Language, Globalization, and the Triumph of Popular Demand: The Discourse of Populism in American Prestige Press Coverage of the Global Hegemony of English

Abstract

This article zeroes in on “the American situation” with respect to the global hegemony of English. It does so by way of textual analysis of a number of articles taken from a pool of 275 American prestige press accounts of the global spread of English. Drawing parallels between prestige press and some academic accounts of culture and globalization, the article critically engages instances of a pervasive populist individualist ideology expressed via what the author calls the discourse of populism.

Notes

1. Stempel (1961) established the category prestige press in a study of newspaper coverage of the 1960 presidential election. He placed 15 newspapers in this category, including the L.A. Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. The International Herald Tribune was not among these. However, it is owned and published by The New York Times Company.

2. The other discourses were universal progress, triumphalism, and linguistic conflict and competition; for more on these discourses, please see Demont-Heinrich (2006).

3. Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) predicts that 90% of the world's more than 6000 language could disappear in the next 100 years. Linguists who do not share her view of English and other larger languages—French, Spanish, Hindi, etc.—as “killer languages” also anticipate a radical drop in world linguistic diversity in the near future.

4. Of course, there have been repeated attempts to push through an official English amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Such attempts continue to this day (Crawford, 2000; Hartman, 2003).

5. By “mass communicative flow,” I refer to cultural and media products produced in a particular cultural and communicative context, which are then distributed and consumed, globally, on a quantitatively massive scale. I do not mean that such products are necessarily consumed in predictable, homogenous ways by amorphous masses of people.

6. According to the pro-English lobbying group U.S. English, as of the middle of 2007, 30 U.S. states had passed “Official English” laws (http://www.usenglish.org/inc/official/states.asp).

7. A clincher quote or paragraph is a mechanism that allows journalists to maintain an air of objectivity, while projecting a preferred reading onto a text via its closing segment.