Bilingualism, gender, and ideology

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to theorize the relationship between bilingualism and gender within a feminist post structuralist framework. I suggest that all language contact phenomena, including bilingualism, acquire different meanings indifferent contexts and can be linked to gender only indirectly. In some contexts, where bilingual skills are highly valued, they may become a means for one group to dominate the other, while in others bilingualism and cultural mediation are constructed as “servile” occupations and assigned to the less powerful group. Depending on gender relations in minority and majority communities, the values and benefits of monolingualism and bilingualism may be different for men and women. In some situations, knowledge of the majority language would be useful to everyone in the community, in others, the majority language is more useful for men than for women, and yet in others, it is women who profit most by shifting to the majority language. In sum, it is argued that it is not the essential nature of femininity or masculinity that defines the patterns of bilingualism, language maintenance or language shift, but rather the nature of gender, social, and economic relations, and ideologies of language and gender that mediate these relations.