The role of the linguist in public debate

Abstract

This article aims to analyze common-sense notions about language, the debates arising from them, and the position of the linguist in the public sphere, proposing a critical reflection on their social role. The research problem stems from a shift in where language is discussed: debate about what counts as speaking well has largely migrated to widely used digital platforms, where academic concepts circulate outside their context of formulation and are received by a non-specialist audience. Grounded in sociolinguistics, the study discusses how language use is intertwined with power relations, identities, and social hierarchies. The theoretical framework is organized around three main axes: language ideologies, the concept of pretoguês, and the role of the linguist in public debate. It examines how language standardization contributes to the construction of normative notions of “correct” and “incorrect”, which are often naturalized by speakers, as well as the tensions surrounding the linguist’s participation in public debate. Methodologically, this is a qualitative case study: comments were collected from an outreach video about pretoguês published on TikTok and Instagram, selected by thematic relevance and analyzed through inductively constructed descriptors. Five descriptors were identified, three of which directly contradict what sociolinguistics has established about variation and speaker competence. The most frequent one, present in eleven of the twenty-three comments analyzed, attributes command of the legitimate language exclusively to formal education; another descriptor shows that academic argument is dismissed not on its merits, but because it is read as ideological. The findings indicate that language constitutes a field of symbolic struggle, underscoring the need for a critical engagement of linguistics in the public sphere.