Power moves
Gramsci's concept for the system of domination that works not through force but through culture, institutions, and taken-for-granted 'common sense.
What is hegemony?
This is the mistaken idea that acquiring literacy, by itself, automatically produces higher-order thinking, economic mobility, and social progress.
What is the literacy myth?
This term refers to the language visible in public signs, billboards, shop names, and government buildings in a given territory or urban space.
What is the linguistic landscape?
Rather than treating identity as a fixed thing you ARE, linguistic anthropologists prefer this verb-form — the ongoing, active process of doing who you are.
What is identifying (or identification)?
J.L. Austin's term for utterances that don't just describe the world but actually DO something — 'I promise,' 'I apologize,' 'I now pronounce you…'
What are performatives?
For Foucault, this capital-D term refers to the broader system of ideas, institutions, and practices that shape what can be said, known, and done — regulating thought and conduct.
What is Discourse?
This debunked claim holds that children from low-income families hear millions fewer words than their wealthier peers by age three — treating working-class and nonstandard language use as 'less' language.
What is the word gap myth?
When linguistic anthropologists treat the city as THIS, they're reading signs, storefronts, and graffiti as meaningful communicative acts that can be analyzed like discourse.
What is a text?
Clothing, consumption, labels, hairstyles, accents, and even what we eat are all ways humans do THIS in everyday life.
What is enacting or "doing" identity?
Austin's term for the conditions — the right authority, the right setting, the right procedure — that have to be in place for a performative to 'work.'
Bourdieu's term for the set of dispositions, habits, and bodily ways of being that individuals acquire from the social structures they grow up in.
What is habitus?
Jonathan Rosa's term for the false idea that bilingual or minoritized speakers possess 'no real language' — that their speech counts as neither one language nor the other.
What is the languagelessness myth?
A focus on linguistic landscape lets us see these kinds of dynamics — power relations, gentrification, belonging, exclusion, and who a neighborhood is for — written right on its walls.
What are social, political, and economic processes (shaping space and identity)?
These small words — 'here/there,' 'us/them,' 'we/they' — are one of the most powerful linguistic resources for marking group belonging and difference.
What are deictics?
'Once upon a time,' lowering your voice for a prayer, or switching to a formal register to begin a ceremony — these are all examples of THIS: signaling what kind of speech event is happening
What is keying?
Bourdieu's term for the idea that prestigious forms of language — accent, vocabulary, style — can be 'cashed in' for social and economic advantage.
What is linguistic capital?
Shirley Brice Heath's longitudinal study across three communities showed that children from THIS group did best in mainstream schools — because their home literacy practices aligned with school expectations.
What is the mainstream/middle-class community (or Maintown)?
Walking through a neighborhood with residents, photographing signs, and mapping languages across space are examples of methods used for THIS kind of research.
What is linguistic landscape research (or ethnographic study of signage)?
When a speaker moves between two or more language varieties within a single conversation or even a single sentence, this is one common way of enacting identity
What is code-switching?
Performance is about skill; performativity is about THIS — the transformative force of speech that brings social realities into being, whether or not it's delivered well.
What is force or efficacy?
Even in unequal systems, people aren't just dominated — they push back, reframe, and use language creatively. This is the concept of THIS in language.
What is agency (or power and agency)?
García & Wei's term for fluid language practices that move between and beyond named languages — engaging speakers' full meaning-making repertoires rather than keeping languages separate.
What is translanguaging?
The idea that public signs don't just carry information but POINT to something — conferring value, status, or belonging on certain languages, people, and places.
What is indexicality (signs as indexical)?
Even at the level of how you say a single vowel, THIS can index class, age, region, gender, and affect — showing that identity work happens at every linguistic scale.
What is pronunciation?
This is one of the key limitations of trying to identify explicitly performative words: most utterances that 'do things' don't actually contain words like 'promise' or 'declare' — action is accomplished more subtly.
What is that performativity is rarely marked by explicit performative verbs (most speech acts are implicit)?