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Creole, community, identity

Article  in  AAA, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik · January 2003

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 In Christian Mair, ed., Interaction-based sociolinguistics and cultural studies.
Thematic issue of Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28(2): 249-277.
Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003.

Creole, Community, Identity*

Peter L. Patrick

patrickp@essex.ac.uk

University of Essex

Abstract: The original notion of acts of identity (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller
1985), based upon studies of variation in Atlantic Creoles, is reconsidered, and
its contingency upon particular features of the samples is explored. The
mission of exploring the formation of identity in ‘new’ societies is viewed from
a perspective on the historical development of Creole speech communities.
Variation in two (post-) Creole data-sets is analysed, for some of the same
variables studied in Acts: one group (London Jamaican youth) is typical of that
studied under the Acts paradigm in its diffuseness, while another (urban
mesolectal Jamaicans in Kingston) is not. A typology of linguistic identity work
is suggested – identity development, identity shift, and identity modification –
differentiated by age and developmental processes, and by degree of
reorientation.

*This paper was presented to the Colloquy on Acts of Identity, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, February
2002. I thank the organisers, Peter Auer and Christian Mair, respondent Andrea Sand, and other
presenters, especially Nik Coupland, Mark Sebba, and Ben Rampton for their comments.
Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Creole, Community, Identity

Peter L. Patrick

1. Introduction: Acts of Identity

It was the mission and accomplishment of LePage and Tabouret-Keller’s Acts of

Identity (1985; hereafter Acts) to illuminate notions of community and group

identity by examining the work done through language in certain Atlantic

Creole and post-Creole speech communities. Twenty years on, this effort is

worth re-examining from a different footing. Current creolist perspectives and

interests differ from those of Acts; quantitative analysis of language variation

has developed considerably since Le Page’s innovative, but relatively

unsuccessful, attempts; while interest in linguistic exploration and expression

of identity has burgeoned, especially in the area of adolescent speech so crucial

to the Acts venture.1 With hindsight one may identify gaps and shortfalls in the

original, and suggest expansions and further developments as well. I begin

with a critique of some underlying assumptions and practices of the Acts

model, proceed via brief analyses of two (post-) Creole communities – one

similar to those studied in the original, and one different – and conclude by

suggesting a typology of identity work for further research. The speech

examined below comes from speakers of Caribbean English Creoles with

Jamaican roots.

1 While it will be convenient to locate the principal ideas in the 1985 book and refer to them
collectively as Acts, I recognize their evolution in prior works, especially Le Page (1968, 1978,
1980), Le Page et al. (1974), McEntegart & Le Page (1981), Tabouret-Keller & Le Page (1983).
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

What is it about Creole communities – their newness, heterogeneity,

articulated complexity? – that makes them such fertile ground for exploring the

expression of identity?

‘Community’ remains a vague but essential component of most (socio-)

linguistic theories: it is the undefined ground upon which crucial corporate

notions such as ‘language’, ‘dialect’ and ‘style’ are figured. I draw on the

notion of ‘speech community’ as it has evolved and been variously understood

over the last century. Patrick (2002) discusses the concept as a site for

exploring a number of dimensions critical to sociolinguistic analysis, including:

o the uniformity of speech by different speakers, on distinct occasions,

o the problem of identifying a group of speakers who share a language

(or identifying the boundaries of a language as spoken by individuals),

o the equation of shared linguistic knowledge with social membership,

o linguistic and normative uniformity vs. subjective identification,

o analytic focus on institutional power vs. individual agency, and,

o the problem of correlation vs. the problem of indexicality.

All these problems potentially arise in consideration of the Acts model as well.

Mendoza-Denton has recently defined identity as “the active negotiation of

an individual’s relationship with larger social constructs, in so far as this

negotiation is signaled through language and other semiotic means. Identity

[…] is neither attribute nor possession, but an individual and collective-level

process of semiosis” (2001: 475). This dual emphasis coincides well with

Tabouret-Keller’s “transitive and intransitive” notions (1997: 315), which might

more precisely be called ‘referring’ and ‘reflexive’:

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

“[First,] language is taken as an external behavior allowing the identification

of a speaker as a member of some group [...] [Second,] language is taken as

the means of identifying oneself ... to belong to a group also identified by

its language” (1997: 315; see also Acts: 5)

In a nutshell, Acts:

1. observed language behavior of children and early adolescents

2. in several of the more unfocussed2 situations in which Atlantic Creoles

are used (Belize, St Lucia, London Jamaican),

3. working from the individual up towards the level of social groups,

4. making certain assumptions about the relation of the production data

analysed to speakers’ self- and other-perceptions, and

5. further assumptions about the arbitrariness, or subjectivity, of group

boundaries and language boundaries,

6. in order to explain how individuals manage language as a resource for

marking and crossing boundaries through acts of projection, and

7. to propose the well-known four constraints on this ability3, as well as

8. the intersubjective process of focussing initially-diffuse elements, which

2 Focussing, introduced in Le Page (1978) and elaborated in Acts, relates to the degree of
alignment of linguistic norms between a speaker’s own repertoire of linguistic systems and
others present in the community as models. Acts speaks of a focussed system as one that is
more regular or systematic, and less variable, than an unfocussed or diffuse one.
3 First formulated in Le Page 1978 and taken over into Acts (1985: 182). Speakers’ freedom is
constrained by “(i) the extent to which we are able to identify our model groups. (ii) the extent
to which we have sufficient access to them and sufficient analytical ability to work out the rules
of their behaviour, (iii) the strength of various (possibly conflicting) motivations towards one or
another mode and towards retaining our own sense of our unique identity, (iv) our ability to
modify our behavious” (1978 :15).
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

9. contributes to historical processes of group-formation and development

of ideologies about homogeneous and autonomous language varieties.

Rather than comment thoroughly on all of the points raised in this summary, I

begin by touching on most discursively, before briefly reviewing Creole

linguistic data which illustrate the topic.

2. The relevance of youth

It is striking that Acts is largely limited to the speech of children and young

people (point 1, above), just like the later theories of “crossing” it so influenced

(Rampton 1995, 1999). Certainly the approach has been extended to other age

groups; and just as certainly, there is a noticeable lack of attention to children’s

speech in sociolinguistic work on contemporary Atlantic Creoles, both from the

points of view of first- and second-language acquisition and language

socialization (pace such works as Roberts 1976, Simmons-McDonald 1998,

Youssef 2000, Meade 2001), and from the standpoint of language use in

adolescent peer-groups.4 Acts thus made a valuable addition to the literature

on Creoles, one which it is difficult to evaluate for lack of follow-up studies.

Yet it is legitimate to ask: Why was this particular age-group the right

one for developing a theory of identity, and what might have been gained by

concentrating on others, or by systematically comparing age-groups within a

community? LePage, who became interested in Creole language structure and

development from a historical standpoint, can be seen as following a general

4 Caribbean scholars, however, have produced much applied linguistic work on classroom
education of Creole-speaking children – the problem that motivated LePage himself initially.
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

tendency of social scientists to study children and adolescents of school-age as

members of peer-groups. Sociolinguistic examples include the founding

sociolinguistic study of Fischer (1958), Labov et al.’s (1968) Harlem study, and

more recent work such as Eckert (2000). Below I suggest we might profit from

discriminating several kinds of identity work which are partially aligned with

different life-stages. It may well be that the nature of pre-adulthood lends

itself to certain types of identity-work which are well characterized in Acts,

while other types require additional concepts, transformations, and tools.

3. Historical elements of Creole identity: emergence of the new

To a Caribbean Creolist, the questions asked in Acts concerning identity are not

only ontogenetically relevant, but have also a clear connection with historical,

phylogenetic issues: namely, the origin and rise to prominence of Creole

groups in societies recently formed from predominantly African and European

source populations (in a few cases, such as Belize, also Amerindian). For

linguists as well as historians and literary scholars, one of the principal tasks is

to locate, describe and explain the genesis of the new: the new language, new

social group, new literature (point 9).

To the extent that we can abstract and simplify, establishing moments of

crystallisation in what must be a complex and continuous process, this is the

order of formation normally found in the Atlantic world. Caribbean Creole

languages appear to have generally taken shape even before the emergence of

Creole social groups, i.e. locally-born social cohorts whose culture has evolved

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

in the New World (Mintz & Price 1992).5 Naturally, both Creole language and

people long predate the emergence of a recognizable Creole literature.

Creolists have come to a general recognition that early contact between

groups of speakers who remain, for a while, socially distinct determines

important aspects of the structure of Creole languages – aspects which are

new, in the sense of not simply being transmitted intact from one of the input

grammars. This is especially true where Creole peoples are understood as

mixed-race, rather than simply as native-born children of Europeans, or

Africans. (The former, to whom the original sense of criollo applied, did not

persist long as a salient group associated with this term in most of the English-

speaking Caribbean, which thus contrasts with Latin America).

Earlier work (Hall 1966, Bickerton 1981, Muhlhausler 1980, Holm 1988)

stressed the importance for language development of the first generation to

nativize a contact language – often conceived as a generation of children born

to parents of different ethnolinguistic groups (for the Caribbean: African and

European, African and African, or African and Amerindian). However, more

recent theoretical developments (e.g. Baker & Corne 1986, Arends 1995,

Mufwene 2001, Becker & Veenstra 2003) stress the significance of several

distinct stages. In these models, which may differ quite considerably, the

earliest decades of contact and settlement history – which may precede the

emergence of such a nativized generation – play a critical role in shaping the

grammar of the emergent Creole, even if later events restructure it

significantly.

5 The stress here is thus on the evolution of new cultural and social institutions, rather than on
demographic patterns, though the two must be related.
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Evidence from a range of Creole languages (e.g. Sranan, Saramaccan,

Morisyen) makes it clear that contact varieties can crystallise system-level

properties and features within a few decades, which then persist for centuries

in the life of a language. For example, Jamaican Patwa (JP) 6 probably became

largely fixed in outline form between 1675 and 1725, though the first text

identified as ‘Creole’ by Lalla & D’Costa (1990) dates to 1740.7 Certain

elements of ‘basilectal’ (core) JP grammar are attested continuously from early

on and provide clear evidence of systematization, e.g. invariant pronouns,

unmarking of tense in narrative contexts, changes in vowel quantity

distinctions and word-class distribution, and palatal glides between initial velar

consonants and /a/. 8 While other features are first attested only in the 19th

century – including some tense and aspectual markers, for-infinitives, plurals

with post-nominal –dem, and serial verbs – that is no sure indication of when

they first entered the system.

The emergence of new social and cultural forms, groups and institutions

is less precisely datable, but certainly occurs later in Jamaica. Edward Kamau

Braithwaite’s study The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica begins with

1770, as the American Revolution “gave an impetus to the creolization of the

society” (1971: 306; see also 101, xiv-xvi). It was only from the mid-eighteenth

century that locally-born slaves began to approach parity with Africans; while

6 Patwa (or Patois) is the name most often used by Jamaicans for this language, which linguists
agree is a Creole; it is the same as the language linguists usually refer to as ‘Jamaican Creole’, a
technical term rarely used by its speakers.
7 See evidence on this point in Lalla & D’Costa (1990), Patrick (1999). Alleyne (1988) however
takes a longer view emphasizing continuity across the centuries in both language and culture.
8 Although glides only appear in later texts (Lalla & D’Costa 1990:51), they must have occurred
before 1750, as argued in Patrick (1999).
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

only in the last quarter of the 1700s did the number of ‘coloured’ people born

in Jamaica (free and unfree) surpass the number of ‘whites’ (ibid: 105, 168; this

is no better than a rough estimate). The consequences for social structure are

not merely a matter of demographics any more than for language – yet

population changes, plus the growth of local conventions and histories, and the

recession of overseas ones, must have been fundamental to social and cultural

evolution.

As to literature, Lalla (1996) agrees with Ramchand (1970) that Jamaican

prose fiction only became established in the early twentieth century, with

publications shortly after 1900 by Thomas MacDermot, the first Creole to

practice as a literary person. Lalla’s understanding of an emerging Jamaican

literary voice depends significantly on charting the shrinkage and

disappearance of the vast distances – spatial, temporal, cultural, psychological,

emotional – maintained between the writer (partly on behalf of the reader) and

the character and experience of Jamaica and Jamaicans.

4. Focussed and diffuse Caribbean Creole societies

The point of such generalization is to distinguish the roles and processes of

establishing new identities under new conditions, where physical isolation and

historical ‘discovery’ provide the possibility of locating discrete moments in

social and cultural developments. Although Caribbean Creole societies and

cultures are relatively new compared to European, African or Amerindian ones,

there is a continuum in the New World regarding how focussed different

communities and nations are in their self-identification, and Acts selected

situations at one extreme for attention (point 2).

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Perhaps the primary characteristic of St Lucia’s history as a colony is its

oscillation back and forth between French and British control and colonial

traditions. This resulted in “an English social pattern […] superimposed upon

existing French social patterns” (Lewis 1968: 144), and the generational divide

that grows between French (Creole)- and English-dominant speakers today.

Even more striking is Belize, with its history of forced immigration for nearly

every one of the astonishingly diverse ethnic groups – African, British, Mayan,

Mennonite, Black Carib, mestizo, Lebanese, and Miskitu – yet the relative

unimportance of slavery both socially and economically, and the absence of a

plantation culture: “The unique settlement history of the colony […] had unique

results” (ibid: 292).

These are fascinating societies worthy of close attention, and Acts did

great service by studying them as speech communities, but in many ways they

are atypical of the Caribbean. Certainly they are at the other extreme from

situations like Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados. There, ethnic interaction is

significant but dominated by a few large groups, distinctive folk cultures were

established early on, and national self-images are relatively unified and well-

recognized throughout the region and overseas (though hardly conflict-free).

These islands were among the major contributors of West Indian

immigration to Britain. In briefly considering ‘London Jamaican’, again Acts

deliberately concerns itself with a variety spoken by people who have (still

today) not resolved their identity as a community. What might we learn about

such processes by comparing London Jamaicans with their Kingston kin – as

below – or St Lucia with Trinidad, where “French Creole remained widespread

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

until the end of the nineteenth century” (Winer 1993: 9) but then shifted rapidly

and decisively to an English-based Creole in a single generation?

5. From individual to community? Variation and transmission

Auer & Mair (2002)9 betray a certain uneasiness about what they call “overdone

individualism in LePage’s approach”, referring to the belief that there must be

“further constraints on the autonomy of the speaker” than the four riders which

are the most-quoted part of Acts. This individualism is indeed one of the more

serious difficulties of the Acts model. It arises partly from an analytical

orientation shared with most discourse and conversation-analytic approaches,

and partly from an idiosyncratic stress on speaker autonomy and creativity at

the expense of the systematic nature of language, and its normal transmission

(largely unchanged) across generations. In hindsight this appears something of

a mismatch with method: Acts itself, to the extent that it conducted

sociolinguistic analysis, embraced quantitative and correlational procedures

locating individuals relative to social factors such as sex, age, family type,

geographical location, religion, household, etc. In contrast most of its

successors were more concerned with building on the ‘four riders’ as a means

of attributing social meaning to linguistic choices. These problems of

correlation and indexicality, though interrelated, are rarely pursuable with the

same methods (Patrick 2002).

Gumperz’s influential Discourse Strategies (1982), contemporaneous

with Acts, exemplifies discourse-analytic approaches which emphasise

exploring how interaction, including language, constitutes social reality.

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Gumperz cites a worldwide weakening of social boundaries and deference to

group norms, compelling attention to the processes by which individuals index

identity. Such attention requires intense methodological focus on face-to-face

interaction, ethnographic observation, and a consequent restriction to small-

scale studies. This move has been influential in recent thinking (e.g. Bucholtz

1999), where the divorce of the correlational and indexing enterprises in

sociolinguistics assumes – wrongly, I think – the appearance of historical

inevitability.10

I am here attending not only to the autonomy of the speaker, a problem

in itself, but also to the difficulty that the Acts model shares with most

discourse-analytic theory in linking the behavior of individuals in highly

contextualized, unique interactions to larger social units that exist over long

stretches of time, and facilitate the regular maintenance and transmission of

linguistic behaviors (point 3). For example, the stylistic variation displayed with

the (-ing) variable (e.g., morning vs. runnin’) by members – including 3-year-

olds – of every English speech community studied, recapitulates grammatical

alternations dating back a millennium to Old English, transformed via

geographical distributions attested in northern and southern dialects of English

500 years ago (Houston 1991, Labov 1989, Roberts 1996).

In Acts, the locus of groups is in individual perception and behavior,

through acts of projection – although Tabouret-Keller herself is concerned to

relate “identities as social constructs and identities as subjective constructs”

9 The position paper for the conference at which this paper was first given.
10 This is not the position Gumperz rests with, however; see Gumperz & Levinson 1996, Patrick
2002. Furthermore, its stress on modern developments makes it of questionable use in
historical research of even modest time-depth, such as the creolist enterprise.
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

(1997: 324). Yet in the face of such durability in variation and transmission as

exemplified for (-ing), I find it difficult to accept the assertion that “[t]here is no

system for the speaker to internalise other than that which he has himself

created, which is already internal, and is already the idiosyncratic expression of

his search for identity” (LePage et al. 1974: 14).

This insistence by the Acts model may have been colored by prevailing

creolist notions. Creole and pidgin languages are frequently understood to

result from breaks in the “normal transmission” of language systems, and to be

non-genetic in their relation to those languages which supplied their input

materials. That is, it emphatically cannot be said of pidgins and Creoles that all

structural subsystems and the lexicon are acquired intact by each succeeding

generation (Thomason & Kaufman 1988), as is generally accepted to be typical

of nearly all languages which are not undergoing language death. Such

freedom from historical constraints and linguistic inheritance as Creoles thus

enjoy underlies their capacity for rapid change and development, through such

modes as grammaticalization (Baker & Syea 1996).

More recently, the notion that a sharp break in transmission is

fundamental to pidginisation and creolisation has been rejected. Some linguists

believe this affects the non-genetic status of Creoles (e.g. DeGraff 2001).

Others have gone even further, arguing that there is no linguistic class of

Creole languages, and that the genetic-linguistic model based on the

Comparative Method represents a misunderstanding of the nature of language

change (Mufwene 2001).

Such claims inspire skepticism, and betray confusion about the methods

and findings of historical linguistics (Thomason 2002). But even they remain far

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

from embracing Le Page’s position on the idiosyncratic creation of grammars,

which for most creolists could only constitute a phase preceding crystallisation

in the development of community norms – and certainly would not describe the

contemporary systems of the conventionalized language situations Acts

investigates.

The assumption that the locus of language itself is individual is shared

with linguists of many stripes, including Chomskyan syntacticians. Some

textbook authors, impressed by the Acts model, elaborate the argument that it

demonstrates the impossibility of modelling the speech community. Hudson

(1996) considers several major definitions of the latter, but ultimately chooses

a radical subjectivist view, and ends by entirely dismissing its utility.

Wardhaugh (1998) similarly develops the concept historically over a simple but

misleading trajectory from idealized homogeneity (Chomsky 1965) to

fragmented individualism (Le Page), with community dependent upon the

impulse to identify oneself with others. Duranti abandons the speech

community as “an already constituted object of inquiry”, and recommends it be

understood instead as an analytical perspective: “the product of the

communicative activities engaged in by a given group of people” (1997: 82).

This view is sympathetic to the Acts model’s goals of accounting for the

emergence of widely-shared ideologies of language, and allowing scope for

speaker agency, though it does not solve the problem of accounting for social

community (Patrick 2002).

It must however be remembered that while Acts drew on the richness of

Creole Sociolinguistic Complexes (CSCs, Carrington 1993) to propose new

interpretive moves, it did not claim to reveal anything new about the structural

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

extent or social organization of variation in Creoles, which has long been highly

estimated. It may be that the task of modelling this variability daunts the many

linguists who, consciously or not, accept the axiom of categoricity: “Data for

linguistic analysis must be regularized to remove real-world variability”

(Chambers 1995: 12). Perhaps the rejection of the speech community and the

embrace of radical subjectivity is a natural response. Even variationists have at

times concluded that Creole continua, e.g. Jamaica, cannot be modelled

according to assumptions held in common with other dialect situations (Guy

1980; see Patrick 1999 for counter-evidence).

6. Linguistic Identity and Group Boundaries

Another characteristic feature of Acts and the research it has influenced is a

tendency to look optimistically at situations where boundaries are heavily

underlined in one way or another. To the extent that speakers are able to

transcend the constraints, this predilection underlines Le Page and Tabouret-

Keller’s belief in the permeability, arbitrariness, and subjectivity of group and

language boundaries (point 5). The two echo and may reinforce each other –

that is, the reluctance to subscribe to the notion of heritable linguistic systems

(dialects, or languages) may reflect a willingness to accept that social

boundaries, which can appear quite strong to group-insiders, can be breached

by acts of identity.

This tendency is often echoed and amplified in studies of ‘crossing’ or

‘styling the other’ (Rampton ed. 1999). These crossings may be between ethnic

groups that are often perceived as culturally quite distant (e.g. Afro-Caribbean

and Punjabi in London, Rampton 1995; US African American and European

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

American, Bucholtz 1999), or neighboring groups with a considerable linguistic

difference (Belize Creole English and Honduran Spanish, in Acts). Such relations

may be linked to a preference for studying young people, perhaps because of

both their relative flexibility in language acquisition, and a certain naïvete or

openness as to what extent of identity control and transformation is generally

possible (point 6).

The situations examined below contrast in that both the varieties of

language and social groups of interest are not so distant, echoing Johnstone:

“speakers’ use of features of a variety that has been part of their repertoire

since early youth, a variety that is identified with one of the demographic

categories with which they partly or sometimes identify themselves or

against which they define themselves” (1999: 506).

In the centuries-long process of identity development that Atlantic Creole

societies have been undergoing, there has not been just a finite encounter with

the colonizing source, but a series of meetings and confrontations in which

members of the Creole society strive not to be overwhelmed culturally by the

foreign and imperial ‘mother land’ and ‘mother tongue’. For Jamaica, that

familiar foreign object is English. I now turn to two cases of that encounter, one

at home and one abroad, to see what sorts of identity work may be required.

7. Jamaican speech in London: two young men

In the first data set I consider choices made by two young Afro-Caribbean men

in urban London (Knight 2001). They are of identical background, if one can

ever say that, but with contrasting orientations towards integrating their

Jamaican heritage into their “transportable identities” (Zimmerman 1998).

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

‘David’ and ‘Gary’ (pseudonyms) are brothers, aged 20 and 22. Born in

the North of England to Jamaican parents who themselves had lived significant

parts of their lives in England, the boys moved to SE London before the oldest

was 3, and were raised mostly by their mother near Peckham. Speech samples

were collected and initially analysed by their mother’s sister.11 Both women,

like most of the older generation in the family, were born and/or raised in

Jamaica in their early years, though immigration to Britain began in their

parents’ generation (i.e., David and Gary’s grandparents). The women, i.e. the

parental generation, frequently use Patwa natively, even in situations where JP

speakers are a minority, as I have observed myself.

Neither boy has ever been to Jamaica, but other family members continue

to travel back and forth and to immigrate to Britain, and in other ways – food,

music, child-raising practices – the family maintain strong contact with

Jamaican culture. They are well described according to the pattern in Sebba

(1993), where gradual assimilation occurs such that the third generation is

markedly more integrated into British culture than the first or second. After

leaving school, David did factory and casual work, while Gary initially pursued a

footballing career and worked in the building trades. They have played football

for the same team, and have both been involved in performing music.

These objective similarities conceal clear differences in orientation

between the two young men, however – contrasts which suggested that it might

be revealing to study their language use. David’s dress and hairstyle marked

him as visibly participating in contemporary black culture: he had a distinct

11 Data and analysis are drawn from the unpublished 2001 undergraduate thesis of Pamela
Knight, written under my direction; see Knight, Patrick & Straw 2002 for further details.
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

preference for designer labels such as Fubu, and wore Nike trainers, hat,

sweatshirt and jeans. His hair was short at the sides but long and twisted at the

top, in a style that refers to dreadlocks but with a contemporary urban flavor. In

school, David had many more black friends than Gary, and took the opportunity

on his own initiative to read about black history and culture. David’s first post-

school football team was almost entirely West Indian in composition; Gary’s

was mixed, with a minority of Afro-Caribbeans.

Gary’s school network, too, was predominantly white and mixed. Their

mother described Gary as a more accepting, and David as a more questioning,

personality. Gary’s hair was always short and in no distinctive style; he too

tended to dress in sports clothes, but with no preference for designer labels.

Musically, Gary was exclusively into mixing garage, while David was interested

in ragga, improvising lyrics as well.

In the excerpt of their speech below, brackets {xx} mark a stretch with JP

intonation contours, three dots (...) mark a brief pause or an ellipsis, and Ksst!

indicates the Jamaican paralinguistic gesture of kiss-teeth (Figueroa & Patrick

fc, Patrick & Figueroa 2002). Pam is Gary and David’s aunt (the researcher), and

Lyle is a male cousin of about their age, visiting from Jamaica:

David: listen on de tape I was mixin an MC

Gary: I don’t even want no MC man

David: Yeah, dat’s what it’s about ...

Gary: yeah, but it’s different man. Garage is different cause you

mix it man. You gotta listen to it.

David: Nah man but you can listen to it {an chat de mike}... got de

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

mike in my hand yeah... I got my finger on the record. You

get what I’m sayin...

Gary: I just play de tunes...

Pam: So you don’t talk, Gary?

Gary: Mm-mm (=no)

Lyle: Gary but if yu noh taak yu naah go beknowin den, man

Gary: Yeah man. I’m just a DJ man, I just spin de tunes. Eh, DJs

make more money dan de MCs y’know

David: Ksst! ...

Gary: ...Yeah a fousand pound a hour...

The contrast in musical performance styles referred to may reflect both

issues of preference and competence. Garage is quintessentially British music,

which submerges its influences from African-American and Caribbean styles,

while ragga is much more strongly Jamaican-identified, and relies heavily on

stylized and spontaneous verbal artistry in which Patwa elements act as

authenticators.

The data come from five group recording sessions which are

conservatively characterized as interviews, since parts of most of them involved

topic control by the fieldworker (Knight 2001). The participants are briefly

described in Table 1. Where family membership is not indicated, participants

are perr-group members and friends of David or Gary; “ -> UK” means a

participant was born or brought up for a significant period of time in the UK.

Only the speech of Gary and David is reported here; note that they did not both

participate in all interviews, and that there is more data for David.

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Interview Gary/David, Others: Others: Others:

Pamela relation ethnicity age
1 Gary, David, L, cousin, ♂ Jamaican 24
Pam C, mother Jamaican mid-40s
V, sister Jam -> UK 15
K, friend, ♀ Jam -> UK teens
2 Gary, Pam L, cousin, ♂ Jamaican 24
Jam -> UK 15
India -> UK 22
Jam -> UK 21
Anglo, UK 20
Anglo, UK 19
3 David, Pam Frenchie, ♂ Fr/Afric ->UK 21
Fumi, ♀ Nigerian 19
RD unknown unknown
4 David, Pam L, cousin, ♂ Jamaican 24
5 Gary, Pam n/a n/a n/a

Table 1: Participants in the London Jamaican interactions

Knight (2001) quantifies three variables as indicators of the extent to

which JP elements are featured in Gary and David’s speech. Phonological

variables (TH) and (DH) are combined in this summary as their differences of

environment and occurrence are slight. Dialectal variants include a Standard

English fricative [Ɵ] or [ð], a contrasting fricative [f] or [v] in London Vernacular

English (LVE), and a stop [t] or [d] in Jamaican Patwa. (Word-initially, [d]-

stopping occurs also in LVE, so it is not counted in that environment.)

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Standard Eng London VE Jam Patwa

(TH) eg ‘thousand’ [Ɵ] [f] [t]
(DH) eg ‘brother’ [ð] [v] [d]
(PL) {-z} {-z, Ø} {Ø, -dem}

Table 2: Linguistic variants in the London Jamaican analysis

The morphological variable is plural number-marking. In contexts where

Standard English requires plural number to be categorically marked with

allomorphs of {-z}, London Vernacular English variably allows zero-suffixation,

while Jamaican Patwa allows both zero and the post-nominal suffix –dem,

historically derived from the 3rd plural pronoun.12 In addition, mesolectal JP

shows frequent use of {-z} marking which resembles English in form, but the

constraints which govern the appearance and alternation of {-z} with zero differ

from those in metropolitan English varieties (Patrick 1994, Patrick et al. 1993).

Thus tokens of {-z} are not counted as potentially indexing Jamaican identity in

this analysis, and those tokens of zero-marking which are ambiguous between

LVE and JP are separated from those which belong unambiguously to JP

patterns.

There are relatively few unambiguous cases of number-marking on the JP

pattern for David – only 21 in 302 tokens of semantically-plural noun phrases –

and none at all for Gary, out of 202 tokens. However, all those tokens used by

David are consistent with the operation of the constraints identified as

governing distribution in urban mesolectal Jamaican Patwa, namely:

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

• Animacy: {-z} as well as {-dem} is favored in JP by the semantic

category [+human], including body parts, and disfavored for animals,

inanimates, and crops or plants.

• Redundancy: {-z} is favored in JP syntactic environments where

determiners do not redundantly indicate number (i.e. with possessives,

definite articles, and in bare NPs). Post-nominal {-dem} occurs with these

too, especially after definite articles. {-z} is disfavored by determiners

that do mark number (quantifiers, numerals and demonstratives), while

{-dem} does not occur with them at all. This can be characterized as a

functional pattern, where markers tend to appear in cases that would

otherwise not bear surface signs of their plural meaning.

• Phonological context: Following vowels favor the occurrence of {-z},

and consonants disfavor it, as with other Atlantic Creoles (e.g. Gullah,

Rickford 1986) and African American varieties (Tagliamonte et al. 1994).

The reverse holds for {-dem}.

The first two grammatical constraints find no parallel in general varieties of

English (including African American English, Poplack 2000: 96-97), where

number marking is categorical at the level of morphology. Note that the most

basilectal element, {-dem}, and the one borrowed from general English into JP,

{-z}, share quantitative constraints for animacy; have parallel constraints with

respect to redundancy (categorical for {-dem}, and quantitative for {-z}); and

have opposed patterns in the phonology.

12 This must be distinguished from the free pre-nominal demonstrative dem which, like English
these/those and many other determiner elements, also carries plural meaning (Patrick fc).
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

The overall patterns of occurrence of the different variables for both

brothers are highlighted in Figures 1 and 2, and in the summary Table 3. While

there are three occasions of speech for each brother, it is not asserted that

these represent three distinct styles, and the numbers of the interviews are

irrelevant (i.e. not ordered according to any criterion other than date); they are

simply presented to sample situational variation.

IV-1 IV-2 IV-3 IV-4 IV-5

(TH + DH) JC LV SE JC LV SE JC LV SE JC LV SE JC LV SE
David 55 44 1% n.d. 18 80 0% 48 52 0% n.d.
N=437 % % % % % %
Gary 6% 94 0% 2% 98 0% n.d. n.d. 2% 98 0%
N=259 % % %

(Plural) JC A SE JC A SE JC A SE JC A SE JC A SE
David 10 5% 85 n.d. 3% 3% 94 12 10 78 n.d.
N=302 % % % % % %
Gary 0% 11 89 0% 14 86 n.d. n.d. 0% 6% 94
N=202 % % % % %

Table 3: Frequency of two variables for two London Jamaican speakers (after
Knight 2001)13

Note however that Gary’s highest use of Jamaican features (6% for the

phonological variable) occurs in situation 1, where his brother, sister, mother,

cousin – the latter two fluent users of JP – and a family friend are present. David

uses (TH+DH) the most here as well, but his highest use of morphological

feature {-dem} occurs in situation 4, when (besides Pam) only his male same-

13 Total numbers of phonological tokens for David are 437, and for Gary 259; totals of all
semantically-plural nouns for David are 302, for Gary 202. All other figures are percentages.
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

age cousin is there. David’s lowest use of all JP features is in situation 3, where

only Pam, his aunt, is present.

The nearly complete absence of JP forms is a striking feature of the

speech of Gary. However, he is clearly a vernacular speaker – not a lame, by any

means – in fact neither he nor David ever use the standard phonological

variants at all, in the recordings examined. David’s use of JP plural-marking

strategies, including post-nominal –dem, never goes above 12%, but note that

this is respectable compared to the rate of –dem marking shown by urban

mesolectal speakers in Jamaica. It is never a very frequent marker in Kingston

speech, either, compared to zero-marking. This infrequency in input may mean

its constraints are not especially easy to learn, compared to those governing

alternation between {-z} and zero.

All of David’s plural tokens with –dem are animate, in fact [+human],

except one (de tune-dem), thus reflecting the JP constraint. In addition, all of

them occur with definite articles, possessives, or in bare NPs, observing non-

redundancy. In this respect it appears that David’s grammar for JP plural-

marking matches the source (island Jamaican) grammar.

(insert Figures 1 and 2 here)

Figure 1. Non-standard plural-marking by two London Jamaicans

Figure 2. Non-standard variants of (TH) and (DH) for two London Jamaicans

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Non-standard plural-marking by Two London Jamaicans

This bar is for -dem alone

Kingston
(In Kingston, however, zero-marking =60%)

Gary-5

Gary-1

Ambig. -0
Gary-2
JP -dem/-0

David-3

David-1

David-4

0% 3% 6% 9% 12% 15%

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Non-standard variants of (TH + DH) for Two London Jamaicans

100%

80%

60%

LV
JP

40%
No
Jamaicans
but Pam
present Gary's
20%
highest
= 6%

0%
David-1 David-4 David-3 Gary-1 Gary-2 Gary-5

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Both David and Gary also make frequent use of zero-marked plurals. In

many British dialects it is possible for nouns to go unmarked for plural if they

belong to the category of weights-and-measures (Trudgill & Hughes 1987).

However, in Jamaican speech such nouns have the opposite effect, favoring {-z}

marking (Patrick 1994, Patrick et al. 1993). David’s “ambiguous” zero-marked

cases follow the British dialect pattern more often than they give evidence for

the JP one, while Gary’s only non-standard plural-marking is all of the zero-

marked weights-and-measures type. Here, it is evident that their grammar is

more English- than Creole-like, despite the fact that we expect the zero-

marked examples to have been much more frequent than tokens with {-dem}

in the JP home input both boys were exposed to.

Taken together, the quantitative evidence for these variables indicates

that it was entirely within the boys’ grasp to have assimilated some quite subtle

constraints from the Jamaican grammar of their parents’ generation, and David

at least has done so. Gary however strongly tends to avoid the forms and

variable constraints that his brother displays. In excerpts like the one above,

both young men are capable vernacular speakers, but they go different ways.

Evidently, these 3rd-generation London-born Jamaicans have adequate

access to the group of JP speakers, ability to analyse their behavioral patterns,

and ability to modify their own behavior to match it – in other words, they

satisfy three of the constraints in the Acts model. The remaining one,

motivation, is perhaps the most interesting. What exactly does it mean for Gary

and David to choose between Standard, London Vernacular and Jamaican Patwa

variants?
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Surely employing the latter has little to do with affiliating themselves to a

‘Jamaican’ group identity. Both Gary and David have access to ‘Jamaican’ as a

transportable, ascribed identity, whether or not they index, or others orient to,

it. (This is true at least in a British context – it would not be so obvious if they

found themselves in Jamaica, or an overseas enclave in, say, Brooklyn or Miami

– where any markers that could be associated with an ‘English’ identity would

not necessarily be understood as compatible with ascription to ‘Jamaican’.)

That is, this identity is latent, theirs for the claiming; they are potential in-

group members before they even act or project.

This contrasts with cases often analysed using the Acts model, and with

crossing, where an identity perceived as relatively distant from the subject is

actively pursued. However, it is typical in some respects of the type of situation

I describe below as ‘identity development’ – in that, for young people, even

when an identity is theirs for the claiming, they must still decide whether they

wish to claim it, and then learn and practice how to claim it. In this sense all

young people are thus apprentices in a community of practice (Meyerhoff

2002). Such practice is especially urgent when, as with London Jamaicans, the

identity in question has been in some way de-naturalized – here, by

immigration:

• removed from a context (Jamaica) where it is legitimated and

naturalized, and

• not yet re-naturalized in the new context (urban England).

Decisions made in this setting, and their reception from peers, are thus

relevant not only to the projection of individual identity – but also to the
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

focussing of collective identity in the context of the submergence of old

symbolic behaviours, development of a new repertoire, and selection from it, as

a new expression of ethnolinguistic group membership surfaces for British

Afro-Caribbeans.

8. ‘Patwa’ and ‘English’ in Kingston: poles of the urban mesolect

An instance of a different kind comes from the urban mesolect of Veeton, a

mixed-class neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica. This mesolect has been

characterized (Patrick 1999) as:

1. Inherently variable, with a predilection for zero-marking

Absences occur where metropolitan or standard Englishes make certain

forms obligatory – and also where JP basilectal forms14 could occur, but

might be stigmatised – and the variation is constrained in a regular manner

by system-internal factors.

2. Defined by the partial incorporation of significant grammatical elements

from General English.

This cannot generally be characterized as codeswitching, because it does

not display co-occurrence and may be simply too frequent over very short

stretches; or borrowing, because it is highly conventionalised and socially

evaluated as a native pattern (Patrick 1996).

14 Basilectal forms in JP are those most distant in surface form and underlying structure from
metropolitan English, and often show the clearest evidence of substratal interference effects.
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Thus speakers with practically no such English forms in their control can

clearly be identified as basilectal; those with essentially categorical grammars

largely conforming to General English syntactic and morphological patterns, as

acrolectal; and the vast majority of Urban Jamaican speakers as mesolectal.15

Most Jamaicans do not have much regular face-to-face input from

speakers of General English in early childhood. Consequently, to the extent

they acquire awareness of invariant agreement-marking, inflection, and other

patterns of General English, it is through instruction in a second variety at

school, or exposure later in life. Only a small minority ever fully acquire these

patterns productively. But the overwhelming majority appear to successfully

internalise, quite early, social norms concerning appropriate use and evaluation

of speech, in a model that at least opposes English and Patwa, and denigrates

Patwa.

Figures 3 and 4 contrast the results of two oral translation tasks

administered to Veeton speakers in 1989-90. Recorded sentences in Jamaican

‘Patwa’ were played to speakers, who were asked to translate them into

‘English’, and vice versa. Each sentence was mined with linguistic elements that

distinguish these varieties, and read by a Jamaican actress. The tasks invited

speakers to maximise the contrast between two explicitly polarized varieties

along the Jamaican Creole continuum (DeCamp 1971, Rickford 1987, Patrick

1999). The ten speakers, who span the mesolectal portion of the continuum,

provide production evidence for their stereotype of the opposed varieties, in a

15 General English here refers to native dialects of English, standard or non-standard, which
have arisen through normal transmission rather than by language contact.
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

stylisation that addresses the question: “What counts as Patwa, and English, in

Jamaica?”. I also give an average measure of their conversational performance,

recorded on occasions before this test, for the same features.

The first feature is consonant-cluster absence, the simplification of

morpheme-final clusters ending in /-t/ or /-d/ – a feature of all English

dialects, but generally realised at a lower rate than in Jamaican. The speakers

all show significantly higher absence rates in the ‘Patwa’ guise than the

‘English’. In most cases their own informal speech pattern is close to their

‘Patwa’ stereotype – or even higher – and nearly everyone agrees quite closely

that Patwa is characterized by a high, yet not categorical, rate of absence of

about 70-80%. However, their English values are all over the map.

The second feature is the marking by verb-inflection of past-reference

verbs – obligatory in General English, but highly variable in Jamaican, as the

symbols representing conversational data show.16 As the latter rise, from left to

right, so do the values for ‘English’, though they do so somewhat raggedly, and

speakers range from 0% to 100%. There is a general consensus for ‘Patwa’

however: 6 of 10 speakers show no inflection at all in this guise.

16 In varieties such as African American English, inflection is near-categorical but often masked
by high levels of consonant-cluster simplification, Fasold 1972. Though the two processes
interact in JP, the detailed analysis in Patrick 1999 estimates and accounts for this effect.
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Figure 3. Translation task data for ten Veeton speakers: (TD) absence

100%

80%
(TD)-deletion

60%
"English" test
40% "Patwa" test
Conversation
20%

0%
Matty
Bigga

Roxy
Tamas
Dinah

Opal

Noel

Olive
Mina

Rose

Figure 4. Translation task data for ten Veeton speakers: (Past)-inflection

100%

80%
Verb Inflection

60%
"English" test
40% "Patwa" test
Conversation
20% n. d.

0%
Matty
Bigga

Roxy
Tamas
Dinah

Opal

Noel

Olive
Mina

Rose

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

Looking a little deeper, we can see that for the phonological feature of

(TD) – which is not very salient, i.e. people are often unaware of whether they

have produced it – speakers across the board have conversational usage which

is close to how they describe ‘Patwa’. For (Past) however, a salient grammatical

marker – it is explicitly taught in school – only the speakers on the left side of

the chart (all working-class) do this. The others (all either middle-class or

avowedly upwardly-mobile) show conversational usage that is close to, or even

surpasses, that for ‘English’. That is, dual norms divide the community for

production here. In sum, on this evidence,

• ‘Patwa’ is a highly-focused national vernacular,

• showing strong agreement on production norms across social

boundaries,

• while ‘English’ production norms are diffuse and vary greatly, although

• they are systematically linked to social factors (including education,

status, mobility etc.; Patrick 1999), but

• there is agreement across society as to relative social evaluation of these

two polar stereotypes, and their appropriate domains for use. Thus,

• varieties structurally remote from English come to serve the social-

symbolic (including identity) functions of the standard.

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

The types of identity work that are required of urban mesolectal Jamaican

Patwa speakers are evidently constrained by a range of social, historical and

developmental factors. A speaker’s actual grammar – the set of resources they

have available to mobilize when social situations demand – is likely to change

during their lifetime (notably during the first period described below, but

possibly afterwards too). To the extent that face-to-face interaction is required

for such change, people’s access to the group of speakers who command

standard varieties (Jamaican or foreign), and their role-relationships to them,

differ widely across Jamaican society. Their ability to identify patterns of

‘English’ is shaped by public conventions of what is salient, and attributions of

specific value to it, that are the product of colonial history. The ability to

change their own speech may well be linked to age. Thus, different

expectations will apply to:

• young Jamaicans still determining their own ‘sociolinguistic profile’,

along with their network affiliations, class-cultural choices, and socio-

economic trajectories;17 versus

• older Jamaicans extending their basic range incrementally via, e.g., work

contact with foreign tourists, visits from or to overseas family, etc; versus

• older Jamaicans undergoing a significant change of circumstances, e.g.

emigrating for work on a long-term basis, or marrying a non-Jamaican

and moving overseas (not to Jamaican enclaves), or even more radical

shifts as suggested below.

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All of these situational differences have an impact on their motivation, too.

9. A taxonomy of identity work

These sorts of considerations suggest a 3-way distinction in types of identity

work which may be of much broader utility than Caribbean Creole societies.

The purpose is to develop a taxonomy that allows us to perceive, from a unified

perspective, strands of work which have often remained distinct and unrelated.

To be most useful, work related to the Acts model requires differentiation

among at least three sorts of situations, which I will call identity development,

identity shift, and identity modification. 18

9.1 Identity development

This type, chronologically the first, relates to children and adolescents, even up

to and including young adults. Throughout this period of life, people are

involved in the creation of what one might call their primary identities, and

language is instrumental in this. (I think the claim can be made whether or not

one accepts the existence of unique personal identities, and I intend it to be

compatible with a range of positions on this.)

Children are evidently capable of quite radical changes, perhaps because

of not having fully built up and invested in identities over time. The process of

17 Patrick (1999) argues that expectations of social mobility can influence linguistic behavior of
young urban Jamaicans as powerfully as their own or their family’s socio-economic status.

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

identity development through social use of language proceeds hand in hand

with, and sometimes even precedes, the acquisition of structural constraints on

core elements of grammar (Labov 1989, Roberts 1996).

Adolescents are certainly still involved in such construction, and may

often believe themselves, and be, capable of radical shifts, even when this

appears unlikely or even absurd to adult eyes. Jane Hill (1999: 547) observes

that adolescents may more often inhabit the space between “playful

appropriation” and “heartfelt identification”, in their linguistic crossing, than

adults do. Research on European-American adolescents belatedly adopting

features of African American Vernacular English has chronicled this in revealing

detail (see e.g. Bucholtz 1999, Cutler 1999, and Jacobs-Huey 1997); other case

studies where adolescent identity work is done across ethnic divisions include

Hewitt (1986) and Deppermann (2002). Hatala (1976) and Sweetland (2002), in

contrast, have demonstrated that AAVE competence may be developed from

childhood by white Americans integrated into vernacular African American

culture, and claimed successfully as a feature of ascribed local, urban,

working-class – rather than racial – identity. Work by Eckert (1989, 2000) has

closely explored similar processes for a community of white adolescents in a

Detroit high school whose identity choices are no less sharply opposed, but for

whom race and ethnicity do not define available boundary-crossing options.

Even young adults in the post-teen years may still be critically involved in

identity development; school-leaving is not necessarily the end of the period of

primary identity development. It seems likely that important changes in life-

18 I unabashedly use psychological terms here, but do not intend to give the impression of

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

trajectory are first encountered only then, and primary identity may still shift in

response – as Hewitt’s (1986) brief observations about what happens to London

vernacular white speakers’ cross-racial interactions when they leave school

suggest – or, at any rate, it remains to be consolidated during the initial period

of economic independence and societal recognition of autonomy.

In this process, access to others and ability to modify one’s own behavior

may not always be problematic, among the four riders of the Acts model. While

motivation to join a group may vary, the ability to assess and respond to

feedback received may itself be undergoing social development. Identity

development involves a process of affiliation, but the subject is a moving

target, and may not yet be a good judge of the distances attempted. On the

other hand, many affiliations might be attempted in this phase, and success in

only a few might be satisfactory – it may often be a less-directed, rather

experimental series of efforts.

9.2 Identity transformation

For purposes of contrast I treat both the remaining categories as taking place

in adulthood, after identity development, though of course they are not

restricted to these later life-stages.

Cases of identity shift are the dramatic cases of radical change and

redefinition, which happen quite frequently, but not to everyone. Examples

include ‘getting [fundamentalist] religion’ (Stromberg 1993); discovering an

alternate mode of sexuality or ‘coming out’ (Wood 1997); becoming a refugee

to a sharply distinct cultural setting; changing known groups within a larger

coherence with the way psychologists use or understand them.

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

unit (e.g. Barth’s 1969 case of Pathans shifting to Baluchi ethnicity); changing

sex; experiencing a life-threatening or –changing illness (Patrick & Payne-

Jackson 1996); becoming homeless; etc.19 In such cases, which are not often

studied by sociolinguists, something previously recognized by oneself and

others as a fundamental aspect of identity is altered, shifts, and a process of

reorientation and redefinition occurs over a length of time extending perhaps

to years. Transformation seems a more appropriate way to describe this mode

than development or gradual, incremental modification.

It is likely that in all cases language will be a vehicle for self-redefinition,

and may therefore be subject to dramatic or subtle change. Here there is little

doubt about the motivation for projecting a new identity through language; the

questions are primarily ones of access, and ability to modify one’s own

behavior. The process of acquiring new ways of speaking will itself be fraught

with emotion or risk because successful performance of the new identity is at

stake – it is not simply affiliative, or instrumental, but integrational, and

acceptance may be of paramount concern. However, it is clear that not all cases

of language shift – i.e. community language shift, including language loss – will

fall under this heading.

9.3 Identity Modification

2This last modality has often been considered in the linguistic accommodation

literature (Giles & Robinson 1990), though not always as an ongoing process

19 Certainly some of these can happen to children or adolescents (see e.g. the celebrated cases

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

through life. It has been noted in studies of second language or dialect

acquisition (e.g. Winer 1985, Chambers 1992), though again as a one-off

event, and usually for the young. Subsequent to the development of an

individual identity that one has a certain amount of confidence in, and barring

radical identity shifts, it seems normal for adults to continue to modify,

substitute, add or otherwise change aspects of their behavior and beliefs in an

incremental way, with results that are generally long-lasting.

Linguistic reflections of this might include the acquisition of new

registers or styles; the ability to address a group of strangers in public; written

language for consumption in a non-face-to-face evaluative situation (e.g., in a

white-collar work environment); how to speak to very young children; how to

talk about grief, etc. It could also of course involve developing command of

new varieties for specific uses, e.g. second language acquisition for work. In my

own case, natively speaking a NE American standard variety and (near-natively)

mesolectal JP, I had to learn how to speak in an educated West Indian register

for professional reasons, since at conferences in the Caribbean the former

variety is disaffiliative – and simply feels physically wrong to me – while the

latter is inappropriately informal.

As such examples suggest, the degree of completeness in acquisition

may vary widely, and there may be no such target as ‘native competence’ in the

desired code.The linguistic distance crossed might or might not be great, and

the time of acquisition might be short or long. But in contrast to the previous

described and studied in Lane 1979, Louden 1999), but I do not attend to that possibility now.
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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

category, the feeling is that one’s fundamental self (if such a thing exists – it

certainly does as a folk category for many people) may not necessarily be at

risk in the process. It is essentially a process of affiliation from a secure center.

Motivation may surface in instrumental terms, rather than integrational ones as

for identity shift, to use a distinction well explored in the SLA literature (Cook

1993, Larsen-Freeman & Long 1990).

Many processes of projecting identity through language do not fall neatly

into this schema. For example, learning to speak like an old person – is this

developmental? It certainly may not be additive as the model just sketched for

identity modification suggests – rather perhaps transformational, yet without

necessarily requiring a radical shift. Testing against a range of case studies is

obviously required, and refinement or elaboration of the distinctions

themselves may be necessary. Nonetheless, I believe that the three categories

are basic types of change over time which have not been systematically

distinguished and related to each other. Much of the work which has been

called ‘crossing’ has really characterized only the first, and explorations of the

third sort (such as Johnstone 1999) sit uneasily under the same label.

In this light we may see that some analytic schemes have been too

narrowly applied, while others have assumed a certain generality of address

and may yet profit from trials over a wider array of situations, as suggested by

this taxonomy of identity work.

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Oct 2003 PL Patrick

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06 March 2003
Rev. 19 October 2003
Peter L Patrick
Dept of Language & Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ
UK
patrickp@essex.ac.uk

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