Language & Identity

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Language & Identity

Language & Communication Lecture 4

Vasiliki Saloustrou, PhD c., KCL vasiliki.saloustrou@kcl.ac.uk

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Definitions?

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• Wide variety of different ways scholars think about language – in formal rather than functional linguistics, or in psycho- rather than in socio-linguistics, or even within different branches of sociolinguistics.

• I am not going to lay down any authoritative definition!

Language

Dictionary definitions (Oxford dictionary):

1. The fact of being who or what a person or thing is.
2. A close similarity or affinity.

Origin of the word: Late 16th century (in the sense ‘quality of being identical’): from late Latin identitas, from Latin idem ‘same’.

Identity

Bendle (2002): different kinds of meanings of 'identity':

• similarity vs. difference, involving social, racial, ethnic, or gender categories
• in terms of the social performance of self-hood
• in terms of 'narratives of the self', understood as stories one tells about who one is
• in psychoanalytic terms, where self and identity are felt to be constrained by unconscious structures of the mind, etc.

Identity

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First-WAVE APPROACHES TO Language & Identity

Language & Social Class

Labov (1966) Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores Method: Observations & interviews (ethnography & elicitation)

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Language & Social Class

Labov (1966) Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores

Main findings:

• Social stratification:

The pronunciation of /r/ depended on the social-class membership of the employees

• Stylistic stratification:

The pronunciation of /r/ depended on the degree of attention of employees

Main idea: Variationist approach to social classSocial class as pre-existing, possessed category (independent variable) that determines and is reflected on people's linguistic behaviour (dependent variable)!

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Language & Class, Sex, Style

Trudgill (1974) Social Differentiation of English in Norwich - the variable (ng) Method: Questionnaire (elicited data)

Main ideas:

• Variationist approach to class & sex
• Focus on structure (structuralist)
• Essentialist conceptualisation of identity

• Gender as binary

Main findings:

• Social & Stylistic stratification

Increase in -ing endings as we move from WC to MC and from CS to FS

• Sex variation

Women in group 2 identify more strongly with women from group 1 (use more overtly prestigious forms) - more status conscious & socially insecure vs. men of group 2 identify with WC speakers' language (covert prestige) (cf. Lakoff 1973; Cheshire 1989)

Women's linguistic behaviour

Lakoff (1973): Features of women's language

• Lexical hedges or fillers,
• Tag questions,
• Rising intonations on declaratives,
• Empty adjectives,
• Precise color terms,
• Intensifiers,
• Hypercorrect grammar,
• Superpolite forms,
• Avoidance of strong swear words,
• Emphatic stress

Holmes (1998): Possible explanations

• Social status/capital explanation

• Social expectations: 'women as guardians of society', 'subordinate groups must be polite'

• Vernacular forms expressing machismo

• Women's own social background

• Influence of interviewer & context: women more sensitive to conversational needs & contextual factors / topics discussed with men enhancing the use of vernacular forms, etc.

• Women use linguistic forms that increase solidariry vs. men using language stressing power difference

Language & Age

Examples of studies: Romaine 1984; Chambers 1995; Chambers and Trudgill 1998; Downes 1998

Gneral finding: Vernacular forms (e.g., double negation, -in endings) are high in adolescence and then reduce as people approach middle age (due to societal pressures to conform) E.g., Downes (1998): men's usage of -in vs. -ing variants at different ages in NZ Main ideas:

• Conceptualisation of age groups as homogeneous
• Chronological vs. social age? (Eckert 1997)
• Variationist, structuralist approach to age

Language & Ethnicity

Shuy, Wolfram & Riley (1967) Main finding:In every social group interviewed in Detroit, AA used more multiple negation than white Americans did. Main ideas:

• Essentialist, structuralist view of ethnicity (skin metaphor) as pre-existing & reflected in language
• Variationist approach to ethnicity
• Presumed homogeneity & fixity

What about diasporic groups?

Variationist approaches: Essentialism Structuralism Reflectionism Determinism Statistical generalisations

Cameron 1990

De-mythologising sociolinguistics

Quantitative Sociolinguistics has certainly clarified some aspects of language in society. But other aspects remain mysterious, the crucial questions unanswered [...] why people behave linguistically as they have been found to do. Sociolinguistics does not provide us with anything like a satisfactory explanation. The account which is usually given in the quantitative paradigm is some version of the proposition that 'language reflects society'. [But] concepts like 'norm', 'identity' and so on, [...] stand in need of explication themselves. [...] A demythologized Sociolinguistics whould incorporate [an approach to language in society] as a necessary complement to quantification and microanalysis.

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Second-Wave approaches to Language & Identity

Realworld changes

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Realworld changes

Bauman 2005; Vertovec 2007; De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2012

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Discursive turn

Post-modern/ performative turn

Social-interactionist turn

Bendwell & Stokoe 2006

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Discourses & Performance

Foucault 1972 The self as a socio-historical and socio-cultural product, as the unfinished construct of discourse (= ideology) Individual agency hailed by external structures and discourses Butler 1990The subject can agentively shape the discourse, while simultaneously being shaped by it. Identity-as-performance: "Because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis". That genesis is not corporeal but performative, so that the body becomes its gender only "through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time." (pp. 273-4)

Socio-interactionist turn

Social theory Macro-analysis Discourse CDA

Ethnomethodology micro-analysis discourse CA/MCA

Ethnomethodological micro-analyses

Conversation analysis

• For a person to 'have an identity' is to be cast into a category with associated characteristics.
• Such casting is indexical and occasioned (it only makes sense in its local setting).
• Participants orient to that identity.
• The force of 'having an identity' is its consequentiality in the interaction - what it allows, prompts or discourages participants to do next (Antaki & Widdicombe 1998).

Membership Categorisation Analysis MCA attends to the categories interactants orient to in talk, the category-bound activities they associate with these inference-rich categories, as well as to the negotiation of these categories in interaction, i.e., the extent to which membership in a category is ‘ascribed (and rejected), avowed (and disavowed), displayed (and ignored) in local places and at certain times’ (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998: 2).

Indexicality

Ochs 1993 Indexing gender INDEX CONSTITUTE Linguistic features acts, stances identities E.g., particle 'ze' coarse intensity male voice particle 'wa' delicate intensity female voice (in Japanese)

Can you think of any examples in English?

Communities of practice (CofP)

Wenger's (1998) definition of CoP:

• mutual engagement
• joint enterprise,
• common repertoire of resources

--> membership is contingent upon participation in common practices rather than on geographical boundaries, cultural or biological inheritance. Taken up by discursive identity scholars E.g., Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (1992): gender construction in social practice - shift from speech to practice - view of identity as shaped by activities and relations within small groups Related methodologies: e.g., micro-ethnography

Critical Discourse Analysis

Focus on macro-level Discourses and ideologies that become normalised and considered as objective reality. Attempt to ‘denaturalise’ the taken-for-granted power inequalities and hierarchies, as these feature in a text, while accounting for the fact that individuals may agentively resist the authoritative dictates of the social order (Fairclough 1994: 61). Analysis of: a) the text, b) the discourses which inform the formulation of the text (‘discursive practice’), c) the wider socio-cultural context in which the text is situated (‘social practice’) (Fairclough 1995).

Narrative identities

From auto-biographical to interactional stories

Stories as a prime site for identity construction (e.g., Schiffrin 1996; De Fina et al. 2006)Labov's (1972) model of narrative structure - Focus on:

• structural components of oral narratives
• about personal past experience
• elicited in research interviews

--> established a view of narrative as a coherent unit--> privileged a specific type of narrative, i.e., monologic big stories / stories of emblematic events with temporal organisaiton

Narrative identities

From auto-biographical to interactional stories

Interactionist approaches to narrative & identity - Focus on:

• emergence, co-construction of stories in interaction - CA perspective (Sacks 1974; Jefferson 1978; Goodwin 1984)
• different narrative genres, e.g., monologic vs. co-authored, linear vs. fluid, mundane vs. highly tellable (Ochs & Capps 2001)

--> inclusion of less canonical narratives (incoherent, fragmented, open-ended) --> inclusion of other types of identity: inconsistent, fragmented, relational (De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2012)

The Queen's gambit

How is Beth constructing herself in the story?

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Identity politics

'You can't put me in a box! We are all others!'

• Identity politics focuses on the 'us' vs. 'them' distinction

• 'Our' behaviour is presented as natural (depoliticized) - 'their' behaviour is portrayed as irrational & political (Blommaert 2016)

• E.g., wearing a hijab is presented as a threat to democracy BUT forcing women in Western countries to get rid of it is not seen as a political action

• Strategic essentialisation --> discriminatory, groupist practices --> polarization

Can such classifications capture the complexity of life in this post-modern world and do justice to individuals' needs?

Video

• Why does Ross choose to speak with a British accent?
• How is this accent used to help Ross construct a desired identity?
• Do his interlocutors accept or reject this identity in talk?

References

Antaki, C., and Widdicombe, S. (eds). (1998) Identities in talk. London: Sage. Bauman, R. (2005) ‘Liquid Modernity and Dilemmas of Development’, Thesis Eleven, 83(1), pp. 61-77. Bendle, M. (2002) 'The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity', British Journal of Sociology. 53 (1)/1-18 Benwell, B., and Stokoe, E. (2006) Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, New York.Cameron, D. (2009 [1990]) ‘Deemythologizing Sociolinguistics’, in Coupland, N. and Jaworski, A. (eds) The New Sociolinguistics Reader. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 106-118. Chambers, J. K. (1995) Sociolinguistic theory: linguistic variation and its social significance. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, USA: Blackwell. Chambers, J. K. and Trudgill, P. (1998) Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheshire, J. (1987) 'Syntactic variation, the linguistic variable and sociolinguistic theory', Journal of Language & Social Psychology, 8(2). De Fina, A., Schiffrin, D. and Bamberg, M. (2006) Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Fina, A. and Georgakopoulou, A. (2012) Analyzing Narrative. Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Downes, W. (1998) Language and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, P., and McConnell-Ginet, S. (1992) 'Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 461–490. Fairclough, N. (1994) ‘Conversationalisation of public discourse and the authority of the consumer’, in Keat, R., Whitely, N. and Abercrombie, N. (eds), The Authority of the Consumer. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1972) The archeology of knowledge. New York: Harper and Row. Goodwin, C. (1984) ‘Notes on Story Structure and the Organization of Participation’, in Atkinson, M. and Heritage, J. (eds) Structures of Social Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 225-246.

References

Holmes, J. (1998) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman. Jefferson, G. (1978) ‘Sequential Aspects of Storytelling in Conversation’, in Schenkein, J. (ed) Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction. New York, NY: Academic Press, pp. 219-248.Labov, W. (1966) Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Lakoff, R. T. (1973) ‘The logic of politeness; or, minding your p’s and q’s’, in Corum, C., Smith Stark, T. C. and Weiser, A. (eds) Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, April 1973. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 292–305. Ochs, E. (1993) 'Indexing gender', in Miller, B. D. (ed.), Sex and Gender Hierarchies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp. 335-358). Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (2001) Living Narrative. Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press. Sacks, H. (1974) ‘An analysis of the course of a joke’s telling in conversation’, In Bauman, R. and Sherzer, J. F. (eds) Explorations in the ethnography of speaking. Cambridge University Press, pp. 337–53. Schiffrin, D. (1996) ‘Narrative as Self-portrait: The Sociolinguistic Construction of Identity’, Language in Society, 26, pp. 167-203. Shuy, R. W. , Wolfram, W. and Riley, W. K. (1967) Linguistic correlates of social stratification in Detroit speech. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University.Trudgill, P. (2009 [1974]) ‘The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich’, in Coupland, N. and Jaworski, A. (eds) The New Sociolinguistics Reader. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 60-65. Romaine, S. (1984) 'The status of sociological models and categories in explaining language variation', Linguistische Berichte, 90: 25–38. Vertovec, S. (2007) ‘Super-diversity and its implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), pp. 1024-1054. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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