Who do I sound like today? The relationship between language and identity
Felicia Lee
When the word ‘identity’ is mentioned, what comes to your mind? Your nationality? Your occupation? Your role as a parent or child? Or your involvement in an underground subculture that should be kept hush-hush?
The notion of identity is a fluid and complex one which is context-bound and ever-changing, and identity helps an individual to feel a sense of belonging and is vital to build a healthy self-esteem. There are many aspects to identity-building, and language use is one of them.
How does language construct one’s identity?
Think about this: if you identify with the cosplay (short for costume play) subculture, you’d probably enjoy dressing up in elaborate costumes and fashion accessories of your favourite fictional character from anime, Japanese manga, cartoons, television series, movies or video games. Not only that, you’d probably attend cosplay conventions and competitions, make your own cosplay costumes and accessories, and even speak in lingo that only insiders of the subculture are aware of. This is evidence that language use can index or signal certain social identities that speakers wish to perform or construct.
That is just one aspect of how the use of insider language can build solidarity between in-group members, but I’m pretty certain that the very same cosplayers will not speak in cosplay lingo at work or at home. Very often, people possess the autonomy to make language choices in interactions, and these choices are largely influenced by the people whom they are speaking to, as well as the situations that they are in. In other words, people’s language choices both affect, and are possibly affected by, the interactions that take place. As such, the social identities that speakers wish to project through the different ways they speak are developed and co-constructed in these interactions, and those identities should be seen as flexible and multifaceted.
Language use and identity development
Here’s an example of how a tiny linguistic feature used (or not used) in a myriad of social contexts is associated with different social identities:
In the English language, speakers may pronounce words such as ‘what’ or ‘cat’ with or without the /t/ release. To put it simply, when the ‘t’ is released, it means that the ‘t’ sound is audible in the pronunciation of the words mentioned above. In separate studies done by Bucholtz (1999) with nerd girls, Benor (2001) with Orthodox Jewish boys, and Podesva and colleagues with gay men (2002), it was found that /t/ release in American English was used to a great extent but is associated with different social identities. For example, nerd girls pronounce the ‘t’ sound clearly to sound intelligent (Bucholtz, 1999), while Orthodox Jewish boys show their ‘Jewishness’ (Benor, 2001) through the released ‘t’. Podesva and colleagues (2002) found that gay men deliberately pronounce the ‘t’ sound in their speech at their workplace to sound more professional and educated, while in a more personal situation like a gathering with their friends, they do the same thing to take on a more bitchy-diva persona.
What does this all mean? Well, returning to the idea that a speaker can choose to use different linguistic features under different circumstances, they can choose to enunciate the ‘t’ to sound more intelligent like the nerd girls, or sound more like a prissy diva depending on the interlocutors or situation. Or you might even choose to not pronounce the ‘t’ clearly to project some other identities in that particular interaction.
So keep in mind that language is not just used for communication, but also as social and cultural marker of identity that reflects who you are, and what you stand for.
References:
Benor, S. B. (2001). The learned /t/: phonological variation in Orthodox Jewish English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 7(2), 1-16.
Bucholtz, M. (1999). “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society, 28(2), 203-223.
Podesva, R., Roberts, S., & Campbell-Kibler, K. (2002). Sharing resources and indexing meaning in the production of gay styles. In K. Campbell-Kibler, R. Podesva, S. Roberts, & A. Wong (Eds.), Language and sexuality: contesting meaning in theory and practice (pp. 175-189). CSLI Publications.