Language and Ethnicity: The View from Within

Abstract

As the twentieth century draws to an end, anyone who keeps abreast of the news from the former Yugoslavia, the former USSR, Burundi and Rwanda, the West Bank and Gaza, Northern Ireland, Somalia, South Africa, and various other trouble-spots throughout the globe must be convinced of the importance of ethnicity in the relationships between individuals, on the one hand, and the relationships between collectivities, on the other. Nevertheless, important though it may be in human affairs, “ethnicity” is not an exact scientific term. Rather, like “race,” “people,” “nation,” and “nationality,” terms with which it is semantically associated, it pertains to one of those “perilous ideas” which the social sciences have initially borrowed from, then elaborated, and now share with popular discourse (Wolf, 1994–1).* Much of its importance in sociolinguistics stems from the fact that ethnic phenomena loom so large and resonate so tumultuously in the “outer (that is the non-academic) world.” The word “ethnicity” per se is of rather recent prominence, however. Indeed, it is still not found in many languages in which more traditional terms such as “people,” “nationality,” “culture,” and even “race” continue to be utilized. However the availability of all of the foregoing terms as well as “ethnicity” in modern English and in several other modern Western languages, means that both the semantic overlap between at least some of them, as well as the boundaries that divide them, need to be clarified.

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