In what sense English? an exploration of English migrant identities and identification

Abstract

The empirical focus of this article is an analysis of the self‐identities of English‐born persons living in urban Scotland. The material is theorised relative to the debate between modernist conceptions of identity and post‐structuralist notions of identification. The researchers construct a fourfold typology of ‘English’ migrants that helps to problematise the nature and diverse meanings of ‘Englishness’. The search to understand why many English migrants avoid the ‘English’ label in statements of self‐identity leads to consideration of work on neo‐tribes and problems of identification in fluid societies. A secondary, but also important, aspect of the paper is the exploration of ‘accent’ as a marker of ‘identity’. This proves important in bounding the English service class in Scotland, otherwise an invisible migrant population.

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