Jillian Cavanaugh’s contribution to “Sociolinguistic Frontiers” tells the story of the emergence of the concept of “language ideologies” that mediate “between the social practice of language and the socioeconomic and political structures within which it occurs.” The concept became an embedded component in analyzing the treatment of minority languages and dialects, and how power relations can be revealed through everyday language use. Today, rather than an overarching framework, language ideology has evolved into a critical point of departure for understanding the intersection between language and various forms of inequality that also require other intellectual tools to fully grasp.
Jillian R. Cavanaugh
Jillian R. Cavanaugh is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist who received her PhD from New York University. She is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at Brooklyn College CUNY, and on the faculty of the Anthropology Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her first research project on language ideologies culminated in the book, Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Her current research is with food producers in northern Italy. Her work has analyzed language and social transformation, materiality, gender, the value of heritage food, and labor in late capitalism. She has written about dialect poetry in Italy and the work of Elena Ferrante. Her most recent book, coedited with Shalini Shankar, is Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Cavanaugh is a 1999 IDRF fellow.