Monica Heller
Biographic Data
| ID | 128449 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Monica Heller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Monica |
| FAMILY NAME | Heller |
| SIGNATURE | HELLER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4888-3450 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 106 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1127 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 103 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Ethnicity from Ethnolinguistic Identity to Commodified Exploitation
The concept of ethnicity has advanced and retreated as an object of anthropological interest. A central concern of studies of nationalism and modernity, it faded from view, only to reappear more recently tied to questions around the commodification of identity. This article traces the relational concept of ethnicity, understood to be part of a semiotic constellation with nation and race, as linked to the legitimization of social inequality in the…
Crisis on the terrain of language
Actors and discourses in the construction of hegemony
In this paper, I will examine one aspect of a Gramscian notion of hegemony, one which focusses on the way in which hegemony is about “collectively attaining a single cultural “climate””, at least in part through language. This assumes discursive struggle in which some views end up marginalizing others. I will examine this struggle in terms of some of the ways in which the trajectories of actors and of discourses are connected, such that discursiv…
Nordicity, language and the nation-state
Espéranto
Nous présenterons une analyse des vagues d’engouement pour la construction des langues, que ce soit les langues dites internationales et auxiliaires, comme l’Espéranto (19e siècle et début du 20e), ou les langues "construites", comme le Klingon plus récemment. Cette analyse interprète ces phénomènes comme des réponses à des moments de crise dans les relations internationales dûes aux limites imposées par le cadre dominant de l’État-nation dûes au…
Multilinguisme
L’entrée fournit une généalogie du concept de « multilinguisme », analysant comment il est apparu comme objet de discussion quotidienne, de politique institutionnelle, et d’enquête scientifique. Elle prend comme point de départ que le concept est foncièrement idéologique, et que sa pertinence relève de conditions historiques matérielles en lien avec le rapport entre le colonialisme et la construction de l’État-nation
Introduction. Un Canadien errant: Les mobilités et la construction de la francité canadienne
Introduction. Un Canadien errant : les mobilités et la construction de la francité canadienne. Un article de la revue Francophonies d'Amérique (Un Canadien errant : les mobilités et la construction de la francité canadienne) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Quelques profils de participantes et de participants au projet « Un Canadien errant
Quelques profils de participantes et de participants au projet « Un Canadien errant ». Un article de la revue Francophonies d'Amérique (Un Canadien errant : les mobilités et la construction de la francité canadienne) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Le rapport centre-périphérie et les mobilités structurées: Les jeunes Franco-Manitobains et Montréal
Cet article explore les relations ambivalentes de jeunes Franco-Manitobains pris entre deux pôles d’attraction, le domicile et le Montréal cosmopolite. Cette ambivalence émerge des tensions entre deux sources de légitimité francophone : Montréal en tant que métropole et capitale culturelle du Canada français, ainsi que ville internationale et cosmopolite attrayante, et le Manitoba en tant que lieu d’origine authentique et centre de la francophoni…
Mobilités, circulation et ancrages: La francophonie dans la vallée de l’Okanagan-Similkameen en Colombie-Britannique1
Cet article aborde le lien entre mobilités et ancrages francophones dans l’Okanagan-Similkameen grâce à des entretiens menés auprès de 35 francophones établis dans la vallée, ainsi que de 24 travailleurs saisonniers francophones qui font partie des jeunes qui convergent dans la région chaque été depuis les années 1980 pour la cueillette des cerises. La mobilité de ces jeunes s’inscrit dans une longue histoire de travailleurs saisonniers francopho…
Ancrage, mobilité et francité au Manitoba français: Histoire D’une Lignée
Cet article propose une analyse des récits de vie des membres d’une lignée d’origine française à la Montagne Pembina, au Manitoba, entre la fin du xixe siècle, période où l’ancêtre « canadien », Jean-Baptiste Déroche, immigre dans la région, et le début du xxie siècle. Dans une perspective diachronique, cette étude cherche à saisir les motifs de l’ancrage territorial des membres de la lignée des Deroche et de leur mobilité sociale. Elle considère…
Moments of crisis
This essay considers the challenges faced by academic journals such as this one at this moment of crisis of capitalism, with pressures on the one hand to democratize and decolonize, and on the other to produce profit through intensification, flexibilization and precaritization
Introduction to the Theme Series 'Decentring the Anglosphere
Critique
Authority and knowledge production: Language’s “hall of mirrors”
Preview this article: Authority and knowledge production, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/lcs.00021.hel-1.gif
Scholarly committees as elite public action: The SSRC and the origins of sociolinguistics
Starting in the early 1950s, the SSRC cultivated interdisciplinary research into the role of language in culture and thought through its Committees on Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics. Here, Monica Heller examines how the latter committee (1963-1979) helped establish sociolinguistics in the United States, investigating the tensions between language, culture, and inequality. In exploring how the committee shifted focus from the developing wo…
Sociolinguistic frontiers: Emancipation and equality
In her conclusion to this issue, Monica Heller reflects on the ways in which the field has both advanced and obscured understandings of how linguistic inequality is related to broader hierarchies of power. The great accomplishment of sociolinguistics - its liberal and scientific claims that all languages are equal in value - did little to engage how inequalities between different groups of speakers were reproduced. Heller argues that the scholarl…
Journal of Sociolinguistics: Continuity and renewal
Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History
"Providing an original approach to the study of language by linking it to the political and economic contexts of colonialism and capitalism, Heller and McElhinny reinterpret sociolinguistics for a twenty-first century audience. The authors map out a critical history of how language serves as a terrain for producing and reproducing social inequalities. The book, organized chronologically, and beginning in the period of colonial expansion in the si…
Dr. Esperanto, or Anthropology as Alternative Worlds
In this 2015 presidential address, I use the story of so-called artificial (invented, constructed) languages to discuss anthropology as an act of imagining alternative worlds. I argue that this activity becomes particularly salient at moments of crisis in liberal democratic capitalism and takes a variety of forms according to the position of social actors with respect to the political economic conditions they face. From Esperanto to Klingon and b…
Treating language as an economic resource: Discourse, data and debate
Can language be a commodity? In recent years, along with other colleagues, we have developed arguments that language is increasingly treated as a commodity in late capitalism (Tan and Rubdy 2008; Heller 2010; Duchêne and Heller 2012; Park and Wee 2012). This argument has been the subject of three major types of critique: The first comes from linguistic minority theorists, the second from the field of “language economics,” and the third from Marxi…
Anthropology as Discursive Space: Comment
Sustaining the Nation: The Making and Moving of Language and Nation
This book is an ethnography of labor mobility and its challenges to the idea of the nation. Using the example of francophone Canada, it examines how social difference (race, ethnicity, language, gender) has been used to sort out who must (or can) be mobile and who must (or can) remain in place in the organization of global circulation of human and natural resources. It argues that "francophone Canada" can best be understood as an ethnoclass categ…
Commentary
Linguistic commodification in tourism
Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalonia and different zones of francophone Canada in sites related to heritage and cultural tourism, we argue that tourism, especially in multilingual peripheries, is a key site for a sociolinguistic exploration of the political economy of globalization. We link shifts in the role of language in tourism to shifts in phases of capitalism, focusing on the shift from industrial t…
Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity
The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many different ways (cf., e.g. Bauman 1997; Castells 2000; Giddens 1990). These include emerging tensions between State-based and corporate identities and language practices, between local, national and supra-national identities and language practices, and between hybridity and uniformity. Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into…
The Commodification of Language
Although language can always be analyzed as a commodity, its salience as a resource with exchange value has increased with the growing importance of language in the globalized new economy under the political economic conditions of late capitalism. This review summarizes how and in which ways those conditions have a commodifying effect on language and focuses on contemporary tensions between ideologies and practices of language in the shift from m…
Linguistic commodification in tourism
Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalonia and different zones of francophone Canada in sites related to heritage and cultural tourism, we argue that tourism, especially in multilingual peripheries, is a key site for a sociolinguistic exploration of the political economy of globalization. We link shifts in the role of language in tourism to shifts in phases of capitalism, focusing on the shift from industrial t…
Language and the nation-state: Challenges to sociolinguistic theory and practice1
Communities, identities, processes, and practices are key linked concepts of concern to research on the role of language in the construction of social relations within the nation-state. In the current globalizing context, sociolinguistics has begun to recognize the need to reorient studies of language, community, and identity in the nation-state away from autonomous structure and towards process and practice, in order to capture the ways in which…
Language choice, social institutions, and symbolic domination
The study of language choice and code-switching can illuminate the ways in which, through language, social institutions with ethnolinguistically diverse staff and clients exercise symbolic domination. Using the example of French-language minority education in Ontario (Canada), this article examines the ways in which ethnic and institutional relations of power overlap or crosscut, forming constraints which have paradoxical effects. In an analysis …
Introduction: Sociolinguistics and tourism - mobilities, markets, multilingualism
In the introduction to this special issue on Sociolinguistics and Tourism, we focus on language in tourism as an important window into contemporary forms of economic, political, and social change. Our aim is twofold: (1) to establish and extend 'sociolinguistics and tourism' as another social and applied domain of sociolinguistic research; and (2) to use tourism as a lens for a broader discussion of the sociolinguistics of late modernity. To this…
Alternative ideologies of la francophonie
This paper concerns current transformations in the relationship between political and linguistic ideologies of la francophonie based on a sociolinguistic ethnographic study in a French-language minority school in Canada. A dominant modernist orientation, focussing on unilingual social spaces and the authenticity and integrity of French, is being confronted by an emerging globalizing orientation which emphasizes the value of French as an economic …
The politics of codeswitching and language choice
Using data from ethnographic studies of the use of French and English in Ontario and Quebec (Canada) in a variety of settings (hospital, factory, school, etc.) over the period 1978–1990, I discuss language choice as a political strategy, especially as a strategy of ethnic mobilisation. More broadly, I argue that codeswitching must be understood in terms of individual communicative repertoires and community speech economies, particularly as these …
Vers de nouvelles formes de pouvoir langagier ? Langue(s) et identité dans la nouvelle économie
Cet article s'inscrit dans une approche sociolinguistique critique pour explorer l'inscription de la francophonie canadienne dans le champ du tourisme patrimonial en lien avec les idéologies linguistiques, tant dominantes qu'émergentes, de trois de ces communautés : l'Acadie, l'Ontario et l'Alberta. On y constate que l'authenticité linguistique est mobilisée à des fins identitaires pour reproduire, célébrer et consommer le soi, sans échapper aux …
Critique and Sociolinguistic Analysis of Discourse
My point of departure for this paper is that 'critique' is fundamentally about identifying and explaining the construction of relations of social difference and inequality (and then deciding what position to take about such processes, and what, if any, action that might lead to). I focus on one particular theoretical and methodological dimension of this project; namely the linkage between local linguistic practices and processes of social structu…
From protector to producer: The role of the State in the discursive shift from minority rights to economic development
Enjeux sociaux de la sociolinguistique: Pour Une Sociolinguistique Critique
La sociolinguistique est devenue un domaine internationalement reconnu et plusieurs positions quant à la conception du « socio » y apparaissent aujourd'hui. Les auteurs en examinent trois : la nature sociale du langage ; la création d'un domaine interdisciplinaire ; la relation théorique entre langues et sociétés. Les auteurs développent la notion de sociolinguistique critique proposée en 2002 par M. Heller et l'appliquent au domaine du travail c…
Dr. Esperanto, or Anthropology as Alternative Worlds
In this 2015 presidential address, I use the story of so-called artificial (invented, constructed) languages to discuss anthropology as an act of imagining alternative worlds. I argue that this activity becomes particularly salient at moments of crisis in liberal democratic capitalism and takes a variety of forms according to the position of social actors with respect to the political economic conditions they face. From Esperanto to Klingon and b…
Language and Dis-Citizenship in Canada
Language policy generally is framed in terms of rational choice, but this ignores the interplay of material and symbolic resources and the role of ideologies of language, culture, class, and nation in organizing the social and the moral order. Using examples from Canada, this article shows how dis-citizenship is a matter of struggle over access to resources, framed within the dominant ideologies of language and culture connected to the workings o…
Ebonics, language revival, la qualité de la langue and more: What Do We Have to Say About the Language Debates of Our Time
Langue », « communauté » et « identité: Le discours expert et la question du français au Canada
Parmi les concepts clés de l'anthropologie linguistique (et de ses disciplines soeurs, la sociolinguistique, la sociologie du langage, la psychologie sociale du langage, l'aménagement linguistique) on trouve depuis longtemps ceux de « langue », « communauté » et « identité ». Ces concepts centraux pour la discipline émergent comme partie du discours du nationalisme étatique, et y sont profondément imbriqués. Dans cet article, je trace les grandes…
Gumperz and Social Justice
John Gumperz's work was characterized by a concern for social justice. This article traces some of the ways this concern manifested itself through such concepts as "key situation," and in research foci on moments of social selection in powerful state institutions. It reviews some critiques of Gumperz's approach to the problem of how social difference is tied to social inequality, and some of the productive responses to those critiques, anchoring …
The Political Economy of Texts: A Case Study in the Structuration of Tourism
The field of tourism, particularly in linguistic minority contexts, shows how texts are situated within struggles over the legitimization of symbolic and material resources. In order to understand this field, we distance ourselves from some of the prevailing assumptions in discourse analysis, which presents texts and contexts as separate entities for which a certain autonomy can be assumed. We offer instead a view of texts as some among many arti…
Community and commodity in French Ontario
Linguistic minority movements have long adopted dominant discourses linking language and community. Analysis of two sites of discursive production in francophone Canada (literacy centers and a call center workplace in Ontario) shows that current socioeconomic changes challenge those discourses. Language and community are uncoupled and redefined as commodities with exchange value in the globalized market for services and information. "Community" s…
La sociolinguistique et l'éducation franco-ontarienne
L'objectif de cet article est de fournir une analyse critique du rôle de la sociolinguistique dans l'évolution récente de l'éducation en langue française, domaine central de la mobilisation politique des francophones de l'Ontario. Il démontre comment les sociolinguistes contribuent à légitimer cette mobilisation, et plus particulièrement les revendications scolaires de la nouvelle classe moyenne francophone. En même temps, il examine comment les …
Discourse and Critique: Part One
Du français comme "droit" au français comme "valeur ajoutée: De la politique à l'économique au Canada
Le discours sur la langue a beaucoup évolué au Canada. Longtemps pensée comme un aspect parmi d'autres des critères de distinction entre groupes culturels ou « raciaux », distinction servant de principe de stratification sociale dans l'économie coloniale canadienne, la langue devient le terrain central de lutte contre la marginalisation économique chez les francophones au milieu du XXe siècle. Les revendications nationalistes québécoises ont fait…
Repenser le plurilinguisme: Langue, postnationalisme et la nouvelle économie mondialisée
Il est devenu difficile aujourd’hui de maintenir la fiction de l’homogénéité et les marchés nationaux protégés issus du nationalisme moderne. L’expansion capitaliste force à s’ajuster à de nouvelles réalités bien identifiées par nombre d’auteurs importants : l’expansion des marchés et la recherche de ressources; la saturation des marchés et la nécessité de se concentrer sur la valeur ajoutée, les produits de niche, la spécialisation, la distincti…
Idéologies et pratiques du multilinguisme au québec: Luttes Et Mutations Dans Un Site De La Nouvelle Économie
Le pouvoir langagier peut s'exercer par de nombreux biais en milieu de travail. Notamment, des questions concernant le plurilinguisme se posent dans ces contextes. à partir d'un travail de terrain mené en 2002-2003 dans une ONG basée à Montréal et œuvrant dans le secteur du développement durable et du commerce équitable, nous examinerons certaines des nouvelles manifestations des tensions de longue date entre l'unilinguisme francophone et le bi e…
Bilingualism and identity in the post-modern world
Nowadays bilingualism is becoming a positive value to be promoted and defended in our western social and cultural context. Being understood from a wide perspective, bilingualism may be both a way of wielding the power and resisting it. Nevertheless, the most relevant aspect is understanding the sources of value of bilingualism and the nature of valued bilingual practices, because not all of them get the same recognition from the point of view of …
Body, Nature, Language: Artisans to Artists in the Commodification of Authenticity
This article examines processes of authenticating and selling handicrafts at the conjuncture of cultural pride and economic profit in two peripheral sites (Finnish Sámiland and rural Québec), under shared conditions of late capitalism and globalising political economies. These conditions (re)structure traditionalist and modernist discourses about artisans' historical bodies, their connections to the local land (nature), and how they interactional…
“Bonjour, hello?”: Negotiations of Language Choice in Montreal
Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1978), pp. 588-597
How to Ask for Wiper Fluid in Montreal: Struggling with the Terminology of Car Parts in Québecois
Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 567-580
Minorités linguistiques et interventions: Essai de typologie/Linguistic minorities and interventions: Towards a typology
Negotiations of language choice in Montreal
Something strange is going on in Montreal. Every encounter between strangers, however casually, especially in public places but by no means exclusively, has become a political act. Buying a pair of socks has become problematic, as witnessed by the following article from The Montreal Star of January 26, 1978, reporting one person's frustration: The other day I walked into a department store and had a conversation which made me feel foolish. It was…
Latino language and communicative behavior
Swedish research and debate about bilingualism: A critical review of the Swedish research and debate about bilingualism and bilingual education in Sweden from an international perspective. By Christin…
Crib Speech and Language Play
The social and historical context of minority French language education in Ontario
This paper discusses the development of the minority French‐speaking population in Ontario from its origins in the seventeenth century to the present day, focussing on the changing circumstances affecting minority French‐language education. Political, economic and demographic processes are shown to influence the role French‐language schools have been expected to and have been able to play in contributing to the maintenance of French language and …
Bilingual and Multicultural Education: Canadian Perspectives
Lingua in Diaspora: Studies in the Language of the Second Generation of Yugoslav Immigrant Children in Sweden
The Discourse of Medicine: Dialectics of Medical Interviews
Transfer and Interference in Language: A Selected Bibliography
Editors' preface
First encounters: The role of communication in the medical intake process
This paper examines the relationship between communicative and organizational processes in the medical and financial screening steps of the patient intake process of an urban out‐patient clinic. It shows how conversational routines are used to regulate the sometimes conflicting demands placed on intake by the clinic's ideological goals, patients’ goals, and a variety of practical (including governmental) constraints. This regulation is a product …
Introduction
Strategic ambiguity: Codeswitching in the management of conflict
Code-switching has often been described as a conversational strategy. Sometimes this strategy is discussed in terms of stylistic effects, that is, in terms of its use in aggravating or mitigating such conversational acts as requests, denials, topic shifts, elaborations or comments, validations, or clarifications (Gal 1979; Gumperz and Hernandez-Chavez 1971; Gumperz 1982a,b; Zente11a 1981; Valdes 1981; McClure 1981; Genishi 1981)
Conversational Strategies and Contexts for Talk: Learning Activities for Franco-Ontarian Minority Schools
This article presents some problems of Franco-Ontarian minority education, related to the heterogeneity of the student body and to students' reduced access to contexts for the use of French. It describes innovative learning activities, based on the ethnography of communication and cooperative learning techniques, designed to provide more flexible and broader contexts for the use of French. Finally, it presents an analysis of one episode of a smal…
Communicative resources and local configurations: An exploration of language contact processes
Speech economy and social selection in educational contexts: A Franco‐Ontarian case study
This paper discusses the relationship between the evaluation of students' performances at school and schools' roles in controlling access to valued resources. It focuses on the role of language use in face‐to‐face encounters in processes of social selection, drawing on data from Franco‐Ontarian schools, where students' use of language has consequences for access to the school system (and hence to participation in a key institution of the Franco‐O…
Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives
Aspects sociolinguistiques de la francisation d'une entreprise privée
French immersion in Canada: A model for Switzerland
Intimate Adversaries: Cultural Conflict Between Doctors and Women Patients. Alexandra Dundas Todd Power Under the Microscope: Toward a Grounded Theory of Gender Relations in Medical Encounters. Kathy …
Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France . R. D. GRILLO
Sociology (68 works) · Political science (55 works) · Linguistics (53 works) · Philosophy (52 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (47 works) · Computer Science (31 works) · Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies (28 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Humanities (23 works) · Law (23 works)