Response to Sally Johnson: Misunderstanding language?

Commentary on Sally Johnson's "Who's Misunderstanding Whom? Sociolinguistics, Public Debate and the Media" (2001) commends the timeliness of her reminder that the findings of science often conflict with common sense & daily experience & are rejected for that reason; in the case of linguistics, as language is internal to culture & constitutive of social groupings, linguists' statements are often received by the public as patently untrue, particularly when the issue is one of correct or superior language. The respect for popular discourses on language that linguists need to develop requires their acknowledgement of the artificiality of the Saussurean separation of language & culture & their freedom from ideological theses -- eg, the undemonstrable claim that all languages are equal or the view that languages are self-contained systems that restore equilibrium through internal change -- as such claims are not objective or scientific & merely pit an academic ideology against popular language ideologies, about which linguists still have much to learn. 5 References. J. Hitchcock