The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity

Siân Preece

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317365235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity provides a clear and comprehensive survey of the field of language and identity from an applied linguistics perspective.

Forty-one chapters are organised into five sections covering:

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• theoretical perspectives informing language and identity studies

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• key issues for researchers doing language and identity studies

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• categories and dimensions of identity

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• identity in language learning contexts and among language learners

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• future directions for language and identity studies in applied linguistics

Written by specialists from around the world, each chapter will introduce a topic in language and identity studies, provide a concise and critical survey, in which the importance and relevance to applied linguists is explained and include further reading.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity is an essential purchase for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and TESOL. Advisory board: David Block (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats/ Universitat de Lleida, Spain); John Joseph (University of Edinburgh); Bonny Norton (University of British Colombia, Canada).

Part I Perspectives on language and identity

1 Historical perspectives on language and identity

John E. Joseph

DOI: 10.4324/9781315669816-1

Introduction

Language and identity is a topic in which contemporary perspectives cannot be neatly separated from historical ones. Identity, even in the here and now, is grounded in beliefs about the past: about heritage and ancestry, and about belonging to a people, a place, a set of beliefs and a way of life. Of the many ways in which such belonging is signified, what language a person speaks, and how he or she speaks it, rank among the most powerful, because it is through language that people and places are named, heritage and ancestry recorded and passed on, and beliefs developed and ritualised.

No language exists in a homogeneous or unchanging form. It is through variation that the identity of individuals is indexed and interpreted: who they are, what they care about and like, and what they aspire to. Such indexing can have both positive and negative consequences. The evolution of sounds, words and grammatical forms has been a history of changes that started small, in some particular town or village, and spread out through contact with people from other towns and villages. Even now, the development of mass communication has not put an end to local differences in language use, so that how people speak indexes where they are from. Even in a given locale, different generations speak somewhat differently; and other cultural differences, including religious or sectarian ones, and those associated with gender, occupation or education, are indexed as well. Because change does not occur in wholesale fashion, it results in something like layers of time in a language. Any members of the younger generation who resist some new word or pronunciation or intonation used by their age mates, sticking instead to the way their grandparents speak, are likely to have this difference interpreted by others as signifying something deeper about their identity.

This chapter aims to consider historical perspectives in two senses: the perspectives that are embodied within identity itself and the conceptual history of their study. Besides approaching language and identity theoretically and historically, the chapter will focus on how such an approach relates to issues of concern to applied linguistics.

Identities are manifested in language as, first, the categories and labels that people attach to themselves and others to signal their belonging; second, as the indexed ways of speaking and behaving through which they perform their belonging; and third, as the interpretations that others make of those indices. The ability to perceive and interpret the indices is itself part of shared culture. No group can be culturally homogeneous. The urge to tribalise is too deeply rooted in human nature, indeed in animal behaviour generally, which testifies to how deep it runs in our evolutionary heritage. So, for instance, within Christian or Muslim religious identity, there are various ways of ‘being Christian’ and ‘being Muslim’; in other words, a variety of Christian and Islamic cultural identities. They are subsumed under the umbrella of a religious identity that itself admits of variants, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant, Sunni and Shia, and within the latter, Sufis, each with their distinctive practices and texts, even if most of their central beliefs are shared.

Cultural identities rarely carry great imaginative power unless they are textualised as national or racial/ethnic identities. Religious identities can be forceful, but they tend as well to take on a national or quasi-national dimension, as is currently the case with Islamic State. People do not go to war for other aspects of their culture the way they willingly die for their fatherland or their people, or other ‘imagined communities’ which they perceive as being naturally constituted, rather than just arbitrary, contingent cultural constructs (Anderson 1991). And yet, it is not provable that any race or nation is a ‘natural’ entity; all are at least partly constructed, and at the same time, as Bateson (1995) has pointed out, ‘Everything is natural.’ Gender identities might seem to be directly linked to the physical configuration of reproductive organs; and yet, people are readier to accept that an individual is a woman trapped in a man’s body, or vice versa, than they are that someone is a Japanese trapped in an Ethiopian’s body.

Overview

From earliest recorded history to the present day, reflection on language has included (and has at times been dominated by) ideas concerning the link between a particular language and the people who speak it. These ideas form an initial dichotomy:

1. That the language a people speaks is not connected in any significant way to the nature of the people who speak it;
2. That the language a people speaks plays a crucial role in making them a people.

Idea (1) had its most powerful champion in Aristotle, who believed that all human beings share the same mental experiences, which get coded differently in the words of different languages but without affecting the experiences themselves. Already in Antiquity however a version of (2) was maintained by Epicurus, who argued that the shapes of people’s bodies, varying by their ethnicity, caused them to expel air differently, and that this combined with the effects of their environment shaped their languages in profoundly distinct ways. It was the revival of Platonic and Epicurean thought from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, removing Aristotle from his unique position as ‘The Philosopher’, that brought about what is known as the Renaissance, and gave rise to modern versions of (2), which, graded from weakest to strongest, include:

• That the language plays a purely pragmatic role: the simple fact of its being shared binds a people together, regardless of the internal form of the language;
• That the particular form or ‘genius’ of their shared language reflects what distinguishes the people who speak it from other people;
• That the particular form or genius of their shared language has endowed them with their distinct nature or genius as a people.

The difference between (2b) and (2c) is that ‘reflecting’ implies that something physical or spiritual in the people’s nature, other than their language, is the cause, and the genius of the language is the effect (this would include Epicurus’s view); whereas ‘endowing’ means that the genius of the language is the cause, and the nature of the people is the effect.

When linguistics was established as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, it was built over a fault line between the Enlightenment conception of a language as a system of rational signs (compatible with 1 and 2a), and the Romantic conception of a language as a Weltanschauung, a deep, spiritual vision of the universe that embodies the essence of a particular nation or race (compatible with 2b and 2c). The Enlightenment took linguistic signs to be grounded in the senses, and hence to have a universal basis, but with the signs of particular languages being ultimately arbitrary. For the Romantics, language originates in the senses, as they are directed by the national soul, to which it remains bound.

Idea (2a) in the list above has been referred to by Sériot (2014) as the ‘Jacobin’ approach, since its most overtly worked-out theorisation and application has been in France, from the seventeenth century through the French Revolution and down to the present day. The Jacobin outlook assumes that creating a shared language is the necessary and sufficient condition for producing a nation out of the sometimes distantly related peoples who live in a contiguous landscape.

Idea (2c) in the list is what Sériot calls the ‘Romantic’ approach, in which the nation comes first, in the form of a shared soul, out of which the language is projected. Neither the Jacobin nor the Romantic approach lacks precedents from before the eighteenth century; they have an ancient heritage. But the lands that would come in 1871 to form Germany were, a hundred years earlier, a nation without a state. This was in stark contrast to France, which had become a relatively united kingdom in the seventeenth century. It was when Napoleonic France began its imperial drive eastward that the concept of German nationhood came to be aggressively asserted, with the shared German language as its cornerstone. As Sériot (2014: 258) writes, ‘For German romantics, language was the essence of the nation, while for French revolutionaries, it was a means to achieve national unity.’

The Romantic view of language was dominant by the time modern linguistics began to crystallise as an academic discipline in the first half of the nineteenth century, though the Jacobin alternative continued to be the principle on which French language policy was formed, both domestically and overseas. Nor did the Jacobin view ever disappear from public discourse about language, even in countries where policy was more Romantically inclined. The Enlightenment/ Jacobin concern with signs was reincorporated into modern linguistics with the highly influential Saussure (1916).

These two diametrically opposed views encapsulate the tension and ambivalence inherent in how we think about language and identity. Although no polls have been taken, it seems likely that most of us espouse one or the other view depending on the circumstances. If we believe it is important for the chance to learn a second language to be part of every child’s education, it may be for a combination of Jacobin reasons (civic coherence in a multilingual country, for example) and Romantic ones (the belief that you cannot understand how other people think without learning their language, or that you cannot understand your own thought without the perspective on your mother tongue a second language affords).

All this leaves idea (2b) in the list above with a peculiar status. It is very widespread, perhaps more than any of the others, yet it is ambiguous. For some it represents a strong version of (2a), for others a weak version of (2c). It is also bound up with the role of what can broadly be called the ‘literary’ in national identity. Until universal education became widespread, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the linguistic dimension of national identity was already important, but, figuratively speaking, it floated above the daily life and concerns of the vast majority. Across Europe and Western Asia, the commonly inhabited linguistic reality was that of local vernacular dialect plus liturgical language. Either might be distantly related to the national language, if there was one, or even unrelated, as will be discussed in the next section.

Language and identity research has tended to take the links between the two to be constructed intersubjectively and context-contingently. Each of these terms requires some unpacking. ‘Constructed’ stands in opposition to ‘essential’: the identities a person has (or occupies) are understood not as unchanging, inescapable, determinate categories, but as categories which are potentially fluid and fuzzy, and which the person occupying them does not control. Rather, they are constructed ‘intersubjectively’, which is to say among the participants in a linguistic encounter. I am having a linguistic encounter at this moment with you, my reader; I cannot control the version of me that you construct in your mind based on how I write. There are as many versions of my identity as there are readers of my text, and the same is true of people with whom I have face-to-face linguistic encounters. There, however, my way of speaking is likely to adjust based on the cues I am getting from them moment by moment, whereas in writing I have to imagine an ideal reader. The ‘-subjectively’ part means that you, as reader, are not an object, passively having my message poured into you. You are actively co-constructing the meaning of this text, as a subject.

‘Context-contingently’ means that the same people will co-construct different identities for one another depending on the circumstances, even if the linguistic indices are (abstracted from the circumstances) the same. Forensic linguists have to perform that sort of abstraction; for them it is a problem that ‘context’ is potentially limitless. Researchers in language and identity, while not denying that forensic linguistics has its uses, will worry that such ‘objective’ data as it purports to turn up will always be dependent on that abstracting, which removes the data from the reality of context.

Modern linguistics has moved slowly but steadily toward embracing the identity function as central to language (for an overview, see Joseph 2004). 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 twentieth-century linguists such as Jespersen (1925) and Sapir (1927, 1933) came to investigate how language functions to define and regulate the role of the individual within the social unit at the same time as it helps to constitute that unit, they were not without predecessors. It was just that mainstream linguistics as it had developed within the nineteenth century was not inclined to see such questions as falling within its purview.

An important study by Labov (1963) looked at the dialect of English on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, where the dipht...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures, tables and boxes
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Language and identity in applied linguistics
• Part I Perspectives on language and identity
• Part II Categories and dimensions of identity
• Part III Researching the language and identity relationship Challenges, issues and puzzles
• Part IV Language and identity case studies
• Part V Future directions
• Index