Language and Identity

Our topic is “Language and Identity”. This chapter speaks about how people use language to
construct individual and social identity because through language we can establish our identity
and shape other people’s view of who we are.

for example, when you identify yourself as belonging to a particular group or community, you
adopt the linguistics conventions of that group or community. These linguistic conventions are the
words you use and the way you say them. The group is the one that defines and controls these
conventions.

What do we mean by linguistic identity?

Linguistic identity refers to how you talk.

Social identity: how you dress, how you behave, how you talk.

What is identity? who we are and how others perceive us. it’s not defined, we constantly build
and negotiate it all our lives through our interaction with others. Multifaceted: this means that
people switch into different roles at different times in different situations. This switch is made
through the language we use.

Accents and dialect:

A dialect is a form of the language that is spoken in a particular part of the country
or by a particular group of people. There are many different dialects of English and
they have different words and grammar. Most learners of English learn the
standard dialects of the language.

There are many different forms of standard English: for example, standard British
English, standard American English, standard New Zealand English, standard
Indian English. The standard dialects of the language are used by governments, in
the media, in schools and for international communication.

A dialect is not the same as an accent. An accent refers to the way we pronounce
words and the standard dialect of a language can be spoken with different accents.

Examples of dialect forms in British English are:

I ain’t going to school today. (standard form: I’m not going to school today.)

She don’t understand. (standard form: She doesn’t understand.)

Would you like a cheese cob? (cob is a dialect word in parts of the north of
England and means ‘bread roll’.)

 Where we grew up
 Where we went to school
 How wealthy our family was

Influences the variety of language we speak. So, our accent and dialect indicates a great deal of
information about ourselves, such as regional origin, social class, and education.

“Give an example of myself”

Our accent changes depending on the region we are living. Accent is a label of identity. speakers
change their accent to disguise their membership of or distance themselves from a particular
regional or social group, or to move close to another group they want to belong to.

How we communicate and interact with others through talk.

Language and the construction of personal identities.

This is about how personal identities are socially constructed through the use of:

May:

 Names
 Naming practices
 Rituals

May: System of address

 Construction of group identity

Identity and representation:

We speak about “social categories of identity”. How people categorize themselves or are
categorized by others as belonging to a social group through types of representation or categories.

The word teenager is a category imposed to adolescents by adults. in the 60’s a teenage group
used the term “hotrodders” to indentify themselves. This was their own category, to name their
particular socialgroup.

Social categories of identity are imposed on some groups by others, who may be in a more
powerful position or they want to use that category to make some kind of judgment about them.
These social categories may have cultural assumptions that accompany them. And this may imply
a conflict.

In places where there is social conflict there will be linguistic conflict too, about whose words are
used, and about which terms are used by which group of people to identify themselves and their
opponents.

We do not always control the categories that people use to define our identity.

May: Ingroup and outgroup

Style shifting: convergence

Divergence:

In some situations, speakers may choose not to converge, but instead either to maintain their own
variety (linguistic maintenance) or move to a more extreme variety of their dialect (linguistic
divergence), in order to emphasize the difference between themselves and the person they are
talking to.

For example: children who diverge from expected norms by using their variety of Black English in
the classroom as an expression not only of solidarity with the black peer group but of distance
from and exclusion of the out-group (teachers and/or white children)