Language and identity : national, ethnic, religious

Offering a uniquely broad-based overview of the role of language choice in the construction of national, ethnic and religious identity, this textbook examines a wide range of specific cases from various parts of the world in order to arrive at some general principles concerning the links between language and identity. It will benefit students and researchers in a wide range of fields where identity is an important issue and who currently lack a single source to turn to for an overview of sociolinguistics.

Author Notes

John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh

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Choice Review

Joseph (Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland) provides a thoughtful, well-organized, and--despite his reluctance to say so--fairly radical view of the relation between language and identity, which he "reconfigures." Offering "an overview of how national, ethnic, and religious identities are constructed through language and how language is constructed through them," the author moves beyond the still-dominant view of language as an autonomous, formalistic system that enables one to generate representations and self-representations and to communicate. In a wide-ranging discussing that quotes Ferdinand de Saussure and Dante with equal ease, Joseph gives interpretation a central role and explores its foundational coupling with identity. He argues that to separate language as a system from those who speak it purposively is to distance one from whatever truths can be learned about language. He devotes two chapters to a helpful survey of theories from linguistics and other disciplines such as anthropology, looking at how they sought to connect language and identity. Other chapters explore how language is intricately involved in the construction of national and religious identity, with examples drawn from Hong Kong and, with particular efficacy, from Lebanon. Complex, lucid, and accessible, this is an important volume. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. K. Tololyan Wesleyan University

Preface	p. x
1 Introduction	p. 1
The identity of identity	p. 1
What language has to do with it	p. 2
Fundamental types of identity	p. 3
Construction and multiplicity	p. 6
Other terms used in current research	p. 9
Identity as a linguistic phenomenon	p. 11
2 Linguistic Identity and the Functions and Evolution of Language	p. 15
Identity and the traditional functions of language	p. 15
Identity and the phatic and performative functions	p. 17
Does identity constitute a distinctive function of language?	p. 20
'Over-reading': identity and the evolution of language	p. 25
Conclusion	p. 39
3 Approaching Identity in Traditional Linguistic Analysis	p. 41
Introduction	p. 41
Classical and Romantic views of language, nation, culture and the individual	p. 42
The nineteenth century and the beginnings of institutional linguistics	p. 46
The social in language: Voloshinov vs Saussure	p. 48
Jespersen and Sapir	p. 51
Firth, Halliday and their legacy	p. 56
Later structuralist moves toward linguistic identity: Brown & Gilman, Labov and others	p. 58
From 'women's language' to gender identity	p. 61
From Network Theory to communities of practice and language ideologies	p. 63
4 Integrating Perspectives from Adjacent Disciplines	p. 67
Input from 1950s sociology: Goffman	p. 67
Bernstein	p. 68
Attitudes and accommodation	p. 70
Foucault and Bourdieu on symbolic power	p. 73
Social Identity Theory and 'self-categorisation'	p. 76
Early attempts to integrate 'social identity' into sociolinguistics	p. 77
Communication Theory of Identity	p. 80
Essentialism and constructionism	p. 83
5 Language in National Identities	p. 92
The nature of national identities	p. 92
When did nationalism begin?	p. 95
Constructing national identity and language: Dante's De vulgari eloquentia	p. 98
Taming and centring the language: Nebrija and Valdes	p. 102
Language imagined as a republic: Du Bellay	p. 106
Fichte on language and nation	p. 109
Renan and the Kedourie-Gellner debate	p. 111
Anderson's 'imagined communities' and Billig's 'banal nationalism'	p. 115
De-essentialising the role of language: Hobsbawm and Silverstein	p. 119
Studies of the construction of particular national-linguistic identities	p. 125
Europe	p. 126
Asia	p. 128
Africa	p. 130
Americas	p. 130
Australasia and Oceania	p. 131
6 Case Study 1: The New Quasi-Nation of Hong Kong	p. 132
Historical background	p. 132
The 'myth' of declining English	p. 134
Samples of Hong Kong English	p. 140
The formal distinctiveness of Hong Kong English	p. 144
The status of Hong Kong English	p. 148
The functions of Hong Kong English	p. 150
Chinese identities	p. 151
Constructing colonial identity	p. 154
The present and future roles of English	p. 158
7 Language in Ethnic/Racial and Religious/Sectarian Identities	p. 162
Ethnic, racial and national identities	p. 162
From communities of practice to shared habitus	p. 167
The particular power of ethnic/racial identity claims	p. 168
Religious/sectarian identities	p. 172
Personal names as texts of ethnic and religious identity	p. 176
Language spread and identity-levelling	p. 181
8 Case Study 2: Christian and Muslim Identities in Lebanon	p. 194
Introduction	p. 194
'What language is spoken in Lebanon?'	p. 195
Historical background	p. 196
Distribution of languages by religion	p. 197
The co-construction of religious and ethnic identity: Maronites and Phoenicians	p. 198
Constructing Islamic Arabic uniqueness	p. 200
Recent shifts in Lebanese language/identity patterns	p. 203
Still more recent developments	p. 207
Renan and the 'heritage of memories'	p. 208
Linking marginal ethnic identities: Celts and Phoenicians	p. 212
Language, abstraction and the identity of Renan	p. 215
Maalouf's utopian anti-identity	p. 220
Afterword: Identity and the Study of Language	p. 224
Notes	p. 228
Bibliography	p. 235
Index	p. 256

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