Competing language ideologies of health literacy
This article examines how ‘Sara’, a migrant woman living with a disability, narrates her experiences with Norway’s
welfare and healthcare. Sara invokes a trope — tydelighet [clarity] — to describe successful communication styles
in Norwegian institutional spaces. Through ethnographic investigation, I demonstrate how this trope indexes broader linguistic
ideologies cycling through different levels of the Norwegian nation-state. To be able to communicate with clarity is linked to being a
specific type of citizen-subject. On the one hand, Sara describes the sociopragmatic style of clarity as enabling access to
healthcare and welfare services, stable employment, and speaker legitimacy. On the other hand, lack of clarity rationalizes
inequalities in institutional spaces. I propose that this ideology has a racializing, gendering, and disabling function. The
article offers insights into how language ideologies regulate Sara’s lived experience with health literacy to secure a healthy and
employed life as a migrant with disability living in the welfare state.
Article outline
- 1.Setting the scene
- 2.Context
- 2.1Health literacy in Norwegian welfare and workfare
- 2.2Norwegian and sociolinguistic employability
- 3.Methods, analysis, and concepts
- 3.1Data and ethics
- 3.2Ideologized narratives
- 3.3Investing in linguistic capital
- 4.Analysis and findings
- 4.1Sara’s lived experience of language
- 4.2Assuming a ‘responsible’ position
- 4.3Clarity of health communication
- 4.4Clarity as indexical of linguistic ideology
- 4.5Clarity as a tool to cope with inequalities
- 5.Discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Transcription conventions
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References