Language and Social Identity: An Annoted Bibliography

Székelyhidi Eszter (Johanna)

Language and Social Identity:

An Annoted Bibliography

My focus is the relationship between language and social identity. I am interested in how the language a person speaks shapes their self-evaluation and what does it say about their place in society. My approach is not personal: I wish to use the data to determine whether analysing the language a character speaks in a literary work is a useful method of character analysis. More specifically, I am interested in the subtle changes of the character’s usage of language when they interact with members of different social groups.

 The play I have in mind is Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde, the topic of my thesis. In the play, all the characters are English-speaking members of London high society, but they form two groups: dandies and puritans. The language of the dandies is poetic, paradoxical and playful. The way the puritans speak is more goal-oriented, with clear-cut sentences and unintentional contradictions. The four major characters are all seeking their social identities, and they move from one social group to the other. I am interested whether the language they speak in a given scene could be a marker of which group they identify with at the given moment.

Jaspal, R. (2009). Language and Social Identity: a Psychological Approach. Retrieved 05.10.2015, from http://www.academia.edu/200226/Language_and_social_identity_a_psychosocial_approach

The author examines language as a marker of social identity. He emphasises that social identity is contex-specific, and thus it is dynamically changing with the individual’s interactions. Social identity marks the membership in a group, typically ethnic or religious. Language-crossing occurs when the individual wants to gain membership in a group by the language associated with the group. Language attitudes play a large role in this: the individual is motivated to belong to a group which is regarded to be positive. Whether a language is positive or negative is completely arbitrary, but the negative evaluation of one’s language and thus one’s identity results in psychological conflicts nevertheless. Linguistic diversity is often regarded to be a “threat to national unity,” therefore language minorities are often motivated or forced to leave behind their mother tongues, so they can be part of the dominant nation, ethnic group, or religion.

            The article proved to be a good start to my study, providing me with the basic information I needed. Jaspal reinforced my hypothesis that language is context-specific, and that language crossing might have a personal motivation behind it.  However, the author’s main focus was on large social groups, and I was more interested in the individual. Furthermore, he did not focus on changes in the register within the same language: English. Nevertheless, it was a reliable, well-structured and informative article. The evaluation of languages is a relevant addition to my study: stigmatizing minority languages affects the individual greatly. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, the dandies form a minority group. It is interesting to note that when a character is caught speaking like a dandy, they are often scolded by the puritans, or even by the dandies who are yet to accept the character’s membership in their circles: the character has more to prove before he or she is entitled to use the dandy-lingo. Furthermore, the dandies despise the puritans, and when Lord Darlington is caught moralising, “speaking like a puritan,” he gets rejected from the dandies’ group.

Ochs, E. (1993). Constructing Social Identity: a Language Socialisation Perspective. Retrieved 05.10.2015, from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/ochs/articles/Constructing_Social_Identity.pdf

The author focuses on the competent native speaker building social identities, such as woman/man, mother/father, scientist and so on. This is done by acts and expressing stances. Identity is not only constructed by the individual, but by other people surrounding them: the relationship between language and social identity is hence mediated. The social identity is not explicitly encoded in the language: the social meaning is inferred. The membership in a social group (language community/distinct social group/other) depends on the member’s knowledge of convention.  The author uses several chemical analogies to prove her point.

            The chapter met my focus, since it dealt with the individual, and their places in distinct social groups, such as dandy or puritan. The mediated nature of the relationship of language and identity proves that the perception of a character’s use of language will always be filtered. Any literary analysis dealing with the character’s use of language should pay mind to the (intended) audience of their speech. Ochs argues that the key to membership in a social group is the knowledge of convention, which might explain the occasional failure of the characters; for example, Lady Windermere, coming from a puritan background, is very confused by the language of the dandy Lord Darlington, especially the flattery. She does not know that praising beauty is common among the dandies, and she interprets the act of Lord Darling as unrequired flirtation. The chapter was relevant to my topic and greatly helpful, although I have found the chemical analogies quite confusing and unnecessary.

Jannarone, A. G. (2006). Social Identity. Retrieved 05.10.2015, from http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/bia/documents/social_identity.pdf

Social identity is an individual’s place in several groups, and it should be noted that there is always a primary group. The factors deciding which groups the individual belongs to are the individual's capacities, experiences, mobility, and location. Traditionally, there is a hierarchical identity structure, from one’s membership in a family to their ethnicity/religious group. Language provides them with the sense of belonging. The groups create the psycho-social concept of the “other:” some groups are regarded to be superior. This notion is closely connected to the “power of place,” which is the way the surroundings will influence the individual’s identity. The self-defined or self-selected social identities form two groups, namely professional/vocational membership (doctor, warrior, cleric) or socio-economic categories (middle class, artist, business).

            The article is short, and its source is indeterminable: Jannarone is the director of the Behavioral Influences Analysis Center in Air War College, but no other information is noted. Nevertheless, I found the article to be a reliable source, and it provided me with much needed terminology: I now know that dandy/puritan is a socio-economic category, and that the concept of the “other” is a psycho-social one. His focus on hierarchy is crucial for my study, because the main conflict between dandies and puritans comes from the fact that puritans are regarded as superior, as they have the financial stability the dandies lack. The dandies are merely on the margin of high society, and they are stigmatised, they are the “other.” Interestingly, the dandies take pride in this otherness,  and they emphasise their differences with the puritans by the way they behave, the way they dress – and most importantly, the way they speak.