Abstract:
Language ideology is most typically taken conceptual or ideational, having to do with
consciousness, beliefs, notions and ideas. The most applied feature often attributed to ideology is an intimate connection to social power and its legitimation. For J.B. Thompson (1984), for example, ideology is signification that is essentially linked to the process of sustaining asymmetrical relations of power - to maintaining domination by disguising, legitimating, or distorting those relations. In the strongest formulations of this principle, ideology is always the tool or property of dominant social groups, cultural conceptions belonging to oppositional or subordinate groups are by definition nonideological.
