culture

 Compare and contrast two key ideas (from different texts) from this week’s readings. How do they relate to indexicality? Please provide one example for each key idea and explain how they’re important/relevant. 

THE DIALOGIC
IMAGINATION

Four Essays

by
M. M. BAKHTIN

Edited by
fichael Holquist

Translated by
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist

U N I V E R S I T Y O F T E X A S P R E S S
A U S T I N A N D L O N D O N

Copyright 0 1981 by the University of Texas Press
All tights reserved
Printed i n the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich.
The dialogic imagination.
(University of Texas Press Slavic series; no. I )
Translation of Voprosy literalury i estetiki.
Includes index.
I . Fiction-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Literature

–

Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Holquist, J. Michael.
11. Title. 111. Series.
PN3331.82jl3 801′.953 80-15450
ISBN 0-292-71527-7

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be
sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin. Texas
78712.

T h e publication of this volume was assisted in part by a grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency
whose mission is to award grants t o support education, scholarship, m e –
dia programming, libraries, and m u s e u m s in order to bring the results of
cultural activities to the general public. Preparation was made possible
in part by a grant from the Translations Program of the endowment.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

The principal idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art can
and must overcome the divorce between an abstract “formal” ap-
proach and an equally abstract “ideological” approach. Form and
content in discourse are one, once we understand that verba!
discourse is a social phenomenon-social throughout its entire
range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image
to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning.

It is this idea that has motivated our emuhasis on “the stvlis- ,
tics of genre.” The separation of style and language from the ques-
tion of genre has been largely responsible for a situation in which
only individual and period-bound overtones of a stvle are the priv-
ileged subjects of studv. whllp tone is ignored. The
–

great historical destinies of genres are overshadowed by thLpetty
vicissitudes of stylistic modifications, which in their turn are
linked with individual artists and artistic movements. For this
r e a s o n , ~ I i s t i c s has been deprived of an authentic p h l l o s o ~ l
and sociological approach to its problems, ~t has b e c o m e b d

d o w n in stylistictrivia; it is not able to sense behind the indiva-
\

ual anGeriod-bound shifts the great and anonymous destinies of
artistic discourse itself. More often than not, stylistics defines i t –
self as a stylistics of “private craftsmanship” and ignores the so-
cial life of discourse outside the artist’s studv, discourse in the

. . ‘open spaces of ~ u b l i c cities and villaees, of social
groups, generations and epochs. Stylistics is concerned not with
living discourse but with a histological specimen made from it,
with abstract linguistic discourse in the service of an artist’s indi-
vidual creative powers. But these individual and tendentious
overtones of style, cut off from the fundamentally social modes in
which discourse lives, inevitably come across as flat and abstract
in such a formulation and cannot therefore be studied in organic
unity with a work’s semantic components.

I (2701 D I S C O U R S E I N T H E N O V E L \
Various schools of thought in thc philosophy of language, in lin-

guistics and in stylistics have, in different periods (and always in
close connection with the diverse concrete poetic and ideological
styles of a given epoch], introduccd into such concepts as “system
of language,” “monologic utterance,” “the speaking individuum,”
various differing nuances of meaning, but their basic content re-
mains unchanged. This basic content is conditioned by thr spr-
cific sociohistorical destinies of European languages and by the
destinies of ideological discourse, and by those particular histor-
ical tasks that ideological discourse has fulfilled in specific social
spheres and at specific stages in its own historical development.

These tasks and destinies of discourse conditioned specific vet-
bal-ideological movements, as well as various specific genres of
ideological discourse, and ultimately the specific philosophical
concept of discourse itself-in particular, the concept of poetic
discourse, which had been at the heart of all conccpts of style.

The strength and at the same time the limitations of such basic
stylistic categories become apparent when such categories are
seen as conditioned hy specific historical destinics and by the
task that an ideological discourse assumes. These categories
arose from and were shaped by the h i s t o r i c a l l e o r c e s at
work in the verbal-idenlogical evolution of specific social groups;
they comprised the theoretical expression of actualizing forces
that were in the process of creating a life for language.

These forces are the forces that serve to unify and centralize
the verbal-ideological world.

Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the
historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization,
an expression of th-forces of language. Aunitary lan-
guage is not something glven [dan] but is always in essence
posited [zadanl-and a t every moment of its linguistic lifc it is
opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same time it
makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heter-
oglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a ccrtain
maximum of mutual understanding and crystalizing into a real,
although still relative, unity-the uni e reianing conver-
sational (everyday) and literary langua ect l d

A common unltary lenguagc is J system of I ~ n g u l s t ~ c norms .-
But these norms do not constltutc an ahstraa imperatlvc, thcy
are rather the generative forces of linguistic llfe, forccs that strug-
gle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite

DISCOURSE I N T H E N O V E L [271]

and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating within a het-
eroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an
officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already
G m e d language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia.

What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic mini-
m u m of a common language, in the sense of a system of elemen-
tary forms (linguistic symbols] guaranteeing a minimum level of
comprehension in practical communication. We are taking lan-
guage not as a system of abstract gammatic-
-c
a world view, even as a concreu

Z e t e verbal and ideoloeical unification and centralization, which –
develop in vital comection with the processes of sociooolitical
and c-i.

Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of
the medieval church, of “the one language of truth,” the Carte-
sian poetics of neoclassicism, the abstract grammatical universal-
ism of Leibniz (the idea of a “universal grammar”), Humboldt’s
insistence on the concrete-all these, whatever their differences
in nuance, give expression to the same centr~petal forces in socio-
linguistic and ideological life; they serve one and the same proj-
ect of centralizing and unifying the European languages. T-c-
tory of one reigning language (dialect) over the others, the sup-
planting of languages, their enslavement, the process of illumi-
nating them with the True Word, the incorporation of barbarians
and lower social strata into a unitarv language of culture and
truth, the canonization of 1 svstems. philolorn with i t s
methods of studying and teaching dead languages, languages that
were by that very fact “unities,” I n d o – E u r w h i s t i c s with
i t s focus of attention, directed away from language plurality t o
a single proto-language-all this determined the content and
power of the category of “unitary language” in linguistic and sty-
Bstic thought, and determined its creative, style-shaping role in
the majority of the poetic genres that coalesced in the channel
formed by those same centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life.

But the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a
“unitary language,” operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any
glven moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into
linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to for-

ma1 linguistic markers, especially phonetic), but also-and for u s
this is the essential point-into languages that are socio-ideologi-
cal: languages of social groups, “professional” and “generic” lan-
guages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of
view, literary language itself is only one of these hctcroglot lan-
guages-and in its turn is also stratified i n t o languages [generic,
period-bound and others). And this stratification and heteroglos-
sia, once rralized, is n o t only a static invariant of linguistic life,
but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglos-
sia widen and deepen a s long as language is alive and developing.
Alongside the centripetal forces, t h e centrifugal forces of lan-
&age carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideo-
logical centralization and unification, the uninterrupted pro- m

Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point

DISCOURSE I N T H E NOVEL 12731

where centrifugal a s well as centripetal forces are brought to~bear.,
The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unifica-
tion and disunification, intersect i n the utterance; the utterance
not only answers t h e requirements of its own language as an indi-
vidualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the re-
quirements of heteroglossia a s well; i t is in fact an active partici-
pant in such speech diversity. And this active participation of
every utterance in living heteroglossia detcrmines the linguistic
profile and style of the utterance to n o less a degree than its inclu-

I
sion in any normative-centralizing system of a unitary language.

I

i

Every utterance participates i n t h e “unitary language” (in its I
centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes

I of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying
forces).

Such is the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social
group, a gmre, a school and so forth. It is possible t o give a con- !
Crete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed
it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled
tendencies i n the life of language. i

The authentic enviionment of an utterance, t h e environment

uipetal forces of verbal-ideological life, the novel-and those
artistic-prose genres that gravitate toward it-was being histor-
ically shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces.
At the time when poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural,
national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological
world in t h e higher official socio-ideological Levels, o n the lower
levels, on the stages of- and a t 6 u l f o o n m 3 , the
heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all “lan-
guages” and dialects; there developed t h e literature of the fobli-
awr and Schwamke o f s t r e e t i n g s , anecdotes, where
there was n o lanrmaee-center at all, where there was t o be found

in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglos-
sia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously con-
crete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual
utterance.

At t h e rime when major divisions of the poetic genres were de-
veloping under the influcnce of the unifying, centralizing, cen-

~-..-. – ~ – –
a lively play with t h e “langua&of poets, scholars, monks,
knights and others, where all “languages” wete masks and where
no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face.

–

Heteroglossia, as organizcd in thcsc low gcnrcs, was n o t mcrcly
heteroglossia vis-a-vis the accepted literary language /in all i t s
various generic expressions), that is, vis-a-vis t h e linguistic cen-
ter of the verbal-ideological life of the nation and the epoch, but
was a heteroglossia consciously opposed t o this literary language.
It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the of-
ficial languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had
been dialogized.

Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language that were
born and shaped by the current of centralizing tendencies in t h e
life of language have ignored this dialogized heteroglossia, in
which is embodied the centrifugal forces in the life of language.
For this very reason they could make no provision for t h e dialogic
nature of language, which was a struggle among socio-linguistic
points of view, not an intra-language struggle between individual
wills or logical contradictions. Moreover, even intra-language
dialogue [dramatic, rhetorical, cognitive or merely casual) has
hardly been studied linguistically or stylistically up to t h e present
day. O n r ~ r i i g h t even say outright that the dialogic aspect of dis-
course and all the phenomena connected with it have remained
to the present moment beyond the ken of linguistics.

In the poetic image narrowly conceived [in the image-as-trope),
all activity-the dynamics of the image-as-word-is completely
exhausted by the play between the word [with all its aspects1 and
the object (in all its aspects). The word plunges into the inex-
haustible wealth and contradictory multiplicity of the object it-
self, with its “virginal,” still “unuttered” nature; therefore it pre-
sumes nothing beyond the borders of its own context (except, of
course, what can be found in the treasure-house of language it-
self). The word forgets that its object has its own history of con-
tradictory acts of verbal recognition, as well as that heteroglossia
that is always present in such acts of recognition.

For the writer of artistic prose, on the contrary, the object re-
veals first of all precisely the socially heteroglot multiplicity of its
names, definitions and value judgments. Instead of the virginal
fullness and inexhaustibility of the object itself, the prose writer
confron.ts a multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been
laid down in the object by social consciousness. Along with the
internal contradictions inside the object itself, the. prose writer
witnesses as well the unfolding of social heteroglossia surround-
ing the object, the Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goes
on around any object; the dialectics of the object are interwoven
with the social dialogue surrounding it. For the prose writer, the
object is a focal point for heteroglot voices among which his own
voice must also sound; these voices create the background neces-
sary for his own voice, outside of which his artistic prose nuances
cannot be perceived, and without which they “do not sound.”

The prose artist elevates the social heteroglossia surrounding
objects into an image that has finished contours, an image com-

9. The Horatian lyric, Villon, Heine, Laforgue, Annenskij and others-de-
spite the fact that these are extremely varied instances.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [ 2 7 9 ]

pletely shot through with dialogized overtones; he creates artis-
tically calculated nuances on all the fundamental voices and
tones of this heteroglossia. But as we have already said, every ex-
tra-artistic prose discourse-in any of its forms, quotidian, rhe-
torical, scholarly-cannot fail to be oriented toward the “already
uttered,” the “already known,” the “common opinion” and so
forth. The — dialo-ientation of discoursris a ph enomenon that
is, of course, a property of any discourse. It is the natural orienta-
tion of any living discourse. On all its various routes toward the :
object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien word ‘
and cannot help encountering it i n a living, tension-filled interac-
tion. Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as
yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really
have escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation
with the alien word that occurs in the object. Concrete historical
human discourse does not have this privilege: it can deviate from
such inter-orientation only on a conditional basis and only to a
certain degree.

It is all the more remarkable that linguistics and the philoso-
phy of discourse have been primarily oriented precisely toward
this artificial, preconditioned status of the word, a word excised
from dialogue and taken for the norm [aithough the primacy of
dialogue over monologue is frequently proclaimed). Dialogue is
studied merely as’ a compositional form in the structuring of
speech, but the internal dialogism of the word [which occurs in a
monologic utterance as well as in a rejoinder), the dialogism that
penetrates its entire structure, all its semantic and expressive
layers, is almost entirely ignored. But it is precisely this internal
dialogism of the word, which does not assume any external com-
positional forms of dialogue, that cannot be isolated as an inde-
pendent act, separate from the word’s ability to form a concept
[koncipirovanie] of its object-it is precisely this internal dialo-
gism that has such enormous power to shape style. The internal
dialogism of the word finds expression in a series of peculiar fea-
tures in semantics, syntax and stylistics that have remained up to
the present time completely unstudied by linguistics and stylis-
tics [nor, what is more, have the peculiar semantic features of
ordinary dialogue been studied).

The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it;
the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that
is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object
in a dialogic way.

In poetic genres, artistic consciousncss-undrrstoud as a unity
of all the author’s semantic and expressive intentions-fully real-
izes itself within its own language; in them alone is such con-
sciousness fully immanent, expressing itse!f in it directly and
without mediation, without conditions and without distance.
The language of the poet is his language, he is utterly immersed
in it, inseparable from it, he makes use of each form, each word,
each expression according to its unmediated power to assign
meaning (as it were, “without quotation marks”), that is, as a
pure and direct expression of his own intention. No matter what

[ 2 8 6 ] DISCOURSE I N THE NOVEL

“agonies of the word” the poet endured in the process of creation,
in the finished work language is an obedient organ, fully adequate
to the author’s intention.

The language in a poetic work realizes itself as something
about which there can be n o doubt, something that cannot be
disputed, something all-encompassing. Everything that the poet
sees, understands and thinks, he does through the eyes of a given
language, in its inner forms, and there is nothing that might re-
quire, for its expression, the help of any other or alien language.
The language of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptol-
emaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing
else is needed. The concept of many worlds of language, all equal
in their ability to conceptualize and to be expressive, is organical-
ly denied t o poetic style.

The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and
insoluble conflicts the poet develops within it, is always il-
lumined by one unitary and indisputable discourse. Contradic-
tions, conflicts and doubts remain in the object, in thoughts, in
living experiences-in short, in the subject matter-but they do
not enter into the language itself. In poetry, even discourse about
doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.

To take responsibility for the language of the work as a whole
at all of its points as its language, t o assume a full solidarity with
each of the work’s aspects, tones, nuances-such is the funda-
mental prerequisite for poetic style; style so conceived is fully ad-
equate to a single language and a single linguistic consciousness.
The poet is not able to’oppose his own poetic consciousness, his
own intentions to the language that he uses, for he 1s completely
within it and therefore cannot turn it into an object to be per-
ceived, reflected upon or related to. Language is present to him
only from inside, in the work it does to effect its intention, and
not from outside, in its objective specificity and boundedness.
Within the limits of poetic style, direct unconditional inten-
tionality, language at its full weight and the objective display of
language (as a socially and historically limited linguistic reality)
are all simultaneous, but incompatible. The unity and singularity
of language are the indispensable prerequisites for a realization of
the direct (but not objectively typifying) intentional individuality
of poetic style and of its monologic steadfastness.

This does not mean, of course, that heteroglossia or even a for-
eign language is completely shut out of a poetic work. To be sure,

such possibilities are limited: a certain latitude for heteroglossia
exists only in the “low” poetic genres-in the satiric and comic
genres and others. Nevertheless, heteroglossia (other socio-ideo-
logical languages) can be introduced into purely poetic genres,
primarily in the speeches of characters. But in such a context it is
objective. It appears, in essence, as a thing, it does not lie on the
same plane with the real language of the work: it is the depicted
gesture of one of the characters and does not appear as an aspect
of t h e word doing the depicting. Elements of heteroglossia enter
here not in the capacity of another language carrying its own par-
ticular points of view, about which one can say things not ex-
pressible in one’s own language, but rather in the capacity of a
depicted thing. Even when speaking of alien things, the poet
speaks in his own language. To shed light on an alien world, h e
never resorts t o an alien language, even though it might in fact be
more adequate to that world. Whereas the writer of prose, by con-
trast-as we shall see-attempts to talk about even his own
world in an alien language (for example, in the nonliterary lan-
guage of the teller of tales, or the representative of a specific so-
cio-ideological group); he often measures his own world by alien
linguistic standards.

As a consequence of the prerequisites mentioned above, the
language of poetic genres, when they approach their stylistic
limit,” often becomes authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative,
sealing itself off from the influence of extraliterary social dialects.
Therefore such ideas as a special “poetic language,” a “language
of the gods,” a “priestly language of poetry” and so forth could
flourish on poetic soil. It is noteworthy that the poet, should he
not accept the given literary language, will sooner resort to the
artificial creation of a new language specifically for poetry than
he will t o the exploitation of actual available social dialects. So-
cial languages are filled with specific objects, typical, socially lo-
calized and limited, while the artificially created language of po-
etry must be a directly intentional language, unitary and singular.
Thus, when Russian prose writers at the beginning of the twen-

I
I 12. It goes without saying that we continually advance as typlcal the ex-
I treme to which poetic genres aspire; in concrete examples of poetic works it

is possible to find features fundamental to prose, and numerous hybrids of
various generic types exist. These are especially widespread in perlods of shift
in literary poetic languages.

[ 2 8 8 ] D I S C O U R S E I N T H E N O V E I

tieth century began to show a profound interest in dialects and
skaz, the Symbolists (Bal’mont, V. IvanovJ and later the Futurists
dreamed of creating a special “language of poetry,” and even made
experiments directed toward creating such a language (those of
V Khlebnikov).

The idea of a special unitary and singular language of poetry is
a typical utopian philosopheme of poetic discourse: it is grounded
in the actual conditions and demands of poetic style, which is al-
ways a style adequately serviced by one directly intentional lan-
guage from whose point of view other languages /conversational,
business and prose languages, among others) are perceived as ob-
jects that are in no way its equal.I3 The idea of a “poetic language”
is yet another expression of that same Ptolemaic conception of
the linguistic and stylistic world.

Language-like the living concrete environment in which the
consciousness of the verbal artist lives-is never unitary. It is
unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative
forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological con-
ceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninter-
rupted process of historical becoming that is a characteristic of all
living language. Actual social life and historical becoming create
within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of
concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and
social belief systems; within these various systems (identical in
the abstract) are elements of language filled with various seman-
tic and axiological content and each with its own different sound.

Literary language-both spoken and written-although it is
nitary not only in its shared, abstract, linguistic markers but

also in its forms for conceptualizing these abstract markers, is it-
self stratified and heteroglot in its aspect as an expressive system,
that is, in the forms that carry its meanings.

This stratification is accomplished first of all by the specific or-
ganisms called genres. Certain features of language (lexicological, 1 semantic, syntactic) will knit together with the intentional aim,
and with the overall accentual system inherent in one or another
genre: oratorical, publiclstic, newspaper and journalistic genres,
the genres of low literature (penny dreadfuls, for instance] or, fi-

13. Such was the point of view taken by Latin toward national languages
in the Middle Ages.

D I S C O U R S E I N T H E N O V E L 12891

nally, the various genres of highliterature. Certain features of lan-
guage take on the specific flavor of a given genre: they knit to-
gether with specific points of view, specific approaches, forms of
thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of the given genre.

In addition, there is interwoven with this generic stratification
of language a professional stratification of language, in the broad
sense of the term “professional’f- the

e h – 5 – the polltlclan, the p u b l ~ c education
teacher and so forth, and these sometimes coincide with, and
sometimes depart from, the stratification into genres. it goes
without saying that these languages differ from each other not
only in their vocabularies; they involve specific forms for man-
ifesting intentions, forms for making conceptualization and eval-
uation concrete. And even the very langvage of the writer [the
poet or novelist) can be taken as a professional jargon on a par
with professional jargons.

What is important to us here is the intentional dimensions,
that is, the denotative and expressive dimension of the “shared”
language’s stratification. It is in fact not the neutral linguistic
components of language being stratified an\d differentiated, but
rather a situation in which the intentional possibilities of lan-
guage are being expropriated: these possibilities are realized in
specific directions, filled with specific content, they are made
concrete, particular, and are permeated with concrete value judg-
ments; they knit together with specific objects and with the be-
lief systems of certain genres of expression and points of view pe-
culiar to particular professions. Within these points of view, that
is, for the speakers of the language themselves, these generic lan-
guages and professional jargons are directly intentional-they
denote and express directly and fully, and are capable of express-
ing themselves without mediation; but outside, that is, for those
not participating in the given purview, these languages may be
treated as objects, as typifactions, as local color. For such out-
siders, the intentions permeating these languages become things,
limited in their meaning and expression; they attract to, or excise
from, such language a particular word-making it difficult for the
word to be utilized in a directly intentional way, without any
qualifications.

But the situation is far from exhausted by the generic and pro-
fessional stratification of the common literary language. Al-
though at its very core literary language is frequently socially ho-

[290] D I S C O U R S E I N T H E N O V E L

mogeneous, as the oral and written language of a dominant social
group, there is nevertheless always present, even here, a certain
degree of social differentiation, a social stratification, that in
other eras can become extremely acute. Social stratification may
here and there coincide with generic and professional stratifica-
tion, but in essence it is, of course, a thing completely autono-
mous and peculiar t o itself.

Social stratification is also and primarily determined by dif-
ferences between the forms used to convey meaning and between
the expressive planes of various belief systems-that is, strat-
ification expresses itself in typical differences in ways used t o
conceptualize and accentuate elements of language, and strat-
ification may not violate the abstractly linguistic dialectological
unity of the shared literary language.

What is more, all socially significant world views have the ca-
pacity to exploit the intentional possibilities of language through
the medium of their specific concrete instancing. Various tenden-
cies (artistic and otherwise], circles, journals, particular news-
papers, even particular significant artistic works and individual
persons are all capable of stratifying language, in proportion to
their social significance; they are capable of attracting its words
and forms into their orbit by means of their own characteristic
intentions and accents, and in so doing to a certain extent alienat-
ing these words and forms from other tendencies, parties, artistic
works and persons.

Every socially significant verbal performance has the ability-
sometimes for a long period of time, and for a wide circle of per-
sons-to infect with its own intention certain aspects of language
that had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse,
imposing on them specific semantic nuances and specific ax-
iological overtones; thus, it can create slogan-words, curse-words,
praise-words and so forth.

In any given historical moment of verbal-ideological life, each
generation at each social level has its own language; moreover,
every age group has as a matter of fact its own language, its own
vocabulary, its own particular accentual system that, in their
turn, vary depending on social level, academic institution (the
language of the cadet, the high school student, thc trade school
student are all different languages) and other stratifying factors.
All this is brought about by socially typifying languages, no mat-
ter how narrow the social circle in which they are spoken. It is

D I S C O U R S E I N T H E N O V E L [291]

even possible to have a family argon efine the societal limits of
a language, as, for instance, the p 1 gon of the Irtenevs in Tolstoy,
with its special vocabulary and unique accentual system.

And finally, at any given moment, languages of various epochs
and periods of socio-ideological life cohabit with one another.
Even languages of the day exist: one could say that today’s and
yesterday’s socio-ideological and political “day” do not, in a cer-
tain sense, share the same language; every day represents another
socio-ideological semantic “state of affairs,” another vocabulary,
another accentual system, with its own slogans, its own ways of
assigning blame and praise. Poetry depersonalizes “days” in lan-

—

guage, while prose, as we shall see, often deliberately intensifies
aifference between them, gives them embodied representation
and dialogically opposes them t o one another in unresolvable
dialogues.

Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language
is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of
socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the
past, between differing epochs of the past, between different
socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies,
schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These “lan-
guages” of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways,
forming new socially typifying “languages.”

Each of these “languages” of heteroglossia requires a methodol-
ogy very different from the others; each is grounded in a com-
pletely different principle for marking differences and for estab-
lishing units (for some this principle is functional, in others it is
the principle of theme and content, in yet others it is, properly
speaking, a socio-dialectological principle]. Therefore languages
do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in
many different ways (the Ukrainian language, the language of t h e
epic poem, of early Symbolism, of the student, of a particular gen-
eration of children, of the run-of-the-mill intellectual, of the
Nietzschean and so on). It might even seem that the very word
“language” loses all meaning in this process-for apparently
there is no single plane on which all these “languages” might be
juxtaposed to one another.

In actual fact, however, there does exist a common plane that
methodologically justifies our juxtaposing them: all languages of
heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and mak-
ing each unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms

I 12921 D I S C O U R S E I N T H E NOVEL
for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views,
each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values. As
such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supple-
ment one another, contradict one another and be interrelated di-
alogically. As such they encounter one another and co-exist in the
consciousness of real people-first and foremost, in the creative
consciousness of people who write novels. As such, these lan-
guages live a real life, they struggle and evolve in an environment
of social h e t e r ~ ~ l o s s i a . Therefore they are all able to enter into
the unitary plane of the novel, which can unite in itself parodic
stylizations of generic languages, various forms of stylizations
and illustrations of professional and period-bound languages, the
languages of particular generations, of social dialects and others
(as occurs, for example, in the English comic novel). They may all
be drawn in by the novelist for the orchestration of his themes
and for the refracted [indirect) expression of his intentions and
values.

This is why we constantly put forward the referential and ex-
pressive-that is, intentional-factors as the force that stratifies
and differentiates the common literary language, and not the lin-
guistic markers (lexical coloration, semantic overtones, etc.) of
generic languages, professional jargons and so forth-markers
that are, so to speak, the sclerotic deposits of an intentional pro-
cess, signs left behind on the path of the real living project of an
intention, of the particular way it imparts meaning to general lin-
guistic norms. These external markers, linguistically observable
and fixable, cannot in themselves be understood or studied with-
out understanding the specific conceptualization they have been
given by an intention.

Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse ‘ [napravlennost’] toward the object; if we detach ourselves com-
pletely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of
the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social
situation or the fate of a given word in life. To study the word as
iuch, ignorjng the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just a s
senseless a s to study psychological experience outside the con-
text of that real life toward which it was directed a n d by which it

1 is determined.
By stressing the intentional dimension of stratification in liter-

ary language, we are able, as has been said, to locate in a single
series such methodologically heterogeneous phenomena as pro-

I DISCOURSE I N THE NOVEL [29jl

i

fessional and social dialects, world views and individual artistic
works, for in their intentional dimension one finds that common
plane on which they can all be juxtaposed, and juxtaposed di-
alogically. The whole matter consists in the fact that there may
be, between “languages,” highly specific dialogic relations; no
matter how these languages are conceived, they may all be taken
as particular point=w on the world. However varied t h e so-
cial forces doing the work of stratification-a profession, a genre,
a particular tendency, an individual personality-the work itself
everywhere comes down to the (relatively) protracted and socially
meaningful (collective) saturation of language with specific (and
consequently limiting) intentions and accents. The longer this
stratifying saturation goes on, the broader the social circle en-
compassed by it and consequently themore substantial the social
force bringing about such a stratification of language, then the
more sharply focused and stable will be those traces, the linguis-
tic changes in the language markers [linguistic symbols\, that are
left behind in language as a result of this social force’s activity-
from stable (and consequently social) semantic nuances to au-
thentic dialectological markers (phonetic, morphological and
others), which permit us to speak of particular s o c ~ a l dialects.

As a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in
language, there are no “neutral” words and forms-words and
forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely
taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. ~ o r x n –
d i v i d u i ~ c ~ n i o u s n e s s living i i i E J G g u a g e is not an abstract
system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot con-
ception of the world. All words have the “taste” of a profession, a
genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a
generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of
the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged
life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual
overtones, f ~ e n e r i c , tendentious, individualistic] are inevitable in
the word. ,

As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur
in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear
that these were not only various different languages but even in-
ternally variegated languages, that the ideological systems and
,yproaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with
.these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live
in peace and quiet with one another-then the inviolability and
predetermined quality of these languages came to a n end, and the
necessity of actively choosing one’s orientation among them
began.

Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the
forms for its incorporation), is another’s speech in another’s lan-
guage, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted
way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced dis-
course. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses si-
multaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the
character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the au-
thor. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and
two expressions. And all the while these two voices are dialogi-
cally interrelated, they-as it were-know about each other {just
as two exchanges i n a dialogue know of each other and are struc-
tured in this mutual knowledge of each other); it is as if they ac-
tually hold a conversation with each other. Double-voiced dis-
course is always internally dialogized. Examples of this would be
comic, ironic or parodic discourse, the refracting discourse.of a
narrator, refracting discourse in the language of a character and
finally t h e discourse of a whole incorporated genre-all these dis-
courses are double-voiced and internally dialogized. A potential
dialogue is embedded i n them, one as yet unfolded, a concen-

D I S C O U R S E I N T H E N O V E L ( 3 2 5 1

trated dialogue of two voices, two world views, two languages.
Double-voiced, internally dialogized discourse is also possible,

of course, in a language system that is hermetic, pure and unitary,
a system alien to the linguistic relativism of prose consciousness;
it follows that such discourse is also possible in the purely poetic
genres. But in those systems there is n o soil to nourish the devel-
opment of such discourse in the slightest meaningful or essential
way. Double-voiced discourse is very widespread in rhetorical
genres, but even there-remaining as it does within the bound-
aries of a single language system-it is not fertilized by a deep-
rooted connection with the forces of historical becoming that
serve to stratify language, and therefore rhetorical genres are at
best merely a distanced echo of this becoming, narrowed down to
an individual polemic.

Such poetie and rhetorical double-voicedness, cut off from any
process of linguistic stratification, may be adequately unfolded
into an individual dialogue, into individual argument and con-
versation between two persons, even while the exchanges in the
dialogue are immanent to a single unitary language: they may
not be i n agreement, they may even be opposed, but they are di-
verse neither in their speech nor in their language. Such double-
voicing, remaining within the boundaries of a single hermetic
and unitary language system, without any underlying fundamen-
tal socio-linguistic orchestration, may be only a stylistically sec-
ondary accompaniment to the dialogue and forms of polemic.”
The internal bifurcation (double-voicing] of discourse, sufficient
to a single and unitary language and to a consistently monologic
style, can never be a fundamental form of discourse: it is merely a
game, a tempest i n a teapot.

The double-voicedness one finds in prose is of another sort
altogether. There-on the rich soil of novelistic prose-double-
voicedness draws its energy, its dialogized ambiguity, not from i n –
dividual dissonances, misunderstandings or contradictions /how-
ever tragic, however firmly grounded in individual destiniesIjz in
the novel, this double-voicedness sinks its roots deep into a fun-

23. In neoclassi~ism, this double-yoicing becomes crucial only in the low
genres, especially in satire.

2 3 . Within the limits of the world of poetry and a unitary language, every-
tlung important in such disagreements and contradictions can and must be
laid out in a direct and pure dramatic dialogue.

damental, socio-linguistic speech diversity and multi-languaged-
1
!

ness. T N ~ , even in the novel heteroglossia is by and large always
personified, incarnated in indiv~dual human figures, with d ~ s –
agreements and oppositions individualized. But such oppositions
of individual wills and minds are submerged in social hetcroglos- 1
sia, they are reconceptualized through it. Oppositions between

i
individuals are only surface upheavals of the untamed elements I
in social heteroglossia, surface manifestations of those elements
that play on such individual oppositions, make them contradic-
tory, saturate their consciousness and discourses with a more fun-
damental speech diversity.

Therefore the internal dialogism of double-voiced prose dis-
course can never be exhausted thematically (just as the meta-
phoric energy of language can never be exhausted thematically); I
it can never be developed into the motivation or subject for a I
manifest dialogue, such as might fully embody, with no residue,
the internally dialogic potential embedded in linguistic hetero-
glossia. The internal dialogism of authentic prose discourse,
which grows organically out of a stratified and heteroglot lan-
guage, cannot fundamentally be dramatized or dramatically re-
solved (brought to an authentic end]; it cannot ultimately be
fitted into the frame of any manifest dialogue, into the frame of a
mere conversation between persons; it is not ultimately divisible
into verbal exchanges possessing precisely marked boundaries.”

I
This double-voicedness in prose is prefigured in language itself
(in authentic metaphors, as well as in myth), in.language as a so- ~
cia1 phenomenon that is becoming in history, socially stratified
and weathered in this process of becoming.

1 –
The relativizing of linguistic consciousness, its crucial par- !,

ticipation in the social multi- and vari-languagedness of evolving
languages, the various wanderings of semantic and expressive in-
tentions and the trajectory of this consciousness through various
languages (languages that are all equally well conceptualized and
equally objective), the inevitable necessity for such a conscious-
ness to speak indirectly, conditionally, in a refracted way-these
are all indispensable prerequisites for an authentic double-voiced

!
prose discourse. This double-voicedness makes its presence felt
by the novelist in the living heteroglossia of language, and in the i

2 4 The more consistent and unltary the language, the more acute, dra-
matlc and ” h l s h e d ” such exchanges generally are

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [3271

multi-languagedness surrounding and nourishing his own con-
sciousness; it is not invented in superficial, isolated rhetorical po-
lemics with another person.

If the novelist loses touch with this linguistic ground of prose
style, if he is unable to attain the heights of a relativized, Galilean
linguistic consciousness, if he is deaf to organic double-voiced-
ness and to the internal dialogization of living and evolving dis-
course, then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual
possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre. He may, of course,
create an artistic work that compositionally and thematically
will be similar to a novel, will be “made” exactly as a novel is
made, but he will not thereby have created a novel. The style will
always give him away. We will recognize the naively self-con-
fident or obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced
language (perhaps accompanied by a primitive, artificial, worked-
up double-voicedness). We quickly sense that such an author
finds it easy to purge his work of speech diversity: he simply does
not listen to the fundamental heteroglossia inherent in actual
language; he mistakes social overtones, which create the timbres
of words, for irritating noises that it is his task to eliminate. The
novel, when torn out of authentic linguistic speech diversity,
emerges in most cases as a “closet drama,” with detailed, fully de-
veloped and “artistically worked out” stage directions (it is, of
course, bad drama). In such a novel, divested of its language diver-
sity, authorial language inevitably ends up in the awkward and
absurd position of the language of stage directions in play^.’^

. In his well.known works on the theory and teehnlque of the novel,
Spielhagen focuses on precisely such unnovelistic novels, and rgnores pie-
cisely the kind of potential specific to the novel as a genre. As a theoretician
Spielhagen was deaf to heteroglot languages and to that which it specifically
generatcs: double-voiced discourse.

DISCOURSE IN T H E NOVEL [ ~ s I ]

O u r motif carries even greater weight in the realm oi religious
thought and discourse (mythological, mystical and magical). T h e
primary subject of this discourse is a being who speaks: a deity, a
demon, a soothsayer, a prophet. Mythological thought does not,
in general, acknowledge anything not alive or not responsive. Di-
vining the will of a deity, of a demon (good or bad), interpreting
signs of wrath or beneficence, tokens, indications and finally the
transmission and inteipretation of words directly spoken by a de-
ity (revelation), or by h i s prophets, saints, soothsayers-all in all,
thc transnlission and interpretation of the divinely inspired ( a s
opposed to the profane) word are acts of religious thought and dis-
course having the greatest importance. All religious systems,
even primitive ones, possess a n enormous, highly specialized
methodological apparatus (hermeneutics) for transmitting and in-
terpreting various kinds of holy word.

T h e situation is somewhat different in the case of scientific
thought. Here, the significance of discourse as such is com-
paratively weak. Mathematical and natural sciences do not ac-
knowledge discourse as a subject i n i t s own right. In scientific ac-
tivity one must, of course, dcal with another’s discourse-the
words of predecessors, the judgments of critics, majority opinion
and s o forth; one m u s t deal with various forms for transmitting
and interpreting another’s word-struggle with a n authoritative
discourse, overcoming influences, polemics, references, quota-
tions and so forth-but all this remains a mere operational neces-
sity and does not affect the subject matter itself of t h e science,
into whose composition the speaker and his discourse do not, of
course, enter. T h e entire methodological apparatus of the mathe-
matical and natural sciences is directed toward mastery over
m u t e objects, brute things, that do not reveal themselves i n
words, that do not comment on themselves. Acquiring knowl-
edge here is not connected with receiving and interpreting words
or signs from the object itself under consideration.

In t h e humanities-as distinct from the natural and mathe-
matical sciences-there arises the specific task of establishing,
transmitting and interpreting the words of others (for example,
the problem of sources in the methodology of t h e historical
disciplines). And of course in the philological disciplines, the
speaking person and his discourse is the fundamental object of
investigation.

Philology has specific aims and approaches to its subject (the

(3521 DISCOURSE I N THE NOVEL DISCOURSE I N T H E NOVEL [ 3 5 3 ]

speaker and his discourse] that determine the ways it transmits
and represents others’ words (for example, discourse as an object
of study i n the history of language). However, within the limits of
the humanities (and even of philology in the narrow sense] there
is possible a twofold approach to another’s word when it is treated
as something we seek to understand.

The word can be perceived purely as an object (something that
is, i n its essence, a thing). It is perceived as such in the majority of
the linguistic disciplines. In such a word-object even meaning be-
comes a thing: there can be n o dialogic approach to such a word
of the kind immanent to any deep and actual understanding. Un-
derstanding, so conceived, is inevitably abstract: it is completely
separated from the living, ideological power of the word to
mean-from its truth or falsity, its significance or insignificance,
beauty or ugliness. Such a reified word-thing cannot be under-
stood by attempts to penetrate its meaning dialogically: there can
be no conversing with such a word.

In philology, however, a dialogic penetration into the word is
obligatory (for indeed without it n o sort of uriderstanding is possi-
ble]: dialogizing it opens up fresh aspects in the word (semantic
aspects, in the broadest sense), which, since they were revealed
by dialogic means, become more immediate to perception. Every
step forward in our knowledge of the word is preceded by a “stage
of geniusu-a sharpened dialogic relationship to the word-that
in turn uncovers fresh aspects within the word.

Precisely such an approach is needed, more concrete and that
does not deflect discourse from its actual power to mean in real
ideological life, an approach where objectivity of understanding is
linked with dialogic vigor and a deeper penetration into discourse
itself. No other approach is in fact possible in the area of poetics,
or the history of literature (and in the history of ideologies in gen-
eral] or to a considerable extent even in the philosophy of dis-
course: even the driest and flattest positivism in these disciplines
cannot treat the word neutrally, as if it were a thing, but is obliged
to initiate talk not only about words but inwords, in order to pen-
etrate their ideological meanings-which can only be grasped di-
alogically, and which include evaluation and response. The forms –
in which a dialogic understanding is transmitted and interpreted
may, if the understanding is deep and vigorous, even come to have
significant parallels with the double-voiced representations of an-
other’s discourse that we find in prose art. It should be noted that

the novel always includes in itself the activity of coming to know
another’s word, a coming to knowledge whose process is repre-
sented in the novel.

Finally, a few words about the importance of our theme in the
rhetorical genres. The speaker and his discourse is, indisputably,
one of the most important subjects of rhetorical speech land all
other themes are inevitably implicated in the topic of discoursel.
In the rhetoric of the courts, for example, rhetorical discourse ac-
cuses or defends the subject of a trial, who is, of course, a speaker,
and in so doing relies on his words, interprets them, polemicizes
with them, creatively erecting potential discourses for the ac-
cused or for the defense (just such free creation of likely, but never
actually uttered, words, sometimes whole speeches-“as h e
must have said” or “as he might have said1′-was a device very
widespread in ancient rhetoric); rhetorical discourse tries to out-
wit possible retorts to itself, it passes on and compiles t h e words
of witnesses and so forth. In political rhetoric, for example, dis-
course can support some candidacy, represent the personality of a
candidate, present and defend his point of view, his verbal state-
ments, or in other cases protest against some decree, law, order,
announcement, occasion-that is, protest against the specific
verbal utterances toward which it is dialogically aimed.

Publicistic discourse also deals with the word itself and with
the individual as its agent: it criticizes a speech, an article, a point
of view; it polemicizes, exposes, ridicules and so forth. When it
analyzes an act it uncovers its verbal motifs, the point of view in
which it is grounded, it formulates such acts in words, providing
them the appropriate emphases-ironic, indignant and so on.
This does not mean, of course, that the rhetoric behind the word
forgets that there are deeds, acts, a reality outside words. But such
rhetoric has always to do with social man,’ whose most funda-
mental gestures are made meaningful ideologically through t h e
word, or directly embodied in words.

The importance of another’s speech as a subject in rhetoric is
so great that the word frequently begins to cover over and sub-
stitute itself for reality; when this happens the word itself is di-
minished and becomes shallow. Rhetoric is often limited to pure-
ly verbal victories over the word; when this happens, rhetoric
degenerates into a formalistic verbal play. But, we repeat, when
discourse is torn from reality, it is fatal for the word itself as well:
words grow sickly, lose semantic depth and flexibility, the capac-

( 3 5 4 ) DISCOURSE I N THE NOVEL

ity to expand and renew their meanings in new living contexts-
they essentially die as discourse, for the signifying word lives
beyond itself, that is, it lives by means of directing its purposive-
ness outward. The exclusive concentration on another’s dis-
course as a subject does not, however, in itself inevitably indicate
such a rupture between discourse and reality.

Rhetorical genres possess the most varied forms for transmit-
ting another’s speech, and for the most part these are intensely
dialogized forms. Rhetoric relies heavily on the vivid re-accen-
tuating of the words it transmits (often to the point of distorting
them completely) that is accomplished by the appropriate fram-
ing context. Rhetorical genres provide rich material for studying
a variety of forms for transmitting another’s speech, the most var-
ied means for formulating and framing such speech. Using rhet-
oric, even a representation of a speaker and his discourse of the
sort one finds in prose art is possible-but the rhetorical double-
voicedness of such images is usually not very deep: its roots do
not extend to the dialogical essence of evolving language itself; it
is not structured on authentic heteroglossia but on a mere diver-
sity of voices; in most cases the double-voicedness of rhetoric i s
abstract and thus lends itself to formal, purely logical analysis of
the ideas that are parceled out in voices, an analysis that then
exhausts it. For this reason it is proper to speak of a distinctive
rhetorical double-voicedness, or, put another way, to speak of
the double-voiced rhetorical transmission of another’s word (al-
though it may involve some artistic aspects), in contrast to the
double-voiced representation of another’s word in the novel with
its orientation toward the image of a language.

Such, then, is the importance of the speaker and his discourse
as a topic in all areas of everyday, as well as verbal-ideological,
life. It might be said, on the basis of our argument so far, that in
the makeup of almost every utterance spoken by a social per-
son-from a brief response in a casual dialogue to major verbal-
ideological works [literary, scholarly and others)-a significant
number of words can be identified that are implicitly or explicitly
admitted as someone else’s, and that are transmitted by a variety
of different means. Within the arena of almost every utterance an
intense interaction and struggle between one’s own and another’s
word is being waged, a process in which they oppose or dia-
logically interanimate each other. The utterance so conceived is a
considerably more complex and dynamic organism than it ap-

DISCOURSE I N THE NOVEL (3551

pears when construed simply as a thing that articulates theinten-
tion of the person uttering it, which is to see the utterance as a
direct, single-voiced vehicle for expression.

That one of the main subjects of human speech is discourse it-
self has not up t o now been sufficiently taken into consideration, ‘
nor has its crucial importance been appreciated. There has been
no comprehensive philosophical grasp of all the ramifications of
this fact. The specific nature of discourse as a topic of speech, one
that requires t h e transmission and re-processing of another’s
word, has not been understood: one may speak of another’s dis-
course only with the help of that alien discourse itself, although
in the process, it is true, the speaker introduces into the other’s
words his own intentions and highlights the context of those
words in his own way. To speak of discourse as one might speak
of any other subject, that is, thematically, without any dialogized
transmission of it, is possible only when such discourse is utterly
reified, a thing; it is possible, for example, to talk about the word
in sueh a way in grammar, where it is precisely the dead, thing-
like shell of the word that interests us.

All the highly varied forms worked out for the dialogized trans-
mission of another’s word, both in everyday life and in extra-
artistic ideological communication, are utilized in the novel in
two ways. In the first place, all these forms are present and re-
produced in t h e ideologically meaningful as well as the casual
utterances of the novel’s characters, and they are also present in
the inserted genres-in diaries, confessions, journalistic articles
and so on. In the second place, all the forms for dialogizing the
transmission of another’s speech are directly subordinated to the
task of artistically representing t h e speaker and his discourse as
the image of a language, in which case the others’ words must
undergo special artistic reformulation.

What, we may ask, is the basic distinction between forms for
transmittinganother’s word as they exist outside the world of art
and the artistie representation of such transmission in the novel!

All extra-artistic forms, even those that closely approach artis-
tic representation-as, for instance, in certain rhetorical double-
voiced genres (parodic stylizations)-are oriented toward the
utterance of individual persons. These are practically engaged ex-
changes of others’ isolated utterances, at best serving only to ele-
vate single utterances to a point where they may be perceived as

13561 D I S C O U R S E I N T H E N O V E L

generalized utterances in someone else’s manner of speaking,
thus utterances that may be taken as socially typical or charac-
teristic. These extra-artistic forms, concentrated as they are on
the transmission [even if free and creative) of utterances, do not
endeavor to recognize and intensify images lying behind the iso-
lated utterances of social language, a language that realized itself
in them but is not exhausted by them, for it is precisely an im-
age-and not a positivistic, empirical given of that language. In
an authentic novel there can be sensed behind each utterance the
elemental force of social languages, with their internal logic and
internal necessity. The image in such cases reveals not only the
reality of a given language but also, as it were, its potential, its
ideal limits and its total meaning conceived as a whole, its truth
together with its limitations.

Thus double-voicedness in the novel, as distinct from double-
voicedness in rhetorical or other forms, always tends toward a
double-Ianguagedness as its own outside limit. Therefore novel-
istic double-voicedness cannot be unfolded into logical contradic-
tions or into purely dramatic contrasts. It is this quality that de-
termines the distinctiveness of novelistic dialogues, which push
to the limit the mutual nonunderstanding represented by people
who speak in different languages.

We must once again emphasize that what is meant here by so-
cial language is not the undifferentiated mass [sovokupnost’] of
linguistic markers determining the way in which a language is
dialectologically organized and individuated, but rather the con-
crete, living, integral mass [celokupnost’l made up of all the
markers that give that language its social profile, a profile that by
defining itself through semantic shifts and lexical choices can be
established even within the boundaries of a linguistically unitary
language. A social language, then, is a concrete socio-linguistic
belief system that defines a distinct identity for itself within the
boundaries of a language that is unitary only in the abstract. Such
a language system frequently does not admit a strict linguistic
definition, but it is pregnant with possibilities for further dialec-
tological individuation: it is a potential dialect, its embryo not
yet fully formed. Language in its historical life, in its heteroglot
development, is full of such potential dialects: they intersect one
another in a multitude of ways; some fail to develop, some die off,
but others blossom into authentic languages. We repeat: language
is something that is historically real, a process of heteroglot de-

D I S C O U R S E I N T H E N O V E L [ 3 5 7 ]

velopment, a process teeming with future and former languages,
with prim but moribund aristocrat-languages, with parvenu-lan-
guages and with countless pretenders to the status of language-
which are all more or less successful, depending on their degree
of social scope and on the ideological area in which they are
employed.

The image of such a language in a novel is the image assumed
by a set of social beliefs, the image of a social ideologeme that has
fused with its own discourse, with its own language. Therefore
such an image is very far from being formalistic, and artistic play
with such languages far from being formalistic play. In the novel
formal markers of languages, manners and styles are symbols for
sets of social beliefs. External linguistic features are frequently
used as peripheral means t o mark socio-linguistic differences,
sometimes even in the form of direct authorial commentaries on
the characters’ language. In Fathers and Sons, for example, Tur-
genev sometimes goes out of his way to emphasize his characters’
peculiarities in word usage or pronunciation (which can be, by
the way, extremely characteristic from a sociohistorical point of
view).

Thus the different ways the word “principle” is pronounced in
the novel can scrve to mark off different historical and cultural
social worlds: the world of noble-landowner culture of the twen-
ties and thirties, raised o n French literature but a stranger to
the Latin language and to German science, or the world of the
raznotinec intelligentsia of the fifties, with the tone of a seminar-
ist or doctor raised on Latin and on German science. The hard
Latin or German pronunciation of the word “principles” won out
in the Russian language. As a further example we might note
Kukshina’s use of the word gospodin [gentleman] for Celovek
(man], a word choice rooted in the lower and middle genres of lit-
erary language.

Such direct, external commentary on the peculiarities of char-
acters’ languages is typical for the novel as a genre, but it is not of
course through them that the image of a language is created in a
novel. Such commentary has already itself been turned into an
object: in such situations the author’s words have dialogized,
double-voiced and double-languaged overtones to them (for ex-
ample, as they interact with the characterological zones dis-
cussed in the preceding chapter).

The context surrounding represented speech plays a major role

in creating the image of a language. The framing context, like the
sculptor’s chisel, hews out the rough outlines of someone else’s
speech, and carves the image of a language out of the raw empiri-
cal data of speech life; i t concentrates and fuses the internal im-
pulse of the represented language with the exterior objects it
names. The words of the author that represent and frame an-
other’s speech create a perspective for it; they separate light from
shadow, create the situation and conditions necessary for it to
sound; finally, they penetrate into the interior of the other’s
speech, carrying into it the11 own accents and their own expres-
sions, creating for it a dialogizing background.

Thanks to the ability of a language to represent another lan-
guage while still retaining the capacity to sound simultaneously
both outside it and within it, to talk about it and at the same time
to talk in and with it-and thanks to the ability of the language
being represented simultaneously to serve as an object of repre-
sentation while continuing to be able to speak to itself-thanks
to all this, the creation of specific novelistic images of languages
becomes possible. Therefore, the framing authorial context can
least of all treat the language i t is representing as a thing, a mute
and unresponsive speech object, something that remains outside
the authorial context as might any other object of speech.

All devices in the novel for creating the image of a language
may be reduced to three basic categories: ( I ] hybridizations, [ z ]
the dialogized interrelation of languages and ( 3 ) pure dialogues.

These three categories of devices can only theoretically be sep-
arated i n this fashion since in reality they are always inextricably
woven together into the unitary artistic fabric of the image.

What i s a hybridization? It is a mixture of two social languages
within the limits of a single utterance, a n encounter, within the
arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic con-
sciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social
differentiation or by some other factor.

Such mixing of two languages within the boundaries of a single
utterance is, i n the novel, an artistic device (or more accurately, a
system of devices) that is deliberate. But unintentional, uncon-
scious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the
historical life and evolution of all languages. We may even say
that language and languages change historically primarily by
means of hybridization, by means of a mixing of various “lan-

D l S C O U R S E I N THE NOVEL [ 3 5 9 ]

p a g e s ” co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a
single national language, a single branch, a single group of dif-
ferent branches or different groups of such branches, in the histor-
ical as well as paleontological past of languages-but the crucible
for this mixing always remains the utterance.”‘

The artistic image of a language must by its very nature be a
linguistic hybrid [an intentional hybrid]: it is obligatory for two
linguistic consciousnesses to be present, the one being repre-
sented and the other doing the representing, with each belonging
to a different system of language. Indeed, if there is not a second
representing consciousness, if there is no second representing
language-intention, then what results is not an image [obrazl of
language but merely a sample [obrazecl of some other person’s
language, whether authentic or fabricated.

The image of a language conceived as an intentional hybrid
is first of all a conscious hybrid (as distinct from a historical,
organic, obscure language hybrid); an intentional hybrid is pre-
cisely the perception of one language by another language, its il-
lumination by another linguistic consciousness. An image of lan-
guage may be structured only from the point of view of another
language, which is taken as the norm.

What is more, an intentional and conscious hybrid is not a mix-
ture of two impersonal language consciousnesses [the correlates
of two languages) but rather a mixture of two individualized lan-
guage consciousnesses (the correlates of two specific utterances,
not merely two languages) and two individual language-inten-
tions as well: the individual, representing authorial conscious-
ness and wi4, on the one hand, and the individualized linguistic
consciousness and will of the character represented, on the other.
For indeed, since concrete, isolated utterances are constructed in
this represented language, it follows that the represented linguis-
tic consciousness must necessarily be embodied in “authors””%f
some s o ~ t who speak in the given language, who structure utter-
ances in that language and who therefore introduce into the
potentialities of language itself their own actualizing language-

34. Such historically unconscious hybrids are similar to double-languaged
hybrids but they are, of course, single-voiced. Semi-organic, semi-intentional
hybridization is characteristic of a system of literary lannuaee. . – –

3 5 . Even though these “authors” niay be impersonal, merely types-as in
the stylizations of generic languages and of public opinion.

1360) DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

intention. T h u s there are always two consciousnesses, two lan-
guage-intrntions, two voices and consequently two accents par-
ticipating in an intentional and conscious artistic hybrid.

While noting the individual element in intentional hybrids, we
must once again strongly emphasize the fact that in novelistic ar-
tistic hybrids that structure the image of a language, the individ-
ual element, indispensable as it is for the actualization of lan-
guage and for its subordination t o t h e artistic whole of t h e novel
(here the destinies of languages are interwoven with t h e indi-
vidual destinies of speaking persons], is nevertheless inexorably
merged with the socio-linguistic element. In other words, the
novelistic hybrid i s not only double-voiced and double-accented
(as in rhetoric) but is also double-languaged; for in it there are not
only (and not even s o m u c h ) two individual consciousnesses, two
voices, two accents, as there are t w o socio-linguistic conscious-
nesses, two epochs, that, true, are not here unconsciously mixed
(as in an organic hybrid), but that come together and consciously
fight it out on the territory of the utterance..

T h e Two S t y l i s t i c Lines of D e v e l o p m e n t
in t h e E u r o p e a n N o v e l

T h e novel is the expression of a Galilean perception of language,
one that denies the absolutism of a single and unitary language-
that is, that refuses t o acknowledge its own language as the sole
verbal and semantic center of t h e ideological world. It is a percep-
tion that has been made conscious of t h e vast plenitude of na-

i

DISCOURSE I N THE NOVEL (3671

tional and, more t o the point, social languages-all of which are
equally capable of being “languages of truth,” but, since such i s
the case, all of which are equally relative, reified and limited, as
they are merely t h e languages of social groups, professions and
other cross.sections of everyday life. T h e novel begins by presum-
ing a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world, a
certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness, which
no longer possesses a sacrosanct and unitary linguistic medium
for containing ideological thought; it i s a consciousness man-
ifesting itself i n the midst of social languages that are surrounded
by a single [national] language, and in the midst of [other] na-
tional languages that are surrounded by a single culture [Hellen-
istic, Christian, Protestant], or by a single cultural-polit~cal world
(the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Roman Empire and s o forth).

What i s involved here i s a very.important, in fact a radical revo-
lution in the destinies of human discourse: the fundamental lib-
eration of cultural-semantic and emotional intentions from the
hegemony of a single and unitary language, and consequently the
simultaneous loss o f a feeling for language as myth, that is, as an
absolute form of thought. Therefore it i s not enough merely to
uncover the multiplicity of languages i n a cultural world or the
speech diversity within a particular national language-we m u s t
see through t o the heart of this revolution, to all the conse- –
quences flowing from it, possible only under very specific so-
ciohistorical conditions.

In order that an artistically profound play with social languages
become possible, it is necessary t o alter radically t h e feel for dis-
course at the level of general literature and language. I t i s neces-
sary to come t o terms with discourse as a reified, “typical” but at
the same timc intentional phenomenon; we must learn how to
become sensitive to the “internal form” (in the Humboldtian
sense) of an alien language, and to the “internal form” of one’s
own language as an alien form; we m u s t learn how to develop a

I
sensitivity toward t h e brute materiality, t h e typicality, that is t h e
essential attribute not only of actions, gestures and separate

! words and expressions, but the basic ingredient as well in points
of view, in how the world is seen and felt, ways that arcorganical-
ly part and parcel with the language that expresses them. Such a
perception i s possible only for a consciousness organically par-
ticipating i n the universurn of mutually illuminating languages.
What is wanted for this t o happen i s a fundamental intersecting

13681 DISCOURSE I N THE NOVEL

of languages in a single given consciousness, one that participates
equally in several languages.

The decentralizing of the verbal-ideological world that finds its
expression in the novel begins by presuming fundamentally dif-
ferentiated social groups, which exist in an intense and vital in-
teraction with other social groups. A sealed-off interest group,
caste or class, existing within an internally unitary and unchang-
ing core of its own, cannot serve as socially productive soil for t h e
development of the novel unless it becomes riddled with decay or
shifted somehow from its state of internal balance and self-suffi-
ciency. This is the case because a literary and language con-
sciousness operating from the heights of its own uncontestably
authoritative unitary language fails to take into account the fact
of heteroglossia and multi-languagedness. The heteroglossia that
rages beyond the boundaries of such a sealed-off cultural uni-
verse, a universe having its own literary language, is capable of
sending into the lower genres only purely reified, unintentional
speech images, word-things that lack any novelistic-prose poten-
tial. It is necessary that heteroglossia wash over a culture’s aware-
ness of itself and its language, penetrate to its core, relativize the
primary language system underlying its ideology and literature
and deprive it of its naive absence of conflict.

But even this will not suffice. Even a community torn by social
struggle-if it remains isolated and sealed-off as a national en-
tity-will be insufficient social soil for relativization of literary-
language consciousness at the deepest level, for its re-tunmg into
a new prosaic key. The internal speech diversity of a literary di-
alect and of its surrounding extraliterary environment, that is,
the entire dialectological makeup of a given national language,
must have the sense that it is surrounded by an ocean of hetero-
glossia, heteroglossia that is, moreover, primary and that fully re-
veals an intentionality, a mythological, religious, sociopolitical,
literary system of its own, along with all the other cultural-ideo-
logical systems that belong to it. Even were an extranational
multi-languagedness not actually to penetrate the system of liter-
ary language and the system of prose genres (in the way that the
extraliterary dialects of one and the same language do, in fact,
penetrate these systems)-nevertheless, such external multi-lan-
guagedness strengthens and deepens the internal contradictori-
ness of literary language itself; it undermines the authority of
custom and of whatever traditions still fetter linguistic con-

,! *

i
DISCOURSE I N THE NOVEL [369]

sciousness; it erodes that system of national myth that is organi-
cally fused with language, in effect destroying once and for all a
mythic and magical attitude to language and the word. A deeply
involved participation in alien cultures and languages (one is i m –

#, possible without the other) inevitably leads to an awareness of
i the disassociation between language and intentions, language and
I thought, language and expression.

i
By “disassociation” we have in mind here a destruction of any

absolute bonding of ideological meaning to language; which is
!
: the defining factor of mythological and mag~cal thought. An ab-
I solute fusion of word with concrete ideological meaning is, with-
i out a doubt, one of the most fundamental constitutive features of
I myth, on the one hand determining the development of mytho-

logical images, and on the other determining a special feeling for
I the forms, meanings and stylistic combinations of language.

Mythological thinking in the power of the language containing
it-a language generating out of itself a mythological reality that
has its own linguistic connections and interrelationships-then

i substitutes itself for the connections and interrelationships of re-
I ality itself (this is the transposition of language categories and de-

pendences into theogonic and cosmogonic categories). But lan-
guage too is under the power of images of the sort that dominate

I mythological thinking, and these fetter the free movement of its
intentions and thus make i t more difficult for language categories
to achieve a wider application and greater flexibility, a purer for-

! ma1 structure (this would result from their fusion with materially
concrete relationships); they limit the word’s potential for greater

I e~pressiveness.’~ The absolute hegemony of myth over language as well the he- gemony of language over the perception and conceptualization of reality are of course located in the prehistorical /and therefore
1 necessarily hypothetical) past of language consciousness.37 But

3 6 . We cannot here engage in depth the problem of the interrelationship of

1 language and myth. In the relevant literature this problem has up to now
been treated on the psycholo@cal level alone, with an orientation toward
folklore, and wlthout linking it to concrete problems in the history of lan-

I guage consciousness ISteinhal, Lazarus, Wundt and othersI.Jn Russia Pot- ebnia and Veselovskri demonstrated the fundamental relationship between these two problems.
3 7 . Thrs scientific area is first deemed worthy of seientific Inquiry in the

“paleontology of meanings” of the Japhetists.

13701 D I S C O U R S E I N T H E NOVEL

even in those eras where t h e absolutism of this hegemony has
long since been displaced-in t h e already historical epochs of
language consciousness-a mythological feeling for t h e authority
of language and a faith i n t h e unmediated transformation into a
seamless u n i t y of t h e entire sense, t h e entire expressiveness in-
herent i n t h a t authority, are still powerful enough i n all higher
ideological genres t o exclude t h e possibility of any artistic use
of linguistic speech diversity i n t h e major literary forms. T h e
resistance of a unitary, canonic language, of a national m y t h bol-
stered by a yet-unshaken unity, i s still too strong for heteroglossia
t o relativize and decenter literary a n d language consciousness.
T h i s verbal-ideological decentering will occur only when a na-
tional culture loses its sealed-off and self-sufficient character,
when it becomes conscious of itself as only one among other cul-
tures and languages. It i s this knowledge that will sap t h e roots of
a mythological feeling for language, based as i t i s on a n absolute
fusion of ideological meaning with language; there will arise a n
acute feeling for language boundaries (social, national and seman-
tic), and only t h e n will language reveal its essential h u m a n char-
acter; from behind its words, forms, styles, nationally charac-
teristic and socially typical faces begin t o emerge, t h e images of
speaking h u m a n beings. T h i s will occur, moreover, at all layers of
language without exception, even i n t h e layers of greatest inten-
tionality-the languages of t h e high ideological genres. Language
(or more precisely, languages) will itself become a n artistically
complete image of a characteristic h u m a n way of sensing and
seeing t h e world. Language, no longer conceived as a sacrosanct
and solitary embodiment of meaning and truth, becomes merely
o n e of m a n y possible ways t o hypothesize meaning.

T h e situation i s analogous i n those cases where a single a n d
unitary literary language is at t h e same t i m e another’s language.
What inevitably happens is a decay a n d collapse of t h e religious,
political a n d ideological authority connected with that language.
It is during t h i s $recess of decay that t h e decentered language
consciousness of prose art ripens, finding its support i n t h e social
heteroglossia of national languages that are actually spoken.

This is how those germs of novelistic prose appear i n t h e poly-
and heteroglot world of the Hellenistic era, i n Imperial Rome and
during t h e disintegration and collapse of t h e church-directed cen-
tralization of discourse and ideology in t h e Middle Ages. Even i n
modern times, t h e flowering of t h e novel is always connected

D I S C O U R S E I N T H E NOVEL [371]

with a disintegration of stable verbal-ideological systems a n d
with a n intensification and intentionalization of speech diversity
that are counterpoised t o t h e previously reigning stable systems,
an activity that goes o n both within t h e limits of t h e literary di-
alect itself and outside it. — – – –

Style can
be defined as t h e fundamental and creative (triple] relationship of
discourse to its object, to t h e speaker himself and to another’s
discourse; style strives organically t o assimilate material into
language and language into material. Style cannot accommodate
anything that i s i n excess of this exposition, anything given, al-
ready shaped, formed i n words; style either permeates t h e object
directly and w i t h o u t any mediation, a s i n poetry, or refracts its
own intentions, as i n literary prose (even t h e prose novelist does
not expound t h e speech of another, but rather constructs a n artis-
tic image of it). T h u s t h e chivalric romance in verse, while it too
is defined by a rupture between material and language, is able t o
overcome this gap and t o assimilate material to its language,
thereby creating a special variant of authentic novelistic style.4′

47. Translating and assimiIating alien material is completed here not in
the individual consciousness of the creators of novels: this process, lengthy
and multi-staged, is accomplished in the literary-language consciousness of
the epoch. Individual consciousness neither begins it nor ends it, but is part
of its progress.

The concept “general
literariness” regulates tne area or spoKen and written heteroglos-
sia that swirls in from all sides on the fixed and strict poetic
genre-genres whose demands spring neither from conversation-
al nor from everyday written language.s0 “General literariness”
attempts to introduce order into this heteroglossia, to make sin-
gle, particular style canonical for it.

We repeat, the concrete content of this extra-generic literari-
ness of language can be profoundly diverse, with varying degrees
of specificity and concreteness; for its support it may rely on a
variety of cultural-ideological intentions, it may motivate itself
with the most diverse interests and values-and all this in order
to preserve the socially sealed-off quality of a privileged commu-
nity (“the language of respectable society”), or to preserve local
interests at the national level-for example, to reinforce the he-
gemony of the Tuscan dialect in the Italian literary language-or
to defend the interests of cultural-political centralization, as oc-
curred for example in France in the seventeenth century. A wide
variety of concrete forces may fill this category: its function may
be served by an academic grammar, a school, salons, literary
tendencies, specific genres and so forth. And this category may
seek to extend its borders to the limit of language [as opposed to
style], that is, to the outer limits defining a language: in such
cases it achieves a maximal degree of generality but is deprived of
almost all ideological coloration and specificity (in such cases it
motivates itself with phrases of the type “such is the spirit of lan-
guage,” “that is very French,” etc.). But it may also do the op-
posite, and seek its stylistic [as opposed to linguistic] limit: in
this case its content becomes even more ideologically concrete,
and acquires a certain definiteness as regards objects and emo-
tions. These new requirements serve to define, with great speci-
ficity, those who speak and those who write (in such cases, it

l o . The horizon of “literary language” may be considerably narrowed
down in other epochs-when one or another semi-literary genre works out a
fixed and sharply differentiated canon (for example, the epistolary genre).

DISCOURSE I N T H E NOVEL [ 3 8 3 ]

motivates itself in this way: “thus should every respectable per-
< son think, talk, and write," or "every refined and sensitive man

does thus and so . . . ,” etc.1. In the latter instance, the “literad-
ness” regulating the genres of ordinary everyday life (conversa-
tions, letters, diaries] cannot fail to exercise an influence-some-
times very profound-on the way we think in our actual lives,
and even on our very life-styles, creating “literary people” and
“literary deeds.” And finally, there is great variety in the degree to
which this category may be historically actualized and essential
in the history of literature and literary language: it may be great,
for instance, as in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, but it can also be negligible; thus, in other epochs, hetero-
glossia (even dialectological heteroglossia] spills over even into
the high poetic genres. All of this-the nature and varying de-
grees of historical actuality-depends of course on the content of
“literary language,” on the force and durability of the cultural and
political instantiation upon which it relies.

We are touching here only fleetingly on the extremely impor-
tant category of the “general literariness of language.” We are not
concerned with its significance in literature in general or i n the
history of literary language, but only as it plays a role in the his-
tory of novelistic style. And its importance here is enormous: it
has a direct significance in novels of the First Stylistic Line, and
an indirect significance in novels of the Second Line.

Novels of the First Stylistic Line aspire to organize and styl-
istically order the heteroglossia of conversational language, as
well as of written everyday and semiliterary genres. To a signif-
icant extent this impulse to order determines their relationship
to heteroglossia. Novels of the Second Stylistic Line, however,
transform this already organized and ennobled everyday and liter-
ary language into essential material for its own orchestration, and
into people for whom this language is appropriate, that is, into
“literary people” with their literary way of thinking and their lit-
erary ways of doing things-that is, such a novel transforms
them into authentic characters.

An understanding of the stylistic essence of the First Line is
impossible without taking into account the following extremely
important consideration, namely the special relationship these
novels have with conversational language and with life and every-
day genres. Discourse in the novel is structured on an unin-
terrupted mutual interaction with the discourse of life. The chi-

ll!

(3841 D I S C O U R S E I N THE N O V E L

valric romance i n prose sets itself against the “low,” “vulgar”
heteroglossia of all areas of life and counterbalances to it its own
specifically idealized, “ennobled” discourse. Vulgar, nonliterary
discourse is saturated with low intentions and crude emotional
expressions, oriented in a narrowly practical direction, overrun
with petty philistine associations and reeks of specific contexts.
The chivalric romance opposes to all this i t s own discourse,
linked only with the highest and noblest associations, filled with
references to lofty contexts (historical, literary, scholarly). Thus
may the ennobled word-as distinct from the poetic word-re-
place the vulgar word i n conversations, letters and other everyday
genres just as a euphemism replaces a coarse expression, for, it

~~ . seeks to orient itself i n the same sphere as real-life discourse.

Poetry also comes upon language as stratified, language in the
process of uninterrupted ideological evolution, already frag-
mented into “languages!’ And poetry also sees its own language
surrounded by other languages, surrounded by literary and extra-
literary heteroglossia. But poetry, striving for maximal purity,
works in its own language as if that language were unitary, the
only language, as if there were n o heteroglossia outside it. Poetry
behaves as if it lived i n the heartland of its own language territory,
and does not approach too closely the borders of this language,
where it would inevitably be brought into dialogic contact with
heteroglossia; poetry chooses not to look beyond the boundaries
of its own language. If, during an epoch of language crises, the
language of poeky does change, poetry immediately canonizes
the new language as one that is unitary and singular, as if n o
other language existed.

What i s present in the novel is an artistic system of languages,
or more accurately a system of images of languages, and the real
task of stylistic analysis consists in uncovering all the available
orchestrating languages in the composition of the novel, grasping
the precise degree of distancing that separates each language from
its most immediate semantic instantiation in the work as a
whole, and the varying angles of refraction of intentions within
it, understanding their dialogic interrelationships and-finally-
if there i s direct authorial discourse, determining the heteroglot
background outside the work that dialogizes it (for novels of the
First Line, this final task is the primary one).

A resolution of these stylistic tasks necessitates first and fore-
most profound artistic and ideological penetration into the nov-
el.65 Only by such a penetration (reinforced, of course, by factual
knowledgel can the artistic meaning of t h e whole be mastered
and can we begin to sense how that artistic meaning is the source
from which everything flows: the tiniest differences in distance
between individual aspects of language and their most immediate

6 5 . Such insight also involves a value judgment on the novel, one not only
artistic in the narrow sense but also ideological-for there is n o artist~c un-
derstanding without cvaluation.

DISCOURSE I N THE NOVEL (4171

semantic instantiation in the work, the most subtle nuances in
the way an author accents various languages and their different
aspects. No purely linguistic observations, however subtle, can
ever uncover this movement and play of authorial intentions as
they are at work among different languages and aspects of lan-
guages. Artistic and ideological penetration into the whole of the
novel must at all times be guided by stylistic analysis. One must
not forget during this process that the languages introduced into
the novel are shaped into artistic images of languages (they are
not raw linguistic data), and this shaping may be more or less ar-
tistic and successful, may more or less respond to the spirit and
power of the languages that are being represented.

But, of course, artistic penetration by itself is not enough. Sty-
listic analysis encounters a whole series of difficulties, especially
when it deals with works from distant times and alien languages,
where our artistic perception cannot rely for support on a living
feel for a language. In such a case (figuratively speaking) the entire
language-as a consequence of our distance from it-seems to lie
on one and the same plane; we cannot sense in it any three-di-
mensionality or any distinction between levels and distances.
Here historico-linguistic research into the language systems and
styles available to a given era (social, professional, generic, ten-
dentious) will aid powerfully in re-creating a third dimension for
t h e language of the novel, will help us to differentiate and find t h e
proper distances within that language. But linguistic analysis is,
of course, an indispensable support even when studying contem-
porary works.

But even this is not enough. A stylistic analysis of the novel
cannot be productive outside a profound understanding of hetero-
glossia, an understanding of the dialogue of languages as it exists
in a given era. But in order to understand such dialogue, or even to
become aware initially that a dialogue is going on at all, mere
knowledge of the linguistic and stylistic profile of the languages
involved will be insufficient: what is needed is a profound under-
standing of each language’s socio-ideological meaning and an ex-
act knowledge of the social distribution and ordering of all t h e
other ideological voices of the era.

An analysis of novel style confronts a unique difficulty in t h e
fact that the processes of transformation (to which every lan-
guage phenomenon is subject) occur at a very rapid rate of change:
the process of canonization, and the process of re-accentuation.

When certain aspects of heteroglossia are incorporated into the

[418] DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

language of a novel-for example, provincialism, characteristic
professional and technical expressions and so forth-they may
serve t o orchestrate authorial intentions [consequently they are
always distanced, “qualified”]. But other aspects of heteroglossia,
analogous to the first, may, at the given moment, already have
lost their flavor of “belonging to another language”; they may al-
ready have been canonized by literary language, and are con-
sequently sensed by the author as no longer within the system of
provincial patois or professional jargon but as belonging rather to
the system of literary language. It would be a gross mistake to as-
cribe to such aspects an orchestrating function: they either al-
ready lie on the same plane as the author’s language or, in those
cases where the author is not at one with contemporary literary
language, they exist within a different orchestrating language (a
literary, not provincial, language). In other instances it even be-
comes very difficult to decide what, for the author, has become an
already canonized element of the literary language and in what he
still senses heteroglossia. The more distant the work to be ana-
lyzed is from contemporary consciousness, the more serious this
difficulty becomes. It is precisely in the most sharply heteroglot
eras, when the collision and interaction of languages is especially
intense and powerful, when heteroglossia washes over literary
language from all sides [that is, in precisely those eras that most
conduce to the novel) that aspects of heteroglossia are canonized
with great ease and rapidly pass from one language system to an-
other: from everyday life into literary language, from literary lan-
guage into the language of everyday, from professional jargon into
more general use, from one genre to another and so forth. In this
intense struggle, boundaries are drawn with new sharpness and
simultaneously erased with new ease; it is sometimes impossible
to establish precisely where they have been erased or where cer-
tain of the warring parties have already crossed over into alien
territory. All this gives rise to enormous difficulties for the ana-
lyst. In more stable eras languages are more conservative; can-
onization is accomplished more slowly, with more difficulty,
and thus it can be easily traced. We should add, however, that
the speed with which canonization is accomplished creates diffi-
culties only in trivial matters, in the details of stylistic analy-
sis (primarily in analyzing others’ words scattered sporadically
throughout authorial speech). For anyone who grasps the basic or-
chestrating languages and the basic lines of movement and play
of intentions, canonization is no obstacle.

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [4191

The second process-re-accentuation-is considerably more
complicated and may fundamentally distort the way novel style
is understood. This process has to do with the “feel” we have for
distancing, and involves the tact with which an author assigns
his accents, sometimes smudgng and often completely destroy-
ing for us their finer nuances. We have already had occasion to
point out that several types and variants of double-voiced dis-
course can, when being perceived, very easily lose their second
voice and fuse with single-voiced direct speech. Thus a parodic
quality (in those situations where it is not an end in itself, but is
united with a representing function) may under certain circum-
stances be easily and quickly lost to perception, or be signifi-
cantly weakened. We have already shown how parodied dis-
course, in an authentic prose image, can offer internal dialogic
resistance to the parodying intentions. For the word is, after all,
not a dead material object in the hands of an artist equipped with
it; it is a living word and is therefore in all things true to itself; it
may become anachronous and comic, it may reveal its narrow-
ness and one-sidedness, but its meaning-once realized-can
nevcr he completely extinguished. And under changed conditions
this meaning may emit bright new rays, burning away the reify-
ing crust that had grown up around it and thus removing any real
ground for a parodic accentuation, dimming or completely ex-
tinguishing such re-accentuation. In this process we must keep in
mind the following peculiarity of every true prosaic image: au-
thorial intentions move through it as if along a curve; the dis-
tances between discourse and intentions are always changing (in
other words, the angle of refraction is always changing); a com-
plete solidarity between the author and his discourse, a fusion of
their voices, is only possible at the apexes of the curve. At the
nadirs of the curve the opposite occurs: it is possible to have a full
reification of the image (and consequently a gross parody on it),
that is, it becomes possible to have an image deprived of any real
dialogicality. A fusion of authorial intentions with the image may
alternate abruptly with complete reification of an image, and this
within the space of a short section of the work (in Pushkin, for
instance, this can be seen in t h e author’s relationship to Onegin’s
image and occasionally to Lensky’sJ. The curve tracing the move-
ment of authorial intentions may be more or less sharp, the prose
image may be both less fraught and better balanced. Under
changed conditions for perceiving an image, the curve may be-
come less sharp and may even be stretched out into a straight

!
(4201 DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

line: the image then either becomes entirely or directly inten-
tional, or ( o n the contrary) it may become purely reified and
crudely parodic.

What conditions this re-accentuation of images and languages
in the novel! It is a change i n the background animating dialogue,
that is, changes in the composition of heteroglossia. In an era
when the dialogue of languages has experienced great change, the
language of an image begins to sound in a different way, or is
bathed in a different light, or is perceived against a different di-
alogizing background. In this new dialogue, a proper, direct inten-
tionality in both the image and its discourse may be strengthened
and deepened, or (on the contrary) may become completely re-
ified la comic image may become tragic, the one who had been
unmasked may become the one who strips away mask and so onJ.

In re-accentuations of this kind there is no crude violation of
the author’s will. It can even be said that this process takes place
within theimageitself, i.e., not only in the changed conditions of
perception. Such conditions merely actualize in an image a po-
tential already available to it (it is true that while these condi-
tions strengthen some possibilities, they weaken others). We
could say with justification that in one respect the image has be-
come better understood and better “heard” than ever before. In
any case, a certain degree of ~ncomprehension has been coupled
here with a new and more profound comprehension.

Within certain limits the process of re-accentuation is un-
avoidable, legitimate and even productive. But these limits may
easily be crossed when a work is distant from us and when we
begin to perceive it against a background completely foreign to it.
Perceived in such a way, it may be subjected to a re-accentuation
that radically distorts it. Such has been the fate of many novels
from previous eras. Especially dangerous is any vulgarizing that
oversimplifies re-accentuation (which is cruder in all respects
than that of the author and his time) and that turns a two-voiced
image into one that is flat, single-voiced-into a stilted heroic
image, a Sentimental and pathos-charged one, or (at the other ex-
treme) into a primitively comic one. Such, for instance, is the
primitive and philistine habit of taking “seriously” Lensky’s im-
age, or his parodic poem “Where, O where have you gone. . . .”; of
such a sort would be a purely heroic interpretation (in the style of
Marlinsky’s heroes) of, for example, Pechorin.

The process of re-accentuation is enormously significant in the

,
DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL [421]

history of literature. Every age re-accentuates in its own way the
works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic
works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideo-
logical re-accentuation. Thanks to the intentional potential em-

i beddedin them, such works have proved capable of uncovering in
each era and against ever new dialogizing backgrounds ever

i newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally con-
tinues to grow, to further create out of itself. Likewise their influ-
ence on subsequent creative works inevitably includes re-accen-
tuation. New images in literature are very often created through a
re-accentuating of old images, by translating them from one ac-
centual register to another [from the comic plane to the tragic, for
instance, or the other way around).

i, Dibelius, in his books, offers interesting examples of just such a
creation of new images by means of a re-accentuation of old ones.
Professional and social-class types in the English novel-doctors,
jurists, landowners-originally appeared in the comic genres,
then later moved over into secondary comic planes of the novel as
secondary reified characters, and only from there moved up into
the higher levels where they were able to become the novel’s ma-
jor heroes. A basic method for transferring a character from the
w m i c to a higher plane is to represent him in misfortune and suf-
fering: sufferings serve to translate comic characters into another,
higher register. Thus the traditionally comic image of the miser
helps to establish hegemony for the new image of the capitalist,

! which is then raised to the tragic image of Dombey.
Of special importance is the re-accentuation of poetic images

into prosaic ones, and vice-versa. In this way the parodic epic
emerged during the Middle Ages, which played such a crucial role
in preparing theway for the novel of the Second Stylistic Line (its
parallel classical expression was Ariosto). Of great importance as
well is the re-accentuation of images during their translation out
of literature and into other art forms-into drama, opera, paint-
ing. The classic example is Tchaikovsky’s rather considerable re-
accentuation of Evgenij Onegin: it has had a powerful influence
on the philistine perception of this novel’s images, greatly weak-
ening the quality of parody in them.66

6 6 6 . This prohlem of double-voiced parodlc and ironic discourse [more ac-
eurately, its analogues) in opera, in music, in choreography [parodic dances] is
extremely interesting.

[422] DISCOURSE IN THE N O V E L

Such is t h e process of re-accentuation. We should recognize its
great and seminal importance for the history of literature. In any
objective stylistic study of novels from distant epochs it is neces-
sary to take this process continually into consideration, and to
rigorously coordinate the style under consideration with the I

background of heteroglossia, appropriate to t h e era, that dialo-
gizes it. When this i s done, the list of all subsequent re-accentu- t

ations of images i n a given novel-say, thc imagc of Don Qui-
xote-takes on a n enormous heuristic significance, deepening
and broadening our artistic and ideological understanding of
them. For, we repeat, great novelistic images continue to grow
and develop even after t h e m o m e n t of their creation; they are ca-
pable of being creatively transformed i n different eras, far distant
from the day and hour of their original birth.

1934-1935

GLOSSARY

Bakhtin’s technical vocabulary presents certain difficulties; while
he does not use jargon, he does invest everyday words with spe-
cial content. In the interests of a smooth translation we have ren-
dered these words i n a variety of ways; here we collect and s u m –
marize the terms most central to his theory.

T h e page i i u ~ n b e r s indicate where in the text useful illustra-
tions or discussions of the concept occur.
ACCENT [akcent) [p. 51
accentuation lokcencuaciia)
accentuating system [okcentnojo sisterno)
reaccentuation [pereokcentuociioJ

An accent, stress or emphasis. Every language or discourse sys-
t e m accents-highlights and evaluates-its material i n its o w n
way, and this changes through time. The parallel with a lan-
guage’s stress system i s not accidental, but i t might be noted that
as a rule Russian words have only o n e stress per word, and this i s
highly marked, s o changes i n stress can substantially alter the
sound of a word in context.
ALIEN, other, another, someone else’s ( t u i o j ] [p. 431

C u i o i i s t h e opposite of svoj [one’s own) and implies other-
ness-of place, point of view, possession or person. It does not (as
does “alicn” in English) imply any necessary estrangement or ex-
oticism; it is simply that which someone has made his own, seen
lor heard) from the point of view of an outsider. In Bakhtin’s sys-
tem, we are all t u i o j t o one another by definition: each of us has
his or her own [svoil language, point of view, conceptual system
that to all others is E i ~ i o i . Being Cuioi makes dialogue possible.
T h e novel is that literary art form most indebted t o l u i d o s t ‘
[otherness).
ARTISTIC GENRES Ixudoiestvennye i o n r y J
artistic-prose discourse [xudoiestvenno-prozaiEeskoe slovoj
[pp. 260-261)

14241 GLOSSARY

artistic craftsmanship i n prose
The opposite of “artistic” here is either extra-artistic [vnex-

udoiestvennyj) or bytovoj [everyday, casual, ordinary]. “Artistic”
genres are those that are reworked to aesthetic purpose and can
therefore be re-contextualized (a sonnet, a portrait, an art song);
an “everyday genre” is a mode of expression that involves con-
ventions (a personal letter, table talk, a chat over the back fence,
throwing rice at weddings) but is of the byt [ordinary everyday
life] and rooted in specific contexts. The project in “Discourse in
the Novel” is precisely to establish a legitimate place for the
novel in the artistic genres; novel theory, Bakhtin laments, too
often presumes novel language to be a neutral medium, unre-
worked, or openly polemical, as in rhetoric.
AS~IMILATINC during transmission [usvojajuSaja peredata] 7′
[P. 3411
also, “simultaneous appropriation and transmission” I

We communicate by crossing barriers: leaving our svoj, or
making another’s Euioj our own. Transmission of information is
therefore always simultaneousIy an appropriation (or assimila-
tion) of it. But there is always a gap between our own intentions
and the words-which are always someone else’s words-we
speak to articulate them. The gap may be greater or smaller, how-
ever, depending on the “fit” between what we believe and what
we arc saying. If I am a believing Christian, how I recite the
Lord’s Prayer will indicate my closeness to the world view of the
text. 1 assimilate its ideology while transmitting it. If I were a mil-
itant atheist, 1 would, in the ways I chose to speak it, indicate my
distance from the prayer. I would dramatize nonassimilation of
its “message” in my transmission.
AUTHORITATIVE DISCOURSE [avtoritetnoe S ~ O V O ] [pp. 342ff.l

This is privileged language that approaches us from without; it
is distanced, taboo, and permits no play with its framing context
(Sacred Writ, for example). We recite it. It has great power over us,
but only while in power; if ever dethroned it immediately be-
comes a dead thing, a relic. Opposed to it is internally-persuasive
discourse [vnutrenne-ubeditel’noe slovo], which is more akin to
retelling a text in one’s own words, with one’s own accents, ges-
tures, modifications. Human coming-to-consciousness, in Bakh-
tin’s view, is a constant struggle between these two types of dis- 6,
course: an attempt to assimilate more into one’s own system, and
the simultaneous freeing of one’s own discourse from the au-

GLOSSARY 142 51

thoritative word, or from previous earlier persuasive words that
have ceased to mean.
RELIEF SYSTEM [krugozor] [pp. 385 -386)
also, conceptual system,
conceptual horizon

Literally in Russian “the circle of one’s vision.” Primary here is
the fact that krugozory are all always highly specific, and the vi-
sual metaphor emphasizes this: what I see can never be what you
see, if only (as Bakhtin put it in an early essay) because I can see
what is behind your head. Every Cuioj thus has its own krugozor.
When the term is used on a global or societal scale we have ren-
dered it as “belief system”; when it refers to the local vantage
point of an individual, as “conceptual horizon.”
CANONIZATION (kanonizacija]
canonic quality [kanoniinost’]

The tendency in every form to harden its generic skeleton and
elevate the existing norms to a model that resists change. At the
end of “Discourse in the Novel” (pp. 417ff.J Bakhtin discusses a
special difficulty in novel theory, how to read properly the rapid
transforming processes of canonization and of re-accentuation.
Canonization is that process that blurs heteroglossia, that is, that
facilitates a naive, single-voiced reading. It is no accident that the
novel-that heteroglot genre-has no canon; it is, however, like
all artistic genres subject to the pressures of canonization, which
on a primitive level is mereIy the compulsion to repeat.
CENTRIPETAL-CENTRIFUGAL [centrostremitel’nyj-centro-
beinyil IPP. 272-2731

These are respectively the centralizing and decentralizing (or
decentering) forces in any language or culture. The rulers and the
high poetic genres of any era exercise a centripetal-a homoge-
nizing and hierarchicizing-influence; the centrifugal (decrown-
ing, dispersing) forces of the clown, mimic and rogue create alter-
native “degraded” genres down below. The novel, Bakhtin argues,
is a de-normatizing and therefore centrifugal force.
CHRONOTOPE [XIORO~OP]

Literally, “time-space.” A unit of analysis for studying texts ac-
cording to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial catego-
ries represented. The distinctiveness of this concept as opposed to
most other uses of time and space in literary analysis lies in the
fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interde-
pendent. The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of

14261 GLOSSARY GLOSSARY [4z7]

the forces at work i n the culture system from which they spring.
COMPLETED-finished, closed-off, finalized [zaverien]
and its noun zaverSennost’ [completedness, finalization]
its antonym nezaveriennost’ [inconclusiveness, openendedness)

This implies not just completed, but capable of definitive final-
ization. Dialogue, for example, can be zaverien [as in a dramatic
dialogue)-it can be laid out i n all its speaking parts, framed by an
opening and a close. A dialogized word, on the other hand, can
never be zaverieno: the resonance or oscillation of possible mean-
ings within it is not only not resolved, but must increase in com-
plexity as it continues to live. Epic time is zaverieno; novel-time,
the present oriented toward the future, is always nezaverieno.
CONTEMPORANEITY, contemporary life [sovrernennost’) Ipp.
18ff.1
also, contemporary reality

The Russian word implies a simultaneity of times-in past,
present or future; for Bakhtin the concept is most productive
when the two temporal simultaneities are that of author and cre-
ated character, or of author and event. Epic occurs i n an absolute
past that could never have been sovremennyf to its author-bard or
to its audience, regardless of when the related events had oc-
curred in “real” historical time. The novel, in contrast, permits
authorial- and reader-access to the artistically represented world.
DrALoCIsM [ d i a l o g i m ]

Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a
world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, i s under-
stood, as a part of a greater whole-there i s a constant interaction
between meanings, all of which have the potential of condition-
ing others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and i n
what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utter-
ance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of
the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, in-
sures that there can be no actual monologue. O n e may, like a
primitive tribe that knows only its own limits, be deluded into
thinking there is one language, or one may, as grammarians,
certain political figures and normative framers of “literary lan-
guages” do, seek in a sophisticated way t o achieve a unitary lan-
guage. In both cases the unitariness i s relative to the overpower;
ing force of heteroglossia, and thus dialogism.
DIALOGUE [dialog] [pp. 41 1ff.1
dialogizing [dialogujuSiii)
dialogized ldialogizovannij]

Dialogue and its various processes are central to Bakhtin’s the-
ory, and it is precisely as verbal process (participial modifiers) that
their force is most accurately sensed. A word, discourse, language
or culture undergoes “dialogization” when it becomes relativized,
de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things.
Undialogized language is authoritative or absolute.

Dialogue may be external (between two different people) or in-
ternal [between an earlier and a later self). Jurij Lotman [in The
Structure of the Artistic Text, tr. R. Vroon [Ann Arbor, 19771)~ dis-
tinguishes these two types of dialogue as respectively spatial
[A-B) and temporal (A-A’] communication acts [p. 91.
DISCOURSE, word [S~OVO]

The Russian word slovo covers much more territory than its

‘? English equivalent, signifying both an individual word and a
method of using words [cf. the Greek logos) that presumes a type
of authority. Thus the title of our final essay, “Discourse in the
Novel,” might also have been rendered “The Word in the Novel.”
We have opted for the broader term, because what interests
Bakhtin is the sort of talk novelistic environments make possi-
ble, and how this type of talking threatens other more closed sys-
tems. Bakhtin at times uses discourse as it is sometimes used in
the West-as a way to refer to the subdivisions determined by so-
cial and ideological differences within a single language (i.e., the
discourse of American plumbers vs. that of American academics).
But it is more often than qot his more diffuse way of insisting on
the primacy of speech, utterance, all in praesentia aspects of
language.
DISPLAYED, exhibited [pokazannyil [p. 3221

A word “displayed as a thing,” reified, a word maximally de-
prived of authorial intention. It involves a manipulation of con-
text in such a way that the word is stripped of those overtones
that enable it to be perceived as natural. A word is pokazano
when it is put in quotation marks, for instance.

I
“ENNOBLED DISCOURSE”

or “discourse made respectable” [oblagoroiennoe slovo] [pp.
381-3841

A category of value located on the border between criteria for
style and criteria for language. When discourse is “ennobled” it i s

4:) elevated, made less accessible, more literary and better ordered.
“Ennobled language” always presumes some privilege and exer-
cises some social control.

GLOSSARY 14291

EVALUATIVE, judgmental, valorized, axiological, value- [cen-
nostnyj]

Evaluation never takes place in a void; t o assign value means to
assess and rank. Thus when Bakhtin (in “Epic and Novel”) speaks
of the epic past as a cennostno-vremmenoj [temporally valorized,
or time-and-value] cateogory, he means to emphasize the fact that
time, like all other sequences, is hierarchical along a goodlbad
axis as well as a beforelafter; the epic past is not only past, but
good because it is past.
EVERYDAY LIFE [ byt]
everyday genre (bytovoi i a n r l

This is what ordinary people live, and their means for commu-
nicating with each other [bytovye ionryl-the private letter, the
laundry note-are not considered artistic. They are, however,
both conventionalized and canonized; indeed, all communication
must take place against a certain minimum background of shared
generic expectations.
GENRE [ ~ U I I T ]

In the most general terms, a horizon of expectations brought t o
bear on a certain class of text types. It is therefore a concept larger
than literary genre (examples of everyday genres [byrovye ianry]
would be the shopping list or telephone conventions). A genre
both unifies and stratifies language [p. %88]. In these essays, how-
ever, the term is most frequently invoked to define the kind of
formulae that have tended to limit literary discourse. The novel
is seen as having a different relationship to genre, defining itself
precisely by the degree to which it cannot be framed by pre-exist-
ing categories.
H E T E R O G L ~ S S I A [raznorelie, raznorelivost’) [p. 2631

The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any
utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over
text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of
conditions-social, historical, meteorological, physiological-
that will insure that a word uttered i n that place and at that time
will have a meaning different than it would have under any other
conditions; all utterances are heteroglot i n that they are func-
tions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and
therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a con-
ceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and
centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic
linguistics must always suppress.

HYBRID [gibrid] [pp. 305ff.I
hybridization [gibridizaciia] [pp. 358ff.I

T h e mixing, within a single conclete utterance, of two or more
different linguistic consciousnesses, often widely separated in
time and social space. Along with dialogization of languages and
pure dialogues, this is a maior device for creating language-im-
ages in the novel. Novelistic hybrids are intentional [nameren-
nyj) (unlike, say, naive mixing in everyday speech); their double-
voicedness [dvugolosnost’J is not meant to resolve. Since hybrids
can be read as belonging simultaneously to two or more systems,
they cannot be isolated by formal grammatical means, by quota-
tion marks (Bakhtin analyzes the hybrid constmctions in Dick-
ens’ Little Dorrit Ipp. 30zff.1). Hybridization is the peculiar mark

q’ of prose; poetry, and in particular poetic rhythm, tend to regiment
and reduce multiple voices to a single voice [p. 2981. Double-
voicedness in poetry, when it occurs, is of an essentially different
sort [pp. 327-1291
I D E O L O G Y lideologiia] Ipp. 333-1351
ideologue [ideolog]
ideologerne [ideologim)

This is not to be confused with its politically oriented English
cognate. “Ideology” in Russian is simply an idea-system. But it is
semiotic in the sense that it involves the concrete exchange of
signs in society and in h i s t o ~ y . Every word/discou~se betrays the
ideology of its speaker; great novelistic heroes are those with the
most coherent and individuated ideologies. Every speaker, there-
fore, is an ideologue and every utterance an ideologeme.
IMAGE OF A LANGUAGE lobraz iazyka] [p. joo]

A central concept, but one difficult to conceptualize because
few of the associations that cluster around either “image” or “lan-
guage” are helpful i n grasping what Bakhtin means i n bringing
them together. Images are what literature-preeminently the
novel-uses; in selecting what is to be said, the overriding con-
cern should be to highlight the ideological impulses behind an
utterance rather than any local meaning an utterance might have
when conceived as a mere linguistic expression.
INTERNALLY PERSUASIVE DISCOURSE Ivnutren~le-ubid~tel’noe
slovo]

i : cf. AUTHORITATIVE DISCOURSE, above.
INTF.RlLLuMw-mnoN, intcranimation, mutual illumination
[vzaimnoosveStenie]

(4301 GLOSSARY

The major relativizing force in de-privileging languages. When
cultures are closed and deaf [gluxoj] to one another, each consid-
ers itself abso!.ute; when one language sees itself in the light of
another, “novelness” has arrived. With novelness, “two myths
perish simultaneously: the myth of a language that presumes to
be the only language, and the myth of a language that presumes
to be completely unified” [p. 681.

We see here Bakhtin’s fondness for vision metaphors lcf. “re-
fraction,” krugozor] as well as play with the Russian word pros-
veiienie [education, enlightenment], which comes about only in
the light of another.
LANGUAGE (jazyk]

Bakhtin seems to endorse that broad definition of language of-
fered by Jurij Lotman in The Structure of the Artistic Text, “any
communication system employing signs that are ordered in a par-
ticular manner” [p. 81. With this in mind, Bakhtin differentiates
between

AL~ENIOTHERIANOTHER’S LANGUAGE [Euioj jazyk]: a language
not one’s own, at any level.

SOCIAL LANGUAGE [social’nyj jazyk]: a discourse peculiar to a
specific stratum of society (professional, age group, etc.) within a
given social system at a given time.

NATIONAL LANGUAGE [ n a c i o n a l ‘ n ~ jazyk]: the traditional lin-
guistic unities (English, Russian, French, etc.) with their coherent
grammatical and semantic systems.
[azyk is incorporated into compound nouns with the following
equivalents:

HE.rERoGLossIA [raznoreiie, raznojazyiie]
OTHER-LANGUAGEDNESS [ino jazyiie]
PoLvcrossrA [mnogojazyiie]
MONOGLOSSlA [odnojazyEie]

The distinction between razno- [hetero-1 and mnogo [poly-] is the
difference between type and quantity, but the two attributes are
often used together.

ORCHESTRATION [orkestrovka]
Bakhtin’s most famous borrowing from musical terminology

is the “polyphonic” novel, but orchestration is the means for
achieving it. Music is the metaphor for moving from seeing (such
as in “the novel is the encyclopedia of the life of the era”) to hear-
ing (as Bakhtin prefers to recast the definition, “the novel is the
maximally complete register of all social voices of the era”). For

GLOSSARY (43 I ]

Bakhtin this is a crucial shift. In orallaural arts, the “overtones”
of a communication act individualize it. Within a novel perceived
as a musical score, a single “horizontal” message [melody) can be
harmonized vertically in a number of ways, and each of these
scores with its fixed pitches can be further altered by giving the
notes to different instruments. The possibilities of orchestration
make any segment of text almost infinitely variable. The literary
CHRONOTOPE (see above), with its great sensitivity to time /p. 861.
finds a natural kinship with the overwhelmingly temporal art of
music.
PENETRATION, insight (proniknoveniel [pp. 416-4171

Such blunt, often crudely material expressions aIe character-
istic of Bakhtin’s somewhat militarized language. ldeologies
“battle it out in the arena of the utterance.” Novelness “invades”
privileged discourse. Boundaries between svoj and Cuioj are “vio-
lated.” Behind this aggressive talk is Bakhtin’s concern that the
reader feel the forces involved here as bodies, in concrete compe-
tition for limited supplies of authority and territory. A true “pen-
etration” into the novel is more than a mere scholarly investiga-
tion of it: it is a sortie onto a battlefield, where victory belongs
(but never for long) to the one who can best map the movement of
hostile forces. These essays, written in the mid-1930s and early
19405, perhaps reflect the general militarization of Soviet life and
language during the prewar and war years. But such rhetoric is of
course also impeccably Marxist-although Bakhtin, as it were,
recoups the class struggle for epistemology.
PHILOSOPHEME Ifilosofim]

Any concept that is recognizably a unit of a philosophical sys-
tem (cf. IDEOLOGEME].
POLYGLOSSIA [mnogoiazyEie]

The simultaneous presence of two or more national languages
interacting within a single cultural system (Bakhtin’s two histor-
ical models are ancient Rome and the Renaissance).
PRECONDITIONED, qualified, “with reservations” [ogovorennyj]
[P. 3311

cf. its noun ogovorennost’ (“already bespoke quality”)
ogovorka, a reservation [pp. 6-91
The only un-preconditioned world was Eden, and since its Fall

we have all spoken about the world in someone else’s ltuiie]
words. The world of objects and meanings [predmetno-smyslovoj
mir] in which we live is therefore highly relativized; Bakhtin’s

14321 GLOSSARY GLOSSARY 14331

use of the term merely alludes to the encrustation of meanings
bonded to any word or object.
PRINCIPLED, systematic, rigorous, regular [principial’nyj]

The Russian has no moral overtones as does its English equiv-
alent, and bears some resemblance to what is meant today by
structure: a “principled” solution is one that relates to a larger
system, that presumes certain regularities or norms for itself.
When Bakhtin complains that there has been no principial’nyi
approach to the novel, he is referring not to the absence of
a canon but to the absence of a minimal list of constitutive
features.
R E F R A C T I O N [perelom] [pp. 299-300; 419ff.I

cf. the verb prelomljat’sja, to be refracted
i In Bakhtin’s ideal case, the poet writes in a directly intentional

language, one that means what he wants it to mean, while the
prose writer’s intentions are of necessity “refracted” at various
angles through already claimed territory. Authorial refraction is
central to the light-ray metaphor Bakhtin uses to illustrate the
complexity in reading a prose communication. Every word is like
a ray of light on a trajectory to both an object and a receiver. Both
paths are strewn with previous claims that slow up, distort, re-
fract the intention of the word. A semantic “spectral dispersion”
occurs, but not within the object (as would be the case with self-
enclosed poetic tropes) but before the word reaches the object, in
the “occupied territory” surrounding the object. In any novelistic
prose one can trace-as Bakhtin does at length for L2ttJe Dorrit
[pp. 302-3071-the “angle of refraction” of authorial discourse as
it passes through various other voices, or voice-,and character-
zones. But there are other refracting media as well, including that
mass of alien words present not in the object but in the con-
sciousness of the listener.
REIFICATTON, brute materiality [ob”jektnost’, ob”jektifikacija]

cf. adj. obViektnyj, objectified, reified, “turned into a thing”
The process [rhetorically intended or historically caused) of

stripping a word [slovo] of its “normal” contexts. This happens
when a word is pokazano (exhibited].
SPEECH [ret’]

Character speech ( r e 3 geroev]: this refers not to the speeches of
a character but to a manner of speaking specific to him.

Between the two traditional grammatical categories of DIRECT
SPEECH [prjamaja ret’l and INDIRECT SPEECH [kosvennaia re?’]

Bakhtin posits an intermediate term, QUASI-DIRECT SPEECH [ne-
sobstevenno-prjarnaja ret’]. (This category is given very detailed
treatment in chapter 4 of V. N. VoloSinov’s Marxism m d the Phi-
losophy of Language [tr. Matejka and Titunik, New York, 19731,
pp. 141-159.) Quasi-direct speech involves discourse that is for-
mally authorial, but that belongs in its “emotional structure” to a
represented character, his “inner speech transmitted and regu-
lated by the author” [p. 3 19, where the passage cited is an internal
monologue of Nezhdanov’s from Turgcnev’s Virgin Soil].

Quasi-direct speech is a threshold phenomenon, where au-
thorial and character intentions are combined in a single inten-

I tional hybrid. Measuring the relative strength of these competing
intentions is a major task of novel stylistics.
STRATIFICATION [rassloenie] [p. 2891

For Bakhtin this is a process, not a state. Languages are con-
tinually stratifying under pressure of the centrifugal force, whose

1 project everywhere is to challenge fixed definitions. Represented
characters in a novel exist in order to find, reject, redefine a stra-
tum of their own; formal authors exist to coordinate these strat-
ifying impulses.

i Stratification destroys unity, but-as with our military meta-
phors discussed above (PENETRATION)-this IS not a negative
or negating process. It is cheerful war, the Tower of Babel as may-
pole. To create new strata is the express purpose of art, or as Lot-
man happily put it, “art is a magnificently organized generator of

i languages” (Structure of the Artistic Text, p. 4).
TENDENnous, period-bound, belonging to a certain school or
trend [napravlenteskijl

Tendentious language is a type of social language heavily influ-
enced by the norms of a given literary school or period, i.e., the
vocabulary and presuppositions shared at any given time by Nat-
uralists, Neoclassicists and so forth.
UTTERANCE [vyskazivanie]

I Bakhtin’s extension of what Saussure called the parole aspect
of language (the speech actlutterance), but where utterance is

i
made specifically social, historical, concrete and dialogized. See
the numerous and excellent discussions of this in V. N. Vol-
oGinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, as on pp.
40-41: “In the verbal medium, in each utterance, however trivial
it may be, [a] living dialectical synthesis is constantly taking
place between the psyche and ideology, between the inner and

[ 4 3 4 ] GLOSSARY

outer. In each speech act, subjective experience perishes in the
objective fact of the enunciated word-utterance, and the enunci-
ated word is subjectified in the act of responsive understanding in
order to generate, sooner or later, a counterstatement.”
VOICE [golos, -gins]

This is the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness. A
voice always has a will or desire behind it, its own timbre and
overtones. SINGLE-VOICED DISCOURSE [edinogolosnoe slovo] is the
dream of poets; DOUBLE- ICED DISCOURSE [dvugolosnoe S ~ O V O ]
the realm of the novel. At several points Bakhtin illustrates the
difference between these categories by moving language-units
from one plane to the other-for example, shifting a trope from
the plane of poetry to the plane of prose [pp. 327ff.l: both poetic
and prose tropes are ambiguous [in Russian, dvusmyslennyi, lit-
erally “double-meaninged”] but a poetic trope, while meaning
more than one thing, is always only single-voiced. Prose tropes by
contrast always contain more than one voice, and are therefore
dialogized.
ZONE [zona]
character zones [zony geroev]
speech zones [reEivye zony]

Zones are both a territory and a sphere of influence. Intentions
must pass through “zones” dominated by other [Euioj] charac-
ters, and are therefore refracted. A character’s zone need not be-
gin with his directly quoted speech but can begin far back in the
text; the author can prepare the way for an autonomous voice by
manipulating words ostensibly belonging to “neutral” authorial
speech. This is a major device of comic style [see Bakhtin’s analy-
sis of Little Dorrit (pp. 302- 3071).

In Bakhtin’s view there are no zones belonging to no one, no
“no-man’s land.” There are disputed zones, but never empty ones.
A zone is the locus for hearing a voice; it is brought about by the
voice.

The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities
Author(s): Debra Spitulnik
Source: Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 6, No. 2 (DECEMBER 1996), pp. 161-187
Published by: Wiley on behalf of American Anthropological Association
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■ Debra Spitulnïk
EMORY UNIVERSITY

The Social Circulation of Media

Discourse and the Mediation of
Communities

This article demonstrates how mass media , because of their extensive accessi-
bility and scope , can serve as both reservoirs and reference points for the
circulation of words, phrases , and discourse styles in popular culture. Focus-
ing on the social circulation of radio discourse in Zambia, I examine the
semiotics of the decontextualization, recontextualization,and creative rework-
ing of media discourse outside of contexts of direct media consumption. The
analysis illustrates one productive avenue for probing the linguistic intertex-
tuality of large-scale societies , as well as the more general heteroglossic nature
of language. It suggests that people’s active engagements with mass media,
along with the social circulation of media discourse and its intertextual
connections, are key components in the construction and integration of
communities.

Nothing somewhat the mass begins mediation intangible, from zero, of like communities and those this is that especially extend that are across true large, when cities, shifting, it comes regions, and to
the mass mediation of communities that are large, shifting, and
somewhat intangible, like those that extend across cities, regions,

and nations. When we look at the communications that emanate from mass
media, we see that, like most other forms of speaking, they are preceded
and succeeded by numerous other dialogues and pieces of language that
both implicate them and render them interpretable. Such is the social life
of language – as an abundance of scholars have repeatedly argued – to be
imbricated in innumerable webs of connection with other utterances (Bakh-

tin 1981, 1986; Foucault 1972), indexically linked to past and future speech

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6(2):161-18 7. Copyright © 1997, American Anthropological
Association.

161

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162 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

events (Bauman and Briggs 1990:64; Irvine 1996; Silverstein 1976), and
vitally entangled with the ongoing practices of everyday life (Hanks 1996).
In this article, I would like to explore how such cross-linkages of language

in use – what have come to be called relations of intertextuality (following
Bakhtin; cf. Briggs and Bauman 1992) – factor into the mediation of com-
munities. Undertaking this task requires a return the older and very com-
plex question of what constitutes a speech community. It also leads us into
the relatively new terrain of investigating the actual processes of intertex-
tuality, for example, questions about the transportability of speech forms
from one context to another and the conditions that enable their decontex-

tualization and recontextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and
Bauman 1992; Lucy 1993; Silverstein and Urban 1996).

The specific problem to be examined here concerns the social circulation
of media discourse in Zambian popular culture. We will consider several
cases in which phrases and discourse styles are extracted from radio broad-
casting and then recycled and reanimated in everyday usage, outside of the
contexts of radio listening. As Urban has argued, such social circulation of
discourse is essential for the existence of every society or culture because it
creates a kind of “public accessibility” that is vital for the production of
shared meaning (Urban 1991:10, also 27, 191). Relations of intertextuality
are elemental in this process, according to Urban (1991:20), because shared
meanings result from the construing of interconnections across different
instances of publicly accessible discourse. While Urban focuses on how
social circulation leads to public accessibility, much of the material consid-
ered here exhibits somewhat of a reverse direction – where the widespread
availability of the communication form itself creates possibilities for social
circulation.1

The discussion below demonstrates that, because of their extensive ac-
cessibility and scope, mass media can serve as both reservoirs and reference
points for the circulation of words, phrases, and discourse styles in popular
culture.2 In addition, it explores how mass media – as ongoing, high-status,
public communication forms – have the potential to magnify and even
create the “socially charged life” of certain linguistic forms (Bakhtin
1981:293). Thus as confirmation of Gumperz’s early insight that “mass
media and the prestige of their speakers tend to carry idioms far from their
sources” (1971:223), we will see how radio’s impact on everyday language
extends from the introduction of single lexical items and catchphrases to
the shifting of semantic fields and the modeling of discourse styles. And
finally, the analysis below makes some broader linguistic and cultural
generalizations about both the kinds of media discourse that circulate and
the kinds of conditions that enable this circulation.

The implications of the social circulation of media discourse for questions
about speech communities are far-reaching and go beyond Gumperz’s
(1971) important points about their impact on language change. First, it
provides evidence that particular kinds of social situations and social
institutions have greater weight than others in establishing the sociolinguis-
tic significance of certain linguistic forms (Bourdieu 1991; Gal 1989; Gum-
perz 1971; Irvine 1987; Kroskrity 1992). For example, in some societies, the

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 163

dominant site for producing normative standards for linguistic usage might
be political oratory, while in other societies it might be television newscast-
ing. This has relevance for thinking about the constitution of speech com-
munities, because it suggests that there is a correlation between social scale
and the type of communication modality that dominates the mediation of
community. Along these lines, one question that definitely merits much
more exploration is whether mass communication itself is a necessary
precondition for the construction of community in large-scale societies
(Anderson 1983; Habermas 1989). This seems inherently to be the case, since
public accessibility means something quite different in large-scale societies
than in small-scale societies.

Second, it leads to a series of questions concerning the definition of the
speech community and its applicability to large-scale societies. For exam-
ple, does it even make sense to speak of a speech community across the
nation-state when there is no one common language? When we are talking
about millions of people who may never know or interact with one another,
how do we handle questions about density of communication, frequency
of interaction, and shared linguistic knowledge – three key features that
figure prominently in various definitions of the speech community and that
seem to be a prerequisite for the kind of discursive mediation of society
described by Urban? While these three criteria have been challenged (or just
abandoned) in recent work, along with the general utility of the speech
community concept itself, I believe that they are relevant in important and
interesting ways for thinking about the social and linguistic effects of mass
mediated communication and that they merit another look.3 For example,
in large-scale societies, a high frequency of interaction and density of
communication do occur in a vertical sense – that is, the dominant direc-
tionality of mass media – even if they do not occur in a lateral sense – that
is, the typical (or idealized) directionality of face-to-face communication.
Thus people have frequent interactions or frequent acts of consumption with
certain media forms, even if they do not directly interact with other users
of the same media. Similarly, there is a density of communication in the
sense that there is large-scale exposure to a common communication form,
such as simultaneous listening to a radio drama or a newscast. And finally,
as suggested earlier, questions concerning the production of shared linguis-
tic knowledge, while greatly vexed, can be productively reworked to
include analysis of how certain institutions provide common linguistic refer-
ence points.

Mediating Communities

These various features – common reference points, frequency of con-
sumption, common exposure, simultaneity – are not adequate, however, to
ensure that mass media will contribute to the formation of a community
(speech or otherwise) in large-scale societies. The mass mediation of large-
scale societies requires that some experience of belonging and mutuality be
generated as well. Anderson’s notion of the imagined community is useful
in this regard, because it provides a model of a community where members

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164 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

may not all know one another but all share an idea of belonging to a
collectivity, that is, “in the minds of each lives the image of their commun-
ion” (1983:15). While Anderson’s work has been criticized for its idealized
model of a fairly homogeneous, egalitarian, and equally believed in com-
munity (Bhabha 1994; Gal 1995; Spitulnik 1994a), it is still extremely valu-
able because it demonstrates how linguistic practices create possibilities for
shared identities to be imagined.
For example, Anderson (1983:33-36) discusses how, through both defi-

nite description and generic reference (naming familiar places and invoking
types of places and types of persons), the 18th-century novel constructed a
sense of a shared world, a common social and cultural milieu that belonged
to both author and reader and to a collective readership. In contrast to the
book, the newspaper enabled such simultaneous mass consumption of an
identical communication form to occur on a daily basis, as modern man’s
“substitute for morning prayers” (Anderson 1983:39). Anderson argues
that these new communication forms helped to create the feeling of belong-
ing to a shared but anonymous community of fellow readers.
These insights into the mass mediation of communal identity are impor-

tant because they point out how community and belonging are indexically
constructed in texts. The major drawback of Anderson’s work, however, is
that it overemphasizes the power of verticál modes of communication at
the expense of lateral communication. For example, we learn little about the
practices of consumption and even less about what people are saying to
each other about their experiences of consumption. Instead, reminiscent of
the earlier “hypodermic” models of media effects and media power (see
Spitulnik 1993), there is a privileging of a one-way directionality from a
mass communication form to the masses, who supposedly receive it and
consume it. The implicit assumption is that, as soon as this mass-produced
communication form (e.g., a novel or a newspaper) is distributed, it is
simultaneously participated in and almost automatically produces a feeling
of a shared collectivity because of specific textual features.
While textual acts of asserting or indexing collective identity are impor-

tant, they do not guarantee that this identity actually corresponds to any-
thing at the experiential level. Production is only half of the picture. We
need also to factor in what is happening at the levels of reception and lateral
communication, such as the social circulation of media discourse outside
of contexts of direct media consumption. I suggest in the following that the
repeating, recycling, and recontextualizing of media discourse is an impor-
tant component in the formation of community in a kind of subterranean
way, because it establishes an indirect connectivity or intertextuality across
media consumers and across instances of media consumption. Returning
to the earlier discussion about speech communities, then, this indicates that
even for large-scale societies, it is possible to speak of a density of commu-
nication and frequency of interaction in a lateral sense. That is, there can be
a density and frequency of common communications and cross-linkages,
mediated in a transitive fashion by mass media, without a high density or
frequency of direct communication between all members of a society.

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 165

Public Words and the Semiotics of Circulation

The social circulation of media discourse provides a clear and forceful
demonstration of how media audiences play an active role in the interpre-
tation and appropriation of media texts and messages. It is possible to
investigate these processes in semiotic terms, and recent work on genre and
performance theory offers a very valuable starting point. For example, of
the many important semiotic questions that Bauman and Briggs (1990;
Briggs and Bauman 1992) raise in their discussions of decontextualized
(decentered) and recontextualized (recentered) discourse, three are particu-
larly pertinent for studying the circulation of media discourse: How are
decontextualization and recontextualization possible? What does the re-
contextualized text bring with it from its earlier context(s) (e.g., what kind
of history does it carry with it)? What formal, functional, and semantic
changes does it undergo as it is recentered? (Bauman and Briggs 1990:72-75;
Briggs and Bauman 1992:141 ff.).

The following analysis of how media language is recontextualized, rein-
terpreted, and played with in everyday discourse, focuses specifically on
the recycling of radio expressions such as program titles, broadcasters’
trademark phrases, and broadcasters’ turn-taking routines. These phrases
are in English and ChiBemba, two of the country’s most widely spoken
lingua francas and two of the eight languages that are sanctioned for use
on national radio (Spitulnik 1992). 4 The data on recycled media discourse
considered here stem from dialogue that I either participated in or over-
heard during ethnographic research in the capital city of Lusaka and in the
semiurban/semirural provincial capital of Kasama; it was not elicited and
was not studied systematically across a structured sample population. The
data on media discourse stem from listening notes on and recordings of
radio broadcasts from the three channels of Radio Zambia – Radio 1, Radio
2, Radio 4 – which are part of the Zambia National Broadcasting Corpora-
tion (ZNBC). The linguistic significance of radio in Zambia is substantial
because it is the most widely consumed medium in the country, it is a
primary site for exposure to English, and it is the only widespread mass
communication form that uses Zambian languages.5 Furthermore, given
the fact that Radio Zambia is a centralized state-run monopoly with simul-
taneous national transmission (i.e., there is no regional broadcasting), the
same broadcasts are accessible to the entire national population at the same
time and, thus, allow for the possibility of producing a degree of shared
linguistic knowledge across a population of roughly 9.1 million.

As we investigate the semiotics of how this radio discourse circulates,
four basic issues will concern us: (1) the inherent reproducibility and
transportability of radio phrases; (2) the “dialogic [or intertextual] over-
tones” (Bakhtin 1986:92) that are carried over into the new context of use;
(3) the formal, functional, and semantic alterations that occur in the recon-
textualization; and (4) the degree to which knowledge of the original radio
source is relevant for understanding the recycled phrase. We will see, for
example, that many recycled radio phrases have a formal “prepared-for
detachability” (Bauman and Briggs 1990:74), which enables them to be

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166 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

circulated in particular ways in everyday discourse. We will also see that
there is a degree of semantic open-endedness and flexibility that fosters an
ease of recontextualization and that people actively exploit this semantic
flexibility to create their own meanings for radio-derived discourse.
Overall, the cases considered here exemplify how radio is a source and

reference point for phrases and tropes which circulate across communities.
Many of these are so well-known and standardized that knowledge of them
is virtually essential for one to be considered a communicatively competent
member of a particular society or subculture. As such, they are part of what
can be termed a society’s (or a subculture’s) “public words.” Public words,
understood in this sense, are nothing particularly new to the world or to
linguistic anthropologists, and they exist in societies of all scales and scopes.
They are standard phrases such as proverbs, slogans, cliches, and idiomatic
expressions that are remembered, repeated, and quoted long after their first
utterance. Some public words are anonymous and unattributable, for oth-
ers the sources may be well or vaguely known and perhaps even invoked.
Often, these public words are condensations or extracts from much longer
speech events, and when used, they may function metonymically to index
the entire frame or meaning of the earlier speech situation (Basso 1990a,
1990b; Urban 1991). In the United States such words are the stuff of popular
culture, endlessly recycled and renewed by mass media, politicians, culture
critics, bumper stickers, and the young and trendy. Examples include:
“Make my day,” “Been there,” “Big brother (is watching),” “The buck stops
here,” “Beam me up (Scotty), “Play it again, Sam,” and “Hasta la vista,
baby.” 6

While linguistic anthropology has tended to focus on the analysis of
narrative, oratory, ritual speech, and other very well bounded and easily
identifiable speech genres, little has been said about the smaller, scattered
pieces of formulaic language, for example, the public words of street signs,
graffiti, and political parties, or the popular extracts from radio, film, and
the world of advertising. I argue here that tuning into these smaller genres
or “minor media” (Fischer and Abedi 1990:335 ff.) is one productive avenue
for beginning an analysis of the linguistic intertextuality of contemporary
societies. Further, I suggest that for large-scale societies from the city to the
nation and even the global village, the pervasive connections among these
smaller genres (and between them and the larger genres) is actually a key
constitutive and integrating feature of what can be called a community.

Recycling Metapragmatic Discourse

Many of the public words inspired by Zambian broadcasters are actually
more than just single expressions; they are interactional routines and, in
particular, dyadic exchanges that are about the communication event itself.
Radio broadcasters are faced with the fairly unique condition of having to
generate and maintain an ongoing flow of communication in the absence
of a face-to-face context and within the constraints of an entirely aural
medium. As with telephone communication or other modes of radio use
(e.g., in the taxi-driving profession), cues such as gaze and gesture are

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 16 7

simply not available for assessing whether the channel is open and working
or whether one’s intended interlocutor is listening. Because of these par-
ticular contextual constraints, several types of metapragmatic discourse are
extremely pervasive in radio broadcasting.7 Many of these expressions
constitute broadcasters’ channel-monitoring and turn-taking routines.
Other types are designed explicitly to build audience expectations and
involvement. For example, broadcasting requires title announcements and
other framing devices to demarcate what would otherwise be a continuous
flow of voices and sound. The frequent practices of entitling and announc-
ing function as important contextualization cues about what listeners
should expect; they also serve as key signposts for listeners who have
fluctuating attention or who enter into a speech event that is already
underway.
Metapragmatic discourse is not the only kind of discourse which is

recycled from the realm of radio into contexts of face-to-face communica-
tion, but it is readily seized upon. Why is this so? This is an open question
and certainly one that requires more extensive research. Three explanations
are proposed here as the most likely candidates. First, as Silverstein (1992:67
ff.) has argued, metapragmatic discourse has a particular kind of transpar-
ency of both form and function. Because it explicitly serves to frame and
orchestrate communication, it tends to be more subject to awareness and
segmentation than other linguistic forms (Silverstein 1976:49 f., 1992, 1993).
Second, since metapragmatic discourse is speech about speaking, it is easily
transferable to other speech contexts. For example, in many of the cases
considered below, the significant feature that enables the decontextualiza-
tion and recontextualization of metapragmatic discourse is its general appli-
cability to virtually any kind of dyadic exchange. And third, I suggest that
the detachability and the repeatability of a given radio expression can be
fueled by the medium itself, as it lends prominence to the phrase, for
example, through frequent occurrence or through association with colorful
personalities, heightened drama, or humorous moments. It is especially in
these latter cases that the transportability of a radio phrase is driven by the
specific connotations that it has in the original context. This is illustrated in
our first example.

Checking the Channel

Nearly all national broadcasting in Zambia emanates from the capital city
of Lusaka, but every Monday through Friday four hours of broadcasting
on Radio 2 (one of the English-language channels) are handled by the Kitwe
studios in the Zambian Copperbelt region. When the Lusaka broadcaster
is getting ready to “cross over to the Kitwe studios,” that is, hand over
operations to the Kitwe-based broadcaster, he or she may say: “Kitwe, are
you there?,” “Kitwe, can you hear me?,” or “Hello, Kitwe?” If all goes
smoothly, the Kitwe-based broadcaster responds affirmatively, with greet-
ings, thanks, and good-byes to the Lusaka broadcaster. If the connection is
not good, however, several awkward seconds of airtime may be spent
checking the channel, with the Lusaka-based broadcaster repeating the

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168 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

metapragmatic phrases: “Hello, hello?/’ “Kitwe, are you there?/’ “Kitwe,
can you hear me?,” or “Hello, Kitwe?” This scenario is rather common at
ZNBC (temporary linkup failures occur almost weekly), and thus it is no
surprise that the Kitwe crossover itself can serve as an analogy for tempo-
rarily failed communication, as illustrated in the following vignette.
One day I was shopping in a very large and crowded Lusaka store, and

I noticed a woman trying to get the attention of a friend standing in the next
aisle. She was whispering loudly in the friend’s direction, “Hello, hello?
Hello?” The friend didn’t respond, and the woman, a bit embarrassed over
drawing attention to herself while still not able to attract the friend, laughed
and shouted, “Hello, Kitwe?” This definitely got the attention of the friend,
as well as several other customers, who were clearly amused by this clever
allusion to the bungled ZNBC communication link.8
How is the recontextualization of a radio phrase made possible in this

comic scene? Primarily, the successful recycling of “Hello Kitwe?” rests on
the transposition of two basic components of the original radio event: (1)
the existence of two interlocutors at different locales (Lusaka : Kitwe :: aisle
1 : aisle 2), and (2) uncertainty about the existence of a shared channel.
Furthermore, knowledge of the original radio source is essential for under-
standing the recycled expression. “Kitwe” is not a personal name; it is the
place name for a city on the Zambian Copperbelt. On radio, “Kitwe”
metonymically functions as the proper name of the broadcaster and/or
studio based in the city of Kitwe. In the context of a Lusaka store, however,
there is no obvious link between an individual shopper and the name
“Kitwe.” Unless, of course, one understands it, within the vocative con-
struction, as an echoing of the well-known radio scenario. “Kitwe” then
becomes a name for a person who is hard of hearing.9 The remarkable
humor here is further enhanced by the fact that the sequence “Hello, hello?
Hello, Kitwe? Kitwe, can you hear me?” has no other context besides the
famous radio interaction. The entire expression is uniquely identified with
its context of occurrence, and this identification is what triggers the parodie
mood that results from the expression’s unusual displacement.

T urn-T aking Routines

While the previous example represents what may be a single, idiosyn-
cratic, instance of radio-discourse recycling – and one that I just happened
to overhear in an urban store – there are numerous cases of recycled radio
phrases that have become fairly ordinary and that occur in a wide range of
social contexts. One of these is the title of the popular radio program Over
to You , which runs in six different languages and which has been running
in English for over 30 years.10 In this program a team of two broadcasters
alternate as disc jockeys and signal the handing over of speaker role by
uttering the phrase “Over to you.” One broadcaster is based in the Lusaka
studios, and the other is in the Kitwe studios. The program features musical
selections, many of which are listeners’ requests accompanied by their
dedications and greetings, and the witty exchange between the two broad-
casters. In the show, uttering “Over to you” creates an opening for the

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 169

transfer of speaker role, in which the co-DJ will select a song or read a
listener’s letter.

In the Zambian-language programs, the title and turn-taking phrase is
phonologically assimilated from English: Ovata yu (ChiNyanja) and Ofata
yu (ChiBemba).11 The phrase’s assimilation into Zambian culture is also
evidenced by the completeness of its linguistic assimilation. In many us-
ages, especially among speakers who do not know English, the phrase
functions as a Zambian-language expression with no connotations of for-
eign origin.

As with the successful recycling of “Hello, Kitwe?”, the use of “Over to
you” outside the context of radio requires that certain components of the
original radio event also be in place. There must be another person to
assume the speaker role, and there must be an expectation that the other
speaker perform in some way. Four brief ethnographic examples illustrate
this usage.

In a ChiBemba speaking context during a traditional Bemba marriage
preparation ceremony, one of the prominent elder women who had been
leading a series of songs in ChiBemba addressed a group of women sitting
on the opposite side of the room: “Ofata yu,” she said, expecting that the
addressees would select and lead the next song. In an analogous, but more
“modern” and urban setting in Lusaka, I witnessed the use of the idiom
again in the context of song turn- taking among women instructors/ advi-
sors. This was at a prewedding “kitchen party,” an event that merges the
traditional wedding preparations with the European-derived bridal
shower. In this case, the family and the elder women were upper-class and
highly fluent speakers of English. The ceremonial songs were in ChiBemba,
but the turns were signaled with the English “Over to you.” I came across
yet another example of the phrase’s use in the context of women singing
during a practice session of a Seventh-Day Adventist choral group. After
finishing an English-language song that she had selected and led, the leader
of the singing group handed the hymn book to one of her colleagues and
said, “Over to you”.

A final instance of the use of this expression occurred on a letter that I
received from a neighbor in Kasama. Written along the bottom of an
envelope addressed to me and handed to me by the writer, a 14-year-old
girl, was the phrase “Over ‘2’ you, D.S.” The young girl, whom I had just
met a few days earlier, was very interested in becoming my pen pal and
was hoping that she might be able to visit me in the United States. Her
written recontextualization of the radio idiom added a special flair to the
hand-delivered envelope, as it both foregrounded and played with the form
of the phrase. The symbol 2 took the place of its homonym to, and this
deviation was acknowledged with quotation marks. In addition, my per-
sonal initials were appended to the construction in a form analogous to the
way that radio disc jockeys identify themselves and each other. This clev-
erly elaborated on the transposition of the radio speech event to the context
of personal letter writing, and further indexed the young girl’s conversancy
with the latest trends in popular expressions.

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170 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Returning to our questions about the semiotics of circulation, what is
transported in the recentering of “Over to you” (and its variants) is the basic
discourse format of turn exchange combined with a performance format in
which the animation of a different genre is embedded. The data here
suggest that the phrase is primarily tied to the turn-taking contexts of song
choice and letter-reading/ writing, both of which are elemental in the radio
program. But to what degree is knowledge of the radio source crucial for
understanding “Ofata yu” and “Over to you” in these contexts? For the
most part, these phrases have filtered into popular usage, and attributabil-
ity to a radio source is not as necessary for interpretability as it is with the
phrase “Hello, Kitwe.” It is only in the final example that knowledge of the
radio program really enhances the interpretation of the utterance. Here, the
radio context is invoked with special written flourishes such as abbrevia-
tions and quotation marks. The message on the envelope is interpretable
without knowledge of its intertextuality with the radio program and disc-
jockey nicknames, but awareness of these links is crucial for a full appre-
ciation of the form and its potential currency for a young girl writing to
acquire an American pen pal.

“Getting It” from Radio

Many of the popular phrases inspired by radio broadcasting have a
distinctive kind of symbolic value because of their association with the
medium, which itself is a site of innovation, word play, and colorful drama.
Young Zambians, in particular, closely attend to the linguistic nuances of
radio and creatively poach from radio discourse to make their own trendy
formulations. The following example of recontextualized metapragmatic
discourse illustrates how such processes work and raises larger questions
about the media-external forces that propel the recycling of media lan-
guage.

When a ChiBemba broadcaster is handing over operations to another
broadcaster or when a live reporter is linked in from an outside location,
the following exchange may occur on air:12

(1) Mwaikata line? ‘Do you have the line?’
Ninjikata ‘I’ve got (it)/

The verb root -ikata means “hold,” “grasp,” or “catch”; thus this interchange
refers to the grasping of a transmission link. Among young Zambians,
however, the radio-derived phrase ” Mwaikata line?” has been transformed
into a popular slang expression that focuses on the successful relay of the
message rather than the successful link up of the physical channel:

(2) Waikata line? ‘Do you understand?’ ‘Do you get me?’

In addition to this semantic shift, the original radio phrase also undergoes
a formal change as it is recontextualized. The expressions in (1) and (2) differ
in the second-person form. The radio utterance in (1) utilizes the second-
person plural form {mu-, assimilated as mw-) in reference to single address-

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 171

ees. This polite usage (V of T /V) is mandatory for radio announcers in such
contexts. In the slang usage in (2), however, the second-person singular
form (w-, assimilated as w-) is more appropriate for single addressees as it
connotes familiarity and informality.
Linguistic evidence suggests that the recyclability of the radio expression

“Mwaikata line?” as “Waikata line?” is supplemented, or even motivated, by
two other key factors that are external to the original radio context: (1) other
usages of the verb -ikata within Zambian popular culture and (2) the
existence of a more general paradigmatic set of slang expressions for
“getting it.” Regarding the first factor, the verb -ikata features prominently
in idioms of relay (both channel relay and message relay) during musical
performances, for example, in the imperative phrase “ikata, ikata” ‘grab,
grab’. This phrase occurs as part of a chorus or transition point where one
musician is inviting another musician to come in, that is, to seize the beat
or to take the opportunity to do a special solo. Such musical relays are
analogous to the announcer relay in (1), where one performer hands over
the stage to another. During a performance, “ikata, ikata” ‘grab, grab’ can
also be an exhortation to the listeners to “get it” or “dig it.” Here, the
meaning is more analogous to that of the slang usage (2), which focuses on
addressee’s comprehension or engagement.
The second motivating factor outside of the realm of radio – the existence

of other related slang expressions for “getting it” – also raises an important
question about the cosmopolitan connotations of recontextualized radio
phrases. Significantly, the slang phrase “Waikata line?” joins a host of other
nearly synonymous code-mixed expressions within Zambian youth culture
such as:

(3) Naugeta? ‘Do you[sg] get (me/it)?’
Namugeta? ‘Do you[pn get (me/it)?’
Naudiga? ‘Do you[sg] dig (me/it)?’
Namudiga ? ‘Do you[pi] dig (me/it)?’

In these popular phrases, the English verbs get and dig have been morpho-
logically incorporated as ChiBemba verb roots. They are inflected with the
present perfect tense (na-), the second-person singular or plural subject
markers (u-, mu-), and the indicative suffix (-a). But they are not phonologi-
cally assimilated (the consonants g and d would undergo devoicing), and
thus they retain the indexical link with their fashionable English counter-
parts “Do ya get me?” and “Do you dig it?” The recontextualized radio
phrase is not therefore an isolated linguistic innovation; it participates in a
more general pattern of similar expressions for interpersonal rapport
within Zambian youth culture.

These two motivating factors highlight the critical fact that radio is not
the be-all and end-all for putting a phrase into motion. Indeed, they gener-
ate a crucial modification of Gumperz’s important observation that “mass
media and the prestige of their speakers tend to carry idioms far from their
sources” (1971:223), one that is consistent with other principles of dia-
chronic linguistics. Specifically, we see here that the social circulation of

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172 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

media discourse is often propelled by other (media-external) linguistic lines
of influence of many different orders (e.g., structural, pragmatic, sociolin-
guistic, paradigmatic, analogic, ideological, etc.) that must be accounted for
as well.

This point then leads us to a final question, about the sociolinguistic
significance of the codeswitching in the expressions “Mwaikata line?” and
“Waikata line?”. How does this factor into the processes of recycling media
discourse? In Zambia, as well as in many parts of the world, the strategic
use of codeswitching has the potential to function as “a sign of social
distinction or urbanity” (Kashoki 1978b:94; also see Gumperz 1982 and
Myers-Scotton 1993). It is important to note, however, that not all code-
switching is necessarily trendy or exceptional. It may be a relatively normal
and unmarked feature of urban speech (Swigart 1994), or it may be fairly
ordinary as in utterance (1): “Mwaikata line?”. Here, in the context of a
ChiBemba broadcast, the usage of line is motivated by a lexical gap and is
thus more a case of borrowing than of codeswitching. Line is simply a
technical word imported from the realm of modern utilities, for example,
electricity, telephone, water, sanitation, and broadcasting. By contrast, the
blend of ChiBemba and English in (2) is more marked and unusual. Indeed,
it is the basic index of the expression’s trendiness. This sociolinguistic
difference between (1) and (2) thus demonstrates how recentered radio
phrases may also undergo subtle functional changes in addition to semantic
and formal ones.

Entitling and Naming

Radio program titles constitute another form of metapragmatic discourse
which – comparable to the various interpersonal expressions discussed
above – has a high degree of transparency of form and function. Titles also
have a certain prominence derived from frequent repetition and their
placement within the flow of broadcasting. As stated earlier, titles function
as announcing, captioning, or (re)framing devices. They are designed for
reproducibility and recognizability, and these factors render them particu-
larly available for recontextualization in popular usage.

Even within broadcasting, program titles are recycled from other sources.
For example, nearly all English-language program titles on Radio Zambia
(as well as most program formats) derive from Western sources such as the
BBC and the VOA: for example Main News Bulletin , The Breakfast Show ,
Up-to-Date, The World of Sport , and Sports Roundup}3 Most Zambian lan-
guage program titles are also indebted to other external sources, and many
are strikingly intertextual. For example, the ChiBemba advice program
Kabuusha Taakolelwe Boowa takes its name from a well-known Bemba prov-
erb meaning “the asker was not poisoned by a mushroom.” The program
has, in turn, become the source of coinage for the occupational title kabuusha
‘advisor’. Another advice program, Baanacimbuusa ‘Women Advisors’, has
as its source the name for the ritual leaders of the Bemba girls’ initiation
ceremony. And in an interesting twist on origins, the title of the comic
drama series Ifyabukaaya (Things That Are Familiar’ or ‘Things from

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 173

Around Here’) derives its name from a ChiBemba reader constructed for
basic literacy during the colonial period by the White Fathers missionaries.
In short, virtually all radio titles represent a reanimation or invocation of

another source or another genre. The larger point, then, is that radio
programs themselves represent a range of recyclings, transpositions, and
cannibalizations of other discourse genres. Moreover, this inherent in-
tertextuality of radio itself seems to be a dynamic contributing factor in the
recycling of radio words outside of broadcasting and the ease with which
they circulate and become recontextualized. In popular usage, radio titles
are transported to everyday situations as labels for speech events, experi-
ences, and even personality types. As we saw in the case of “Over to you,”
a radio program title is used to caption a component of a speech event,
namely, the handing over of a turn. The following example illustrates how
a program title can also become the title of a personal experience.
One evening about 7 o’clock, my neighbor returned home from selling

buns at the market, and I asked her how her day went. Using the title of a
ChiBemba radio program, she sighed, “Ah mayo, ‘Imbila ya Bulanda’ ” [Oh
dear, “News of Suffering”]. One of the most popular programs on Radio
Zambia, Imbila ya Bulanda airs virtually every day and serves as a primary
vehicle for individuals to send messages announcing illnesses, deaths, and
funerals. Here, my neighbor was using the radio program title to entitle the
events of her day. She went on to explain how all the places at the market
were filled when she went there at 5:30 a.m., and how she unsuccessfully
tried to maneuver for a spot. She was forced to return later in the afternoon
and finally did manage to find a place to sell her baked goods, but the day
had been very long and exhausting.
Analogous to the Kitwe example above, this recycling injects a bit of

humor into the situation through a marked contrast with the expression’s
original context. The phrase “imbila ya bulanda” is unmistakably welded
to the popular program that features news of death and illness; so virtually
any utterance of it outside this context intertextually invokes the program.
By recontextualizing the phrase as a caption for her day, my neighbor did
indeed exploit the functional force of the phrase to announce that a tale of
woe was forthcoming. But since these events were far less serious than those
announced on radio, her entitling was hyperbolic and lent an ironic humor
to the tale, which after all, had a happy ending.
In addition to providing a common public source for ways of entitling

situations and experiences, media can also be a source for proper names
and names of types of people (Table 1). These humorous modes of naming
and labeling exhibit elements of what is a very pervasive kind of playful,
ironic kind of public verbal culture in Zambia which is not limited to any
particular age, locale, or language (Spitulnik 1994b). They also illustrate
how active audience interpretations enter into the mediated construction
of a world of familiar people, social types, and locales, as described by
Anderson (1983). Some of the particular examples shown here are urban
and youth based, and others are ones that originated in urban-youth slang
but are now more widely used.14 The meaning and derivation of most items
in Table 1 are self-evident, but the first two need some explanation.15

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174 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Table 1
Innovative names derived from media sources

Name Meaning Media Source

By Air Boys political-party vigilantes TV commercial
Chongololo pretentious, European-like Zambian radio program
BaSix Koloko people from the Northwestern Province radio newscasts

(the ones whose newscasts start at 6 a.m.)

Dallas City the Lusaka neighborhood of Kabwata TV show Dallas
(an upper-middle-class residential area)

Hawaii women’s dorms at Copperbelt University TV show Hawaii
(“because the ladies there live like they are Five-0
at a resort”)

Ninja 50-kwacha bill foreign movies
(the highest currency denomination in the

The labeling of party vigilantes as “By Air Boys” in the late 1980s
essentially began with a television advertisement for Zambian Airways.
The ad pictures a smiling customer sitting in a disembodied plane seat
floating across the sky, while the announcer talks about the pleasure of
traveling “by air” with Zambia Airways. This striking image of the floating
customer was then applied to the way that the party vigilantes remove
illegal traders from local marketplaces.16 Once discovered without the
proper papers, the marketeer is lifted on both sides and is suddenly
whisked away by the vigilantes while still in a sitting position, much like
the man in the ad who somehow floats across the screen while seated in a
chair.

The story of chongololo also illustrates the creative reworking of a media
name that imports distinctive imagery from the original source. The Wild-
life Conservation Society of Zambia and Bata Shoe Company sponsor a
children’s program entitled Chongololo (“centipede” in ChiNyanja), which
is produced in ChiNyanja, ChiBemba, and English. This educational pro-
gram features two or three adult hosts who discuss the habits and habitats
of Zambian wildlife. Interspersed with their comments, fictional outings,
and the sound effects of wild animals are songs about animals sung by a
chorus of children. Listeners can become members of the Chongololo Radio
Club of the Air by submitting their answers to the question “Why is it so
important for us to conserve nature?” In all three languages, the program
opens and closes with the children’s chorus singing their theme song in
English:

Chongololo , it’s our favorite club.
Chongololo, it’s the club we love.

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 175

Come and join us on this show, and you’ll have lots of fun.
Learn about the living things [clap] under the sun.17

In popular Zambian slang, chongololo has become a term for Zambians who
try to speak like Europeans. The English-language program is hosted by a
British male who is typically joined by two Zambian females, all of whom
speak with a slow and deliberate British Received Pronunciation (RP)
accent. The Zambian children on the program also speak this form of
English very well for their ages (roughly 8 to 12 years old) and thus sound
particularly precocious and privileged. Even in the ChiBemba and ChiNy-
anja programs, this is reflected in the English theme song. One young
Zambian explained to me:

Chongololo is a word for Zambians who try to adopt a foreign accent so that to a
Zambian they sound like they are Europeans, while Europeans on the other hand
fail to understand what they say. . . . [University of Zambia] students say, “They
speak in tongues/’

A less affected form of Zambian English (with a phonology closer to that
of Zambian languages) is preferred by most Zambians, even by those who
are highly educated and frequently exposed to the English of Europeans
and Americans. For example, a 20-year-old student at a technical training
college walked into the dormitory common room to watch the television
news (which is always in English) and declared in ChiNyanja:

Ah, lelo niza nvelako news cifukwa si achongololo amene azabelenga. [Oh, today I’m
going to listen to the news because iťs not the chongololos reading it.]

The young man clearly approved of the pronunciation of the two newscast-
ers; presumably if they had spoken like chongololos, he would have walked
out.

Not only is the Zambian chongololo guilty of having a fake accent, but
he or she is also guilty of going to the extreme in mimicking European dress
and behavior. This takes on class dimensions, as one university student told
me, “A chongololo is the child of an apamwamba [upper class person]/’
Another put it more extremely: ” ‘Chongies’ are victims of bourgeois
capitalist ideology. They speak with American accents.” 18 The negative
behavior of the chongololo thus extends beyond a verbal style of
“speak[ing] in tongues” to include the desire for a bourgeois lifestyle that
is beyond the reach of most Zambians. Indeed, the actual content of the
Chongololo program itself – observing birds in nature, appreciation of the
world of insects, tourism within Zambia, and concern with wildlife preser-
vation – emblematizes this essentially un-Zambian outlook.

What kinds of semiotic processes are at work in this recontextualization
of a program title as a personal stereotype? First, there are certain formal
linguistic conditions that support it. Analogous to the Kitwe example, this
recontextualization is based on both metonymy and the existence of a
shared lexical category (proper name). The program name Chongololo is also
the club name, and club members – or people like them – are metonymi-

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176 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

cally designated as chongololos or chongies. In addition, the recycling imports
several features of the original radio context into its negative connotations:
the mode of speaking, upper-class leisure activities, and a Western-oriented
outlook. Moreover, the very concept of the radio program as a club that can
be joined furthers the implicit critique that the show and the chongololo
represent an exclusive sector of Zambian society. The Chongololo Radio
Club of the Air, as a club for chongololos, in essence constitutes a distinct
speech community where members share a common norm of English
language usage (i.e., RP). The point of contention, and what motivates the
negative stereotype, is whether this speech community has the rightful
claim to also represent the linguistic community of English within Zambia.
While the program’s speakers do adhere to a “culture of the standard”
(Silverstein 1987) and view themselves as exemplifying proper English
usage – particularly as they are guided by a male British program
host – most Zambians reject this as a model for how Zambians should speak
English.

Poaching from Personalities

In contrast to the Chongololo show, numerous other radio programs
provide very attractive models of speech styles which are emulated and
invoked in more positive ways. In many cases, these styles and linguistic
innovations are actually the trademarks of a particular radio personality.
The uniqueness of such radio personalities is to a great degree built upon
this verbal creativity, a creativity that is at the same time relatively predict-
able since it is recognizable as a personal style. In many instances this very
reputation and visibility is what subsequently propels the adoption of
broadcasters’ linguistic innovations within popular culture (see Gumperz
1971:223). Some of these recycled innovations retain the indexical link to
the individual broadcaster’s speech style, and others have been absorbed
more widely into popular usage. In the following we look at a few examples
of this popular adoption of broadcasters’ speech innovations and habits.

Dennis Liwewe, Zambia’s most famous sports announcer, is renowned
for his fast speech, innovative descriptions, and dramatic delivery. His
broadcasts are almost always in English, and his mode of speaking has
become a model and a reference point for certain phrasings, even beyond
the area of sports. For example, one very common Liwewe phrase during
football (soccer) games combines the word situation with one or two num-
bers:

(4) Ifs a one-zero situation.
(5) Bwalya comes into the Zaire zone. Iťs a one-two situation.

In utterance (4), situation refers to the score. A one-zero situation is thus a
score of one to zero. In (5), situation refers to the positions on the playing
field. That is, there is one offensive player – Bwalya on the Zambian
team – moving in against two defensive players in the Zaire zone.

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 177

Zambians have picked up on this usage of situation and have applied it
outside the realm of sports, to refer to contexts where some numerical
quantity is involved. For example, I was at the University of Zambia snack
bar, and a young man had been at the counter trying to get some matches
to light a cigarette. He was unsuccessful and walked back to his friend,
saying:

(6) 7/i/flmatches, zero situation Things [boxes] of matches, zero situation/
‘About the matches, zero situation/

The “zero situation” in this case is the unavailability of matches. While one
might interpret situation here as meaning “predicament,” it also has a sense
analogous to the sports-specific forms in (4) and (5), as “score” or “posi-
tion.” The young man came up empty-handed in the search for matches;
he thus failed to score and found that nothing was in position.

The recycling of the Liwewe formula “[number(-number)] situation”
outside of sports talk is highly marked as creative language use. While
recontextualized, it still retains an important indexical link back to its
original source. This is not just a link of attribution, that is, the identification
of Liwewe as the originator of the expression, but one that carries the
broader associations of a “Liweweism,” a phrasing that is dramatic, lively,
and somewhat hyperbolic in the manner of the famous Liwewe.19 The usage
of ChiBemba-English code-mixing in (6) lends an additional air of trendi-
ness to the expression.

Other examples of linguistic innovations stemming from specific radio
personalities include the words get and dig as idioms for “understand” that,
as discussed earlier, have been incorporated into the code-mixed slang
expressions “Naugeta?” (Do ya get me?) and “Namudiga?” (Do you dig
it?). These words emanate from the most popular Radio Zambia DJs, who
are themselves recyclers, as they extract popular American and British
slang from song lyrics while exhorting their listeners, talking up the re-
cords, and making segues between selections. Many DJs also exemplify the
pronunciations characteristic of informal American English usage (for ex-
ample, strongly nasalized “gonna,” “wanna,” and “ya know”), and these
expressions circulate quite widely among Zambian youths. The following
excerpt from Radio 4 disc jockey Leonard Kantumoya, also known as “The
Groove Maker” or “The GM,” illustrates some of these media sources of
urban slang:

Ah, when you hear the GM playing instrumentais and keeping a little quiet,
you just know the hour is about to arrive and I’m about to hit the road for home,
because I see my good friend Swidden Hangaala is already in.
He’s dug in already and he’s trying to dig in even further. [Laughs.]
He’s gonna sweep me out of my DJ saddle. [Radio 4, February 3, 1989, emphasis
added]

With this kind of fast-paced, exciting style, Zambian DJs play a pivotal role
in introducing an English-language vocabulary that speaks to the mood
and tempo of the modern condition. Contemporary Zambian English is

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178 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

replete with such words and idioms, many of which are not restricted to
subcultural usage and many of which have origins as far back as the 1940s.
Some of the most popular of these are the words jive, jazz, super , live, nonstop ,
beat, and rap. In this sense, radio – in conjunction with popular music that
is often the original site of such vocabulary – has played a key role not only
in introducing new lexical items but in structuring an entire semantic field
that denotes excitement and entertainment.

Broadcasters’ Recyclings: The Case of Personal Titles

The preceding discussion has touched on several instances where media
professionals themselves recontextualize and reanimate phrases that origi-
nate in other contexts, for example, program titles that stem from indige-
nous oral traditions and Western media sources, and disc-jockey speech
registers that draw from popular song lyrics and the styles of DJs heard on
foreign stations. In this sense, not only does radio serve as model of
normative language use and as a springboard for linguistic innovations
within popular culture, it is also a dynamically intertextual site in which an
existing repertoire of public words is continually being modified and
elaborated upon. This section examines one final case of broadcasters’
recyclings, one that illustrates the possibilities of political parody within
broadcasting.

All radio disc jockeys have at least one nickname that they regularly use;
most of these are boasts of some sort, and many are creative twists on
political titles or other titles associated with high status. For example, the
late Peter Mweemba went by the name “Brother PM,” a combination of his
personal initials and an American-derived term for solidary males.20 In the
Zambian context, this coinage is particularly striking, because PM also
designates the third highest ranking politician in the country, the Prime
Minister.21 As he cultivated his own style of casual and trendy familiarity,
Brother PM played off the fact that the real PM is surrounded by the exact
opposite: an aura of extreme deference and seriousness. Exploiting the full
force of this contrast, ZNBC management actually orchestrated the meeting
of Brother PM and the real PM on national radio, by inviting the then-Prime
Minister to preside over the inauguration of a new radio channel. Peter
Mweemba was the DJ on duty:

Right, this is your DJ, Brother PM,
behind the microphone hoping you’re ready for us,
as we bring it to you, the biggest and best on FM stereo.
Right, in just a few minutes’ time from now,
the Right Honorable Prime Minister, Kebby Musokotwane
will be walking into Radio Mulungushi stereo studio,
to officially switch on Radio Mulungushi. [Radio 4, February 1, 1989]

After the Prime Minister inaugurates the new radio channel, Peter
Mweemba interviews him at length about the role of broadcasting. In the
exchange, the two address each other as “Right Honorable Prime Minister”
and “Peter.” Later in the interview, Mweemba personalizes the discussion

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 179

and focuses on the musical tastes of the Prime Minister. The PM is asked if

he has any favorites to request, and by the end of the interview, he is
integrated like any other avid radio listener into the popular radio format
of the deejayed greeting/request program:

Well, before I spin your records, Right Honorable Prime Minister,
finally, any special greetings to your friends and family?
I realize you are a national leader;
so I suppose there are one or two people you’d like to say hello to.

Of course, the integration is not really complete. Mweemba does not refer
to himself as “Brother PM” during this exchange, nor would we expect the
real PM to use this phrase. Moreover, the list of people whom the Prime
Minister wishes to greet and thank is rather unusual. He first greets his wife,
then his “colleagues in Cabinet,” the Zambian people, and finally the
President.

In an interesting twist on both Peter Mweemba’s innovation and another
political abbreviation, the broadcaster Margaret Phiri uses the initials “MP”
as her DJ trademark. In common parlance, MP designates a Member of
Parliament. Phiri is a rather low-key broadcaster and does not really play
up the political connotations of her nickname. Many listeners feel that she
rather uncreatively copied Mweemba’s model. Behind this, however, are
some basic gender differences and expectations about speaking styles.
Projecting a strong lively personality on national airwaves and, especially,
the playfulness and boasting that is inherent in many DJ nicknames (e.g.,
“The Sweet Sensation” and “The Man with the Longest Queue in Town”)
is deemed more appropriate for Zambian men and less appropriate for
Zambian women.

One popular radio DJ who is constantly promoting himself and coining
new phrases is Leonard Kantumoya (“The Groove Maker” or “The GM”).
Behind the microphone, Kantumoya talks quite a lot and often uses Ameri-
can slang (circa 1970), as illustrated above. The wordplay, or abbreviation
play, in his nickname builds on the fact that, in Zambia, GM is one of the
most pervasive labels for the highest-ranking office in business and indus-
try: the general manager. Using another abbreviation, Kantumoya dubs his
music “PPS” (People Pleasing Sounds). PPS with GM is somewhat of a
mixed metaphor (or mixed bureaucracy), but it is amusing in any case as it
invokes the well-known title “Provincial Political Secretary.” 22

In their recontextualizations of these abbreviations designating bureau-
cratic structures and high offices, Zambian broadcasters display a distinc-
tive sense of humor. They never directly refer to the original source of their
nicknames; they only allude to it. But like political leaders and top level
bureaucrats, they are, in their own realm, at the controls. They are in charge
of spinning the records and making the announcements. In terms of their
pragmatic structure, such DJ nicknames are most apt as uniquely identify-
ing rádio trademarks or signatures, because they already have a built-in
definiteness. The initials themselves presuppose the existence of a specific

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180 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

nonabbreviated form, and these nonabbreviated forms specifically desig-
nate the holder of a particular office or position.
As recyclings of tropes of the nation-state, these DJ nicknames illustrate

a more general point about the public sphere in Zambia. The knowledge of
acronyms and abbreviations is an important part of communicative com-
petence in Zambia, and this is essentially part of the postcolonial legacy.23
For example, in modern-day Zambia the most prominent positions, insti-
tutions, and interests – from government offices and state services to mul-
tinational corporations and foreign donor agencies – are designated by a
proliferation of acronyms such as UNZA, TAZARA, ZESCO, INDECO,
ZNBC, DANIDA, SIDO, FTJ, KK, PM, MP, GM, and DG.24 What appears to
be a virtual alphabet soup for the uninitiated is actually a very concrete
mapping and populating of the public sphere. With their own initials,
Brother PM, MP, and the GM thus index not only their conversancy and
sense of humor about this public sphere but also their unique membership
in it: to be initialed in this way is to have a uniquely identifying description
and to be counted among the ranks of the nation’s leading figures.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to open up a relatively unexplored area of
research at the intersection of language and culture, by investigating the
social circulation of media discourse and its implications for the mediation
of communities. I have argued that broadcasting functions as a common
reservoir and reference point for various kinds of linguistic innovations in
Zambia, ranging from the subcultural to the mainstream, from the fleeting
to the perduring, and from the parodie to the mundane. Radio is a source
for lexical coinage (e.g., chongies and kabuusha), idiomatic expressions (e.g.,
“Waikata line?”), and distinctive modes of verbal interaction (e.g., “Over
to you”). It is also a resource for innovative tropes and analogies: for
example, BaSix Koloko (The Six o’Clockers) as a name for members of ethnic
groups whose newscasts begin daily at 6 a.m., or “Hello, Kitwe” as an
address form for someone who is hard of hearing.

In addition to documenting these processes, I have made some broader
semiotic generalizations about the types of media discourse that circulate
and the types of conditions that enable this circulation. For example,
metapragmatic discourse and, in particular, various kinds of interpersonal
routines and framing devices are readily seized upon in creative rework-
ings of media language. I have proposed that features such as transparency
of form and function and prominence (via frequent repetition or association
with dramatic moments) create a “prepared-for detachability” (Bauman
and Briggs 1990:74) that enables such discourse to be circulated across
communities. I have also suggested that the language of proper names and
definite description (including place-names, nicknames, and abbrevia-
tions), as well as generic names for social types, figure importantly in
socially circulating media discourse, because they function to locate and
populate a shared world, much in a manner analogous to the processes
described by Anderson (1983) in reference to the 18th-century novel. And

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 181

finally, I have suggested that these processes of circulation operate within
a much larger context of a very dynamic verbal culture which itself is
playful, ironic, and highly intertextual.
Addressing the thorny question of the construction of communities is a

much more difficult task than discovering the various semiotic and cultural
conditions that propel the social circulation of media discourse. I have
claimed that mass media provide common reference points for the produc-
tion of shared linguistic knowledge and that the social circulation of media
discourse is just one case of the subtle linguistic connections that exist across
populations that stretch over regional and national boundaries. I have
proposed that criteria such as frequency of media consumption and large-
scale exposure to a common media source enter into this equation and that
the speech community concept can be productively refined by including
these features.

As the cases considered here have intimated, the communities mediated
by radio broadcasting are several. Since media discourse is not uniformly
accessible or even uniformly seized upon and interpreted in the same ways,
all kinds of outcomes are possible. In some instances the social circulation
of media discourse occurs at the subcultural level (e.g., “Waikata line?”
among urban youths), and in some instances it is more general (e.g., “Imbila
ya Bulanda” and “Ofata yu”). Still other instances may be highly idiosyn-
cratic, as suggested by the case of “Hello, Kitwe.” Further research into the
sociolinguistic distribution of recycled media discourse across age, gender,
class, locale, and language is really required to answer such questions about
communities more concretely.

One enduring issue throughout the discussion has been how to charac-
terize the status of these phrases that circulate across and through mass
media and popular culture. Following other work in linguistic anthropol-
ogy (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Lucy 1993; Silver-
stein and Urban 1996), I have attempted in each case to specify the various
formal conditions on, and functional effects of, such recontextualized
speech. In comparison to the better-known speech genres (e.g., narrative,
oratory, ritual speech, and reported speech) that feature in such studies,
many of the media fragments considered here exhibit (1) a much greater
mobility through various social contexts, and (2) a peculiar built-in detach-
ability and reproducibility, as stated above. As they thread through differ-
ent contexts of use, giving people their own voices and aesthetic pleasures,
such public words hearken to speakers and contexts which are in some
ways larger than life. Indeed, it is this transportability, or detachability, that
allows public words to seem to have lives of their own yet also be fibers of
connection across various social situations and contexts.

While some scholars might attribute this circulation of media discourse
more generally to the inherent nature of mass media and/ or to a postmod-
ern condition, I would challenge this. It may be true that the postmodern
condition is characterized by an unprecedented fascination with icons,
images, slogans, jingles, and other mass-produced objects that mass media
disseminate and produce (Baudrillard 1983; Harvey 1989; Hebdige 1988;
Jameson 1984). But the various practices that characterize active audiences

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182 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

such as media poaching and intertextuality (Certeau 1984; Jenkins 1992) do
not seem to be particularly new. The evidence here suggests that recycling
media discourse and even the existence of such “détachables” are part of a
much more general process of language use, or social life of language,
which intersects (but precedes) the postmodern, pop-culture era, and the
advent of mass media as widespread, public communication forms. In fact,
it seems equally the case that the radio recyclings discussed here are not
really exemplars of a postmodern condition per se, but rather they are
evidence of the more general heteroglossic nature of language. To quote
Bakhtin:

[T]here are no “neutral” words and forms – words and forms that can belong to
“no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions
and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an
abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heterglot conception of
the world. All words have a “taste” of a profession, a genre … a particular person,
a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the contexts in
which it has lived its socially charged life. [1981:293]

As a far-reaching, ongoing, public communication form – which is itself
a constant reanimator – radio broadcasting has the potential to magnify,
and even create, this “socially charged life” of certain linguistic forms. I
have suggested here that the study of media discourse in popular culture
is one such avenue for examining the dynamism and mobility of language,
and that this mobility (and mobilizability) has far-reaching implications for
both language change and the construction of public cultures and speech
communities which are vibrant and creative.

Notes

Acknowledgments . Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 1995
American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Washington, DC, in the
session “Social Formations and Language ‘Communities’ ” and at the “Language
in the City: Public Spaces and National Dialogues” conference at New York Uni-
versity in March 1994. The primary research for this article was carried out in
1988-90, supported by Fulbright-Hays and NSF fellowships, and facilitated by the
Institute for African Studies at the University of Zambia. I would like to extend my
sincere thanks to these institutions, and especially to Jane Hill and James Collins,
the paper discussants at the two conferences. I am also grateful to the Spencer
Foundation and the University Research Committee at Emory University for sup-
porting various stages of this work. I am deeply indebted, as well, to many
colleagues who have offered their valuable input at various writing stages, includ-
ing, but not limited to, Mark Auslander, Misty Bastian, Bruce Knauft, Ben Lee, John
Lucy, Mwelwa Musambachime, Bradd Shore, Michael Silverstein, and the anony-
mous reviewers for the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology .

1. As an adjective, public is used here (following Urban) in a fairly neutral sense
to connote wide distribution and a general openness and availability. This defini-
tion contrasts in important ways with definitions of the noun public , or the public ,
as an ideological construct concerning state-citizen relations or corporation-
consumer relations (Calhoun 1992; Gal 1995:417 f.; Gal and Woolard 1995; Spitulnik
1994a). For discussions of how these two are linked, that is, how public availability

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 183

of certain communication forms figures into the ideological construction of publics,
see Gal and Woolard 1995 and Spitulnik 1994a, 1994b.
2. For electronic media, the semantics of the term broadcast (which originated

from the realm of agriculture) encapsulates this important sense of widespread
distribution.

3. See Irvine 1987 for a discussion of the history of the speech community concept
and its various definitions, revisions, shortcomings, and merits. Probably the most
strongly debated issues concern the importance of shared knowledge of a linguistic
code, including shared knowledge of norms for usage and interpretation (Gumperz
1971) and the related emphasis on the homogeneity of the speech community. For
example, several scholars have pointed out that linguistic and sociolinguistic
knowledge is not evenly shared across communities (Irvine 1987; Parkin 1994),
despite a dominant ideology of sharedness in many cases (Silverstein 1987; also see
the other contributions to this ]LA issue). In contrast, the criteria of density and
frequency of interaction have been omitted, more than debated, perhaps because
of their problematic nature for large-scale societies and their behaviorist connota-
tions stemming from Bloomfield, the originator of the speech community concept.

4. ChiBemba is the name for the language of the Bemba people, BaBemba, who
constitute roughly 19 percent of Zambia’s national population (Kashoki 1978a).
More than half of the nation’s 9.1 million inhabitants speak ChiBemba (56 percent
of the national population, according to Kashoki 1978a), and at least one-quarter
speak English (26 percent according to Kashoki 1978a, and 45 percent according to
Claypole and Daka 1993). Approximately 69 percent of all national radio broadcast-
ing is in English, and 6 percent is in ChiBemba (Spitulnik 1992).

5. According to a national media survey conducted in 1991, 57% of all Zambians
own a working radio, 74% listen at least once per week, and 63% listen daily or
almost daily. By sharp contrast, only 17% own TVs and 30% view TV at least once
a week (Claypole and Daka 1993:63-64).

6. For a discussion of this last phrase, see Hill 1993.
7. Metapragmatic discourse is speech that is about the communication context

or about the functions of language in context: for example, “Here’s what I want to
tell you. . . ,” “I didn’t hear what you just said,” and “Stop lecturing me.” As speech
about speaking, metapragmatic discourse functions to both regiment and frame the
interpretation of the ongoing speech event (Silverstein 1976, 1993).

8. Media discourse about mistakes and failures is a common target of comic
recycling. For example, ZNBC radio and TV frequently broadcast public service
announcements for the national electric company regarding temporary power
outages. The phrase “Any inconvenience caused is deeply regretted” is a standard
feature of such announcements and can be humorously recast in other speech
contexts. For an example on the World Wide Web, see Ranjit Warrieťs rendering
of the Zambian English version as “Any inconvenience caused is diply regraitted”
in reference to his homepage’s possibly strange appearance through non-Netscape
browsers (Warrier 1996b).

9. The complex humor of this exchange is even more elaborate for those who
know the etymology of place-name “Kitwe” in Lamba, the language indigenous to
the Copperbelt region. Kitwe is an abbreviation of a Lamba expression for “big ear.”
The place was named after an historical event involving an elephant.

10. In the late 1980s, versions of Over to You aired on Thursdays in Luvale, on
Saturdays in English and ChiLunda, and on Sundays in ChiBemba, ChiNyanja, and
ChiTonga.

1 1 . Further investigation is required to determine the precise morpheme bounda-
ries in these assimilated phrases. My representation is based on a hypothesis that

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184 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

the first three syllables are one word and that you is analyzed as a demonstrative
pronoun for third-person singular, in an analogy with yu (ChiNyanja) and uyu
(ChiBemba) ‘this person’, ‘heť, ‘him’.
12. In the examples, italicized words are ChiBemba (unless otherwise noted), and

nonitalicized words are English.
13. Further examples of foreign-derived titles on Radio Zambia include This Is

My Song , My Old Favorites , Yours for the Asking , and other titles based on fill-in-the-
blank formulas such as X’s Corner ( Children’s Corner , Women’s Corner, and Poet’s
Corner) and X’s Magazine (Women’s Magazine).
14. More specific sociolinguistic questions about the significance of each form

remain open for further research, since their usage and distribution were not
systematically studied.

15. In addition to these more innovative names, Zambian media are also a
popular source for personal names, for example, names for newborns and names
that teenagers adopt for themselves. During the late 1980s the names Jeff and Pam
were very popular, as they derived from the American television series Dynasty and
Dallas running on TV-Zambia.

16. At the time, the party vigilantes were members of the country’s ruling (and
sole) party, the United National Independence Party (UNIP).

17. The closing song substitutes the last two verses with: “Now it’s time to say
good-bye to our friends far and near. Before we go leťs give our wildlife a great big
cheer. Yeah!”

18. This quote points to the difficulty in precisely defining the chongololo accent.
In the radio program the broadcasters’ accents are RP, and the children’s accents
approximate this. But outside of radio, many forms of non-Zambian English count
as chongololo accents, including ones that sound like a blend of American and
British varieties. As one reviewer of this article noted, the perception that chongies
have American accents maybe linked, via ideological pressures, to the identification
of speakers as “capitalists.”

19. Liwewe’s most famous phrase is his characteristic wild yell, “It’s a
gooooooooaaal!!!” For an electronic poaching of this, see Warrier 1996a.

20. Peter Mweemba’s use of brother has several possible connotations and may
stem from idioms of Christian brotherhood and /or from African American usage.

21. Political positions and rankings have changed somewhat under the current
Chiluba government. At the time of fieldwork, during the one-party system, the
secretary-general of the ruling party ranked second after the Zambian president.

22. During the period of one-party rule, this was the title for the second-highest
government position at the provincial level.

23. The creative poaching of such abbreviations, acronyms, and state slogans is
pervasive in Zambia and throughout much of Africa (Mbembe 1992; Spitulnik
1994b). One example of this is illustrated by the renderings of the abbreviation
“IFA,” which is on the front of the large Zambian army trucks manufactured by the
IFA company (of the former East Germany). Because these vehicles are involved in
so many fatal road accidents, the name is interpreted as designating “International
Funeral Association/ Ambassadors,” or imfwa ‘death’.

24. Respectively, these stand for University of Zambia, Tanzania-Zambia Rail-
way, Zambia Electric Supply Corporation, Industrial Development Corporation,
Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation, Danish International Development
Agency, Small Industries Development Organisation, Frederick T. J. Chiluba (the
current president), Kenneth Kaunda (the former president), Prime Minister, Mem-
ber of Parliament, General Manager, and Director General.

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 185

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• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 6, No. 2 (DECEMBER 1996) pp. 123-256
Front Matter
Editorial: Language and Community: Introduction [pp. 123-125]
Encountering Language and Languages of Encounter in North American Ethnohistory [pp. 126-144]
Owners versus Bubu Gujin: Land Rights and Getting the Language Right in Guugu Yimithirr Country [pp. 145-160]
The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities [pp. 161-187]
Reduplication and Reciprocity in Imagining Community: The Play of Tropes in a Rural Bangladeshi Moot [pp. 188-222]
The Emergence of Color Cognition from Color Perception [pp. 223-240]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 241-244]
Review: untitled [pp. 244-246]
Review: untitled [pp. 246-248]
Review: untitled [pp. 248-249]
Review: untitled [pp. 249-251]
Review: untitled [pp. 251-253]
Book Notices [pp. 254-256]
Back Matter

The Everyday Language of
White Racism

Jane H. Hill

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition fi rst published 2008
© 2008 Jane H. Hill

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The everyday language of white racism / Jane H. Hill.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-8453-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-8454-0 (hardcover : alk.
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Introduction: What is Covert Racist Discourse?

Slurs and gaffes are salient forms of racist talk for White Americans, ren-
dered visible within widely shared linguistic ideologies and the ways that
these intersect with the folk theory of racism. Critical approaches to White
racism invite us to look for other racist discourses that are invisible to these
ideologies and to the folk theory. And indeed, we can fi nd them. I illustrate
these “covert racist discourses” with a way of speaking that Whites do not
understand as racist, but which works to reproduce negative stereotypes of
people of color, in this case, members of historically Spanish-speaking
populations in the United States. I call this covert racist discourse Mock
Spanish (Hill 1993a, b, 1998, 2001, 2005b).

By “covert” and “invisible” I mean “for Whites.” Latinos/as have indeed
noticed Mock Spanish and related forms of Spanish used by Whites, and
objected to them. I discuss examples of such objections here, drawn from
published material, from personal communications from colleagues, and
from interviews. However, Whites, who are usually quite guarded about
public race talk (Bonilla-Silva 2003), use Mock Spanish without any of the
usual hedges. Consider an example of a Mock Spanish utterance:

(1) Does CIM Stand For “Consider It Mañana”? (Strassman 1992).

The sentence in (1) was the title of a lecture on “Corporate Information
Management” presented at the Department of Defense on September 22,

Chapter 5

Covert Racist Discourse:
Metaphors, Mocking, and the
Racialization of Historically
Spanish-Speaking Populations
in the United States

The Everyday Language of White Racism Jane H. Hill
© 2008 Jane H. Hill. ISBN: 978-1-405-18453-3

120 Covert Racist Discourse

1992. It seems very unlikely that the speaker would have hedged the title
with the expression, “I’m not a racist, but I’m going to talk about whether
CIM stands for ‘Consider it mañana’.” This frame, “I’m not a racist,
but . . . ,” discussed by van Dijk (1993), provides a good test for whether
an utterance is covert racist discourse or not. If the frame works, the utter-
ance is visibly racist in the ways shown in Chapters 3 and 4. If it does not
work, but analysis can show that racist meanings must be conveyed by the
phrase, we have encountered covert racist discourse. In this case, much
evidence shows that the choice of “mañana” to lighten up the title in (1),
make it a bit of a joke, requires that those who “get” the joke have access
to a stereotype of speakers of Spanish as lazy procrastinators (Hill 2005b).

Another kind of evidence that this language is covert and invisible as
racist is the absence of public reaction. The Mock Spanish tag line “Hasta
la vista, baby” was made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1992
fi lm Terminator II: Judgment Day. In the fi lm the utterance is not a sincere
farewell, since Schwarzenegger says it as he blows his enemy into a million
pieces with an enormous automatic weapon. The phrase is so catchy for
Whites that Schwarzenegger has used it repeatedly in his own campaigns
and when campaigning for other Republican candidates, and it has been
borrowed by Democratic candidates as a reliable applause line. But the
pleasure of the phrase requires access to a negative stereotype of Spanish
speakers as treacherous and insincere, the kind of people who would tell
you politely “Until we meet again” and in the next instant blow you away.
But in the dozens of times I have heard the phrase, I have never heard
anybody frame it with “I’m not a racist, but . . .”

The Spanish Language in the United States

Since Mock Spanish is directed against Spanish speakers, to understand it
in context we must briefl y review their history in the United States. A
community of speakers of Isleño Spanish (originating primarily in the
Canary Islands) became citizens when their lands were incorporated by the
Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The language is still spoken in southern Loui-
siana, although it is moribund (Campbell and Muntzel 1989; LeStrade
2002). Statehood for Florida and Texas in 1845 brought more Spanish
speakers into the union. After 1848, with the conquest of the enormous
Mexican territories that make up the southwestern United States and
California, Spanish became the nation’s most important language after
English. Article IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed Mexican
citizens of the conquered territories full rights in the United States, in the
language seen in (2).

Covert Racist Discourse 121

(2) “The Mexicans who, in the territories aforesaid, shall not preserve the
character of citizens of the Mexican Republic, conformably with what is
stipulated in the preceding article, shall be incorporated into the Union
of the United States, and be admitted at the proper time (to be judged of
by the Congress of the United States) to the enjoyment of all the rights
of citizens of the United States, according to the principles of the Con-
stitution; and in the mean time, shall be maintained and protected in the
free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exer-
cise of their religion without restriction.”

Unfortunately, these guarantees proved to be largely meaningless, since
until the post-Civil War Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitu-
tion, American citizenship was restricted to “Free White Persons.” Indians
were not permitted to become citizens until 1924. Many Mexicans in the
new territories were thought (correctly) to have “Indian blood.” Menchaca
(1993) has documented the legal struggles undertaken by this population.
Menchaca (1995) and Sheridan (1986, 2006) review the theft of their land,
water, stock, and other forms of capital and labor opportunities over 150
years, leading to the marginalization of Mexican American populations into
the nearly caste-like status that can be observed in much of the region
today.

In addition to the old populations, today immigration from all over
the Spanish-speaking world has contributed an enormous diversity of
Spanish-language ways of speaking and Spanish-heritage communities
to the American scene. Unfortunately, this diversity is seldom recognized
by Whites, who understand populations of Spanish-language heritage
within the homogenizing framework that Zentella (1995) has called
“chiquita-fi cation.” Thus populations originating in countries as diverse
as the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Colombia are assimilated to
the system of White stereotypes originally developed around Mexican
Americans.

The same racism that permitted Mexican Americans to be stripped of
material resources also marginalized the Spanish language, as Spanish was
either ignored or actively proscribed. Although after 1924 Mexican Ameri-
cans were all citizens, the bilingual public health and safety announcements,
voter informational materials, and ballots required by law today did not
appear until the late 1960s and early 1970s, and court interpretation remains
a hit-or-miss affair. First-language Spanish was forbidden in public schools,
with students suffering draconian punishment for speaking it. Against enor-
mous odds, some Spanish-language mass media including newspapers, radio,
and theater survived, but the language was for many years quite absent
from public space, which was defi ned as White and English-speaking. The
same racist attitudes that led Mexican Americans to be evaluated as back-
ward, superstitious, treacherous, and dirty were refl ected in evaluations of

122 Covert Racist Discourse

their language, assigned a place as illiterate and ungrammatical “border
Spanish” which was thought to hold its speakers back from the benefi ts of
the full modernity that could be obtained through English.

The Offi cial English movement

Pressure against Spanish never really ceased, and during the last two decades
it has again intensifi ed. Organizations like US English, ProEnglish, and
English First have funded dozens of state-level initiatives as well as cam-
paigns for federal legislation to make English the “offi cial” language of
government. Employers, often supported by the courts, have tried to create
English-monolingual workplaces.1 Public schools are retreating to English-
only policies in many districts, with opportunities for publicly funded
bilingual education now sharply restricted in California and Arizona and
threatened in several other states. The right of students to speak their home
language even in the halls and on the playground is under attack in some
districts (Reid 2005; Crawford 1992a, 1992b, 2000, 2004 reviews the Offi –
cial English movement and the fi ght against bilingual education).

While labels like “English First” suggest a concern for the well-being of
the English language, those who advance offi cial-English policies cannot
rationally be worried about the status of the language. English is unques-
tionably the most important international language today. And indeed the
organizations most actively involved in advancing the offi cialization of
English and restrictions on the use of other languages give minimal atten-
tion to efforts such as funding innovations in English-language instruction,
prizes for English-language works of literature, or institutes that will encour-
age the study of English and English-speaking culture in other countries.
Instead, it seems clear that their motives are merely exclusionary. However,
their efforts have framed the debate over language politics in the United
States. Those who wish to defend US Spanish both as a national resource
for all Americans and as a heritage for historically Spanish-speaking com-
munities are constantly forced to expend their energies in struggle within
this framework.

Beyond the political promotion of “offi cial” English, explicit attacks on
Spanish are part of everyday practices among Americans of English-language
heritage across a wide front. In the previous sentence, I wrote “Americans
of English-language heritage” rather than “White Americans,” my usage in
previous chapters, because African Americans have often joined in attacks
on Spanish and its speakers. They vote heavily in favor of Offi cial English
legislation, and the limited materials to which I have access suggest that
African American elites, like middle-class Whites, are heavy users of Mock
Spanish. I have not included attention to African American attitudes here,

Covert Racist Discourse 123

because my data are very limited. But many African Americans may share
with Whites negative attitudes about Spanish.

Informal pressure against Spanish is a ubiquitous fact of American life.
For instance, at a website that offers a wide range of paraphernalia express-
ing right-wing political views, one can purchase for $15.00 an anti-
immigrant t-shirt that says “OK, you snuck in. Speak English.” To get a
sense of the company one might keep wearing such an item, another shirt
in the site’s small inventory bears an image of a Confederate battle fl ag
with the slogan “Ban illegal immigration, not Southern heritage.”2

Objections to the public use of Spanish extend even to details of ortho-
graphy and pronunciation. Sociologist José Cobas, a faculty member at
Arizona State University, reports a long struggle, still unsuccessful, to make
the university’s bureaucracy place the acute accent over the “é” in his given
name in offi cial correspondence and documents (José Cobas, personal com-
munication, July 15, 2004). The journalist Aly Colón reports that he
resorted to inserting an accent mark by hand on his byline so that his
surname would not read like a body part (Wides-Múñoz 2006).3 Pronun-
ciations are also hotly contested, with Whites often insisting on “hyper-
anglicized” versions of Spanish personal and place names. Peñalosa (1981)
early identifi ed this practice as emanating from White racism. Louisor-
White and Valencia Tanno (1994) documented the struggles of Spanish-
heritage newsreaders on Los Angeles television stations to be permitted to
pronounce their own names in Spanish. While such pronunciations are
now quite common, they remain marked and objectionable for many
Whites. I have been present when Whites have ridiculed, with exaggerated
“r”-rolling and other parodic strategies, the pronunciations that two Latina
television newsreaders in Tucson, Lupita Murillo and Barbara Grijalva, use
for their names. The choice of /tuk!son/ vs. /!tuwsan/ for the city’s name
is politically charged, with Whites insisting on the latter pronunciation even
though it leads to inevitable misspellings (we all regularly get mail addressed
to “Tuscon”). Our airport code is TUS, a not-unexpected victory for the
Anglo pronunciation.4

The rejection of Spanish as a language that is valid in public space is
evident as well in gross grammatical errors in public notices of all types.
Peñalosa (1981) noted signs posted over the sink in public restrooms that
read “Wash your hands/Lave sus manos” (Spanish Lavarse las manos, or
perhaps Lávese las manos). Peñalosa commented that it was astonishing to
see three grammatical errors in three words, but exactly the sign that he
critiqued is still easy to fi nd nearly 30 years after his observation. An aston-
ishing example of ungrammatical public Spanish greets drivers entering the
United States from the Mexican side of the border at the Mariposa Crossing
between Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona. As they reach the inspec-
tion area, they encounter a huge sign reading “All vehicles must stop/Todos

124 Covert Racist Discourse

vehiculos deben pararse.” The Spanish translation is grossly ungrammatical
and unidiomatic, as well as misspelled, and especially entertaining to many
speakers of local Spanish who argue that pararse means “to stand up,” not
“to stop,” which for them is simply parar. Humorous examples abound: A
school in California sent out a reminder letter to parents who had been
asked to sign what in English is called a “permission slip.” The reminder
message called this item “Un resbalón parental de permission.” The word
resbalón does not mean “slip” in the sense of “permission slip,” but refers
instead to skidding, sliding, or, most humorously, a moral lapse. Thus un
resbalón parental can mean something like “a parental sexual misstep.”5 All
of these examples come from parts of the country where literate Spanish
speakers could have easily been asked to proofread them. The signal that is
sent (and received by Spanish speakers) is that their language is not taken
seriously enough to require consultation with them.

Many Whites object to bilingual health and safety postings in any context.
Predictably, they are objects of parody. In the 1980 comedy fi lm Airplane,
as the catastrophe begins, warning lights come on over the seats, with the
“bilingual” message seen in (3).6

(3) “No smoking
El no a you smoko
Fasten seatbelts
Putana da seatbeltz”

Informal pressure against Spanish in the United States includes a ritual-
ized linguistic routine: On overhearing someone speaking a foreign lan-
guage, one aggressively confronts them and insists “This is America! We
speak English here!” (Urciuoli 1996). In April 1998 I heard this line when
I had to change planes in the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport. The terminals in
the airport were connected by an automatic tramway, and each exit was
announced in both English and Spanish over a public address system. On
my tram that day were a dozen teenagers chaperoned by two well-dressed
adult couples. When the fi rst announcement in Spanish came on, one of
the men said loudly and indignantly, “This is America! We speak English
here!” Of course Dallas-Ft. Worth is an important international airport,
with a huge amount of traffi c in and out of Latin America. Apparently,
this gentleman would have preferred to have foreign visitors miss their
fl ights than to have Spanish on the airport’s public address system.7

A shocking instance of this routine occurred on my own campus. On
March 3, 2006, Mauricio Farah G., of the Human Rights Commission of
Mexico, was an invited speaker at a colloquium of the Latin American
Studies Program at the University of Arizona. While the organizers of the
colloquia apparently assumed that people specializing in Latin American

Covert Racist Discourse 125

Studies will understand Spanish, university functions are open to the general
public. Mr. Farah reported his experience as follows:

(4) “Empecé agradeciendo, en español, la invitación que me permitía estar
allí.

Los gritos seguían: ‘This is America!’ ”
[I began in Spanish with thanks for the invitation that had permitted me

to be present. The outcry followed: “This is America!”]

Mr. Farah was shouted down by several members of Border Guardians,
a small anti-immigration group headquartered in Tucson. They proudly
report this bit of activism on their website (Border Guardians’ Victories!
2006). Mr. Farah received an apology from the President of the University
of Arizona, and spoke again in March 2007; on that occasion, the Center
for Latin American Studies provided a translator (which could easily have
been done during the previous year, had the Border Guardians requested
one rather than shouting down the speaker).8

A staple of anti-Spanish rhetoric is that hearing Spanish makes “Ameri-
cans” feel like aliens in their own country. A clichéd expression of this
feeling is objection to the message on many automatic telephone answering
systems, “Press ‘One’ for English.” A Google search on this sentence on
August 8, 2007, produced an astonishing 438,000,000 hits! An amateur
recording in a country-music style of a song with this title was a YouTube
hit during the Summer of 2007, when the US Congress was considering
an immigration bill that, in the view of its opponents, granted “amnesty”
to “criminals.” Objection to “Press ‘One’ for English” is now a hardy
perennial of right-wing talk-radio ranting.

A moral panic was precipitated in the Spring of 2007 by the release of
a recording of a Spanish-language arrangement of “The Star-Spangled
Banner,” the US national anthem, under the title “Nuestro Himno.”
Recorded by a number of leading Latino and Latina recording artists, this
was an exceptionally beautiful arrangement, both musically and in the
poetry of its language. However, it was greeted with passionate opposition.
Even President Bush, who has boasted of his ability to speak Spanish,
observed that

(5) “I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think
people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English
and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English” (Bush:
Anthem Should Be Sung in English 2006).

Some observers of the panic pointed out that “The Star-Spangled Banner”
has been translated into many immigrant and Native American languages.

126 Covert Racist Discourse

President Bush himself had sung the anthem in Spanish, backed by a “Viva
Bush” mariachi band from his home state of Texas, when campaigning in
Mexican American communities (Candidate Bush Would Sing the Star-
Spangled Banner in Spanish at Hispanic Festivals 2006).

Even a single word in public Spanish can trigger an indignant reaction.
In a game against the New York Yankees on May 5, 2006, the Texas
Rangers celebrated the Cinco de Mayo holiday with uniforms that read
“Los Rangers.” This use of los, the masculine plural defi nite article, falls
entirely within the overlapping ranges of Booster Regionalist Anglo Spanish
(linking Texas to a romantic Hispanic heritage) and Mock Spanish appro-
priations of Spanish morphology. But when the right-wing commentator
Michelle Malkin posted a picture of the uniform with the offending Spanish
defi nite article, correspondents on her blog were outraged:

(6) “I understand the Rangers wanted to do something innocuous to recog-
nize a holiday celebrating historical and cultural pride. But the politically
correct selectivity here is telling. While it’s considered a celebration of
‘diversity’ to acknowledge the military sacrifi ces of another nation’s heroes,
it’s considered racist to acknowledge the military sacrifi ces of one’s own.
Case in point: Can you imagine if someone proposed changing the
Rangers’ jerseys to ‘Confederate Rangers’ to celebrate Confederate Heroes’
Day? Oh, and I’m sure I’ll be labeled a racist for pointing out the double
standard.”9

In summary, formal and informal pressure to exclude Spanish from public
space in the United States is intense and takes many forms. As Urciuoli
(1996) has pointed out, Whites are comfortable with the language only in
contexts like ethnic festivals and Mexican-themed restaurants. At the same
time, however, Whites use a great deal of Spanish in the registers of
Regionalist Anglo Spanish and Mock Spanish reviewed below. This simul-
taneous suppression and appropriation suggests strongly that what is at stake
is White privilege, their right to control the symbolic resources of Spanish
and shape these to their own purposes.

Even the fi ercest advocates of Offi cial English and the proscription of
Spanish deny that they have a racist agenda.10 They argue that they are
patriots, insisting on English and objecting to Spanish because national unity
requires a single language, and because they want immigrants to learn
English so that they can enjoy the full measure of success that America
offers (Woolard 1989). However, once we start looking for it, obvious
racist language targeting members of historically Spanish-speaking popula-
tions11 is easy to fi nd. Santa Ana (1999, 2002) showed that the language
of journalism in the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper considered to have
a centrist or moderately liberal editorial perspective, is demonstrably

Covert Racist Discourse 127

organized within a culture of White supremacy. Texts about immigration
in the newspaper in Santa Ana’s large sample were replete with very nega-
tive metaphors, the most frequent being IMMIGRANTS ARE ANIMALS.12
After I read Santa Ana’s work, I started watching for these racist metaphors,
and found that they were astonishingly frequent. Two recent examples
were uttered by politicians addressing national audiences. On October 18,
2005, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, made the
statement in (7):

(7) “We are moving to end the old ‘catch-and-release’ style of border
enforcement, increasing removals by tens of thousands a year” (Mann
2005).

Chertoff refers to a technique in recreational fi shing, where a fi sherman
takes the fi sh off the hook and throws it back in the water, and uses this
to criticize a practice whereby immigration agents would arrest undocu-
mented immigrants and, if they were not wanted for any crime, release
them with a ticket requiring them to appear for a deportation hearing at
a later date.

In a second case, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a candidate for the
Republican nomination for the presidency in 2008, was twitting an oppo-
nent. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a well-groomed suburban business-
man and former governor, had attempted to project an image as a “man’s
man” by insisting that in his youth he had “hunted small varmints . . .
rodents and rabbits.” Romney had employed a landscaping fi rm to care for
his yard that used undocumented Guatemalan immigrant workers, giving
McCain an opening to attack him by producing an especially ugly image
of Guatemalans as proliferating “rodents and rabbits.”

(8) “Maybe he [Romney] can get out his small-varmint gun and drive those
Guatemalans off his yard” (Roston 2007).

Santa Ana follows Lakoff (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980),
arguing that IMMIGRANTS ARE ANIMALS is a constitutive metaphor
“that reproduces a view, with all the entailments, and most importantly the
political and social consequences to disparage human beings. Its dominant
use thus sustains the racist world view” (Santa Ana 1999:217). To say that
a metaphor is “constitutive” means that it creates our understanding rather
than merely elaborating it. The abstract frame IMMIGRANTS ARE
ANIMALS is productive, permitting speakers to draw on their entire expe-
rience of animals, as prey, as domestic, as food, as fi ghting animals, as sexual
creatures, in order to create fresh utterances.

128 Covert Racist Discourse

Constitutive metaphors of this type seem to be invisible. Santa Ana
points out that the various usages derived from IMMIGRANTS ARE
ANIMALS are prosaic; they do not stand out, but reinforce the “conceptual
linkage” between IMMIGRANTS and ANIMALS at a level below
conscious awareness. Santa Ana (1999:217) observes of the Los Angeles
Times that

Rather than explicitly legitimating racist practices and power relationships,
in these political contexts the newspaper merely refl ects the embodied basic
values of the American political order that subjugates immigrants to other
citizens.

That is, these metaphors have remained invisible because they refl ect the
foundational role of racism in White American worlds. They are visible
only to people who are outside that system, or who are victims of it, and
to careful scholars like Santa Ana. Thus these metaphors, like Mock Spanish,
exemplify covert racist discourse (and they do not appear in the frame “I’m
not a racist, but. . . .”). But, unlike Mock Spanish, once noticed these
metaphors are visibly repulsive and clearly racist, fi lling the same semantic
role that “squaw” occupied from the seventeenth century to suggest that
Indian women were closer to does and mares than to women. Santa Ana’s
work strongly supports the central claim of the critical theory of White
racism, that racism is built into the very foundations of White American
culture, shaping unrefl ecting thought, speech, and behavior among those
who share it.

Mock Spanish: Covert Racist Discourse
and Indexicality

“Mock Spanish” (Hill 1998, 2005b) is a set of tactics that speakers of
American English use to appropriate symbolic resources from Spanish. In
Mock Spanish, Spanish loan words like macho “male,” cerveza “beer,” and
mañana “morning, tomorrow,” expressions like hasta la vista “until we meet
again,” and even a few morphological elements such as the Spanish defi nite
article el and the masculine singular suffi x -o are assigned new pronuncia-
tions, new meanings, and new kinds of cultural value (Agha 2003) in
American (and even international) English.

Mock Spanish works to create a particular kind of “American” identity,
a desirable colloquial persona that is informal and easy going, with an
all-important sense of humor and a hint – not too much, but just the
right non-threatening amount – of cosmopolitanism, acquaintance with

Covert Racist Discourse 129

another language and culture. At the same time that Mock Spanish
helps to constitute this identity, it assigns Spanish and its speakers to a
zone of foreignness and disorder, richly fl eshed out with denigrating
stereotypes.

Like the IMMIGRANTS ARE ANIMALS metaphor, Mock Spanish has
passed unrecognized as racist among Whites. I suspect that its function in
White racism remains covert partly because it works by indexicality, a
semiotic process that is not highlighted in White American linguistic ideol-
ogy. This chapter will show how this indexicality works. First, though, I
locate Mock Spanish within a wider range of appropriations of Spanish-
language resources into American English.

Mock Spanish in context: Forms of Anglo Spanish

Spanish-language loan words appear in English by the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. Early examples include “peon,” from peón
“peasant,” and “grandee,” from grande, a title of nobility – and, of course,
“race,” from raza. Throughout the history of this borrowing, loan words
of Spanish origin have been especially susceptible to odd phonological
developments and to pejorating semantic change. “Grandee” illustrates both
of these. The usual patterns of anglicization should yield /grænd/ or
/!grændiy/ (illustrated, for instance, in the anglicizations of the toponym
“Rio Grande”), but “grandee” is hyper-foreignized, with unusual stress on
the last syllable, a treatment that is also common for Spanish surnames like
“Pérez,” pronounced /p@R!εz/. It is also slightly pejorative; to call someone
a “grandee” is usually not a compliment (and of course “peon,” although
it exhibits normal phonological anglicization, is negative in Spanish but an
insult in English).

The American English pronunciations of Spanish-origin place names are
of special interest. These are often “hyperanglicized,” suggesting that speak-
ers are at pains to avoid anyone thinking that they might be speaking
Spanish. A good example of hyperanglicization is the treatment of Spanish-
origin stressed ‘a’ as /æ/. Place names with Spanish San “saint, holy” are
almost invariably realized as [sæn], even though fi rst-language English
permits [an] as in “mañana,” or [hwan] from Spanish “Juan.” An example
noticed by Peñalosa (1981) is [!sæn !piydrow] “San Pedro” (California)
instead of [!san !peydrow], which would be a normal anglicization. The
more important the place name, the more likely it is to be hyperanglicized.
Two interesting cases where White pronunciations are hyperanglicized are
“Tucson” and “Los Angeles.” In English the fi rst is pronounced /!tuwsan/,
where Spanish is /tuk!son/. English /!las !ændž@l@s/ “Los Angeles” is of
interest because the pronunciation /las/ for “Los” is almost invariant in this

130 Covert Racist Discourse

place name, where other California and southwestern place names often
exhibit /lows/. Place names can be subjected to further modifi cations, as
in clipped “San Antone” from “San Antonio” (Texas), or clipped and
boldly mispronounced “San Berdoo” from “San Bernardino” (California),
or merely boldly mispronounced as in /R@!f@Riyow/, the offi cial pronun-
ciation of the city of Refugio (Texas).

Several varieties of American “Anglo Spanish” can be identifi ed (Hill
1993a; “Anglo” is the term used in the US Southwest for English speakers).
“Cowboy Anglo Spanish” is the nineteenth-century source of words like
“adobe,” “lariat,” “corral,” “mustang,” and “buckaroo,” along with many
other loan words associated with the technology and culture of open-range
cattle herding and its associated landscapes (“mesa,” “arroyo”). Cowboy
Anglo Spanish overlaps with Mock Spanish and contributed several items
to its vocabulary (Hill 1993a). Cowboy Anglo Spanish is notable for the
phonological strangeness of many of its lexical items. “Buckaroo,” from
vaquero “cowboy,” like “grandee,” exhibits hyper-foreignization (see Cassidy
1978 and Wentworth 1942 for discussion of this item). “Dalleywelters,” a
technique of roping stock where one end of the lasso is looped around the
saddle horn (from Spanish ¡Dále vuelta! “Give it a turn”), is a case of
“hyperanglicization,” where the pronunciation seems to be exaggeratedly
distant from the Spanish source. The lexicon of Cowboy Anglo Spanish
suggests that those who borrowed these words into English did not speak
Spanish well. For instance, “lariat,” from Spanish la reata, treats the defi nite
article and the noun as a single word, which is a symptom of very restricted
language contact. Cowboy Anglo Spanish does not attest to a golden era
of bilingualism in the Old West. Instead, it provides evidence that those
who spoke it were working hard to distance themselves from the Spanish
language and members of its heritage community.

While a few Cowboy Anglo Spanish items persist in specialized vocabu-
laries in some parts of the United States, it has largely passed out of use in
its core areas (Sawyer 1959, 1975). It survives mainly in frozen forms that
are periodically reinforced by use in fi lms, such as “tough hombre,” and
in words that were recycled into Regionalist Anglo Spanish and Mock
Spanish.

“Regionalist Anglo Spanish” has at least two varieties. The most obvious
is “Booster Regionalist Anglo Spanish,” which appears especially in
California and the Southwest. It shows up by the 1880s as these regions
began to market themselves to tourists and potential residents by drawing
on the presence of Spanish-speaking and Indian heritage communities to
create new regional images (e.g. Gutiérrez 1989; Thomas 1991). The
recruitment of these symbolic resources, which seems so natural today
(although not to everyone, as we shall see), was by no means a foregone
conclusion. Indians and Spanish speakers were throughout these regions the

Covert Racist Discourse 131

victims of ferocious discrimination, and these symbols were often adopted
only reluctantly by White boosters. Wilson (1997) has described Santa Fe,
New Mexico, as a “reluctant tourist town” where the Anglo business
leaders would have preferred to market the city as modern and up-and-
coming. However, when they realized that wealthy easterners came to
Santa Fe in search of spiritual inspiration from Indians, they began to
promote the “Pueblo” architecture which has for many years been required
for all construction in the city. Until late in the twentieth century the New
Mexico Spanish-speaking community felt quite left out of the Santa Fe
tourist boom, and to this day may be more threatened than benefi ted by
it (Rodríguez 1987). But “Spanishness” along with Indianness is important
in marketing Santa Fe and New Mexico. The public linguistic landscape
of Santa Fe is so Spanish that local tourist and real estate marketing materials
often include glossaries to aid newcomers (Hill 1993a). In Tucson real estate
developers embraced Spanish nomenclature only in the 1960s, with the
curious result that the older parts of the city, which have the highest per-
centage of Spanish-heritage residents, have streets with English names (or
numbers), while the new developments on the edges of the city, which
are heavily White, have Spanish street names and subdivision names. Villott
(2000) found in Tucson an almost perfect correlation between average
household income by US Census tracts and the ratio of Spanish to English
street names: the wealthier the neighborhood, the more Spanish street
names it has.

Booster Regionalist Anglo Spanish, like public Spanish informational
signage, is inattentive to standard Spanish grammar and orthography. For
instance, I have encountered “Buenas dias” (Spanish Buenos días) on a
breakfast placemat at a Mexican-themed restaurant in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. A recent October produced a newspaper advertisement from a
Tucson jewelry store, announcing a sale celebrating “La dia de muerte”
(Spanish El día de los muertos).13 Ungrammatical street names and subdivision
names in Tucson led to protests from local Spanish speakers, and for the
last 15 years or so all such names have had to be cleared for Spanish
grammar and spelling by an offi cer of Pima County.

A sub-variety of Regionalist Anglo Spanish is the use by individuals of
a few Spanish items to signal a regional identity as an “old timer” in the
Southwest. I believe this to be largely a masculine practice. It includes
sincere, as opposed to mocking, uses of Spanish greetings and other expres-
sions. An example appeared in an e-mail that I recently received from a
White male colleague. The e-mail, which was a sincere expression of thanks
for a favor, bore the subject heading Mil Gracias. Such usages are surely
appropriations (see Chapter 6), but they suggest positive images of Spanish
speakers as warm and courteous, in contrast to the Mock Spanish usages
of the same items that I will discuss below.

132 Covert Racist Discourse

Spanish words are often recruited to lend apparent authenticity to jour-
nalistic reports on Spanish-heritage populations, often without any attention
to Spanish grammar, and these also overlap with Mock Spanish. For
instance, a New York Times Magazine article on the infl uence of Latinos on
US Catholicism was entitled “Nuevo Catholics,” assimilating the Spanish
word to English grammar by leaving out number agreement (Rieff 2006).
An article in Time magazine on Mexican politicians campaigning among
immigrants in the US was entitled “Don’t stop thinking about mañana,” a
play on the words of the famous Fleetwood Mac song, “Don’t stop think-
ing about tomorrow,” which President Clinton had used as campaign
theme music (Katel 2001). This usage crossed the line into Mock Spanish
in a recent article in the Washington Post travel section for Sunday, Decem-
ber 3, 2006 (Lyke 2006) under the Mock Spanish headline “No crowds?
No rush? In Mexico, no problemo.” The article included phrases like “gor-
geous pescado” and “mongrel perro.” None of these “Spanish” words
challenged monolingual speakers of English, since they are all familiar from
Mock Spanish or transparent in context. But they invite English-speaking
readers to think of themselves as worldly and cosmopolitan.

As we might expect from the previous discussion, even in regions where
Booster Regionalist Anglo Spanish is very common, we encounter objec-
tions from English speakers to Spanish in this function. But opposition to
Booster Regionalist Anglo Spanish and related usages does not come from
a recognition of its grammatical errors or objection to it as appropriation
or theft. Instead, complainants fi nd it un-American and alienating, refl ect-
ing, not a claim by Anglos on Spanish-language symbolic resources in order
to legitimize their regionalist bona fi des, but politically correct catering to
immigrants. I have already discussed the case of the “Los” on the uniform
shirts of the Texas Rangers at their Cinco de Mayo ball game. Another
example occurred recently in Tucson, when the Arizona Daily Star decided
to rename their Sunday travel section with a classic bit of Booster Region-
alism, ¡Vamos!, complete with double exclamation points. On March 4,
2007, the paper kicked off the new name with the following remarks from
the Reader Advocate:

(9) “Today’s Accent section has a new name – ¡Vamos! – that nicely fi ts its
new mission to give readers a sense of what it’s like to live here. ¡Vamos!,
pronounced VA-mos, is Spanish for ‘let’s go,’ ‘Come along with us.’ It’s
the Star’s way of saying, ‘Come, let us show you . . . ,’ Features Editor
Maria Parham said. . . . I’m eager to hear your thoughts on ¡Vamos!. In
the meantime, let’s go” (Kornmiller 2007a).

Only two weeks later, the Reader Advocate had to confess that “Those
who called to criticize the section all focused not on the content or its

Covert Racist Discourse 133

organization but on the name – ¡Vamos!” (Kornmiller 2007b). Among the
comments reported were those in (10):

(10) “A terrible, terrible decision to use a Spanish name for a general interest
section. What in the world were you people thinking?” As one (online)
commenter put it: “What’s next? ‘Tacos’ for the food section?”
(Kornmiller 2007b).

The Reader Advocate was pushed into a very unusual explicit (albeit
partial) statement of the functions of Booster Regionalist Anglo Spanish,
in (11):

(11) “The Star mixes languages every day, just as many Southern Arizonans
do . . . Editors saw ¡Vamos! as an extension of a line that is already
blurred, and blurred mostly by English speakers for their own purposes,
which is to give what they’re doing a sense of place. That was the editors’
goal with ¡Vamos!” (Kornmiller 2007b).

A brief history of Mock Spanish

The oldest token I have identifi ed of an item that is today Mock Spanish
is “peon,” pronounced [!pijan], fi rst attested in 1634, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary.14 In the United States Mock Spanish appears
early. A jail could be called “calaboose,” a bold mispronunciation of Spanish
calabozo, by 1792 (DARE I:508).15 “Adios” appears as a hostile dismissal by
1837 (DARE I:13). “Vamos” as a command meaning “Get out of here!”
(usually “vamoose”) appears by 1900 (Parker 1902, cited in Bagley 2002:67;
Parker reports the utterance from an incident in southern Utah in 1857).
But the full fl owering of Mock Spanish is not evident until the middle of
the twentieth century. Gray et al. (1949) report a rich array of Mock
Spanish forms among English-speaking students at the University of Arizona.
These include bold mispronunciations in salutations such as “hasty lumbago”
and “buena snowshoes.” Raymond Chandler’s mystery novel The Long
Goodbye (1953) attests an example from the same period. No Mock Spanish
appears in Chandler’s earlier books, but in The Long Goodbye an evil doctor
threatens to beat up Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe. As Marlowe beats
a retreat, “Dr. Vukanich” says, “Hasta luego, amigo. Don’t forget my 10
bucks. Pay the nurse” (Chandler 1981[1953]:131).

Coinciding with the rise of the Offi cial English movement, Mock Spanish
exploded in the 1980s and 1990s in every type of media, from major
Hollywood fi lm and television productions to minor sites of mass reproduc-
tion such as t-shirts, greeting cards, and dog dishes (Hill 1993a, b). Mock

134 Covert Racist Discourse

Spanish from this period until today has become an important resource for
American English speakers. It lends colloquial fl air to every level of usage,
from everyday talk to dialogue in fi lms and television shows to political
oratory at the highest level. It is a staple of humor in fi lms, and especially
in television cartoons aimed at children.16 Also during this period, probably
infl uenced by Hollywood fi lms and American television, Mock Spanish
spreads around the English-speaking world; I have identifi ed examples from
Scotland, Ireland, England, and Australia. Mock Spanish appears every-
where in the United States; I have collected anecdotes from every region,
and Breidenbach (2006) assembled a rich collection of tokens from English
speakers in South Carolina from about 2000.17

Tactics of appropriation in Mock Spanish

Mock Spanish borrows Spanish-language words and suffi xes, assimilates
their pronunciation to English (often in a hyperanglicized or boldly mis-
pronounced form), changes their meaning, usually to make them humorous
or pejorative, and uses them to signal that the moment of English-language
speech or text thus embellished is colloquial and informal. Mock Spanish
can accompany lexicon located at the extremes of vulgarity, but it can also
lend a tone of American authenticity, of being a “real person,” to speech
in quite formal contexts.

The core vocabulary of Mock Spanish is probably no larger than 100
words.18 Occasionally new forms enter from popular culture. For example,
in the early 1990s Camel cigarettes were advertised on billboards in Latino-
dominant neighborhoods with a picture of the character Joe Camel and
the caption Un tipo suave, “a cool guy.” A tip jar bearing the handwritten
label “El tip-o suave” turned up on the counter of Bentley’s Coffee House,
near the University of Arizona. Ricky Martin’s 1999 hit song “Livin’ la
vida loca” contributed this expression, as in a recent New York Times article
on undergraduate drunkenness which reported that campuses are addressing
“la vida loca with in loco parentis” (Freedman 2007). However, very few
such new expressions have appeared during the nearly two decades that I
have studied Mock Spanish; most of its vocabulary is attested from the
1950s or even earlier. Mock Spanish is used primarily by monolingual
speakers of English, who are not able to draw freely on Spanish vocabulary
for useful new words.

Four major tactics reshape Spanish loans into Mock Spanish. In semantic
pejoration, Spanish words of neutral or even positive meaning are moved
down into a semantic space that ranges from the merely jocular to the
deeply negative and insulting. In this space expressions of leave-taking, like
“Adios” and “Hasta la vista,” become insults and threats. Mock Spanish

Covert Racist Discourse 135

“Adios” is especially rich. It can be used to constitute a claim of an authen-
tic “old-timer” identity and a stance of southwestern warmth. But insulting
usages are very common. For example, an Arizona Daily Star column pub-
lished February 1, 1993, refl ected the attitude of the community that it had
been betrayed:

(12) “When Alaska Airlines said adios to Tucson yesterday, it pointed to the
tough problem of keeping Southern Arizona connected to the nation’s
hard-pressed air travel system” (Ducote 1993).

The word appeared in the meaning “Goodbye and good riddance” in the
astonishing context of an advertisement for a training course for human
resources professionals:

(13) “Sexual Harassment Training in Spanish – Adios to Lawsuits.”19

A bus-bench advertisement for a Tucson pest-control fi rm, seen in
Figure 2, declared “Adios, cucaracha” to passers-by in a fancy upscale Anglo
neighborhood; “Cucaracha” is also part of Mock Spanish vocabulary.

A New York Post editorial for December 21, 2006, observed that New
York State comptroller Alan Hevesi was about to plead guilty to a felony

Figure 2 Semantic pejoration in Mock Spanish.

136 Covert Racist Discourse

under the headline “Adios, Alan.”20 In my collection is a nationally mar-
keted Hallmark greeting card in the “Shoebox” line (on recycled paper)
that bears a little fi gure in serape and sombrero saying “Adiós” (complete
with accent mark). Inside, the card reads

(14) “That’s Spanish for sure, go ahead and leave your friends, the only people
who really care about you, the ones who would loan you their last thin
dime, give you the shirts off their backs, sure, just take off!”

Spanish-language terms of address and titles are useful as insults. These
include “amigo,” “Señor,” “Señorita,” and “Compadre.” Another widely
used product of semantic pejoration is “nada,” which in Spanish means,
simply, “nothing,” but in Mock Spanish means “absolutely nothing, less
than nothing.” The Sony Corporation during 2007 ran an advertisement
in upscale publications (I saw it in the New Yorker) showing a well-dressed
businessman wearing his expensive headphones in a crowded and noisy
airport waiting area over the legend YADDA YADDA NADA, meaning
that absolutely no unwanted sound will penetrate the headphones. Spanish
words for money like “dinero” or “pesos” imply that the items thus priced
are bargains. An especially rich play on this usage of “pesos” appeared on
a Taco Bell cup acquired by José Cobas’s teenaged son:

(15) “One Grand Prize Winner will win a Million Pesos (That’s $93,000
amigo) And become El Presidente of Taco Bell! Thousands will WIN
INSTANTLY! Cash Prizes from 100–10,000 pesos ($9 to $939)!” (José
Cobas, personal communication, May 22, 2006).

Another example attests to the internationalism of Mock Spanish as well
as its presence in elite contexts. An offer of a cut-rate subscription to the
upscale British literary magazine Granta came in an envelope that bore the
invitation “Carpe dinero!” Other famous pejorated items include “macho,”
which in Spanish includes the simple meaning “male” and need not imply
masculine excess. Again, the New York Times provides an example, from
an editorial criticizing the state of American politics:

(16) “Republican presidential candidates are still playing ¿Quien es mas macho?
[sic] Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani are in their cardboard tough-
guy armor, bickering about ‘sanctuary cities’ and who used to treat
his immigrant constituents more harshly” (Is it Fixed Yet? 2007
[editorial]).

“Mañana,” which in Spanish means “morning” or “tomorrow” and need
not connote procrastination or laziness, conveys only this pejorated sense

Covert Racist Discourse 137

in Mock Spanish (Hill 2005b). All Spanish words that appear in Mock
Spanish are targets for semantic pejoration. They need not necessarily be
insults, but they cannot be in any way formal or serious.21

Rodríguez González (1995) confi rms Mock Spanish semantic pejoration.
For instance, he points out that the Spanish suffi x -ista in English, in con-
trast to -ist, nearly always conveys a negative stance. Hence, “Peronist,” a
neutral usage, compared to “Peronista,” a negative label. Recent examples
include “Clintonista,” a not-very-thoughtful ally of former President
Clinton, or “fashionista,” a slavish follower of fashion.

The second tactic for constructing Mock Spanish is euphemism. Spanish
words that are insulting, lewd, or scatological in Spanish are substituted for
vulgar English words. “Loco” for “crazy” dates from 1887 (DARE III:396).
Scatology is illustrated in the use of the Spanish nursery word “caca” as a
euphemism for English “shit.” A coffee cup in my collection, shown in
Figure 3, was purchased at a nice gift shop near the University of Arizona
several years ago. It bears the inscription “Caca de toro,” and might be
used on a desk in a place of employment where English “Bullshit” would
be unacceptable.

Figure 3 Euphemism in Mock Spanish.

138 Covert Racist Discourse

For several years a bumper sticker reading “Caca pasa” (for English “Shit
happens”) was ubiquitous in Tucson. A usage that is especially offensive to
Spanish speakers is “cojones” (pronounced /k@!howniyz/), and sometimes
spelled as “cajones” (Spanish for “boxes”; Spanish speakers fi nd this hilari-
ous). Speaking in 1996 as US Ambassador to the United Nations, former
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright used the word in an address to the
Security Council, arguing that a Cuban pilot who had shot down a spy
plane from Florida had shown “not cojones, but cowardice” (Gibbs 1996).
The Economist, the upscale British weekly magazine addressed to the inter-
national Anglophone business community, once featured on its cover an
image of US President George W. Bush with an arrow pointing to his
crotch bearing the legend “No cojones on Palestine and Israel” (The Econo-
mist, April 3–9, 2004).

The third tactic for constructing Mock Spanish is to add Spanish mor-
phology, especially the defi nite article “el” and the suffi x “-o” (although
other suffi xes, such as “-ista,” noted above, occasionally appear), to English
words. The most common example is “No problemo,” from English “No
problem.” The Spanish word is problema. Figure 4 shows this usage in a
beer advertisement: Corona beer is “The Drinko for Cinco.”

Figure 4 Borrowed Spanish morphology in Mock Spanish.

Covert Racist Discourse 139

A second example of “-o” suffi xation is “mucho,” as in “Sell mucho
book-os,” overheard in the University of Arizona bookstore. “Mucho”
(pronounced /!muwtšow/), accessible because it is clearly related to English
“much,” is the only adverb available in Mock Spanish; Spanish muy almost
never appears. For instance, Spanish grammar absolutely requires muy macho,
not Mock Spanish “mucho macho” as in (17).

(17) “The yacht used to be called ‘Bouy Toy,’ so named by its former owners,
a gay couple, according to sources at the Capitol Yacht Club. Apparently,
the fellas down at the marina kind of razzed ol’ Duke, a former ‘top gun’
fi ghter pilot, about the gay-themed name. And apparently, Cunningham
couldn’t take it. He changed the boat’s name from the sweet-and-saucy
Bouy Toy to the mucho macho Duke-Stir in December 2004, accord-
ing to Coast Guard records” (Marshall 2005).

“Mucho macho” appears to be a fi xed expression; it is attested as well
in (18), from a New York Times fi lm review headline:

(18) “For Fun, a Mucho Macho Black Hero” (Kerr 2002, reviewing Under-
cover Brother).

A recent addition to the universe of “-o” suffi xed Mock Spanish items
is the website www.eurocheapo.com, using the association between Spanish
and cheapness to market a site that helps the user fi nd travel bargains in
Europe.

The use of “el” is illustrated in the name of a screensaver from the
early 1990s, an electronic aquarium called “El Fish.” This was a pun on
“Electronic Fish,” but it worked nicely since something called “el fi sh,”
within the semantically pejorated universe of Mock Spanish, is something
less than a real fi sh. “El” and “-o” are often found together, forming locu-
tions like “el cheapo” and “el foldo,” as in (19), from a blog commentary
on the Iraq war.

(19) “So the generals have done the big el-foldo [sic] and are signing on to
the McCain escalation plan.”22

The “el . . . -o” frame can be used for any reference that the speaker or
writer wishes to locate within a jocular colloquial register, and suffi xation
with “-o” can proliferate through an utterance or text, as in this example
from the personal ad section of the student newspaper at the University of
California at San Diego:

(20) “Don Thomas! Watcho your backo! You just mighto wake uppo con
knee cappo obliterato. Arriba!”23

140 Covert Racist Discourse

The frame “numero X-o” is especially productive. “Numero Uno” is
of course common, but constructions like “numero Two-o” and “numero
Eleven-o” also appear.24

The last major tactic for Mock Spanish is hyperanglicization and the
closely related tactic of bold mispronunciation. All Mock Spanish tokens
are anglicized; one cannot speak Mock Spanish except in a broad American
English accent. Some phonological adaptations in Mock Spanish represent
merely normal anglicization to the English sound system. For instance,
anglicized Spanish “d,” as in “San Diego” or “adobe,” is a stop /d/ or a
fl ap /D/, not a spirant /δ/, and is alveolar, not dental. Vowels change their
qualities to fi t the English canon. Thus Spanish “e” in fi nal position, as in
“adobe,” becomes /iy/ rather than /ey/, since English does not have /ey/
in unstressed word-fi nal position in native vocabulary. Under stress, it
remains /ey/, as in [how!zey] “José” – a pronunciation which provides the
Mock Spanish fi xed expression “No way, José.”

However, many Mock Spanish words – and some important words that
are not really Mock Spanish, such as place names of Spanish origin – are
not merely anglicized, they are hyperanglicized or boldly mispronounced.
In normal anglicization, Spanish-origin stressed “a” is approximated with
English /a/ (as in “father”), as in Mock Spanish words such as “caca,”
“mañana,” and “Hasta la vista, baby.” However, in hyperanglicization we
encounter /æ/, as in the joke “Grassy-Ass” for “Gracias” (diversely realized
in images on humorous greeting cards; see Figure 5), or /bæn!diyDow/
(where /D/ is an alveolar fl ap) “bandit.”

Bold mispronunciation, a subclass of hyperanglicization, is quite old; for
instance the pronunciation of Spanish “o” as Mock Spanish /uw/ rather
than /ow/ is attested in “calaboose” and in Cowboy Spanish items like
“vamoose” from vamos and “buckaroo” from vaquero. Today this tactic
yields bilingual puns like “Fleas Navidad,” which shows up every year on
humorous Christmas cards with pictures of dogs, and that hardy perennial
“Moo-cho” with a picture of a cow. The opposite treatment is “Much
Grass” from “Muchas gracias.” A whole set of jocular leave-takings formed
with “hasty” as a bold mispronunciation of “hasta” uses this technique:
“hasty lumbago,” “hasty banana,” etc.

A specialized development of bold mispronunciation is parodic imitation
of a Spanish accent in English. Such parodies were a staple of comedy
routines in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, however, they are more visible as
racist than are other forms of Mock Spanish. They have more in common
with the intentional mockery that Ronkin and Karn (1999) labeled “Mock
Ebonics” and Chun (2004) called “Mock Asian” than does Mock Spanish,
which does not explicitly make fun of Spanish. However, examples of
parodic imitation can be found. The example in (19) is reproduced exactly
(although in black and white instead of color) from the “South of the

Covert Racist Discourse 141

Border” website, advertising a tourist trap on the state line between North
Carolina and South Carolina:

(21) “BUENS DIAS, AMIGO! pedro VER’ GLAD YOU COME!! pedro
got 112 meelion amigos, who stay weeth heem, opp teel now all satisfy
come back, send frans . . . thees make pedro ver’ HAPPEE . . . like for
frans come back all time . . . pedro hope YOU make 112 meelion and
wan happee amigos! you come back soon, too, yes?”25

This example, which appears with a stereotyped image of “Pedro” wearing
white pajamas, a striped serape, and an enormous sombrero, would proba-
bly be judged to be racist by many Whites as well as by Latinos. However,
other examples are less obvious. In (22) we see a brief passage written in
support of a congressional candidate by a left-wing blogger who calls
himself “¡El Gato Negro!.”

(22) “Some of joo may remember Coleen Rowley as one of the only peeples
een the FBI who was focused on the future 9–11 highjackers. She weel
breeng much needed security experience to her new job as Congress-
woman. But eef joo theenk that she ees a one-issue candidate, I invite
joo to go to her website and read her position on unplanned pregnancy,

Figure 5 Hyperanglicization and bold mispronunciation in Mock Spanish. The hair
appears as green in the original.

142 Covert Racist Discourse

she could teach the ‘abortion ees icky’ crowd a theeng or two. Amigos,
thees tres señoras need jour help een retaking the Congress for las Democ-
ratistas, and stopping the steenky, corrupt Republiculo agenda right een
eets’ tracks ¡Vamanos!” (¡El Gato Negro! 2006).

¡El Gato Negro! is probably from a Spanish-speaking community (although
not necessarily a fl uent speaker of the language). I suspect this because of
the bilingual pun “Republiculo,” combining “Republican” with culo “ass,”
which is much more sophisticated than most Mock Spanish coinages. So
this case may exemplify what Chun (2004) called “legitimate mockery,”
mockery by speakers licensed as insiders. Another case of this type is the
controversial nationally syndicated column “Ask a Mexican.” The author,
Gustavo Arellano, uses a rich vocabulary of Spanish and English vulgarisms.
I read these as attempts at reappropriation (see discussion in Chapter 2).
However, such efforts risk being read as self-hatred (Navarro 2007).

Indexicality and the Multiple Functions of
Mock Spanish

Mock Spanish has multiple functions. It constructs a light, jocular, humor-
ous stance. “Stance” (Ochs 1996) is a term used today in sociolinguistics
for the speaker’s positioning or alignment, both affective and “epistemic”
(that is, in reference to the truth or likelihood of an assertion) in regard to
her utterance. Mock Spanish also constitutes an identity, signaling that the
speaker possesses a desirable colloquial persona that is peculiarly “Ameri-
can.” At the same time, Mock Spanish locates “Spanish” – as a language –
as marginal, disorderly and “un-American.” It covertly reproduces negative
stereotypes of the Spanish language and Spanish-language-heritage popula-
tions. Finally, it asserts control over the symbolic resources of Spanish,
which it reshapes in the interests of Whiteness. These functions are accom-
plished almost entirely by the semiotic process known as “indexicality.”

Indexicality is one of the three major relationships between the sign and
its object – what the sign stands for – that were distinguished by the nine-
teenth-century American philosopher C. S. Peirce (Parmentier 1994). The
others are the “iconic” and “symbolic” relationships. An indexical sign or
index is grounded in its object – that is, connected to it and recognized as
a sign for it – by proximity, contiguity, or necessity. Examples of Peircean
indexes are a weathervane, which indexes the direction of the wind, smoke,
which indexes fi re, or symptoms such as hives or fever, which index physi-
ological disorder or illness. Iconic signs are grounded in their objects by
resemblance; for instance, a map resembles the territory for which it stands.

Covert Racist Discourse 143

Symbols are grounded by convention: the word “cat” is a sign referring to
the animal because the English-speaking community is committed to this
denotative value for the sound sequence /kæt/ and the orthographic
sequence “cat.”

Peirce’s idea of indexicality was adapted in linguistics by Jakobson (e.g.
1971) and his student Silverstein (e.g. 1976, 1979) in order to investigate
words like “this, that,” “here, there,” “yesterday, today, tomorrow,” the
pronouns “I” and “you,” and tense markers. Jakobson called such words
“shifters,” because they change their meaning depending on the context in
which they are uttered. For instance, to assign reference to temporal expres-
sions like “now” or “yesterday,” or tense markers like “will,” we must
know when the utterance in which they were used occurred. If I say on
September 16, 2007, that “Yesterday I went to a nice party,” we know
that the party took place on September 15, 2007. Similarly, to assign refer-
ence to “this,” “that,” “here,” “there,” we must know where the utterance
occurred. To assign reference to “I” or “you,” we must know who was
speaking, and to whom. Thus, in Peircean theory, these words are “indexi-
cal,” ineluctably linked to their contexts.

Silverstein (1976) distinguished these “referential indexicals” from “social
indexicals.” A particular language, or a particular class or regional dialect
of a language, can function as a social indexical that signals an identity as
“speaker of X” or “person from Y.” Where there is language confl ict, as
between English and Spanish in the United States, the social indexicality
of language choice may be very complex. For instance, the city of “Tucson”
is exactly the same place whether it is called /tuk!son/ or /!tuwsan/, but
in saying /tuk!son/ the speaker signals her Chicana identity, a commitment
to her right to speak this word in Spanish, and her primordial claim to the
place and its resources.

Silverstein (1976, 1979) points out that social indexicals are “creative”:
they produce or entail their context, rather than being determined by it.
The identity indexed by /tuk!son/ – “politically conscious Chicano/a
asserting the public validity of Spanish pronunciation and primordial claim
to place” – is not an element in nature that can be assigned a “referential
index.” Instead, it is precisely projected by the speaker saying /tuk!son/:
upon this pronunciation, the context of situation includes that dimension
of identity, that political stance. In contrast, the pronunciation /!tuwsan/
indexes several possible stances and identities, such as, “I am not a Spanish
speaker,” or “I am a member of a Spanish-heritage community, but I am
no radical, so I am not going to make trouble by asserting my linguistic
heritage in a contested pronunciation of this place name.” In yet another
option, the local Spanish slang name for Tucson is La Tusa. To use this
name indexes yet another identity, as a barrio-oriented cholo. For instance,
a Tucson low-rider club bears this name. Since this name is largely unknown

144 Covert Racist Discourse

to the English-speaking community, it functions primarily to signal an
identity as an insider among others who would also use the name.26

Silverstein (1979) observed that social-indexical functions can become
the objects of “metapragmatic awareness,” where speakers develop views
on appropriate usage and can discuss these. However, usages can have some
functions that are accessible to metapragmatic awareness, but others that are
not. Users of Mock Spanish exhibit this kind of split in metapragmatic
awareness. Most English speakers are aware in a general way of the positive
functions of Mock Spanish in enhancing White identities, but oblivious
to its negative functions of denigration, marginalization, and racist
stereotyping.

Visible functions of Mock Spanish: Positive indexes of identity
and stance

English-heritage speakers and even members of Spanish-heritage communi-
ties often volunteer that Mock Spanish expressions are funny and cute.
English-heritage speakers, questioned about using a Mock Spanish item,
will suggest that they used it because they have “picked up a little Spanish.”
This rationalization is at least 50 years old. Gray et al. (1949) argued that
Anglo University of Arizona students who used expressions like “Hasty
lumbago” did so because they had grown up in the border region and
knew Spanish. Thus the positive indexicality of Mock Spanish, of a light,
colloquial stance, possession of a sense of humor, and a cosmopolitan iden-
tity, is accessible to speaker awareness.

The positive indexical function of Mock Spanish in creating a light
stance and a desirable colloquial persona is not only available to metaprag-
matic awareness, it is so important in this function that to be able to use
Mock Spanish is a vital part of the rhetorical skill set of someone who
aspires to a prototypical “American” identity.27 A canonical example that
demonstrates this function appears in the fi lm Terminator 2: Judgment Day
from 1992. In the fi lm Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a hero machine,
a “Terminator,” who has been sent from the future to defend a child,
John Connor, who will grow up to save humanity by defeating an army
of evil machines. Consider the following dialogue, which occurs as John
Connor and his mother are fl eeing the forces of evil in a car driven by
Schwarzenegger as the “Terminator.”

(23) Mother: Keep it under sixty-fi ve. We don’t want to get pulled over.
Terminator: Affi rmative (in machine-like voice, with German accent).
John Connor: No no no no no no. You gotta listen to the way people

talk! You don’t say “Affi rmative,” or some shit like that, you say “No

Covert Racist Discourse 145

problemo.” And if somebody comes off to you with an attitude, you
say “Eat me.” And if you want to shine them on, you say “Hasta la
vista, baby.”

Terminator: Hasta la vista, baby (still in machine-like voice).
John Connor: Yeah, later, dickwad. And if someone gets upset, you say

“Chill out!” Or, you can do combinations.
Terminator: Chill out, dickwad (in machine-like voice).
John Connor: That’s great! See, you’re gettin’ it!
Terminator: No problemo (in nearly normal voice).

In this dialogue the famous tag “Hasta la vista, baby” is introduced for the
fi rst time. In his fi nal utterance in the scene, the Mock Spanish tag “No
problemo,” the Terminator’s voice sounds fully human for the fi rst time
in the fi lm. That is, it is through the use of Mock Spanish that Schwar-
zenegger’s Terminator moves from being a machine, a symbol of fascist
foreignness amplifi ed by his German accent, to being a sympathetic pro-
tagonist who talks “the way people talk.” The English vulgarisms that
accompany the Mock Spanish in this little language lesson – “Eat me,”
“dickwad” – suggest the range of the register of colloquialism constituted
by Mock Spanish.28

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the Terminator becomes, not merely
human, but “American.” This use of Mock Spanish to construct an explic-
itly “American” voice appears in other fi lms as well. In 2006, the fi lm
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby was an enormous hit for the
comedian Will Ferrell. The DVD of the fi lm, which appeared in time for
Christmas, was heavily marketed as appropriate family entertainment for
the holiday season. Ferrell played Ricky Bobby, a NASCAR racing cham-
pion who hits hard times when his preeminence is challenged by Jean
Girard, a French driver from the Formula One circuit. The character of
Girard parodied the anti-French sentiment that had exploded in 2003 when
the French refused to endorse the US invasion of Iraq. Jean Girard is not
only French, effete to the highest degree, in contrast to Ricky Bobby’s
down-home style, he is gay! (This antithesis of all that is “American” is
played to over-the-top perfection by the great comedian Sacha Baron
Cohen.) Ricky Bobby’s fi rst confrontation with Jean Girard comes in a bar
when the French driver switches the jukebox from country music to cool
jazz. As Ricky Bobby reaches back to punch out the French interloper, he
says “Welcome to America, amigo.” Another plot twist is that, in despair
over his failures on the track, Ricky Bobby breaks up with his best buddy
Cal Naughton. In the last moments of the fi lm, Ricky and Cal reunite.
Mock Spanish plays a key role in this moment of tender all-American male
homosociality. Cal’s track nickname is “Magic Man,” and Ricky announces
that fi nally he, too, has picked a perfect nickname: It is “El Diablo,” which

146 Covert Racist Discourse

Ricky asserts “is like Spanish for a fi ghting chicken, with the claws, and
the beak!”29 This clever touch, which shows that Ricky, typical of Mock
Spanish users, knows nothing at all about Spanish, is part of the fi lm’s satire
of NASCAR-centered “Americanness,” and the fi lm’s use of Mock Spanish,
appearing at pivotal moments in plot transition, is very telling.30

Mock Spanish nicknames are an important index of a certain kind of
American masculinity. President George W. Bush is famous for giving
nicknames to friends and subordinates, and many of those that have been
published are Mock Spanish. Among those recorded are “Pablo” for his
fi rst treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, “Camarones” for Carl Cameron, a
correspondent for Fox News, and “El Grande Jorge” for Congressman
George Miller of California.31 At his 56th birthday golf outing July 6, 2002,
Bush wore a baseball cap with the embroidered legend “El Jefe,” and joked
to reporters that the expression was “French.” Another Mock Spanish
nicknamer is right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh, who often refers
to himself as “El Rushbo.” The most elaborate Limbaugh nickname is
probably “El loco poco Dicko” for former Democratic congressional leader
and presidential candidate Dick Gephardt.32

The use of Mock Spanish is certainly not restricted to the political right.
The late columnist Molly Ivins, who was far to the left in American politi-
cal terms, called Bush “El Chico” and employed Mock Spanish to humor-
ous effect in many of her essays. Ivins constructed a regional identity as a
down-to-earth Texan, but Mock Spanish usage can be heard even from
New England, as in another example from the political left, from the Boston
Globe’s columnist Ellen Goodman, in (24):

(24) “But the sexier and racier question dominating the early chatter [about
possible Democratic presidential candidates for 2008] is the possible
mano-a-womano, black-and-white matchup that could be offered with
Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama atop the national ticket” (Goodman
2006).

Mock Spanish is available to convey a down-to-earth colloquial stance
not only in everyday interaction, but in the highest levels of public life.
Mock Spanish is always good for a laugh, for showing that, even in a formal
context like Ellen Goodman’s Boston Globe op-ed on the Democratic presi-
dential candidates, the writer is serious, but not so serious that you wouldn’t
like her. When Ambassador Madeleine Albright said “cojones” in front of
the Security Council of the United Nations, she was transformed from a
double-chinned dowager with a formidable bosom, the stuff of Marx
Brothers caricature, to a tough, savvy, all-American broad who could be
promoted with confi dence to the exalted position of Secretary of State.
President Bush’s Mock Spanish nicknames are part of his image as a

Covert Racist Discourse 147

likeable fellow. And for at least two decades scriptwriters have drawn
endlessly on Mock Spanish tags to create characters like John Connor in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights, who
resonate as “real people” for an American audience.

Mock Spanish and negative indexes of racist stereotypes and
marginalization of Spanish

If Mock Spanish is such a useful tool in creating stances and identities that
many Americans fi nd enjoyable and positive, what could possibly be wrong
with it? Indeed, should we not think of Mock Spanish as making a con-
tinual display of the importance of the contribution of Spanish to the
American language, and as showing American openness to and respect for
this linguistic heritage? Metapragmatic discourses by Whites about the func-
tions of Mock Spanish often include this notion, that Mock Spanish is a
symbol of our diversity, or of the speaker’s respect for Spanish language
and culture. Regrettably, it is easy to show that this is very unlikely, but
to do so is a scholarly exercise that cannot be accomplished within the
terms of the folk theory of racism and personalist-referentialist linguistic
ideologies. I have never met a speaker from an English-language heritage
who suggested that anyone might object to Mock Spanish, or who believed
that using Mock Spanish might be a way to reshape and control the Spanish
language, or who was willing to admit that Mock Spanish might play a
part in denigrating and marginalizing Spanish and its speakers. English-
heritage Americans are more likely to fi nd such a proposal to be not merely
ridiculous, but profoundly threatening. Several years ago I gave a talk about
my work to the Chicano Studies Program at the University of Arizona. A
reporter from the student newspaper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat, wrote up
the talk in a short piece (Schechter 2000). Letters to the editor vigorously
attacked what they believed my ideas to be, and the entire staff of the
Wildcat joined in an editorial denouncing my work as divisive and “just
go[ing] too far.”33

So, what is the evidence for the negative functions of Mock Spanish?
First, Mock Spanish associates the Spanish language irrevocably with the
non-serious, the casual, the laid-back, the humorous, the vulgar. “Spanish”
is available for joking and for insult; it cannot lend gravitas or sophistica-
tion. Compare, for example, a case of “Mock German”: the marketing of
an expensive computer keyboard, intended for programming specialists,
under the name “Das Keyboard” (überGeeks only!).34 Here, the German
defi nite article “Das” is intended to convey fi ne engineering and high-tech
credibility. It is unimaginable that such a product could be called “El Key-
board.” “El Keyboard” would be a bargain-basement item marketed to

148 Covert Racist Discourse

people who need a product that is no more than basic, or, at best, a way
of joking about something familiar and not terribly special.35

Mock Spanish, with its relentlessly anglicized and even hyperanglicized
and boldly mispronounced phonology and pidgin grammar, assigns native
Spanish fl uency to the realm of the “un-American.” To pronounce Spanish
place names or the names of public fi gures with any approximation of
native Spanish-language phonology is to risk being accused of being stuffy,
effete, p.c., even ridiculous. A Saturday Night Live television skit called
“NBC News Employees” that aired on November 10, 1990, made this
very clear.36 The skit included the Latino actor Jimmy Smits. All the Anglo
characters make themselves ridiculous (I make this judgment from having
shown the skit many times in talks and to classes – and also from a line
given to the Smits character: “If you don’t mind my saying, sometimes
when you take Spanish words and kind of over-pronounce them, well, it’s
kind of annoying”) by insisting on phony-sounding hyper-foreignized pro-
nunciations of everyday Spanish names like “Nicaragua,” “San Diego,”
“Broncos” (the Denver football team), and names for Mexican food. A
running joke involves the name of Smits’s character, Antonio Mendoza,
who keeps insisting that he prefers that his name be pronounced just
/mεn!dowz@/, and not /men!doθa/ or /men!dosa/. I take this as an impor-
tant part of the construction of a desirable identity for the Smits character,
who is displayed in the skit as the only person present who is unpreten-
tiously comfortable with an all-American voice. In contrast to this proscrip-
tion against accurate Spanish pronunciation by Whites, we have seen that
a Spanish speaker who insists on such pronunciations, even one who pro-
nounces his or her own name with Spanish phonology (as do many Latino
and Latina newsreaders on television), is heard as making a highly marked
political gesture.

Another indication that Mock Spanish indexes racist stereotypes is that
it often appears accompanied by highly stereotypical and offensive images
of “Mexicans” (as in the “South of the Border” website quoted in (21)).
It is common in anti-Spanish contexts such as anti-immigrant websites. On
one such site, a picture of Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado),
among the most vitriolically anti-Hispanic members of the US Congress,
a person who described the city of Miami as “third-world,” is captioned
with the words in (25):

(25) “Tom Tancredo is America’s ‘Numero Uno Point Man!’ in Congress on
Illegal Immigration!” (italics and extra exclamation point in original).37

On another such site, a “Gringo dollar” is pictured; the idea is to print
it out and send it to the Republican National Committee. The presidential
image on it is George W. Bush, alongside the legend “Gringo de Mexico.”

Covert Racist Discourse 149

The denomination is “00 Nada pesos.” Across the base of the fake bill is
written “Secure America’s borders. Stop catering to illegals. Then we’ll
send American dollars.”38

Mock Spanish, with its utter neglect of Spanish grammar and its distanc-
ing from Spanish phonology, creates a linguistic space for what I have called
“orderly disorder” (Hill 1998). This space is “orderly” because it is part of
a larger, cultural order where Spanish has been assigned a non-serious func-
tion, and disorderly because in it Spanish loses the grammatical constraints
indigenous to it. Within this space, even bilingual messages involving health
and safety that are required by law are likely to be grossly ungrammatical.
A dramatic illustration of such orderly disorder was identifi ed by Barrett
(2006), who conducted research in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant
where Anglo servers spoke a Mock Spanish-infl uenced pidgin to Spanish-
speaking kitchen staff. One tactic of the English speakers was to use Spanish
words from which Spanish syntax and morphology were stripped, such as
“Could you hablar por telefono and see if he can trabajo?” (Barrett 2006:180,
185). Even written communications to Spanish-speaking staff used this kind
of language. The resulting misunderstandings, which at best compromised
the effi cient running of the restaurant and at worst led to lapses in sanita-
tion, were invariably blamed on the Spanish speakers.

One case in my fi les of such Mock Spanish-infl uenced usage arguably
led to the death of an American citizen. In April 2001, a Peruvian military
pilot shot down a suspected drug-smuggling plane, only to discover that
he had accidentally killed an American missionary and her infant daughter.
Accompanying the Peruvian fl ight was an American spotter plane; one
member of the spotter crew tried to stop the Peruvian from fi ring by
radioing these words: “Are you sure it’s a bandido?” (Kelley 2001).39

The “orderly disorder” of Spanish is taken for granted and even appreci-
ated by English speakers, who think of themselves as “knowing a little
Spanish.” An important contributor to this opinion is the fi ction that
“Spanish is easy” (the collocation “Spanish” and “easy” returned 89,900,000
Google hits on August 12, 2007; see Schwartz 2006 for additional discus-
sion). Spanish is by far the most studied foreign language in the United
States, with three times the number of students of its nearest competitor,
French. This sense of empowerment over Spanish among Whites contrasts
with the most acute anxiety among Spanish speakers about English, as
documented by Urciuoli (1996). Urciuoli’s respondents believed that they
must never mix the two languages, that even a slight Spanish accent in
English is discreditable, and that to code-switch by using Spanish and
English expressions in the same sentence (a practice which decades of lin-
guistic research has shown is an important dimension of linguistic order in
US Spanish bilingual communities) suggests ignorance of English. This
contrast, between the casual disorderliness of Spanish as used by English

150 Covert Racist Discourse

speakers to construct a White public space, and the hypervigilance over
linguistic boundaries within that space required for Spanish speakers, strik-
ingly exemplifi es the way that practices associated with Whiteness can
become unmarked and unnoticeable, while very similar practices associated
with Color become the object of intense monitoring (Hill 1998).

Finally, the connotations conveyed by the semantic pejoration of Mock
Spanish vocabulary items constantly reproduce and reinscribe vulgar racist
stereotypes of the Spanish language and people of Spanish heritage. To fi nd
“mañana” entertaining, one must have access to the stereotype of laziness.
For “adios” and “hasta la vista” to function as brush-offs or hostile threats,
one must have access to the stereotype of treachery and duplicity, of super-
fi cial politeness and friendliness that is really only a thin veil for vicious
motives. An ad for a sale at an upscale Tucson furniture store with the
headline “Contemporary and Southwestern dining, for pesos!” makes sense
only if speakers understand goods priced in pesos to be especially cheap,
since obviously the meaning is not literal. The store would never have
accepted Mexican currency, which is almost impossible to exchange in
Tucson.40 Other Mock Spanish expressions index stereotypes of dirt, dis-
order, and sexual looseness. These effects, like the humorous colloquial
stance projected by Mock Spanish, are the product of social indexicality.
In these cases, however, we see not only the creative indexicality of stance
projection, but what Silverstein (1979) has called “presupposing” indexical-
ity, in that the jokester who uses the Mock Spanish words and expressions
humorously presupposes the negative stereotypes as background. However,
the usages not only reinforce the stereotypes by presupposition, they can
also create or entail them, making them available to people who did not
have them in mind.

We can exemplify this function by showing how Mock Spanish repro-
duces the stereotype of Latin political corruption by using Mock Spanish
political titles like “el presidente” and “Generalissimo.” “Generalissimo El
Busho” is a favorite insult of the left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall, who dresses
President Bush in an absurdly over-decorated military uniform with huge
epaulettes and a high-peaked military cap covered in braid and insignia, as
seen in Figure 6.

In order to “get the joke” of Rall’s insult – indeed, to understand that
it is an insult – one must have access to the stereotype of the overblown,
inauthentic, and corrupt military dictator who rules over a Latin American
“Banana Republic.” We can be sure that the stereotype plays a role in the
usage, because explicit statements of this stereotype occasionally surface. For
instance, in March 2001, the editors of the leftist magazine The Nation
suggested that “Mr. President” was not a good title for George W. Bush,
since he had not been elected (he was installed by a 5–4 decision of the
US Supreme Court). They ran a contest in which readers were invited to

Covert Racist Discourse 151

submit an appropriate title. Inevitably, “El Presidente” was suggested. The
Nation editors commented, “A Banana Republican, of course.”41 The liberal
blogger Kevin Drum used the header “Banana Republicans” for remarks
about the politicization of the 2006 mid-term elections by the US Depart-
ment of Justice.42 Knowing the liberal politics of these writers, we can be
sure that “Banana Republican” is an insult. In case we doubted our con-
clusion, a New York Times op-ed essay by Bill Keller, who deplored intem-
perate attacks on President George W. Bush, explicitly labeled the Spanish
political word “junta” an “insult.”

(26) “I doubt anyone ever referred to his father as a ‘chicken hawk’ or to the
fi rst Bush administration as a ‘junta.’ These are insults, not arguments”
(Keller 2003).43

A fascinating irony of the Banana Republic stereotype is that the original
Banana Republic was not created by Latin Americans possessed by some
essential instinct for Ruritanian misrule, but by Americans who in 1910
installed a corrupt dictatorship in Honduras to protect the interests of the

Figure 6 “Generalissimo El Busho”: Entailing racist stereotypes in Mock Spanish.
Rall © 2003 Ted Rall. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All
rights reserved.

152 Covert Racist Discourse

United Fruit Company. Similar American-assisted coups installed at least
three other notorious military dictatorships: Rafael Trujillo in the Domini-
can Republic in 1930, Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala in 1954, and
Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973. However, very few White Americans
know this history. The “Banana Republic” stereotype is extraordinarily
resilient, and it shapes relationships between the United States and Latin
America at the highest level. Interestingly, these relationships are infl ected
not only by the presumption of corruption, but by the idea that Latin
America is somehow a trivial part of the world that can be taken lightly,
a position entirely consistent with the trivializing jocular stance constructed
by Mock Spanish. Before the destruction of the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush, who as a former governor
of Texas had some notion of the importance of US relations with Mexico,
put Latin American policy high on his agenda. This initiative, however,
was interpreted by critics as revealing Bush’s lack of gravitas. The remarks
in (27), by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, were typical:

(27) “W.’s advisers tried to make him look more impressive in his fi rst forays
into diplomacy by keeping the big world leaders at bay and letting him
hang out with lesser leaders he could talk to in Spanish. So now we have
a whole new alliance with Central and South American countries simply
because W. feels more comfortable at what USA Today dubbed ‘amigo
diplomacy’ ” (Dowd 2001).

The stereotype of the “Banana Republic” continues to make sense to
Americans for a variety of reasons. Explicit statements of the stereotype
occur in what Myers (2005) has called “race talk” among intimates. Woolard
(1989) reported that the stereotype of the corrupt Latino politician
strongly infl uences supporters of the campaign to make English an offi cial
language. Its resiliency is, I believe, at least partly due to the constant
use of forms like “el presidente” as jokes and insults in Mock Spanish,
where White Americans simultaneously construct themselves as humorous,
delightful, all-American, and “knowing a little Spanish,” while projecting
a very negative image of the Spanish-speaking world, its language, and
its citizens.

In the vast majority of cases of Mock Spanish usage, the stereotypes are
entirely implicit, projected by indexicality. To call President Bush “Gen-
eralissimo El Busho” can only be funny if we have access to the Banana
Republic stereotype. Otherwise, it would simply make no sense. Since
American English speakers do fi nd expressions like “Generalissimo El
Busho” funny, inviting jokesters to repeat it often (Ted Rall even has a
section on his website where “Generalissimo El Busho” paraphernalia can
be purchased), the Banana Republic stereotype is made more real.

Covert Racist Discourse 153

Technically, in Peircean terms, the relationship between “Generalissimo
El Busho” and the proposition “Latin American politicians are corrupt,
phony, and incompetent” is not exactly one of index and object. In Sil-
verstein’s (1979) terms, the proposition is an entailment or creation, a
projection, constituted by expressions like “Generalissimo El Busho.” Since
the phrase exists in English, speakers who share referential linguistic ideol-
ogy must assume that it stands for some object in the world. That is, it is
what Peirce called a “dicent” or “dicisign,” where a sign of another type
is “apprehended as” an index (Parmentier 1994). Both “Generalissimo El
Busho” and the stereotype of the Banana Republic are really symbols, signs
grounded in their objects by convention. The convention of the Banana
Republic emanates from the culture of White racism, within which the
stereotype is a kind of truth. In American English the expressions “Genera-
lissimo” and “El Presidente,” which are titles of respect in Spanish, are very
diffi cult to use with a straight face. They carry a very heavy burden of
history, of the voice of White racism, which evokes and reinforces the
fi ctional property of the world, the Banana Republic, that is White racism’s
creation.

The creative indexicality of Mock Spanish expressions – the ways that
they invite hearers to make negative inferences, to become aware of
stereotypes to which they might not have paid attention – occurs because
the pressures on interlocutors to make sense of Mock Spanish are quite
intense. Mock Spanish is a very important tactic of colloquial American
English and its registers of jocular intimacy. To stand apart from it, to refuse
to make the inferences and “get” the jokes, to join in the fun, is to reject
this mutuality and intimacy and its pleasures, to be divisive, and, fi nally, to
be un-American.

Why are the negative functions of Mock Spanish below the
limits of awareness?

Silverstein (2001[1981]) suggested that one property of linguistic expressions
which makes them accessible to consciousness is “unavoidable referential-
ity.” Linguistic ideology takes the expressions of Mock Spanish to be
“referential,” to “mean the same” as the corresponding English words.44 So
“mañana” means “tomorrow” or “later.” But if we admit indexicality to
our analysis, we can see that the word projects many non-referential mean-
ings. The fi rst is a stance, which can be glossed something like this: “I am
using this word because it is a humorous way to talk about delay, implying
a bit of naughty laziness.” The second is an identity, of which this descrip-
tion is an approximation: “In using this word, I signal that I am more than
an uptight, sober, rigidly responsible White person, who is always on time.

154 Covert Racist Discourse

I am a nicer, funnier, more interesting person than that.” To enjoy the
mutuality of the implicated stance, and to buy into the projected identity
as a congenial interlocutor, one must be able to retrieve something like
this: “The naughty laziness in my stance is like the laziness and irresponsi-
bility of a Spanish speaker, someone who would, in the baptismal moment,
have said mañana (the ‘real’ Spanish word).” The stereotype, “Spanish
speakers are lazy,” which would be visible to linguistic ideology as racist
were it to be uttered in that raw form, is never spoken, so referential lin-
guistic ideology fi nds no purchase. What could be wrong with a word that
means “later” while showing that the speaker “knows a little Spanish”?
Nor is the word “mañana” accessible as a slur or an epithet: there is cer-
tainly no overt hostility in the usage, so performative linguistic ideology
fi nds no purchase either. Furthermore, the negative entailments of “mañana”
are surely not intentional, in the usual sense. Indeed, should these entail-
ments be explicitly expressed, users of those expressions might quite sin-
cerely point out that they do not believe them. So these usages are invisible
to personalist linguistic ideology. Even if they are pointed out, within the
folk theory of racism, which requires racist intentions and beliefs, they do
not count as racist. However, within the critical theory of racism, we can
understand that such utterances are part of a collective project, in which
negative stereotypes are constantly naturalized and made normal, circulating
without drawing attention to themselves. By constant repetition in this
covert form, they become part of the basic cognitive tool kit of White
Americans, just like the metaphor IMMIGRANTS ARE ANIMALS. If we
focus on individual beliefs and intentions, as the folk theory of racism
insists, we completely miss the way in which these stereotypes work in a
cultural system, living in interactional space created in mutual engagement,
as people get jokes, apprehend stances, and orient toward identities.

I have suggested that the negative entailments of Mock Spanish expres-
sions are invisible because these expressions work as social indexicals.
However, the positive entailments of these usages are visible to Whites, in
spite of their non-referential properties. Thus, the analysis presented above
is not completely satisfying. I suspect that an important reason, in addition
to its non-referentiality, that the negative indexicality of Mock Spanish is
invisible is because this is actively repressed. The positive stances and identi-
ties entailed in Mock Spanish support the project of White virtue. But the
negative entailments, the racist stereotypes, undercut that project, and
undercut it in a way that is both unintelligible within the folk theory of
racism and deeply threatening. Mock Spanish is not redneck ranting. Most
Whites encounter it almost daily, use it themselves, and certainly have heard
it from public fi gures and characters in entertainments that they admire and
enjoy. The suggestion that this everyday way of being funny might simul-
taneously be racist simply lies outside the regime of truth and sanity. It is

Covert Racist Discourse 155

frightening and dangerous, an attack on White virtue at the most basic
level.

Latino/a reactions to Mock Spanish

I have called Mock Spanish a covert racist discourse, because its racist func-
tions, in reproducing negative stereotypes, are invisible (or at least deniable)
for Whites. However, Mock Spanish is visible as racist to many Latinos
and Latinas. While the Puerto Rican sociologist Clara Rodríguez (1997)
reported that when she fi rst heard Mock Spanish, she was baffl ed by it, the
sociolinguist Fernando Peñalosa (1981), working in southern California,
identifi ed the racist functions of hyperanglicization and bold mispronuncia-
tion of Spanish loan words as long ago as the 1970s. Spanish speakers object
to the use of offensive words like caca and cojones in public English, and
many also object to the ungrammaticality of expressions like “No prob-
lemo,” and mis-spellings like “Grassy-Ass,” as showing disrespect for the
language.

In 1997 Dan Goldstein and I conducted interviews with 11 Anglos, 1
African American, and 12 Latino/a subjects, who were asked to look
through a scrapbook of examples of Mock Spanish, Booster Regionalist
Spanish, and bilingual announcements. They were invited to comment in
any way that they wished on the examples (Hill and Goldstein 2001). We
encountered some diversity among our 12 Latino and Latina subjects. A
few thought that some Mock Spanish usages were cute and funny. Several
expressed sympathy for Anglos who had to struggle with words that might
be diffi cult for them to pronounce (none suggested that Anglos were cos-
mopolitan people who knew some Spanish!). Others thought the scrapbook
examples were simply dumb, empty, and meaningless. Two young men
recognized that some of the usages might be offensive, but that they “didn’t
let it bother them.” But several respondents, ordinary people all, not schol-
ars, reported that they found the usages demeaning, disrespectful, and racist.
Some examples are given in (28–31).

(28) “Muchos smoochos”? [on a greeting card with an image of Snoopy].
These playing on words, sometimes these are very demeaning. I don’t
know, I have a hard time with that.”

In (29), a man responds to an example of a political advertisement with
the headline “Don’t let Congress say Adios to Mining Jobs,” over a picture
of a man in a hard hat leading two small blond boys away from a gate
labeled “closed.” This respondent objects to linguistic appropriation (see
Chapter 6):

156 Covert Racist Discourse

(29) “It’s a double message, adios and, a, a, a white uh, uh male adult with
two uh white kids, um, what a double message. What a co-, covert way
of once again, uh, playing with people’s minds.”

Two men objected to the pejoration of the word macho in its Mock
Spanish usage, as in (30):

(30) “That whole word in itself was totally bastardized. It used to have an
entirely different meaning, which had nothing in reference to how much
you would drink, or what–, how many women you could, you know,
what was your conquest. Basically a, a macho, a, Machismo was a very
comprehensive person that could communicate, uh, that could show his
emotions and express them; once it crossed the border it changed its
whole defi nition to being sarcastic, egotistic, narcissistic. I’m gonna drink
you under the table and how many women can I–.”

One woman, after looking at the entire scrapbook, volunteered a com-
prehensive critique of the materials she had seen:

(31) “Some of those you just kinda hafta be real careful, because you, you,
you know you get somebody to read it and because they’re using maybe
one or two Hispanic words in there or something like that, you think,
oh, you know, they’re kinda, they’re nice, they’re uh, they, they like
our people or whatever, and then all of a sudden underneath it you can
see a real message of, you know, hate or dislike or, or, or being really
um uh, discriminatory towards, towards the Hispanics, and so you kinda
have to take ’em with a grain of salt.”

Conclusion

White speakers of American English, when confronted with the proposal
that Mock Spanish presupposes and reproduces racist stereotypes, vigorously
reject this idea. Surely no racism is intended by such ordinary, and even
entertaining and delightful, usages, which liven up television and cinematic
dialogue, provide a resource for entertaining political commentary from all
points of view, and are frequently heard in everyday conversation. And
many examples of Mock Spanish do seem to be entirely benign to the
unrefl ecting overhearer. Consider the following exchange, which I noted
down on a Sunday morning in March 2001 in the Elk City Cafe in
Redway, California. Both speakers were obviously Anglos, and all appar-
ently Spanish words in the exchange were uttered with normally anglicized
phonology.

Covert Racist Discourse 157

(32) Counter server (female): How’s it going?
Customer (male): Oh, mas o menos.
Server: Not so bueno, huh?

It is certainly wrong to accuse these speakers of intending a message of
racist denigration. However, I hope to have shown that this innocuous bit
of chit-chat is part of a much larger system of White racism and its dis-
courses. This little exchange has played a part in naturalizing, in making
normal and commonsensical for the speakers and those Whites who over-
heard them, the idea that if Spanish is to be “American,” it cannot sound
like Spanish, and it cannot be serious. To become American, Spanish words
must be transformed into light talk like (32), or into jokes and insults.
Furthermore, if we think for a moment, we realize that a Spanish-speaking
counter server and customer, exchanging very similar sentiments in real
Spanish, would have been vulnerable to censure with the “This is America”
routine, which any White customer present (this café, located on the main
highway through town, was a White-dominated space) might have initi-
ated. In fact, it is highly likely that, had the server been a Latina, she would
have received explicit instructions from her manager not to speak Spanish
in the serving area of the restaurant, for fear of making White customers
uncomfortable. Indeed, it is highly likely that had she been a Latina, she
would not have been a server at all; she would have been backstage,
washing dishes and mopping the fl oor (Barrett 2006).

In summary, even these friendly folks in the Elk City Cafe on a sunny
Sunday morning participated, through unrefl ecting everyday practice, in
the reproduction of White racism as a cultural system. I hope to have made
clear that the cultural projects of White racism work through diverse
devices. Spanish and its speakers are assigned to the lower, colored levels
of the racial hierarchy, and material and symbolic resources are appropriated
from them for the purposes of Whites. The many kinds of pressure, formal
and informal, against the Spanish language in the public arena also function
to accomplish these purposes, as do explicit slurs and the utterance of ste-
reotypes. But the unending repetition of unmarked appropriations of
Spanish, from the banal Sunday-morning conversation in the Redway Cafe
to the prose of New York Times opinion pieces and the high dudgeon of
White diplomats, must also be a very important part of the White racist
project, and may be especially important and useful precisely because it is
covert. However, as I have tried to show, these usages are not covert and
invisible to Latinos and Latinas. Instead, they are felt as demeaning, as
degrading, as disrespectful, as an audible, visible, and unpleasant effect, albeit
a less important one than material oppression and the threat of violence,
of living in a racist society.