Christopher Wegenaar
The prevailing theme for this week’s readings is the intersection and interaction of language, community, and identity. More precisely, each article to some extent considers the fluidity of these ideas and the power of individual intention to shape them.
Bourdieu (1986) presents a theory of material and symbolic capital, those assets which may be exchanged for social profit. According to Bourdieu, economic capital underpins all else, though the privileged might try to conceal it; cultural capital accrues primarily as a matter of heritage and education, though there are many factors in play; and social capital accumulates according to one’s investment in building social networks. Language is of concern to Bourdieu only as a particular manifestation of cultural capital, an example of the accumulated assets which establish and contribute to the negotiation of one’s societal stature. When the subject is explicitly addressed, Bourdieu’s views are somewhat opaque; however, he seems to treat linguistic items as fixed assets, elements beyond the full control of yet manipulable by the individual. As a shared cultural object, language exists as an aggregate system to be employed at-will by those who have made the appropriate cultural investments. There is room in Bourdieu’s examination of social capital for linguistic investigation, as well–analyses of the effects of CMC on the construction and maintenance of social groups, for example–but the entanglement of language and social function here is implicit only. The remaining authors, however, treat language much more directly.
Bailey (2012) presents the concept of heteroglossia, an idea conceived by Bakhtin. Key to heteroglossia are the notions of simultaneity and conflict: what are the various sign-sets that one uses, and what are the relative sociohistorical meanings and conflicts of these sets? Multilingualism and multi-variantism are essential to this understanding; monolingualism is not the default. To search for meaning in the codeswitching of the teens in Bailey’s example would thus not necessarily be wise in isolation. Here, as elsewhere, Bailey argues, one must attend to the sociopolitical histories evidenced by such activities. While it is possible that specific implementations of mixed linguistic feature sets might not be interpretable on a moment-by-moment basis, it is not beyond reason to assess them nevertheless as the result of conscious decisions to emphasize relations with cultural objects or to maintain social connections. What do these actions mean within the wider context?
For Bailey, the rationale for linguistic selections is not always conscious; Eckert (2006), meanwhile, is concerned with much more volitional ideas. Communities of practice develop, she writes, as the result of shared intention, through joint activities and a commitment to mutual understanding. In this way, participants are able to define themselves on their own terms, to contribute actively to the creation of their identities. These communities contrast especially with traditional speech communities, which are usually defined along the lines of geography and broad social categories (e.g., gender, class, age). Each approach has its uses, and indeed the two are intertwined; one’s choices for communities of practice derive from one’s place in society.
The nature of the relationship Eckert describes has changed as technology has advanced, even in the years since her chapter’s publication. Thanks to modern innovation, one’s place in time and space is no longer as powerfully directive: the Internet has weakened or eliminated many barriers to inclusion, and anonymity provides a means of disingenuous involvement, even invasion. In such a field of complex interactions, these subjects are ripe for investigation.
Coupland (2000) approaches speaker intention even more extremely. For Coupland, style is everything. Indeed, a problem he establishes at the outset is that style, insofar as it is defined as contextualized language variation, is at the core of sociolinguistics. At the same time, the traditional Labovian interpretations of style according to broadly-categorized linguistic variables are insufficient, failing to capture linguistic events in their totality.
It is worth noting that Coupland focuses his efforts upon what he calls dialect-style rather than style (so-called ways of speaking) in general, but the differentiation is for me unclear. After cataloguing a series of theoretical approaches and assessing their potential contributions to this inquiry, Coupland reasons that dialect-style ought best be defined in terms of self-identity. All linguistic choices are the result of personal presentation, the product of the interaction between internal and external motivations, but these acts are not merely mechanistic responses conditioned by context. According to Coupland, context itself exists only as a result of speaker style-selection, as in the example case of the Cardiff DJ; through his choices he is able to engage with his audience on multiple levels, connecting and disconnecting at will for various purposes. Quantitative analysis of dialect-style points not to socially defined variability but to variability which is the sum total of interlocutor selection; the speaker’s word is final.
Qualifying that thesis are Kroskrity’s (2004) language ideologies. While speakers might by their choices define their own personae, these choices are themselves sifted through the filter of beliefs about the features in question and about language in general. These beliefs, or conceptions, may be consciously-considered or not, and they tend to be defined by political or economic interests. Ideologies exist in multiples even within societies, often at odds with one another; the tension between them might be defined according to Bourdieu’s notion of capital. For example, it is in the interest of those possessed of the cultural capital gained by investment in the dominant (socially or institutionally) linguistic form to maintain this advantage by perpetuating the relegation of other forms to inferior positions. Importantly, one of the major functions of language ideologies is the “creation and representation of various social and cultural identities” (p. 509). While Kroskrity’s discussion occurs at the macro level, the effects of ideologies necessarily trickle down to the micro, where knowledge of the perception or prestige of a given form allows a speaker to modulate production such that the relationship to the hearer is redefined according to intended identity, as in the case of Coupland’s DJ.
Finally, whereas the other authors treat identity only as a consequence of other inquiry, Bucholtz and Hall (2004) cut to the matter directly. For them, identity construction is a process that may be understood with the aid of four oft-referenced semiotic concepts: practice, indexicality, ideology, and performance. These cultural semiotics, according to the authors, inform identity, the definition of which rests upon “tactics of intersubjectivity” (p. 382), paired complementary relations describing the relative degree of sameness, the social credibility, and the authoritative legitimacy achieved by an individual or group. It is by the semiotic processes that associations are created and then systematized, and it is by interacting with the resultant signs (adopting or dismissing features) that one is located along the spectra of each relation.
The readings as a whole, then, work to better define some of the core terminology of sociolinguistics by asking and answering pertinent questions: What, exactly, are we studying when we discuss identity? What is the relationship between the individual and the group? What factors should we consider when analyzing a given phenomenon? If the answers are unsatisfactory or incomplete, the authors at least provide valuable tools for further investigation.
