I examine the powerful institutional scaling project of the 2017 American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century. I analyze the scalar configurations emerging in the report’s narrative argumentation with the goal of denaturalizing its scale-making narratives in the production of a ‘common-sense’ regimentation of the value of language learning and multilingualism in the United States. These configurations show how social inequalities in access to language learning are reinforced through the ideologically mapped categorizations of language to sociocultural domains and kinds of speakers. Nomically- and reportively-calibrated, future-oriented narratives present figurations of growth and progress that mix nationalist ideologies of US expansionism, neoliberal and raciolinguistic logics, and even utopian visions. By focusing on scale, and in particular on interscalar processes of comparison, the resonances across these sometimes contradictory ideological frames are brought into focus.

中文翻译：

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扩大多语言的价值：向美国国会提交的专家报告中关于增长和不平等的“常识”叙述


我研究了 2017 年美国艺术与科学学院报告《美国语言：投资 21 世纪语言教育》中强大的机构扩展项目。我分析了报告的叙事论证中出现的标量配置，目的是在对美国语言学习和多语言制的价值进行“常识”管理的过程中，使其规模化叙事变得非自然化。这些配置表明，语言学习的社会不平等是如何通过从意识形态上映射到社会文化领域和说话者类型的语言分类而得到加强的。经过名义和报道校准、面向未来的叙事呈现了增长和进步的形象，混合了美国扩张主义的民族主义意识形态、新自由主义和种族主义语言逻辑，甚至乌托邦愿景。通过关注尺度，特别是尺度间的比较过程，这些有时相互矛盾的意识形态框架之间的共鸣成为焦点。