Abstract
This chapter reviews some relationships between emotion and “language about language,” otherwise known as “metalanguage.” I focus on two varieties: talk about language varieties, and talk about forms of talk; that is, talk through which speakers frame certain speech acts, word choices, or forms within a language as more or less desirable or otherwise affectively charged. I exemplify both varieties using data from the descendants of former colonial settlers in Kenya, whose metalanguage is emotionally saturated because connected to their ideas about race.
This chapter focuses on emotion and two types of metalanguage, both of them language-ideological in their way. The relationship between emotion and metalanguage in talk about forms of talk or speech acts has been less explicitly developed in the scholarly literature, but it can be found. Contemporary white Kenyan attitudes toward African languages are mostly intended as a rejoinder to the deep disdain found in early colonial discourses. White Kenyans feel it is ideologically and morally appropriate to distance themselves from the African occult, and that the embrace of the occult is pernicious, undesirable, and otherwise in uneasy competition with a wished-for core self that enjoys a lineage of white identity. The resultant anxiety has two layers: the white Kenyans fear occult powers, and they fear what it could mean for their rational identity if they actually believe the occult is real.