City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research CUNY Graduate Center 2007 Embracing Diversity for the Sake of Unity: Linguistic Hegemony and the Pursuit of Total Spanish José del Valle CUNY Graduate Center How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/71 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] Discourses of Endangerment Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages Edited b-r Alexandre Duchene and Monica Heller . continuum Linguistic hegemony and the pursuit of total Spanish the Spanish-speaking world - that such a varied assembly of cultural, Embracing diversity social and economic concerns - has yielded an equally complex set of discourses on language in which the notions of endangerment and for the sake of unity: diversity are variously defined and forms of verbal hygiene differently 12 instrumentalized (Kroskrity 2000: 12). In this chapter, I will fdcus on a particular kind of discourse Linguistic hegemony that, emerging froin within Spain's language policy agencies and in response to concerns about the possible fragmentation of Spaoish, and the pursuit of total espouses not the elimination but the enthusiastic embrace of intral ingual diversity. On the basis of previous research on the topic (de! Spanish Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman 2002a, 2002b, 2004; de! Valle 2005; de! Valle and Villa forthcoming), I will approach these fears of fragmen Jose def Valle tation, affirmations of unity and celebrations of internal diversity as discursive sites where anxieties over Spain's desire to build a privi leged economic and political relationship with Latin America are worked out.