Competing language ideologies of health literacy

Abstract

Abstract 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.