Van Dijk discusses the idea that language and discourse are affected by the culture in which they exist. Certain groups have social power and the dominant perception of certain dialects and languages will differ depending on the perceptions of those who have the social power. As van Dijk pointed out, one of the goals of Critical Discourse Analysis is to both describe and explain how language is used for social power.
For this prompt, I would like you to consider the following:
On the first day of class you were asked to write about your perceptions of Appalachians and the Appalachian region. I asked you to consider writing whatever popped into your head. How might your own upbringing (your race, class, gender, socio-economic status, ability, sexual identity, etc.) have shaped the perspectives you wrote about on the first day of class.
Our upbringings are apparently very influential to our perspectives of the world around us. When asked to consider what sort of words we associate with Appalachia the class was able to fill half of the chalkboard with terms that were increasingly negative and in some cases derogatory towards the people of Appalachia. So what shaped our perspectives of their identity? For one thing, we are all part of the civic discourse that is VMI and unsurprisingly the words “townie” and “stoopie” found their ways onto the list to describe Appalachia. Being a part of a discourse that has a precedence of discontent with a janitorial staff in barracks has led to the progression of reasoning that associates said janitorial staff as uneducated and incompetent under the label of “stoopie.” The rhetoric of our civic discourse as well as the tendency for language to be used to label and categorize things and people has in this case been used to discriminate against certain people. Unfortunately, the labels that we use become associated with the broader identity as we associate incompetence with stoopies, then townies, and inevitably identifying the population of Appalachia in the same negative sense.
Our perspectives of the identity of Appalachia is not only influenced by the civic discourse of VMI, the media and hollywood have obviously contributed to shaping our perspectives of the Appalachian identity. Movies such as “Deliverance” found its way onto the list and if that is not an uncommon view of Appalachians then I do not think I have to tell you how unfortunate that is. Once an archetype or label is established, it becomes incorporated into the language and once popularized in the civic discourse enough to become canon then regions such as Appalachia become associated with all the negative connotations of the sort of words we covered the chalkboard with.