This December, Bloomsbury Linguistics will be publishing Dr David Evans' edited volume, Language and Identity: Social Groups and Cultures in the World. In this week's blog post, editor Dave Evans tells us more about this exciting project.
This book is a ‘must read’ for serious students of language/linguistics for an understanding of the power of language to reflect and create identity. Language marks us out as human and gives us a means to reflect upon our existential and cultural condition. We can interrogate ‘who am I?’ only through language as no other creature can do. Identity is created within and by language - our own utterances position us (my northern accent!) as do the utterances of others. Language gives the past to us, in allowing us, to construct our own past tense narratives, rationalize our present and construct ideal and realistic future selves.
Without language we wouldn’t have the tool to construct the platform on which we can look back at ourselves, so that the ‘I’ can refer to the ‘me’ and, in doing so, reinforce that the ‘I’ exists. How could Descartes have proved his existence in the ‘Cogito’ without language? We would be trapped in a world of sense impressions beyond understanding and only able to satisfy basic instincts in the present tense or thereabouts.
I believe then that the first consideration of language is philosophical because it underpins rationality and the existential self. Following an introductory chapter one, Chapter 2, examines philosophical interpretations of language, taking in such thinkers as Descartes, Kant, Derrida, Heidegger, de Sausssure, Bakhtin and Chomsky. Chomsky follows a Cartesian (Descartes) way of thinking in looking at language mainly as a foundation for rationality and how this separates humans from the animal kingdom. This is very much a showcase position for the free-will of the mind, distinct from and yet linked to the body and physical functions. Chomsky doesn’t talk about social context or gesture or accent and pronunciation. He talks about the rationality of Universal Grammar. True, this is linked to our biology, in terms of an innate mental structure for grammar but it is a given and is not biologically evolving. Chomsky says that our capacity for language goes way beyond our biological provision or biological need. In terms of language, we are not biological needs- based creatures; we have the unique capacity to go beyond this.
Chomsky follows a Cartesian line of argument with regard to the ‘givenness’ of built-in structures. For Descartes, no knowledge is really new. The structures for knowledge that exist in the outer world already exist in the mind and learning is simply, through rationality, filling in the gaps. Yes, knowledge is created by us, but only from what is already given. For Chomsky, it is the same with language-we have the structures for grammar in our heads:-the ‘Universal Grammar’ and now we fill in the gaps for our own languages in our own locations.
What are the arguments against this philosophy of knowledge and language? Is language and grammatical structure so pre-determined or is it more likely that language development has been led by social interaction and complex social practices over time?
Sociology of Language
Most of the book is devoted to the socio-cultural and socio-political nature of language. Systemic functional linguistics, proposed by Halliday and, linked more to social structure by Chouliarsky and Fairclough, argue for a developmental interaction between the inside and outside of language- between lexico-grammar and social structures-mediated by social context. The sociology of language is more concerned with how language interacts with the outer world-how it reflects our cultures and our ways of being in the world.
Some of the chapters in the book-for example the chapter on the Uyghurs of north-west China and the chapter on the language of Amazonian tribes of Brazil show how languages can be squeezed out of existence by more dominant adjacent languages and cultures. Section 2 of the book shows how language and culture live within each other- language expresses culture as language resides within culture and at the same time culture is inscribed on the inside of language. If you squeeze out a minority language, you kill off the culture and ways of being in the world!
There is a strong link in the chapters of section two between language and socio-economics. English is a powerful world language extending its reach into the Uyghur province of China because of its global economic possibilities. Language therefore may well have its internal features in the lexico-grammar but it also has external characteristics of socio-economic and political currency.
What then is the most important thing in language?- socio-economic opportunity or the bonding of localized identities within language ? The chapter on Brazil, for example, shows a return to former historic identities by Amazonian communities by privileging indigenous Indian languages within local institutions such as schools; something that the Chinese authorities refuse to do in the Uyghur province of China.
Geographical extent of Uyghur in China
Do we settle on the idea of multi-lingualism/culturalism or at least bi-lingualism/culturalism as proposed in the book’s conclusion where language learning plays equally to economic opportunity as well as to local linguistic/ cultural identities?
In the pedagogical section, we look at alternative discourse/culture in the youth culture of unicycling. This presents an alternative to the hegemony of popular, media sports. It presents a culture of leisure as individual and small group culture involving language, dress, music, alternative ways of being. This is language as discourse, much wider than grammar, words and phrases. Language learning is also presented as looking for the ‘third way’ and exploration of ‘Otherness’, equally an escape from socio-economic educational hegemony.
The sociology of this book teaches that language and cultural identity are in a dynamic, dialectical interaction with each other where grammar and word meanings are shaped by socio-cultural context such as class and history. Equally language shapes socio-political identity-it can free up regional/national culture. Language and culture are inextricably linked as witnessed recently in Crimea where the Russian speakers want to be Russian and belong to Russia. Language is very powerful indeed as a driver of identity!!
Dave Evans
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