Bourdieu, Language, and a Critique of English in Anglophone Academia

Bibliographic Data

ID23749864
AuthorsGuanglun Michael Mu (0000-0002-8786-0956, corresponding author)
Year2025
Pages1-8
Publication date2025-12-02
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueEncyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal20291
OpenAlexW4416917905
ISBN9781405198431
LanguageEN
References cited15

The problematics of language are integral to Bourdieu's biography and sociology. Brought up speaking Béarnese, Bourdieu was taunted at boarding school for his accent. While the young Bourdieu might not (fully) understand the power struggles and structures behind his linguistic sufferings at school, his reflexive and relational sociology forged over his academic career offered insightful analysis of the relations between linguistic (il)legitimacy, educational (in)equality, and social (im)mobility. Throughout his oeuvre, Bourdieu demonstrated little interest in the grammatical rules of language and the cognitive process of how those rules are learned; he instead took a deep dive into the socialization process of how particular ways of learning and using language are formed as well as the power structures and struggles behind these. In this chapter, I first revisit Bourdieu's relational thesis on language, which is epistemologically different from the models of seminal linguists such as Chomsky and Saussure, and from there, I draw on Bourdieu's model to challenge some of the language practices in Anglophone academia.

Biography · Discourse analysis · Language acquisition · Power (physics) · Power structure · Process (computing) · Reflexivity · Socialization

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