Language ideology is often interpreted as conceptual or ideational, referring to consciousness, beliefs, conceptions, and ideas. The most frequently cited quality of ideology is its tight relationship to social authority and its legitimation. For J.B. Thompson (1984), ideology is primarily tied to the process of perpetuating asymmetrical power relations - to maintaining dominance by hiding, legitimizing, or distorting such interactions. In the most extreme versions of this notion, ideology is always a weapon or property of dominant social groups, whereas cultural concepts belonging to oppositional or subordinate groups are, by definition, non-ideological.