The Language of Belonging

Abstract

In this chapter we discuss and exemplify in detail a range of linguistic phenomena which we want to subsume under the heading of ‘the language of belonging’. We will point to the ways in which the language we use in everyday life is implicated in constructing and confirming multiple identities which may intersect, cross over, overlap, challenge or complement one another. How is group identification achieved, how are local, regional, national or transnational — or indeed any other forms of group affiliations — discursively managed within the social, geopolitical and temporal contexts of people’s lives? In this and the following chapter we shall explore micro-level features of discourse that we see as contributing to the construction of the speaker’s cultural identity. To do this we would like to propose a substantive analytic ‘template’ which other analysts can equally well apply to any type of spoken data. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 70 citations exist upstream.