Abstract
What makes neo-nationalism unique from conventional understandings of nationalism is the hyper-attention to border maintenance and internal homogeneity within spaces of established nationalized boundaries. Over the last decade, political actors across global spaces have utilized neo-nationalist ideologies to attain increasing levels of mainstream legitimacy. Given the central role of language in national imagining, this chapter examines neo-nationalist influence on public discourse surrounding language policy in the United States. Utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological orientation, the author of this chapter explores six interrelated sets of texts that advocate for narrowing language use within the United States to monolingual English. His analysis first identifies argument types used to justify and to propose functions for monolingual English. He then pinpoints intertextual linkages across data sets to shed light on the scope of neo-nationalist influence on public discourse regarding language policy in the United States.
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Meadows, B. (2020). Neo-Nationalism and Language Policy in the United States: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Public Discourse Advocating Monolingual English Use. In: McIntosh, K. (eds) Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching in the Neo-Nationalist Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56550-3_2
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