Language Varieties as Boundaries and as National Identity

Muhammad AzamResearch Scholar

COMSATS Institute of Information Technology Lahore, Pakistan

What is Identity

• The stable and fixed aspects of selfhood: things that you check off on census forms such as . . .

– –Race or ethnicity– –Nationality– –Social class– –Gender– –Age

What is Identity

• Identities are . . .–Stable features of persons that exist prior to any

particular situation.

• AND–Dynamic and situated accomplishments,

enacted through talk, and changing from one occasion to the next.

Four Kinds of Identities

• Master identities . . .– are relatively stable and unchanging: gender, ethnicity, age, national and regional origins.

• Interactional identities . . .• – refer to roles that people take on in a

communicative context with specific other people.

Four Kinds of Identities

• Personal identities . . .– are expected to be relatively stable and unique.

Reference ways in which people talk and behave toward others:hotheaded, honest, forthright, reasonable, overbearing, a gossip, a brown-nose.

Four Kinds of Identities

• Relational identities . . .– refer to the kind of relationship that a person enacts

• with a particular conversational partner

• in a specific situation.

Language and Identity

• Beside a boundary, a name, a flag, or a currency, what makes a country become a respectable and unique nation is its national language.

• National language is a driving force behind unity of the nation’s people, and makes them distinct from other nations – provided you give your language respect.

Language and Identity

• There are two ways of viewing ideologies about identity has become a topic. John Myhill raises the issue, arguing that one ideology is what he calls language-and-identity and the other is an ideology of language-and-territory (Myhill, 1999).– The ideology based on identity is more an emotional

connection with language.– While an ideology based on territory means that its proponents

argue that in each territory, only one particular language “should be the one used in public circumstances and intergroup communication”

Language and Identity

• There are two ways of viewing ideologies about identity has become a topic. John Myhill raises the issue, arguing that one ideology is what he calls language-and-identity and the other is an ideology of language-and-territory (Myhill, 1999).– The ideology based on identity is more an emotional

connection with language.– While an ideology based on territory means that its proponents

argue that in each territory, only one particular language “should be the one used in public circumstances and intergroup communication”

Language and Identity

• A language may be important to a group at a symbolic level.– For instance, individuals may collectively lay claim to a language,

which they themselves do not speak natively, in order to assert a symbolic identity which will differentiate them from others.

– Urdu language for Muslims of subcontinent

• Language can constitute an important marker of social identity at various levels of human interdependence, e.g. subcultural or national.

Language and Identity• It is noteworthy that languages are not inherently ‘good’ or

‘bad’; value and meaning are conferred upon languages by people, which in turn gives rise to pervasive social representations. People may or may not act in accordance with these representations;

• for instance, if a group or its language evokes negative social representations, a member of the social or linguistic group may seek social mobility through membership in a more positively evaluated group.

• The boundaries of linguistic identity are of course permeable; an individual may choose to leave their original group and gain membership of another by adopting a new language.

Constructing a national identity

• Pre-modern India did not have the concept of a nation. It is after contact with the British that it was imported into Indian discourses. Thus, Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-1899) uses the word “qaum” for all Indians and then, when the Muslims drifted apart from the Hindus, for only Indian Muslims.

• But ‘qaum‘ was, and even now is, used by ordinary people for extended class or fraternity (biradari).

Constructing a national identity

• Thus the Pashto-speaking people were described as belonging to the Afghan ‘qaum‘ in India.

• Similarly, one could describe one‘s ‘qaum‘ as arain. Even occupational castes, like weaver (juluha) or barber (nai), were described as ‘qaum‘.

Constructing a national identity

• In short, what the nineteenth century Indian reformers did was to subsume a society fragmented along ethnic, occupational and class lines into a modern, basically Western, identity label: nation (qaum).

• They created the illusion of unity. They constructed a would-be nation, much in the way described by Benedict Anderson (1983), out of groups which did not see themselves as a nation in the Western sense of the term at all.

Ideologies and African-American English in the US

• African American Vernacular English (AAVE) variety of English language is spoken by African-Americans as a indication of ideology and most consider it one of the dialects of American English, but a variety that has a number of distinctive grammatical features.

• The ideologies about African-Americans themselves are reflected in views about this language variety. Some scholarly attempts to study the history of AAVE contribute to a negative bias toward the variety by arguing that AAVE largely shows continuities from various British English dialects.