Standard language ideology in an English-medium Irish secondary school: Conflicting perspectives on the discouragement of nonstandard language

Abstract

The current paper aims to address how one English-medium school functions from the different perspectives within the school: the principal, student/teacher classroom interaction and the students. This approach allows us to see the power differential of the different stakeholders in a school and how iconisation, fractal recursivity, and erasure affect teenagers in Dublin. This paper presents interview data with a principal and the students in a secondary school. Taking a qualitative approach to these data, I show that standard language ideology is linked with economic disadvantage. The school principal’s approach to identifying, problematising and seeking to eliminate certain types of nonstandard language in the school reflects a standard language ideology and is consistent with a raciolinguistic approach to linguistic discrimination. The data suggest that the students themselves take a more nuanced approach.