This document discusses language varieties and national identity. It defines different types of identities, including master identities, interactional identities, personal identities, and relational identities. It examines two ways of viewing language and identity - based on emotional connection or territory. National language plays a role in unity and distinguishing a nation. Language can be a marker of social identity. The boundaries of linguistic identity are permeable as individuals may choose to adopt a new language. When constructing a national identity, reformers in India subsumed fragmented groups into a modern concept of nation. Ideologies about African Americans are reflected in views about African American Vernacular English.

1. Language Varieties as Boundaries
and as National Identity
Muhammad Azam
Research Scholar
COMSATS Institute of Information
Technology Lahore, Pakistan

2. What is Identity
• The stable and fixed aspects of selfhood: things that
you check off on census forms such as . . .
– –Race or ethnicity
– –Nationality
– –Social class
– –Gender
– –Age

3. What is Identity
• Identities are . . .
–Stable features of persons that exist prior to any
particular situation.
• AND
–Dynamic and situated accomplishments,
enacted through talk, and changing from one occasion
to the next.

4. Four Kinds of Identities
• Master identities . . .
– are relatively stable and unchanging: gender,
ethnicity, age, national and regional origins.
• Interactional identities . . .
• – refer to roles that people take on in a
communicative context with specific other people.

5. Four Kinds of Identities
• Personal identities . . .
– are expected to be relatively stable and unique.
Reference ways in which people talk and behave
toward others:
hotheaded, honest, forthright, reasonable,
overbearing, a gossip, a brown-nose.

6. Four Kinds of Identities
• Relational identities . . .
– refer to the kind of relationship that a person
enacts
• with a particular conversational partner
• in a specific situation.

7. Language and Identity
• Beside a boundary, a name, a flag, or a currency,
what makes a country become a respectable and
unique nation is its national language.
• National language is a driving force behind unity of
the nation’s people, and makes them distinct from
other nations – provided you give your language
respect.

8. Language and Identity
• There are two ways of viewing ideologies about
identity has become a topic. John Myhill raises the
issue, arguing that one ideology is what he calls
language-and-identity and the other is an ideology
of language-and-territory (Myhill, 1999).
– The ideology based on identity is more an emotional
connection with language.
– While an ideology based on territory means that its proponents
argue that in each territory, only one particular language
“should be the one used in public circumstances and intergroup
communication”

9. Language and Identity
• There are two ways of viewing ideologies about
identity has become a topic. John Myhill raises the
issue, arguing that one ideology is what he calls
language-and-identity and the other is an ideology
of language-and-territory (Myhill, 1999).
– The ideology based on identity is more an emotional
connection with language.
– While an ideology based on territory means that its proponents
argue that in each territory, only one particular language
“should be the one used in public circumstances and intergroup
communication”

10. Language and Identity
• A language may be important to a group at a symbolic level.
– For instance, individuals may collectively lay claim to a language,
which they themselves do not speak natively, in order to assert a
symbolic identity which will differentiate them from others.
– Urdu language for Muslims of subcontinent
• Language can constitute an important marker of
social identity at various levels of human
interdependence, e.g. subcultural or national.

11. Language and Identity
• It is noteworthy that languages are not inherently ‘good’
or ‘bad’; value and meaning are conferred upon
languages by people, which in turn gives rise to pervasive
social representations. People may or may not act in
accordance with these representations;
• for instance, if a group or its language evokes negative
social representations, a member of the social or
linguistic group may seek social mobility through
membership in a more positively evaluated group.
• The boundaries of linguistic identity are of course
permeable; an individual may choose to leave their
original group and gain membership of another by
adopting a new language.

12. Constructing a national identity
• Pre-modern India did not have the concept of a
nation. It is after contact with the British that it was
imported into Indian discourses. Thus, Syed Ahmed
Khan (1817-1899) uses the word “qaum” for all
Indians and then, when the Muslims drifted apart
from the Hindus, for only Indian Muslims.
• But ‘qaum‘ was, and even now is, used by ordinary
people for extended class or fraternity (biradari).

13. Constructing a national identity
• Thus the Pashto-speaking people were described as
belonging to the Afghan ‘qaum‘ in India.
• Similarly, one could describe one‘s ‘qaum‘ as arain.
Even occupational castes, like weaver (juluha) or
barber (nai), were described as ‘qaum‘.

14. Constructing a national identity
• In short, what the nineteenth century Indian
reformers did was to subsume a society fragmented
along ethnic, occupational and class lines into a
modern, basically Western, identity label: nation
(qaum).
• They created the illusion of unity. They constructed a
would-be nation, much in the way described by
Benedict Anderson (1983), out of groups which did
not see themselves as a nation in the Western sense
of the term at all.

15. Ideologies and African-American
English in the US
• African American Vernacular English (AAVE) variety of
English language is spoken by African-Americans as a
indication of ideology and most consider it one of the
dialects of American English, but a variety that has a
number of distinctive grammatical features.
• The ideologies about African-Americans themselves are
reflected in views about this language variety. Some
scholarly attempts to study the history of AAVE
contribute to a negative bias toward the variety by
arguing that AAVE largely shows continuities from
various British English dialects.