Language and identity Flashcards
Define Ethnicity
A shared social identity consisting of cultural practices, language, beliefs and history; can be constructed through performativity
Define race
Perceived physical similarities and differences considered socially significant
Ethnolect:
A variety of language associated with a particular ethnic group
Multiethnolect:
A variety combining features from a range of languages within a multiethnic, multicultural context
Heritage language:
A language spoken at home, yet is not dominant in that society
lntersectionality:
Social categorisations (gender, class, sexuality etc) all overlapping; ethnicity is interconnected with all other categories
Essentialism:
The idea that a characteristic is inherited and fixed, not adopted or variable
Constructivism:
The notion of being able to adopt certain characteristics to ‘construct’ identity
Performativity:
The power of language to effect change in the world; language function as a form of social action which can involve the creation of identities
Black Cockney:
A variety identified historically by researchers including Roger Hewitt (1986) and Mark Sebba (1993)
Resistance Identity:
John Pitts (2012) noticed a shift among young black speakers, who reported feeling that society was ignoring them, towards a linguistic identity that went against the mainstream; a move from ‘sounding like Ian Wright to Bob Marley’.
Multicultural London English (MLE):
a multi-ethnolect used mostly by young people in London studied by a range of researchers. Kerswill, Fox and Cheshire completed a research project exploring the relationship between age and use of MLE; MLE speakers tended to be young and are perceived as ‘ethnically neutral’.
Linguistic innovators:
Kerswill and Cheshire proposed the English of adolescents in London was changing due to multi-ethnic social networks facilitating horizontal transmission of language features
Brokering:
The use of multimembership in to transfer some element of language from one social group to another. The term is used by Wenger (1998) and Eckert (2000) to describe how some adolescents introduce new ideas into their friendship groups. In order to be a successful broker they must be able to exert enough influence in each group to be able to carry ideas from one group and introduce them to another.
Multicultural Urban British English (MUBE):
Drummond proposed the term for the various urban multi-ethnolect varieties in existence; each will include local accent and dialect features
Code mixing:
Refers to the occasional insertion of vocabulary items from one language into another.
Code switching:
When the speaker moves from one language to another for more extensive periods of time
Punjabi Indian English in West London (Sharma and Sankaran):
Research into use of heritage language features across migrant generations and age
Lectal focusing in interaction (Sharma and Rampton):
Research comparing style shifting and consistently mixed varieties used by British Asian men
AAVE history
In America, after the Civil war, the legal segregation of ethnic groups formed closed networks of primarily a singular ethnic group. It is assumed that the establishment of these closed networks contributed to the development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a variety that Basil Bernstein categorised somewhat crudely as a ‘‘Restricted Code’.
MUBE features
Word-initial DH and TH stopping. - Words beginning with ‘th’ they, them, there are pronounced with a ‘d’ sound dey, dem, dere. Words beginning with ‘th’ thing, three, think are pronounced with a ‘t’ sound ting, tree, tink.
Use of pragmatic marker ‘you get me?’ The use of ‘you get me’ at the end of a sentence is similar to the popular ‘innit’.
Use of (slang) words with a Jamaican rather than a traditional Manchester/London heritage (e.g. bare, rass, mandem)
AAVE features
AAVE includes phonological features such as the reduction of consonant clusters word finally, producing pronunciations such as ‘wes’ for the abstract noun ‘west’, and the substitution of dental fricatives with alveolar plosives in examples such as ‘dat’ for ‘that’, the demonstrative determiner and pronoun.
Grammatically, AAVE is also recognisable by the omission of the primary verb ‘to be’ as both an auxiliary and a main verb (‘he doing’; ‘she angry’) and the regularisation which creates a lack of subject-verb agreement (‘they has a big house’).
Why AAVE may not be evidence for ethnicity influencing language
Despite the unique grammatical and phonological features of AAVE, lexically it is often very similar and any slang terms, as defined by Julie Coleman, will often be used by other social groups too. This is perhaps illustrated by the use of the colloquial ‘crib’ to denote ‘house’ by a range of adolescents in America, not only those who would self-identify as ethnically African American. This suggests that while ethnic identity may well be one of the influences on an individual’s language there may well be other influences at work too.
