This special issue of hagmarl'cs derives from a day-long symposium on "l^anguage Ideology: Practice and Theory" held at the annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association in Chicago, November 1991.1 The organizing premise of the symposium was that language ideology is a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk, if such static imagery for some very dynamic processes can be forgiven. Rather than casting language ideology as an epiphenomenon, a relatively inconsequential overlay of secondary and tertiary responses (Boas 1911; Bloomfield 1944),, the symposium started from the proposition that ideology stands in dialectical relation with, and thus significantly influences, social, discursive, and linguistic practices. As such a critical link, language ideology merits more concerted analytic attention than it has thus far been given. In this first attempt to bring form to an area of inquiry, we have adopted a relatively unconstrained sense of "language ideology." Alan Rumsey's definition, based on Silverstein (1979), is a useful starting point: linguistic ideologies are "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world "(1990: 346). We mean to include cultural conceptions not only of language and language variation, but of the nature and purpose of communication, and of communicative behavior as an enactment of a collective order (Silverstein 1987: l-2). I use the terms "linguistic" and "language" ideology interchangeably, although in the articles that follow one might detect differences in their uses, perhaps varying with the degree to which the authors focus on formal linguistic structures or on representations of a collective order. In order to build toward a general understanding of the cultural variability of language ideology and its role in social and linguistic life, the symposium brought