Gramsci's Cultural Hegemony Theory And The Language Policy Of The United States Of America

Antonio Gramsci is a well-known Italian Marxist philosopher and theorist who made great contributions to the Italian Communist Party and the theories for proletariat revolution. His theory concentrates on the analysis of cultural hegemony, whose basic character is the amalgamative study of culture and ideology. Language plays a very important role in Gramsci's cultural hegemony theory. Gramsci (1971) wrote in his Prison Notebooks that language is also culture and philosophy. It can influence people's values and world view. In addition, the concept of hegemony of Gramsci was originally being used in linguistics. Language can also function as hegemony, which is carried out through the cultural occupation of the dominant class and the dominant language over other languages. Thus, language also acts as an important approach to the realization of cultural hegemony.Language policy is a means of the government to manage social language life and solve the language problems in society. Language policy is an important issue in a nation's social life, since the language policy a government may adopt will involve many social aspects especially in educational and linguistic rights of minorities and immigrant groups. However, language policy is closely related with language education. Language education always occurs through schools and academic groups which belong to Gramsci's "civil society". And "civil society" is the platform that cultural hegemony takes place.In this thesis, the author intends to apply Gramsci's theory to the case study of language policy of the United States of America. It is not an easy task to study the language policy of the U.S. because most of the policies are covert but not overt. There is never a national official language policy declaring English as the official language in American. However, according to Professor Cai Yongliang, the goal of American language policy is maintaining the central status of English and repelling other languages (Cai 2007). After investigation, the author finds that this relates to what Gramsci criticized as "cultural hegemony". The U.S. government exercised a powerful hegemony in language education system on American Indians. The "English-Only Movement" harmed severely the educational and linguistic rights of American Indians and immigrants. The "English-Only Movement" resulted in the passage of official English legislation in 30 states and finally led to the signing of the English Acquisition Act at the beginning of 2002, which virtually terminated the 34-year-old bilingual education policy. The American white achieves cultural hegemony by continuously imposing English language on Native American and immigrant groups. Finally, the author presents her own comments and implications: The dominant language, English language, in Gramsci's terms, symbolized the cultural hegemony of state apparatus. Finally, the author comes to a conclusion that Language may easily become a nation's tool of political power expansion. With the expansion of cultural hegemony through the language policies in the U.S.A., the state has been identified with civil society. The author suggests a government terminate such language policy which resulted in cultural hegemony and hold a tolerant attitude towards languages other than English in the U.S. This thesis is arranged in six chapters.Chapter 1 gives a general description of the present research as well as its significance and implications.Chapter 2 attempts to provide an overall theoretical framework concerning language, culture, ideology, and Gramsci's cultural hegemony.According to the previous research, the author raises the theoretical basis of this paper in Chapter 3.Chapter 4 firstly explains the concept of language policy and then introduces Professor Cai Yongliang's study on American language policy. Four main characteristics of the American language policy are explained in this chapter.In Chapter 5 the author uses her own analyses system to criticize American language policy.Conclusions and several implications are listed in Chapter 6.