Language and social identity: an integrationist critique

The concepts of ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’, which attribute to the individual one fixed underlying ‘linguistic identity’ (or two in the case of bilinguals), are shunned by sociocultural linguists with an interest in group identities, precisely because identities, while being linguistically constructed, are held by the ethnographer to be ‘fluid’ and never antecedently given. Sociolinguists working on identity within the sociocultural framework have therefore turned their back on any dialectological questions, preferring to focus on how linguistic features may contextually index a social identity as part of ‘styles’ (rather than ‘varieties of language’). This paper critically examines the work of two American anthropologists and linguists, Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, from the vantage point of an integrational critique of linguistics (cf. also Pablé and Haas, 2010). The focal point of our critique is the conviction that ‘identities’, as first-order communicational phenomena, cannot be the object of scientific empirical research because this presupposes that indexical values are viewed as micro-contextually determined and available to outsiders with an ‘insider view’. The integrationist, in turn, sees ‘identity’ as a metadiscursive label used by lay speakers to cope with their everyday first-order experience. For the integrationist, this is where identity research begins and ends.

Research highlights
► ‘Social identity’ cannot be researched scientifically, as a first-order phenomenon, because (i) language is not a ‘fixed code’ and (ii) because the linguist is in no privileged position with respect to the non-linguist.
► ‘Identity’ is a second-order (linguistic) construct, the study of which ought to be undertaken within a ‘lay-oriented linguistics’.
► Both integrational linguistics and sociocultural linguistics reject a static and predetermined view of language and society, but only the former has taken the methodological consequences ensuing from such a rejection.