Language: A Case of Awakened Identity

The link between language and identity has been on my radar since my dear colleague Gianni Licata’s presentation at the IH Italy conference last February. He underlined how integral language is to identity, and shared his story of how his Italian- and English-speaking personas vary. I identified immediately, as speaking Spanish makes me more expressive and gets me gesticulating like English rarely can.

I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast yesterday afternoon when my ears pricked up at the mention of language and identity; this got me reading and thinking, then writing, and this is the fruit of the labour of revisiting this interesting topic…

Different Language, Different Me

“So I had a girlfriend…She was across the room talking to her mum on the phone in French. Then her mum put her dad on the phone so she switched to Catalan…I noticed that – wow – that’s not Peggy talking two different languages, then three because she would, like, put her hand on the phone and say ‘Ah – my mum says dadada…’

So – English, French, Catalan. It’s not Peggy speaking three languages; those are three different Peggys. She’s different. Her facial ticks and her movements and her body position changed depending on the language she was speaking…

I started researching multiple personality…Language…reconfigures the brain* in such a way that she actually has different identities in those languages.“

Christopher Ryan on JRE #1369, 24/10/2019 – 00.30 – 1.55 in the video below:

*For example, read the summary of this research on how different areas of the brain are employed to decode Mandarin Chinese and English, and watch how language affects brain function in this short video:

Different Language, Different Group

It’s not just that the language we use affects our individual identity, but also our group identity. Two constructs that detail this are Lesley Milroy’s social networks and Robert Le Page’s acts of identities (Lanehart, S.L., 1996).

Milroy’s work stresses the connection between language and community: how common languages or accent/dialect variations create a social connection between their users, and why local or regional dialects and minority languages can still survive in today’s globalised world. Example seen with my own eyes: strangers from Liverpool holidaying in Benidorm, Spain, formed an instant brotherhood thanks to a shared Scouse accent.

Meanwhile, Le Page’s central principle is that the individual creates the patterns of their linguistic behaviour to resemble the groups they wish to identify with (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985 cit. Rickford, J.R., 2011). For example, notice how Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Ali G persona and British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg (current Leader of the House of Commons) use the English language to demonstrate their respective social group identities:

Where do I go from here?

The language we’re operating in conditions our character and how we interact with the world as part of a group or community, so the key question for our learners is who do you want to be in English?

We can start to anchor this by encouraging learners to pinpoint who their model L2 speaker is: Queen Elizabeth II or Beyonce? Crocodile Dundee or Bill Clinton? Once selected, the more listening practice learners can do with their personal L2 model, the better, and they should make an effort to imitate this speaker’s speech and gestures.

Mastering a foreign language is a matter of identity more than just knowledge, and our teaching should reflect this.

Any comments or queries, please leave a Comment below. Thanks.

Bibliography

Lanehart, S.L., 1996. ‘The Language of Identity’ in The Journal of English Linguistics, Vol. 24 No.4, December 1996 pp.322-331. Accessed from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/007542429602400407?journalCode=enga

Rickford, J.R., 2011. ‘Le Page’s theoretical and applied legacy
in sociolinguistics and creole studies’. Accessed from: http://www.johnrickford.com/portals/45/documents/papers/Rickford-2011b-Le-Pages-Theoretical-and-Applied-Legacy.pdf

Taylor, L., 2015. ‘How the Language you Speak Changes Your Brain’, World Economic Forum. Accessed from: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/how-the-language-you-speak-changes-your-brain/