuable skills. The overwhelming dominance of the LANGUAGE IS A TOOL metaphor is the surface symptom of this intention. The opponents speak out against this economy-oriented point of view by evoking the national historical and cultural heritage. Language, in this discourse, is the BOND which holds together the multicultural nation. The fact that the Early-English proponents only attrib-ute second priority to the other national languages can be seen as an entailment of the ICM of territoriality which dominated the Swiss language policy for the whole 150 years of the exis-tence of the modern state. Had the Swiss model been genuinely oriented towards multilingual-ism and interethnic contact, this choice would seem to go against the socio-linguistic practice. But since the Zurich area is a monolingual German-speaking territory and economic and cul-tural26 relations with the francophone neighbors are becoming more and more marginal, the choice of English as the first foreign language does not seem to be irrational. The ICM of terri-toriality also influences the Early-English opponent's discourse, in that Switzerland as a whole is construed as a territory with four native languages, where there is no prominent place for any other non-native language. It is a minimal degree of competence in at least one other national language that holds the country together. Using the example of José Ribeaud's position I have tried to show that the change in balance of national language instruction opens up profound wounds which are also due to very different attitudes towards linguistic variation and non-standard varieties.

25 "[...] wenn sie nicht Schweizerdeutsch oder jenes Gemisch von Dialekten sprechen, das uns dieMedien als "Zürichdeutsch" vorsetzen"

26 I am quite convinced that the emergence of this debate has also a causal connection to the fact that for quite a while now the French culture has been gradually losing its status as a European 'reference culture'.

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5. Conclusions The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship of conceptualizations of the abstract en-tity 'language' to opposing positions in national language policy debates. In the analysis of the two cases I tried to isolate the major conceptual structures which – across mappings and other semiotic processes – constitute the folk theory of language. Since the focus of this study lies on the role the folk theories play in language policy, some other aspects of the folk theory of lan-guage could only be treated superficially or not at all. Two related ICMs can be found in the two debates:

ICM of territoriality a language belongs to a territory ICM of ethnicity a language belongs to an ethnic group

Those ICMs can surface in the form of different metonymical mappings, such as LANGUAGE IS

CULTURE, LANGUAGE IS HERITAGE, LANGUAGE IS HOME etc. It is the nature of ICMs that they erase some differentiations. In the case of the ICM of territoriality, for instance, even though a particular territory may be inhabited by speakers of a particular majority language, there are almost always minorities which ‚belong’ as much to that territory as the members of the major-ity. Equally, by establishing categories such as English, German or French, category-internal variation is erased. In the case of the US – ironically – the ICM of territoriality erases Native Americans and their languages, i.e. the most original group of inhabitants. Three major metaphors recur in the texts analyzed:

LANGUAGE IS A BOND LANGUAGE IS A TOOL LANGUAGE IS A RAW MATERIAL LANGUAGE IS THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE

It is important to note that, depending on the nature of the argument, language can become lan-guages in both the metaphors and the ICMs. I have tried to show in section 0 that one of the major differences between English-Only proponents and opponents is actually the scope of their respective ICM (nation vs. ethnic group) and the disagreement if the administration should promote one powerful linguistic tool or many different tools. In the Swiss case, the na-ture of a multilingual federation makes it impossible to promote one language as a national bond, and even if the most fanatic proponents of Early English actually believed that English should become a national language, overt propaganda for such a claim would be equal to politi-cal suicide. Similarly, nobody would overtly postulate the exclusive use of any one of the na-tional languages. The multilingual history of the country leads to the plural in the BOND- and

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SOUL-metaphor as well as in the ICM of territoriality. I have shown, however, that this plural means a well-defined set of languages and is not negotiable for further inclusion of any new external language.

The two debates share one salient feature: they both arose when an important group in a nation suddenly was afraid that other people living in that same nation are not learning this group’s language anymore. There has been a lot of arguing about the rational basis for such fears, and it seems that the fears are either unjustified or arise arbitrarily. Immigrants in the US are learning English faster than ever, and children in Zurich and Geneva have preferred learn-ing English for quite a while – which means that they learn it better and faster than French or German respectively. The proponents of Early English therefore do not trigger an anti-national tendency, their effort is rather an expression of this general shift in priorities. In both the Swiss and the US case, the main argument for the defense of the supposedly threatened national lan-guage relies on the same conceptual mappings, the ICM of territoriality and the LANGUAGE IS

A BOND metaphor. Another commonality between the two debates is the value attributed to the English lan-

guage. In both discourses we find – for those who want to emphasize the priority of English – the LANGUAGE IS A TOOL metaphor. English in the globalized context is the basic resource for success, both within the anglophone ‚territories’ and outside of them.

It would be absurd to assert that the language ideologies exposed in this paper emerge solely due to particular preferences for particular metaphors. The analysis carried out in this paper rather shows that humans are using (equally plausible) competing metaphors and ICMs in a flexible way in order to underline the points they want to make. LANGUAGE IS A BOND can mean very different things, depending on context and scope in the particular discourse. If there is a way in which conceptual mechanisms constrain human arguments, then it is on the level of the primary metaphors and the semiotic processes introduced by Gal and Irvine: we tend to homogenize reality in terms of categories, we tend to generate iconic relationships between sa-lient facets of our construal of reality, and we tend to erase counterevidence to our cognitive simplifications and abstractions. Ideologies as encountered in the two cases treated here do not merely reside in two opposite metaphors. They emerge in a much more complex and still widely unknown process of making sense of the world, having particular intentions and believ-ing in certain achievements but not others. ICMs, metaphors and metonymies play an important role in ideological discourse and they are worth studying for those who wish to uncover covert assumptions.

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