What Is Identity?
Your identity is, very simply, who you are. It has two basic aspects: your name, which
serves first of all to single you out from others (the deictic function), and then that
deeper, intangible something that constitutes who you really are, which we might think
of as the meaning of your name (the semantic function).
Names are obviously pieces of language, but less obvious is the role played by the
language you speak, and how you speak it, in constructing that other, deeper aspect of
your identity, both for yourself and others.
Imagine a group of strangers at a bus stop. The bus they are waiting for drives past
without stopping, and the following remarks ensue:
A: Well fuck me.
B: I say, wasn’t that the 23?
C: I’m like not believing this.
Picture in your mind what A, B, and C look like.
You can probably say something about how they are dressed, their background, what
they do, what they are like, and whether you would like them or not. It is extraordinary
how much we are able to infer from what are, after all, a few squiggles on a page. We
have an instinctive capacity to construct the identity of a whole person in our minds
based on minimal input,
and it is most effective when the squiggles represent something the person said. Selfidentity has long been given a privileged role in
identity research. But the identities we construct for ourselves and others are not
different in kind, only in the status we accord them. The gap between the identity of an
individual and of a group – a nation or town, race or ethnicity, gender or sexual
orientation, religion or sect, school or club, company or
profession, or the most nebulous of all, a social class
– is most like a true difference of kind. Group identities seem more abstract than
individual ones, in the sense that ‘Brazilianness’ doesn’t exist separately from the
Brazilians who possess it, except as the other time-budgeting placed a severe upper
limit on the size of groups they could maintain’’ (Dunbar, 1996: 77).
Language made it possible to increase group size without losing social cohesion or the
time needed to gather and hunt food. Because language can be directed at several
people simultaneously, the rate of grooming is increased manifold.
Dunbar notes, ‘‘Being able to assess the reliability of a prospective ally becomes allimportant in the eternal battle of wits’’ (Dunbar, 1996: 78–79). On the one hand,
language serves the purposes of the individual who is seeking to make an alliance: ‘‘It
allows you to say a great about yourself, your likes and dislikes, the kind of person you
are; it also allows you to convey in numerous subtle ways something about your
reliability as an ally or friend’’ (Dunbar, 1996: 78). It also serves the person being
courted as a prospective ally: ‘‘Subtle clues provided by what you say about yourself –
perhaps even how you say it – may be very important in enabling individuals to assess
your desirability as a friend. We get to know the sort of people who say certain kinds of
things, recognizing them as the sort of people we warm to – or run a mile from’’
(Dunbar, 1996: 79). He concludes, ‘‘Language thus seems ideally suited in various ways
to being a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming. [. . .L]anguage evolved to allow us
to gossip’’ (Dunbar, 1996: 79).
If we think about language from this perspective, its primary purpose is no longer
necessarily restricted to one of the two traditionally ascribed to it, communication (by a
speaker having an intention and wishing to transmit it to listeners) and representation
(of the universe, as analyzed into the logical categories that languages are thought to
contain). Before either of these, and in many regards enveloping them both, language
exists, in this reversed perspective, for the purpose of reading the speaker.
Sociolinguistic inquiry into identity and language is concerned with how people read
each other, in two senses. First, how the meanings of utterances are interpreted, not
just following idealized word senses and rules of syntax as recorded in dictionaries and
grammars, but in the context of who is addressing whom in what situation. Secondly,
how speakers themselves are read, in the sense of the social and personal identities
their listeners construct for them based on what they say and how they say it (a
complex process, because most speakers’ output is already shaped in part by how they
have read their listeners). Every day each of us repeatedly undertakes this process of
constructing our reading of people we encounter, in person, on the telephone, on the
radio or the screen, or in writing, including on the Internet, based on their language –
what they say and how they say it.
Targeting Identity in the Analysis of Language
Modern linguistics has moved slowly but steadily toward embracing the identity
function as central to language. The impediment has been the dominance of the
traditional outlook, which takes representation alone to be essential, with even
communication relegated to a secondary place. This outlook was never the only one
available, however, and when early 20th century linguists such as Jespersen and Sapir
came to investigate how language functions to define and regulate the role of the
individual within the social unit at the same time that it helps to constitute that unit,
they were not without predecessors. It was just that mainstream linguistics as it had
developed within the 19th century was not inclined to see such questions as falling
within its purview.
An overview of the development of such inquiry within linguistics and adjacent fields
can be found in Joseph (2004), from which some key moments will be excerpted here.
The first is Labov (1963), a study of the English dialect of Martha’s Vineyard, an island
off the coast of Massachusetts, where the diphthongs in words such as right and house
are pronounced as [ey] and [ew] rather than [ay] and [aw]. This feature is not found in
the dialects of the mainlanders who ‘summer’ on Martha’s Vineyard, and with whom
the Vineyarders (year-round residents) have a complex relationship of dependency and
resentment. ‘‘It is apparent that the immediate meaning of this phonetic feature is
‘Vineyarder.’ When a man says [reyt] or [hews], he is unconsciously establishing the fact
that he belongs to the island: that he is one of the natives to whom the island really
belongs’’ (Labov, 1963: 307). This is very much the sort of analysis of the effect of
linguistic identity on language form that would characterize work in the 1990s and since,
though it was sidelined in the mid-1960s by the statistical charting of variation and
change.
In the meantime, one particular identity focus – gender – led the way in directing
attention to the reading of identity in language. Lakoff (1973) argued that, in both
structure and use, languages mark an inferior social role for women and bind them to it.
Gender politics is incorporated directly into the pronoun systems of English and many
other languages, through the use of the masculine as the ‘unmarked’ gender (as in
‘Everyone take his seat’). Lakoff points to features that occur more frequently in
women’s than in men’s English, such as tag questions, hedges, and pause markers,
which as marks of insecurity and of the role women are expected to occupy are
fundamental to maintaining the status quo in gender politics.
As the notion of separate men’s and women’s language was accepted, the more
general notion of the language–identity link was let in through the back door, leaving
the way open for the study of group identities of all sorts beyond those national and
ethnic ones traditionally associated with language difference. This was a challenge to a
sociolinguistics that had been fixated on class differences. By the mid-1980s this shift
was underway in the work of, for example, Gumperz (1982), Edwards (1985), and Le
Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), though it was really in the 1990s that it would come to
occupy the mainstream of work in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.
This work also received significant input from social psychology, where one approach in
particular needs to be singled out: Social Identity Theory, developed in the early 1970s
by Tajfel. In the years following his death in 1982, it came to be the single most
influential model for analyzing linguistic identity.
Tajfel (1978: 63) defined social identity as ‘‘that part of an individual’s self-concept
which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or
groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that
membership.’’ Within this
simple definition are embedded at least five positions
that in their time were quite revolutionary: that social
identity pertains to an individual rather than to a
social group; that it is a matter of self-concept, rather
than of social categories into which one simply falls;
that the fact of membership is the essential thing,
rather than anything having to do with the nature of
the group itself; that an individual’s own knowledge
of the membership, and the particular value they attach to it – completely ‘subjective’
factors – are what
count; and that emotional significance is not some
trivial side effect of the identity belonging but an
integral part of it.
Beyond this, Social Identity Theory marked a break
with other approaches in the fact that it was not
concerned with analyses grounded in a notion of
‘power,’ but simply in the relative hierarchizations
that people seem instinctively to impose on ourselves,
most particularly in our status as members of ‘ingroups’ and ‘out-groups,’ which would
come into
even greater prominence in the ‘Self-Categorization
Theory’ that developed as an extension of the original
model, notably in the work of Tajfel’s collaborator
Turner (see Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Turner et al.,
1987; Turner, 1991).
Partly under the influence of such work, sociolinguists were beginning to reorient their
own object of
investigation. Milroy (1980) reported data from studies she conducted in Belfast
showing that the ‘social
class’ of an individual did not appear to be the key
variable allowing one to make predictions about
which forms of particular linguistic variables the person would use. Rather, the key
variable was the nature
of the person’s ‘social network,’ a concept borrowed
from sociology that Milroy defined as ‘‘the informal
social relationships contracted by an individual’’
(Milroy, 1980: 174). Where close-knit localized network structures existed, there was a
strong tendency to maintain nonstandard vernacular forms of
speech – a tendency difficult to explain in a model
such as Labov’s, based on a scale of ‘class’ belonging
where following norms of standard usage marked one
as higher on the hierarchy and entitled to benefits that
most people desire. Labov’s early work on Martha’s
Vineyard had suggested that the answer lay in identity, specifically in the value of
belonging to a group
who, although not highly placed in socioeconomic
terms, could nevertheless claim something valuable
for themselves (in the Martha’s Vineyard case, authenticity). Milroy’s book provided
statistical backing for
such an explanation.
Although the inner workings of the social network
depend somewhat on the amount of personal contact,
the essential thing is that its members share norms. As
attention turned to understanding the nature of these
norms, two much publicized views had an impact.
Fish (1980) had devised the concept of the ‘interpretative community’ to account for
the norms of
reading whereby people evaluate different readings
of the same text as either valid or absurd. An interpretative community is a group
sharing such a set of
norms; its members may never come into direct physical contact with one another, yet
share norms spread
by the educational system, books, or the media. Soon
after, Anderson (1991, first published in 1983) proposed a new understanding of the
‘nation’ as an
‘imagined community,’ whose members, like that
of the interpretative community, will never all meet
one another let alone have the sort of regular intercourse that creates a ‘network.’
What binds them
together is the shared belief in the membership in
the community.
Notably with the work of Eckert, sociolinguistic
investigation of groups ideologically bound to one
another shifted from statistically based examination
of social networks to more interpretative examination of ‘communities of practice,’
defined as ‘‘an
aggregate of people who come together around mutual
488 Identity and Languageengagement in an endeavor’’ (Eckert and McConnellGinet,
1992: 464). In the course of this endeavor
there emerge shared beliefs, norms, and ideologies,
including, though not limited to, linguistic and
communicative behavior. The advantage of the
community-of-practice concept is its openness – any
aggregate of people can be held to constitute one, so
long as the analyst can point convincingly to behavior
that implies shared norms or, better still, elicit expression of the underlying ideologies
from members of the
community. This line of research is thus continuous
with another one that has focused more directly on
the normative beliefs or ideologies by which national
and other group identities are maintained. Some
early work along these lines was published in
Wodak (1989) and Joseph and Taylor (1990), and
subsequently a great deal more has appeared, e.g.,
in Verschueren (1999), Blommaert (1999), and
Kroskrity (2000).
Other features of recent work on language and
identity include the view that identity is something
constructed rather than essential and performed rather than possessed – features that
the term identity
itself tends to mask, suggesting as it does something
singular, objective, and reified. Each of us performs a
repertoire of identities that are constantly shifting,
and that we negotiate and renegotiate according to
the circumstances.
Co-constructing National Identity and Language
As mentioned at the outset, it is not simply the case
that identity is built upon language. The reverse is
also true. One of the first obstacles to be overcome in
establishing a national identity is the nonexistence of
a national language. The ‘nation–state myth’ – that
basic view of the world as consisting naturally of
nation–states – is bound up with an assumption that
national languages are a primordial reality. Whatever
difficulty we might have in determining the borderlines of who ‘the Germans’ are,
whether the Germanborn children of Turkish immigrants are German for
instance, or whether certain Alsatians are French or
German, the German language is going to figure significantly in the equation. Hitler
attempted to justify
his initial invasions of neighboring countries on the
grounds that these German-speaking peoples were
inherently part of the German nation; and, as Hutton
(1999) has shown, his policies of oppression and
ultimately extermination of the Jews were underpinned by the argument that, although
their language,
Yiddish, was a form of German, their lack of a nation
gave them the perverse racial peculiarity of not being
able to have a ‘mother tongue.’ They therefore did not
belong to the German body politic but were seen as a
parasite within it.
But whether Bohemian, Alsatian, and Yiddish dialects were part of ‘the German
language’ were not
facts given in advance, nor even ones that a linguist
could establish scientifically. The ‘German language,’
like every national language, is a cultural construct. It
dates from the 16th century and is generally credited
to Luther, who, in translating the Bible, strove to
create a form of German that might unite the many
dialect groups across what until the late 19th century
was a patchwork of small and large states, linguistically very diverse. (This story is itself a
part of the
cultural construct, and although not false, it is considerably oversimplified – in order to
shape up as a
proper ‘hero’ myth, it ignores or marginalizes the
work of many other individuals and broader cultural
changes.) The prototype of the modern national language was Italian, which may seem
surprising, given
that Italy did not become a political nation until
1860, with full unification coming in 1870, just a
year before that of Germany. Or perhaps not so
surprising – the political divisions of the Italian peninsula may have been precisely what
motivated the
creation of cultural unity through linguistic means.
In the Romance-speaking world during the thousand years from the fall of the Roman
Empire to the
Renaissance, ‘language’ meant Latin, used for all official and written purposes, though
what people
spoke in nonofficial contexts was a local dialect,
historically related to Latin though significantly different from village to village. There
was, then, no
‘Italian language.’ That concept and its realization
are credited – heroically, and again only semimythically – to Dante, author of the Divina
Commedia.
Dante’s treatise De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1306), not
published until 1529, lays out the process by which he
claimed to discover, not invent, the national language
of a nation that would take five and a half centuries to
emerge politically. To the modern reader this all
seems a fiction, a pretense of discovery in what will
actually be Dante’s invention of an illustrious vernacular – which will in turn camouflage
how much of it is
actually based on his native Tuscan. But Dante’s volgare illustre became the template on
which other
modern European standard languages were modeled.
Once the national languages existed, however, their
invention was promptly forgotten. The people for
whom they represented national unity inevitably
came to imagine that the language had always been
there, and that such dialectal difference that existed
within it was the product of recent fragmentation,
when in fact it had preceded the unification by
which the national language was forged. In the
words of one prominent historian:
Identity and Language 489National languages [. . .] are the opposite of what nationalist
mythology supposes them to be, namely the primordial foundations of national culture
and the matrices of
the national mind. They are usually attempts to devise
a standardized idiom out of a multiplicity of actually
spoken idioms, which are downgraded to dialects [. . .].
(Hobsbawm, 1990: 51)
By the early 19th century this ‘nationalist mythology’ would lead to strong Romantic
theorizations of
national political identity being grounded in a primordial sharing of language. One of the
strongest
expressions was that of Fichte:
The first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states
are beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who
speak the same language are joined to each other by a
multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they
understand each other
and have the power of continuing to make themselves
understood more and more clearly; they belong together
and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. (Fichte,
1968 [1808]: 190–191)
Fichte was writing to rouse the ‘German nation’ to
repel the advance of Napoleon. He was successful in
doing so. However, in 1870 the shoe was on the other
foot, when the Franco-Prussian War led to the German annexation of Alsace, a Germanspeaking province that had been part of France for more than two
centuries and whose population was mainly loyal to
France, despite their linguistic difference. This provoked a sharp turn away from the
Fichtean view on
the part of French linguists such as Renan (1882),
who formulated a new view of national identity as
based not on any primordially determining characteristic such as language, but on a
shared will to be part
of the same nation, together with shared memories.
The nation, in other words, exists in the minds of
the people who make it up. This is the conception that
Anderson (1991: 6) would return to in defining the
nation as ‘‘an imagined political community.’’ The
‘legacy of memories’ Renan pointed to would dominate future philosophical and
academic attempts to
analyze national identity. The other element, the collective ‘will’ of the people, would,
however, have the
deepest political impact, starting with the redrawing
of the map of Europe at Versailles in 1919. It has
continued to be the assumed basis for the legitimacy
of the political nation up to the present time.
Billig, a colleague and collaborator of Tajfel, has
explored how the ‘‘continual acts of imagination’’ on
which the nation depends for its existence are reproduced (Billig, 1995: 70), sometimes
through purposeful deployment of national symbols, but mostly
through daily habits of which we are dimly aware at
best. Examples include the national flag hanging in
front of the post office and the national symbols
on the coins and banknotes we use each day. Billig
introduced the term banal nationalism to cover the
ideological habits that enable the established nations
of the West to be reproduced. In Billig’s view ‘‘an
identity is to be found in the embodied habits of social
life’’ (Billig, 1995: 8), including language. Smith (e.g.,
1998, Chapter 8) has emphasized how much of the
effort of nationalism construction is aimed at reaching
back to the past in the interest of ‘ethno-symbolism,’
and this can be seen particularly in the strong investment made by modern cultures in
maintaining the
‘standard language,’ by which is meant a form resistant to change, hence harking
backward. Hobsbawm
placed great stress on the fact that enthusiasm for
linguistic nationalism has historically been a phenomenon of the lower middle class.
The classes which stood or fell by the official use of the
written vernacular were the socially modest but
educated middle strata, which included those who acquired lower middle-class status
precisely by virtue of
occupying non-manual jobs that required schooling.
(Hobsbawm, 1998: 117)
These are also the people who become the mainstay
of nationalism – not just by active flag-waving on
symbolic occasions, but daily in the banal ways pointed to by Billig, including their use of
‘proper language’ and their insistence on its norms, for instance
in conversation with their own children. Hobsbawm
has suggested that, in Victorian times, the pattern was
established whereby the lower middle classes (artisans, shopkeepers, and clerks)
enacted their national
belonging by showing themselves to be ‘‘the most
‘respectable’ sons and daughters of the fatherland’’
(Billig, 1998: 122). In other words, although their
real identity was that of a social class, they masked
it for themselves and others in a nationalistic guise.
The mask was double-sided: in their obsession with
‘speaking properly’ as a mark of respectability, they
were contributing to the linguistic construction of
their nation.
At the start of this article, I wrote that identities
are, first and foremost, names, and that the work of
identity construction consists of supplying meaning
for the name. In the case of national identity, language has traditionally been a key
ingredient in this
process for at least five reasons:
1. Groups of people who occupy contiguous territory
and see themselves as having common interests
tend to develop, over long stretches of time, ways
of speaking that are distinctive to them, marking
them out from groups who either are not geographically adjacent to them or else are
perceived
490 Identity and Languageas having different, probably rival, interests. In
other words, language does tend to mark out the
social features on which national belonging will
come to be based – but it is only a tendency,
because it also happens very frequently that the
same way of speaking is shared by people with
very different interests (religious ones, for instance), and that markedly different ways
of
speaking exist among a group of people who nonetheless see themselves as part of the
same nation.
2. The ideology of national unity has favored a view
that nations are real because those within them
share a deep cultural unity, and this has coexisted
with a widespread – indeed, nearly universal –
belief that deep cultural unity is the product of a
shared language. This is what Fichte meant by the
‘invisible bonds’ by which nature has joined those
who speak the same language. Again, as with (1),
it cannot be more than a tendency, because it is not
the case that people who identify themselves as
belonging to the same culture or nation think
identically. Yet language is central to the habitus
(an ancient term revived by Bourdieu): the fact
that we spend our formative years attending long
and hard to the task of learning words and their
meanings from those around us results in our acquiring tastes, habits, and ways of
thinking from
them that will endure into adult life. The language
does not somehow transmit culture and identity to
its speakers – rather, the language is the text
through the constant interaction with which
older speakers transmit culture and identities
(local and personal as well as national, ethnic,
and religious) to the young. (In many cases the
young will want an identity of their own and will
attain it first of all by resisting the imposition of
culture upon them by their elders.)
3. In addition to being the text of cultural transmission, the language is the principal
medium in
which texts of national identity in the more usual
sense will be constructed. It is not the only such
medium, nor the only powerful one, as Billig’s
exposition of ‘banal nationalism’ has shown. But
the particular concepts that constitute a national
identity correspond to words in the national language, embodied in ‘sacred texts’ of the
nation
such as a constitution or key works of the national
literature, including the national anthem.
4. As universal education is adopted throughout the
nation, inculcating standards of ‘correct’ language
assumes a central role. Overtly, this is from a perceived duty to maintain the culture.
However, as
Hobsbawm has shown, such is the force of the
language-culture-nation-class nexus that, especially for the upwardly mobile members
of the lower
middle class, being a ‘proper’ citizen and member of the community is inseparable from
using
‘proper’ language.
5. Insofar as nations are not the historical essences
they purport to be, but are constructs that inevitably involve a certain amount of
arbitrary and even
capricious divisions and classifications, when a
nation wants to control who can live in it, vote in
it, and enjoy state benefits, language can appear to
be the most obvious test for deciding whether
particular individuals belong to the nation or
not. Most nations no longer have laws based on
racial classification – which are rarely easy to
apply in any case – yet many do require cultural
qualifications to be met, which are likely to include language either overtly or indirectly.
Each of these factors has reinforced the others in
giving the national language the force of a cultural–
historical ‘ethno-symbolic’ myth as suggested by Smith
(see earlier discussion). Within each, too, there is a
contradiction or a caveat that has periodically pendulum-swung to prominence, such
that the loss of belief
in the national language and all it stands for is always
potentially there and is bound to come to the fore at
least periodically. The question that is unanswerable
for now is whether national languages, together with
the nations to which they are attached, represent a
historical phase that is now on a course of decline
heading for eventual disappearance, to be replaced
with ‘glocalization’ – a term that has been coined to
denote the combination of globalization with the resurgence of local, subnational sites
of belonging – or
whether they are an invention that has proven too
useful for human social organization to be given up.
See also: Communities of Practice; Ethnicity; Ethnolinguistic Vitality; Gender;
Interactional Sociolinguistics; Language Attitudes; Multiculturalism and Language; Social
Class and Status; Sociolinguistic Crossing.
Reflections of Identity in Language Use
The main focus of studies of language and identity in
sociocultural anthropology (LISA) is on the interplay
between global cultural categories (‘census identities’
such as gender, race, class, or others that may be
culturally salient, such as kinship identities), and
how these identities are constructed, performed, or
challenged locally in speech events through linguistic
forms. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the
LISA approach is that rather than taking census and
other identity categories as pre-given, it investigates
how these categories are made relevant by and for
language users. It is important to understand that
LISA research does not lose sight of the larger picture; it attempts to discover how
speakers’ ideologies
about census identities shape, and are shaped by,
interaction. Identity as viewed in this tradition is
therefore emergent but constrained: identities are
created and re-created when speakers are actually
talking to each other, but the way these identities
emerge is contingent on the speakers’ sociocultural
discourses and ideologies.
Identities are named ‘relationships’ in cultural
ideologies and interactions; identity categories
such as census identities are a shorthand for
identifying – and thinking about – the many ways
that a person relates to others in the community.
Identity in Sociocultural Anthropology and Language 495For example, by referring to
gender or drawing on
a gender identity in interaction, a person calls up a
bundle of culturally-shared relationships to other
people in their culture. A man may call up solidarity
with another man through cultural ideologies of
masculinity that identify men as a class of people
who share certain social traits. In this sense, identities
are ‘imaginary’ (cf. Anderson, 1991 on imagined
communities and nationalism) or ‘figured worlds’
(Holland et al., 1998). Because identities are relational, a person has no single fixed
identity, only
identities constructed and contextualized in interaction (and to the extent that an
identity is psychologically real, it is based on the self’s conception of
its place in psychologically idealized models of interaction). LISA studies investigate the
tension between ideologies of identity categories and their
emergence in interaction through language and
other communicative modes. LISA does not study
the motivation of speakers to join identity categories,
but it does show how such categories are reproduced
in ideologies and cultural discourses through talk.
We might suppose that the most straightforward way of claiming an identity is to speak
the
language of that identity: one is Tongan when one
speaks Tongan, Uzbekh when one speaks Uzbekh,
etc. But this view is destabilized when speakers
are multilingual (which seems to be the larger portion
of the world’s population). Does a Black-AmericanHeterosexual-Woman become
Dominican when she
uses Dominican Spanish, or an Australian when
she uses Australian English? By investigating just
these kinds of situations (Bailey, 2001) LISA researchers have shown that the ‘languageequals-identity’
model is too simple to represent actual interaction.
This research challenges the notion that languages
are single, invariant entities, and has shown that a
language is full of many different voices: registers,
styles, varieties, and even other languages. At the
same time, LISA analyses incorporate speakers’
own ideologies of language. For although we might
objectively observe that language use is never pure,
the subjective ideologies of language users is often
quite different. Language users’ understandings of
‘‘how language is supposed to be’’ affect the way
they use it: they bias performance in certain directions, as sociolinguistic variationists
have been able
to measure.
The terms most used for such a mixed view of
language in LISA are heteroglossia and polyphony,
from the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail
Bakhtin. Bakhtin (1981) argued that words (and by
extension other linguistic forms) carry the ‘voices’ of
previous uses, into current contexts of use. That is,
words have meanings beyond pure denotation and
carry the residue of earlier situations of use. Heteroglossia, as Bakhtin uses the term,
refers to the tension
between the pure official language and more vernacular forms of language existing in a
language community and used in a single text. Polyphony refers the use
of different languages or varieties that meet on an
equal footing (cf. Morris, 1994: 248–249). Bakhtin’s
focus was the novel, but LISA researchers have shown
that heteroglossia and polyphony obtain in everyday
conversation, and these properties of language help
people to create identities in interaction. This view
destabilizes both the simplistic view of ‘a language,’
and the assumption that by using a particular linguistic feature (e.g., word,
pronunciation, or syntactic
construction), one can perform an identity connected
with a culturally-relevant population that is thought
to use that linguistic feature.
Meanings that rely on the current or previous
context, or both, are known as indexical meanings.
All languages have such indexical meanings as part
of their grammar. In English, the meanings of words
such as I and you are associated with actual people
only in the moment of speaking. Thai pronouns
indicate not only speaker and addressee, but also
their relative ages and genders (Simpson, 1997).
Most indexical meanings – whether in a grammar or
not – relate to the aspect of context that provides
information about the speaker’s identity. A linguistic
feature indexes an identity because someone of that
same culturally-relevant identity category has used
it before, or has been represented as using it before
(e.g., in media). Speakers rarely assert directly that
they are, for example, a woman, or white, or Bosnian
(although they do at times, and these moments are all
the more interesting for their rarity). Rather, speakers
more often rely on the processes of indexicality to
create their identities.
Theorizing indexical meaning as it relates to identity has been the focus of much of the
work of
Michael Silverstein (1976, 1996) and Elinor Ochs
(1992, 1993), who have made a number of important
distinctions among indexical meanings that are crucial for understanding how identity
and language are
theorized. The first distinction is between direct and
indirect indexicality (Ochs, 1992). Direct indexicality
is a meaning relationship that holds directly between
language and the stance, act, activity, or identity
indexed. For example, in English, using certain syntactic forms such as imperatives will
generally directly index a relationship of power. The imperative is
associated with the context of a speaker who has the
power to force the addressee to perform the action
stated in the imperative. Indirect indexicality arises
when the social relationship (in this case, power) is
further indexed to an identity category, such as Identity in Sociocultural Anthropology
and Language masculinity. Thus we might notice that men use more imperatives than
women, or there might exist (as in
the United States) a cultural discourse such that men
are supposed to be more authoritative than women.
When this supposed connection is discovered, we
might be tempted to say that imperatives index
masculinity; however, it would be more accurate
to say that imperatives indirectly index masculinity
because they directly index power, and power is in
turn associated with masculinity.
An illustration of this process can be seen in
the American English address term dude (Kiesling,
2004). Dude is used most frequently by young white
men, and indexes a stance of casual solidarity: a
friendly, but crucially not intimate, relationship
with the addressee. This stance of casual solidarity
is a stance habitually taken more by young white
American men than other identity groups. Dude
thus indirectly indexes young, white, masculinity
as well.
Such descriptions of indexicality are abstract, however, and do not take into account the
actual context
of speaking, such as the speech event and the identities of the speakers determined
through other perceptual modes, such as vision. One of the most difficult
aspects of indexicality is that indexes not only call
up the previous contexts in which a linguistic feature
has been used, but what previous context they call up
can be influenced by the current context. Indexical
meanings thus interact with the context of speaking,
such that the (assumed or ‘pre-existing’) identity
of the speaker can affect the indexicality of a form
even as that form is seen as performing an identity.
For example, in the United States, often when a
women uses an imperative, a particular kind of authority – motherhood – is indexed:
when a woman
tells a friend (particularly a man) to ‘‘put on your
coat,’’ the response is often sarcastically, ‘‘Yes,
mother.’’ In this example, the use of an imperative
directly indexes a stance of authority. In the dominant
American cultural discourses of femininity, authority
is indexed only in the context of motherhood, so this
feminine role is indirectly indexed and available
for comment by the addressee of the imperative.
Such a response is not made when the speaker is
known to be a man (unless the addressee wishes to
refigure the speaker as a woman for some reason, in
which case the layers of indexicality begin to become
thick and tangled). One might argue that the content
of the imperative is what indexes motherhood:
mothers order their children to do things for the
children’s own good, especially putting on coats.
This argument only points out just how specific
indexicality can be, however, as a single phrase can
call up the stereotypical class of people known in the
United States as ‘mothers.’ In addition, we might
observe that imperatives used by women are more
often than not used with such ‘motherly’ content. In
any case, note how even such a brief, unremarkable
use of language leads to an intricate web of identity
indexes. Such are the minute, commonplace, but
complex indexical meanings that rely on and recreate
identity discourses and ideologies.
These indexicalities are thus both sensitive to and
indexical of social context and the other possible relevant identities being performed in
a particular instance
of talk-in-interaction. Bonnie McElhinny’s (1994)
study of police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is
particularly relevant in this light. She showed that
when the identity of being a police officer is salient
in an interaction, such a speaker tends to use less
affect in her or his speech. This lack of affect indexes
a distant, emotionless stance, a stance that is not
indexical of femininity in Pittsburgh. However, the
women officers told McElhinny that they did not feel
less feminine in these situations, because gender is less
relevant as an interactional identity; in such interactions they think of themselves
primarily as police
officers. As women have joined men on the police
force, the affectless and emotionless stance has thus
come to index not so much masculinity, but ‘police
officer.’
Further complicating the connections between
linguistic form and identity is the fact that indexes
are always potentially creative as well as presupposing (Silverstein, 1976). That is, an
index can be used
to change what is in play in the context (creative)
rather than simply respond to the already mutually
understood context (presupposing). The classic example of such context-changing uses
is that observed
by Blom and Gumperz (1972) in Hemnesberget,
Norway. In Hemnesberget at that time there was a
diglossic situation in which the linguistic variety of
Norwegian known as Bokma˚l was the official language of government and commerce,
while Ranama˚l
was the local variety (dialect) more typically used for
intimate settings. Blom and Gumperz described an
instance in which an inhabitant goes to the community office for official business and
interacts with another local inhabitant with whom he is friends. The
official business is conducted in Bokma˚l (indexing in a
presupposing manner the situation), but when the
official business is finished, the customer switches
to Ranama˚l to indicate he wishes to have a less
formal conversation about local matters. This
switch from Bokma˚l to Ranama˚l is a creative index,
because it changes the context from formal to informal, rather than responding to an
external cue
such as a change of setting or the arrival of a new
participant.
While this distinction between creative and presupposing indexicality is important and
useful to
begin with, LISA researchers have more recently
emphasized the fact that indexes always have both
a creative and a presupposing aspect. Sidnell
(2003), for example, described how language is
used to create a male space in a Guyanese rum
shop. While this setting is understood by the
Guyanese to be a male space, it is nonetheless often
populated by women for various reasons. Sidnell
analyzed a stretch of talk-in-interaction in which
one of the men drinking in the rum shop designs
‘‘his talk . . . to preserve the observable gender exclusivity of the activity’’ (2003: 338).
That is, the
way his talk is designed makes the space a male
one even when he is addressing a woman in it, and
thereby helps to recreate the ‘male-only’ context, in
effect (creatively) peripheralizing women who are
present.
A final complication comes from the ‘level’ of
knowledge that speakers use in interpreting indexical
meaning. While most indexical meanings are not
overtly discussed by speakers, some linguistic features
nevertheless become the focus of social discussion
and overt knowledge. For example, Americans have
become aware of, and can articulate, the masculine
indexicality of dude (they are aware of its use on this
societal level), but have much more trouble explaining what it means in terms of local
stances. Morford
(1997) analyzed the use of second-person pronouns in
French in this light. She showed that on one level of
indexicality, the use of tu and vous in French indexes
a relationship between two speakers based on a reciprocal vs. asymmetric use of the
forms. However,
Morford found that French speakers have a knowledge about (for example) what kinds
of families have
asymmetric use between parents and children, and
that some speakers make conscious choices about
whether to use tu or vous with other speakers. Most
importantly, these choices have to do with the interplay between this metapragmatic
awareness and the
kinds of identities that speakers wish to create.
Morford cites one particularly vivid example of a
teacher who explains that he constructs status as a
teacher in part through his asymmetric use of second
person address with the support staff of the school.
Performance of Identity in Mediated Social Practice
While the distinctions made above are important,
individual indexical forms such as ‘pronoun’ or ‘accent’ are idealizations of meanings
that are tangled in
a messy, changing, and locally contestable web
of meaning. That is, there are complex meaning
relationships not just between a linguistic form and
a specific social identity, but that there are also connections of meaning among different
kinds of identities, and different social entities and categories such
as institutions and census groups. LISA researchers do
not search for psychological representations of such
links, but rather they investigate the manner in which
such connections are created and used in interaction.
In fact, these connections need not be present in any
individual’s psyche before a speech event; it is by
participating in the event itself that speakers bring
indexicalities and identities about, because they are
needed for speakers to ‘make sense’ of the talk. In
this way, LISA is similar to critical discourse analysis
(see Critical Discourse Analysis) in arguing that the
interpretations that speakers make of the ongoing
talk based on ‘background knowledge’ or conversational principles (see Pragmatics:
Overview) are not
used in a value-free way but are a resource for doing
identity in interaction.
One of the most significant bodies of work along
these lines is Jane Hill’s (1993, 1995, 1998) work on
what she calls ‘‘mock Spanish.’’ In this work, the
process of indirect indexicality and the ideological
structuring of background knowledge come together
to reproduce racist discourses that are covert even
for those using them. Hill took as her starting point
the nonce borrowing of Spanish (or forms that resemble Spanish) by Anglos, such as
Hasta la vista,
baby, popularized by actor and politician Arnold
Schwarzenegger in the film Terminator. Hill showed
that these forms of Spanish are used strategically
by speakers to create an ironic speaker stance with
respect to stereotypically Hispanic (Latino) identity,
stances that are often demeaning to this identity
category (e.g., lazy, disorderly, given to rudeness),
in effect distancing the self from such identities
by gently parodying their principal index, Spanish
language forms.
A similar process is at work in a conversation I
analyzed between two white American fraternity
men (Kiesling, 2001). The two men in that conversation discuss the roster of the
fraternity’s intramural
basketball team. Embedded in this discussion is a
short exchange in which each boasts about his
basketball ability. At strategic points in both parts
of this speech event, the interactants use linguistic
features of African American Vernacular English
(AAVE) (see English, African American Vernacular)
to index their boasting stance, as well as a stance of
basketball expertise. The crucial point is that the men
are not trying to ‘be black,’ but they are drawing on
an association of ‘blackness’ with basketball and
boasting. In other words, when performing ‘basketball player’ it helps to perform ‘black’
as well.
A similar point was made by Bucholtz (1999), who
showed that AAVE features are used in a fight narrative told by a white male high school
student in California to represent a tough stance. Other articles
appearing in the same journal issue as Bucholtz’s
made similar points and represent an important
body of work for LISA understandings of language
and identity.
Issues of race and racism in language, and gender
and sexism in language have therefore been central in
LISA research. Over the past decade, Susan Gal and
Judith Irvine (Gal and Irvine, 1995; Irvine, 2001)
have developed an influential set of concepts for understanding how speakers’
ideologies of language are
involved in the social production of indexicals of
identity categories. Their view recognized three semiotic effects of ideology as a factor
in indexicality:
iconicization, recursivity, and erasure. Iconicization
is the ideological endowing of a linguistic feature
with and characteristic that is taken to be like some
essence of a recognizable identity or type of person.
In the example from Hill above, mock Spanish is
understood to be iconic of some inherent characteristic, laziness or disorderliness, of
Spanish speakers.
Recursivity is the manner in which ideologies are
represented in parallel recurring form with respect
to multiple levels of social organization. In the example above, stereotyped differences
between black
and white men in the United States (the stereotyped
black characteristics of athletic prowess and fighting
ability) become the basis for negotiating differences
between fraternity brothers, both of whom are white.
In effect this use recursively reproduces the black-white identity distinctions in
interactions with only
white male speakers. Finally, erasure is the effective
simplification of both formal and sociological complexities of experience, and can render
all but a single
term of a schematic dichotomization invisible to
speakers. In all of the above examples, the Anglo
white language style is invisible as a specifically alternative register, while the Spanish
and AAVE are
marked and highly salient; the white Anglo vernacular register is erased and re-enforced
as normative by
such uses, rendering its social peripheralizing power
less visible.
Studying Identity through Language and
Contextualized Language Variation
Up to this point, we have generally focused on language and identity as performed
when speakers use
languages or varieties they recognize as different.
But the processes of indexicality, and the tendencies toward iconization, recursivity, and
erasure are
at work even when a single variety is being used,
not only when varieties (or languages) are mixed.
As sociolinguistic variationists continually remind
us, language is inherently variable in both grammar
and use (Guy, 1996); such variability is a valuable
resource for speakers in identity work. Several
researchers have been incorporating insights from
LISA studies into the search for how this variability
is used by speakers to create social meaning.
Penelope Eckert (2000, 2002) is the most prominent of these researchers and has done
the most
to move this new perspective of meaning in variation forward. She advocates
understanding variation
as a resource for creating personal styles and ‘‘stylistic
practice as a process of bricolage, in which ways
of being are transformed through the strategic reuse of meaningful resources.’’ (2002:
5) In her
ethnographic analysis of sociolinguistic variation in
a Detroit-area high school, she showed how vowel
variants vary alternately with other aspects of social
practice and style, such as ‘cruising’ (driving around a
particular route with friends without a destination)
and wearing wide pants cuffs. She showed that while
the variables she analyzed have general meanings
throughout the school (e.g., whether they are associated with the urban rather than
suburban areas of
Detroit), they are used in specific clustered ways to
create personal styles by individuals.
Students of Eckert’s are moving this view of variation and identity forward considerably.
Sarah Benor
(2001) investigated how the language of Orthodox
Jews differs depending on their background and
orientation to integrate into the Orthodox community. Her work is significant in two
respects. First, it
showed that identity is not just about the outward
practices and styles of speakers, but that the internal
orientations and ideologies of speakers can influence
their use of language, and that the relationship between these orientations and
language use are not
necessarily linear. Second, she showed that adults, as
they become integrated socially and ideologically into
a new community with a different way of speaking
(even if that new way is based on the rate of use of a
linguistic variant), can change their speech to the new
way of speaking. This finding suggests that speakers
have much more control over how they speak than
is often assumed. Benor’s work showed further the
Eckertian view that most variables provide general
meaning resources that acquire specific meanings
in local contexts, since each analyzes essentially
the same linguistic form, but show how its indexicality changes depending on the
community and the
individual speaker’s style.
I have been working with a more atomistic view
than Eckert’s, but one that is consistent with her
perspective. This view focuses on the performance
Identity in Sociocultural Anthropology and Language 499of stances in interaction rather
than personal styles.
We can understand Eckert’s personal styles to be
repertoires of stances; the variables used habitually
by speakers to create these styles are primarily
concerned with creating stances – relationships of
the moment. In an analysis of the -ing variable used
in a college all-male fraternity in the United States
(Kiesling, 1998), I showed that the men who speak
with a high rate of the ‘standard’ velar variant [-N] in
meetings are more likely than those whose rate is
lower to be taking a stance at that point highlighting
their structural power in the fraternity (through age
or office-holding). These men also use grammatical
forms that help them take an epistemic stance of
certainty. Men who use the nonstandard coronal articulation [-n] in meetings tend to
take a stance that
highlights their connections to the aggregate of men
(solidarity) or their ability to work hard for the fraternity. They also tend to use more
profanity and
other nonstandard features, such as double negatives
and ain’t. The point is that these differing rates of
the variable shows the fraternity men to be taking
particular stances at various points in specific interactions; it is not just that each man is
from a certain
class or ethnic background and uniformly reflects
that in speech production. Moreover, one can explain
why – in the context of the situation, the man’s
personality, and cultural discourses and ideologies
of masculinity, for example – he would take such a
stance. This focus on stance moves us further toward
an explanation of why speakers use the forms they
do, and how these forms mean in interaction.
Such an interactionally local understanding of the
indexicality of linguistic forms does not entail that
wider cultural discourses, in this case norms of gender, are not also being indexed. In
fact, we see here
how the meanings of variation also exhibit the property of recursivity: the kinds of
stances that the
men take, sorting themselves out relationally, are all
stances that index masculinity in their culture as
well. In other words, they are able to ‘be men’ of
one or another sort – not more or less male – while
they are using either variant, because the dominant
cultural discourses of masculinity include approved
types that are both structurally or intellectually
powerful (the standard users) and that are friendly
or physically powerful (the nonstandard users).
These cultural discourses are being recursively played
out in the momentary stances the men take in the
meetings.
In terms of method, in all of these directions of
research, we find a curious marriage between the
quantitative, objective, paradigm of variationist linguistics and the qualitative,
subjectively-focused
view of culture and interaction from sociocultural
anthropology. One of the crucial ways that anthropology has informed the study of
language and identity is in fact a focus on the speaker’s interpretive
frameworks, to which we turn now.
Ethnographic Investigation of People’s
Interpretive Frameworks
One of the strengths of LISA studies is the in-depth
investigation of the speakers’ interpretive frameworks – how speakers themselves
respond to language as reflective or constitutive of identity. This
metapragmatic awareness, and its relationship to
other indexicalities, is an important area of research
in LISA. Silverstein (2001) proposed a classification
that specifies under what kinds of conditions, and
how, a linguistic form is likely to be accessible to
metapragmatic awareness. While there is not space
to explain these principles here, Silverstein’s work
suggested that certain types of linguistic forms
are more accessible resources for speakers to use to
connect with identities.
Holland and Skinner (1987) took another approach, and argued that identities be
understood as
organized in the cultural models that speakers hold
for the world. Such models are more specific than
ideologies; they are in essence normative narratives
of life trajectories or domains to which actual people
are compared, especially in language. Holland and
Skinner used the cultural model concept to understand how women at a southern U.S.
college semantically organize the language they use to describe men.
Such interpretations of the relationship between
language and identity are beginning to be articulated
with traditional dialectological questions about how
language relates to place. Johnstone (2004a, 2004b)
suggested that a speaker’s emplacement – that is,
being culturally connected to place – is not simply
another census identity, but one that is discursively
negotiated like others. Speakers who live in the same
geographical space take different orientations to it
as a culturally meaningful place, and local dialect
forms may function in various ways in everyday
talk, in self-conscious performances, and in metalinguistic talk about the dialect, to
index these orientations. The use of dialect forms to index orientation
to place may help determine which forms are preserved and which are lost over time.
This work indicates that even such taken-for-granted categories as
place are ideologically organized by speakers, and
that this ideological organization can affect the way
speakers use language, and its meaning in terms of
identities.
Language and Identity over Time
Future research in LISA is likely to focus on further
understanding the ways in which indexicality works
to create identities in interaction, from a number of
perspectives. For one, the question of awareness is
still a very open one, in which even what counts as
awareness is not entirely clear. One can imagine a
typology of awareness that can then be matched
with Silverstein’s accessibility hierarchy. Awareness
may also be promoted by the media as well as faceto-face communication, and it is not
clear the ways
in which these modes of mediation differ for the
creation of identity categories and indexicalities.
Finally, the ways in which the use of these indexicalities construct and re-create identity
categories, and
especially relations of dominance among them, will
continue to be a puzzle for some time.