Language and identities

Abstract

In this chapter we move our focus from the more macro level of various countries’ official recognition of themselves as multilingual states (societal multilingualism) to the more micro level of people’s multilingualism (individual multilingualism). It should be clear that all the languages or varieties that we use have both instrumental and identity functions. However, in any given place and time, some languages will be perceived as being more useful resources than others, with immigrant minority languages often at the bottom of this hierarchy. It always depends on the particular context we are in: a highly valued resource in one society does not necessarily keep this value when we move to another. At the same time, a negatively valued language can have a highly positive identity function associated with it for a particular group of people. In this chapter, we try to understand this identity function of language and how, in multilingual situations, identity may be linked to more than one language. Before we undertake this investigation, we first need to understand how identity works. Let us therefore start by looking at how other people influence our identity through processes of categorization.

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