LING20010 Chap.8 Language, Identity and Social Meaning
Language, Identity and Social Meaning
Identity implies both sameness and difference: an identity people claim for themselves and one others ascribe to them. This chapter follows the subject from Le Page and Tabouret-Keller's acts of identity, through Communication Accommodation Theory and its convergence, divergence and maintenance, to the move from focused to diffuse linguistic systems.
It contrasts the speech community model with the community of practice model, using Eckert's jocks and burnouts and Bucholtz's nerd girls and their superstandard style, and the Newcastle study of mothers' speech to young children.
The centre of the chapter is Eckert's three waves of variation research, which differ in what they think a variable indexes, and the third-wave ideas of the indexical field, styles, personae and bricolage. Labov's Martha's Vineyard study shows identity at work from the field's beginning.
It ends with how identity work spreads beyond language: posture, dress, movement and shared symbols such as a football club's colours all signal belonging, and language is one resource among many that speakers combine.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Acts of identity
- 02
Convergence, divergence and maintenance
- 03
Focused and diffuse systems
- 04
Speech communities and communities of practice
- 05
The three waves of variation research
- 06
Indexical fields, personae and bricolage
Worked example · free
Trace what one variable indexes across three waves
- 1First wave: broad correlations with macro categories, so negative concord indexes working-class status.
- 1Second wave: local categories found ethnographically, so it indexes being a burnout.
- 1Third wave: variables index characteristics, so it indexes a burnout persona speakers can take up or drop.
- 1The shift is from asking which category uses a form to asking what the form means in a moment.
Key terms
- Acts of identity
- Acts of identity are utterances through which speakers make their speech resemble or differ from groups they identify with.
- Convergence
- Convergence is adjusting your speech towards an interlocutor's style, which signals social integration.
- Divergence
- Divergence is moving your speech away from an interlocutor's style, which signals social disassociation.
- Indexical field
- An indexical field is the set of related social meanings that a single variable can carry in different contexts.
- Bricolage
- Bricolage is the combining of variables and other semiotic resources into styles that build a persona.
Language, Identity and Social Meaning FAQ
What is the difference between a focused and a diffuse system?
When people first accommodate to one another, their linguistic behaviour is variable, or diffuse. Over time, patterns with particular people and contexts become regular and predictable, or focused, as English in Australia did between 1830 and today.
What was superstandard style?
Bucholtz's nerd girls used careful pronunciation, avoided vowel reduction and slang, favoured formal or scientific words and resisted vowel fronting. The style rejected coolness and conventional femininity and, Bucholtz argues, also emphasised whiteness through standard forms.
What did the Newcastle study of child-directed speech show?
Mothers used more of the standard [t] when talking to girls and more of the vernacular variant when talking to boys, and the children began producing these gendered variants themselves between the ages of three and four.
What is Communication Accommodation Theory?
It is Giles's account of how speakers adjust their speech towards or away from the people they talk to. Convergence signals integration, divergence signals distance, and maintenance asserts the speaker's own identity, so each move expresses an attitude towards the listener.
Assessment move
Revise this chapter as a sequence of ideas rather than a list of studies. Start with the definition of identity as claimed and ascribed, then acts of identity, then accommodation with its three moves, each tied to an example you can explain. Learn the three waves as a timeline and practise filling it in for negative concord and for one variable of your own.
Then link the third wave to the variables, styles and personae chain and to bricolage. Finally, compare the speech community and community of practice models in a two-column table, because definition questions often turn on that contrast and identity projects must use it.
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