Language and Identity National, Ethnic, Religious John E. Joseph Language and Identity Previous publications by this author: ELOQUENCE AND POWER: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages (1987) LIMITING THE ARBITRARY: Linguistic Naturalism and its Opposites in Plato’s Cratylus and Modern Theories of Language (2000) LANDMARKS IN LINGUISTIC THOUGHT II: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century (with Nigel Love and Talbot J. Taylor, 2001). FROM WHITNEY TO CHOMSKY: Essays in the History of American Linguistics (2002) Language and Identity National, Ethnic, Religious John E. Joseph © John E. Joseph 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the palgrave Macmillan division of St Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–99752–2 hardback ISBN 0–333–99753–0 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joseph, John Earl. Language and identity : national, ethnic, religious / John E. Joseph. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–99752–2 (cloth) — ISBN 0–333–99753–0 (pbk.) 1. Language and languages. 2. Identity (Psychology) 3. Sociolinguistics. 4. Nationalism. I. Title. P107.J67 2004 400—dc22 2004043621 10987654321 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne In memory of my beloved grandparents and godparents Tanus ibn Yusuf Abu Butrus Hubayqat / Anthony Joseph 4 Nov. 1883–20 Sept. 1963 Suraya Qamar / Sarah Amar Joseph 1 Nov. 1898–25 Apr. 1987 This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface x 1Introduction 1 The identity of identity 1 What language has to do with it 2 Fundamental types of identity 3 Construction and multiplicity 6 Other terms used in current research 9 Identity as a linguistic phenomenon 11 2 Linguistic Identity and the Functions and Evolution of Language 15 Identity and the traditional functions of language 15 Identity and the phatic and performative functions 17 Does identity constitute a distinctive function of language? 20 ‘Over-reading’: identity and the evolution of language 25 Conclusion 39 3 Approaching Identity in Traditional Linguistic Analysis 41 Introduction 41 Classical and Romantic views of language, nation, culture and the individual 42 The nineteenth century and the beginnings of institutional linguistics 46 The social in language: Voloshinov vs Saussure 48 Jespersen and Sapir 51 Firth, Halliday and their legacy 56 Later structuralist moves toward linguistic identity: Brown & Gilman, Labov and others 58 From ‘women’s language’ to gender identity 61 From Network Theory to communities of practice and language ideologies 63 vii viii Contents 4 Integrating Perspectives from Adjacent Disciplines 67 Input from 1950s sociology: Goffman 67 Bernstein 68 Attitudes and accommodation 70 Foucault and Bourdieu on symbolic power 73 Social Identity Theory and ‘self-categorisation’ 76 Early attempts to integrate ‘social identity’ into sociolinguistics 77 Communication Theory of Identity 80 Essentialism and constructionism 83 5 Language in National Identities 92 The nature of national identities 92 When did nationalism begin? 95 Constructing national identity and language: Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia 98 Taming and centring the language: Nebrija and Valdés 102 Language imagined as a republic: Du Bellay 106 Fichte on language and nation 109 Renan and the Kedourie–Gellner debate 111 Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ and Billig’s ‘banal nationalism’ 115 De-essentialising the role of language: Hobsbawm and Silverstein 119 Studies of the construction of particular national-linguistic identities 125 Europe 126 Asia 128 Africa 130 Americas 130 Australasia and Oceania 131 6 Case Study 1: The New Quasi-Nation of Hong Kong 132 Historical background 132 The ‘myth’ of declining English 134 Samples of Hong Kong English 140 The formal distinctiveness of Hong Kong English 144 The status of Hong Kong English 148 The functions of Hong Kong English 150 Contents ix Chinese identities 151 Constructing colonial identity 154 The present and future roles of English 158 7 Language in Ethnic/Racial and Religious/Sectarian Identities 162 Ethnic, racial and national identities 162 From communities of practice to shared habitus 167 The particular power of ethnic/racial identity claims 168 Religious/sectarian identities 172 Personal names as texts of ethnic and religious identity 176 Language spread and identity-levelling 181 8 Case Study 2: Christian and Muslim Identities in Lebanon 194 Introduction 194 ‘What language is spoken in Lebanon?’ 195 Historical background 196 Distribution of languages by religion 197 The co-construction of religious and ethnic identity: Maronites and Phoenicians 198 Constructing Islamic Arabic uniqueness 200 Recent shifts in Lebanese language/identity patterns 203 Still more recent developments 207 Renan and the ‘heritage of memories’ 208 Linking marginal ethnic identities: Celts and Phoenicians 212 Language, abstraction and the identity of Renan 215 Maalouf’s utopian anti-identity 220 Afterword: Identity and the Study of Language 224 Notes 228 Bibliography 235 Index 256 Preface This book attempts to put forward a coherent view of identity as a lin- guistic phenomenon in a way that will speak to people across a wide range of interests. That is, inevitably, an undertaking fraught with opportunities for failure. I am a linguist by training and profession – a broad-minded linguist, I think – but inevitably more attuned to the interests that arise from my field than to neighbouring ones, despite my best efforts. The final chapter will consider what exactly these intellec- tual boundaries themselves mean in terms of identity. The Foreword to my book Limiting the Arbitrary (2000) explains that it attempts a historical understanding of the distinction between the nat- ural and the arbitrary in language, upon which my earlier Eloquence and Power (1987) had relied too uncritically. The present book is, on one level, an effort to deal with the phenomena treated in the 1987 work, but with the natural–arbitrary dichotomy taken away, and with certain other unduly powerful concepts declawed. The most obvious of these are ‘power’ itself, which in those late years of the Cold War still resounded with echoes of Gramsci and Foucault, even in the writing of someone with neither Marxist nor post-structuralist theoretical com- mitments; and ‘class’, the very cornerstone of social inquiry, which before 1989 most of us were able to accept uncritically as an analytical category, but after the events of that year had to admit was a social construct of a highly ideological order, in which we as analysts, rather than the members of the ‘classes’ themselves, were doing most of the constructing. The result of modifying these concepts is that the phenomena which make up language standardisation no longer appear so exceptional as they are portrayed in Eloquence and Power, but become difficult to distin- guish from language generally. This has an effect on our understanding of language itself, making it appear no longer to be a decontextualised system of mental calculation or signification, the ‘social’ (or more pre- cisely, human) consequences of which are mere side effects. Manifesting identity, and even more importantly, interpreting identity, come to be seen as central to the very existence and functioning of language. This is not an entirely new view, but one with close precedents in some schools of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking, and more distant precursors extending back to antiquity. Its current x Preface xi resuscitation is having an impact on a wide range of areas concerned with language, including within linguistics the study of sociolinguistics, language acquisition, discourse and pragmatics. But well beyond lin- guistics, the view of identity being rooted in language and vice versa has been taking on growing importance in anthropology, education, sociology, political science, literary and cultural studies, and many other areas besides. My greatest debt of gratitude is to the Leverhulme Trust for the Research Fellowship it awarded me in 1999–2000. Other help has come in the form of grants from the Faculty Group of Arts, Divinity and Music and from the Moray Endowment Fund, the University of Edinburgh, for research on language and identity in Lebanon in the spring term of 1998, research leave from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Edinburgh in the spring term of 1998 and the summer term of 2002. The first research that led to this book was carried out on a Research Grant Award from the University of Hong Kong in 1995–96. I am grateful as well to colleagues and students at the universities of Edinburgh and Hong Kong, the American University of Beirut and the SEAMEO Regional Language Centre in Singapore, who have contributed enormously to my understanding of language and identity.