Lesson-11

11. Code Switching, Identity and Globalization

This lesson consists of three parts:

 Speech Community Identities
 Nation- State Identities
 Multicultural Identities
 Speech Community Identities
(1) Speech community is a term in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology used to describe a
group of people who share the same language, speech characteristics, and ways of interpreting
communication. Speech communities may be large regions like an urban area with a common,
distinct accent (think of Boston with its dropped r's) or small units like families and friends
(think of a nickname for a sibling). They help people define themselves as individuals and
community members and identify (or misidentify) others.

(2)The concept of speech community plays a role in a number of social sciences, namely
sociology, anthropology, linguists, even psychology. People who study issues of migration and
ethnic identity use social community theory to study things like how immigrants assimilate into
larger societies, for instance. Academics who focus on racial, ethnic, sexual or gender issues
apply social community theory when they study issues of personal identity and politics. It also
plays a role in data collection. By being aware of how communities are defined, researchers can
adjust their subject pools in order to obtain representative sample populations.

(3)Speech and Identity the concept of speech as a means of identifying with a community first
emerged in 1960s academia alongside other new fields of research like ethnic and gender studies.
Linguists like John Gumperz pioneered research in how personal interaction can influence ways
of speaking and interpreting, while Noam Chomsky studied how people interpret language and
derive meaning from what they see and hear.

Types of Communities
(4) Speech communities can be large or small, although linguists don't agree on how they're
defined. Some, like linguist Muriel Saville-Troike, argue that it's logical to assume that a shared
language like English, which is spoken throughout the world, is a speech community. But she
differentiates between "hard-shelled" communities, which tend to be narrow-minded and
friendly, like a family or religious sect, and "soft-shelled" communities where there is a lot of
interaction. But other linguists say a common language is too vague to be considered a true
speech community.
(5)The linguistic anthropologist Zdenek Salzmann describes it this way:
“People who speak the same language are not always members of the same speech community.
On the one hand, speakers of South Asian English in India and Pakistan share a language with
citizens of the U.S., but the respective varieties of English and the rules for speaking them are
sufficiently distinct to assign the two populations to different speech communities.” Instead,
Salzman and others say, speech communities should be more narrowly defined based on
characteristics such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and manner of speaking.

 Nation- State Identities

(6) National identity is a person's identity or sense of belonging to one state or to one nation. It
is the sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture,
language and politics. The nation-state “is one where the great majority is conscious of a
common identity and share the same culture”. The nation-state is an area where the cultural
boundaries match up with the political boundaries. The ideal of ‘nation-state’ is that the state
incorporates people of a single ethnic stock and cultural traditions.
(7) However, most contemporary states are polyethnic. Thus, it can be argued that the nation-
state” would exist if nearly all the members of a single nation were organized in a single state,
without any other national communities being present. The nation as we think of it today is a
product of the nineteenth century. In modern times nation is recognized as 'the' political
community that ensures the legitimacy of the state over its territory, and transforms the state into
the state of all its citizens. The notion of 'nation-state' emphasizes this new alliance between
nation and state. Nationality is supposed to bind the citizen to the state, a bond that will be
increasingly tied to the advantages of a social policy in as much as the Welfare State wills
develop.

(8) The study of language and political economy emerged during the 1980s from parallel
currents in several fields. Neo-Marxist scholars across the social sciences were increasingly
interested in the symbolic and linguistic aspects of unequally distributed economic and political
power. Where philosophers during the eighteenth century had posited an essential unity between
language, nationality, and the state, twentieth- century studies viewed this unity as a product of
ideology propagated by state institutions, among them publishing (Anderson 1983) and
education (Bourdieu 1977).

(9) These theoretical discussions of inequality resonated with empirical sociolinguistic research
on the stratification of privileged linguistic forms along class, gender, or ethnic lines. Inspired by
these connections, a new generation of scholars took as their subject the investigation of
boundaries between linguistic and social groupings within the nation-state. According to Gal
(1988), code-switching served in these analyses as a clear example of “systematic, linguistically
striking, and socially meaningful linguistic variation” (245). Scholars in this tradition did not
simply affirm the theoretical arguments advanced in social theory; rather, they viewed
sociolinguistic research as providing an important corrective to some of the more grandiose
claims circulating across academia. The strength of this tradition lies in its combined use of
sociopolitical theory, conversational data, and detailed ethnography to understand language
choice as an ideologically motivated and historically situated response to the state’s prioritization
of certain language varieties over others.

(10) Scholars of language and political economy seek to explain the ways that languages
function in diverse settings both as markers and as constitutive elements of social structures.
Identity is viewed as emerging within the stratifying systems of standardization associated with
European-inspired models of nationalism. Where researchers in the earlier tradition deepened
their investigation of identity as an interactional achievement, these scholars examined the
historical contexts and political ideologies that made social identities inhabitable in the first
place. Critical to this undertaking is the examination of everyday practice as a site for the
production of social hierarchy. Language choice can reflect the understanding of “self” versus
“other” within broad political, historical, and economic contexts, but it can also construct more
localized groupings of ethnicity, gender, or social class within these larger contexts. We have
chosen the term nation-state identities as shorthand for the treatment of subjectivity in this
tradition.

 Multicultural Identities

(11) People who belong to more than one cultural group must navigate the diverse norms and
values from each of their cultural affiliations. Faced with such diversity, multicultural individuals
need to manage and organize their different and possibly clashing cultural identities within their
general sense of self. The multicultural person, therefore, is not simply the one who is sensitive
to many different cultures. Rather, this person is always in the process of becoming a part of and
apart from a given cultural context. He or she is a formative being, resilient, changing, and
evolutionary.

(12) The 1990s was an explosive decade for the theorization of identity, as scholars began to
challenge static understandings of selfhood that damaged a previous generation of research. This
shift, which helped in nothing short of a sea change within linguistics in the way identity is
viewed, can be attributed to a diversity of factors, only some of which can be recounted here.
Postmodern challenges to the authoritative voice of the analyst matched with the rise of digital
communication, multiculturalism, deconstructionism, and the poststructuralist valorization of
discourse as the site for the production of subjectivity.
(13) These developments all presented challenges to psychological understandings of the self as
singular and unified. Critical gender theorists such as Butler (1990) advanced the idea that
identity is performative: it produces itself a new by reiterating what is already discursively
intelligible. For sociocultural linguists, this perspective forced closer attention to how
subjectivity might emerge within the constraints and allowances of interaction. As Bucholtz and
Hall (2004a, 2004b, 2005) suggest in their reviews of this period, identity began to be viewed as
a discursive construct that is both multiple and partial, materializing within the binds of everyday
discourse.
(14) During the same decade, a growing body of research on the globalized new economy began
to theorize identity as fragmented by processes associated with late modernity. The expansion
and intensification of international exchange severed the connection between identity and locale
that had been previously assumed. Whether discussed in terms of “detraditionalization” (Giddens
1991), “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000), or “network society” (Castells 1996), identity had
lost its deictic grounding in the temporal and spatial fixities that constituted an earlier era,
including the nation-state. The full force of these theorizations did not surface in the code
switching literature until after the millennium, but their reflexes can be seen in early
sociolinguistic work on urban diasporic communities and minority groups constituted through
transnational migration.

Noteworthy in this regard are two influential ethnographies published in the mid-1990s that
launched quite divergent views of ethnicity as a social construct: Zentella’s (1997) Growing Up
Bilingual and Rampton’s (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. Both
perspectives are importantly informed by the discursive turn in social theory and offer highly
contextualized discussions of identity as an interactional achievement, even if their
conceptualization of ethnicity at the turn of the century differs. This ethnographically based
generation of research offered renewed attention to the concern with language ideologies,
advancing the idea that language contact brought about by global movement leads to heightened
reflexivity toward the indexical links between language and identity.