Linguistic Identity and

the Functions and

Evolution of Language
Identity and the traditional functions
of language

 Linguists and philosophers have traditionally identified the

primary
purposes of language as one or both of the following:
• communication with others, it being impossible for human
beings
to live in isolation;
• representation of the world to ourselves in our own minds –
learning to categorize things using the words our language
provides us with.
 In Plato’s Cratylus, Socrates says that the purpose of words is for
discriminating things from one another, and for teaching each other about
those things. Discriminating things from one another is what is meant by
representation. Teaching each other about things is communication – where
what is being communicated is, as it happens, representation.
 In the 2300 years since Plato wrote the dialogue, linguists and philosophers
have maintained essentially the same view. Communication has
largely been taken for granted, and the important work to be done on
language has been assumed to be the understanding of its functioning
as a system of representation.
 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), who led attempts to analyse the
functioning of language as a system of representation until finally
deciding that, ultimately, representation cannot be separated from
communication. A language, he concluded, is nothing more nor less
than the use to which it is put.
 Where does linguistic identity fit into this traditional dichotomy?
 In fact, linguistic identity is a category that blurs the dichotomy
between the two traditional functions of language. If we wished, we
might break identity down into components, each of which is
classifiable
as communication or representation, including self-representation.
 Another function of language that has been traditionally recognised
in Western culture is that of expression, where what is expressed are
the
feelings, emotions and passions, usually of an individual, sometimes of
an entire ethnicity or gender or other grouping. Linguists and
philosophers have mostly shied away from giving serious consideration
to
expression as a linguistic function, except in connection with the origin
of language in its most primitive form, before its value for
communication
and representation were recognised.
 The emotions and passions are linked directly to the body, and are contrasted with the
rational operation of the mind which is the basis of representation and communication.
 in modern times, interest in the expressive function of contemporary human language
has not been part of linguistics or the philosophy of language, but of aesthetics,
including aesthetically oriented literary criticism; and in a different mode, of some forms
of psychology, including psychoanalysis, as well as those areas of rhetoric concerned
with appealing to the emotions in modern times, interest in the expressive function of
contemporary human language has not been part of linguistics or the philosophy of
language, but of aesthetics, including aesthetically oriented literary criticism; and in a
different mode, of some forms of psychology, including psychoanalysis, as well as those
areas of rhetoric concerned with appealing to the emotions
Identity and the phatic and
performative functions

 Two other, less traditional functions of language came to be widely

recognised by linguists in the twentieth century, though neither was
originally proposed from within linguistics.
 In 1923 the hugely influential book The Meaning of Meaning appeared.
Even more influential than the main text by Ogden and Richards was
one of the two ‘supplements’,
‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’ by Bronislaw
Malinowski (1884–1942), a Polish-born Lecturer in Social Anthropology
at the London School of Economics.
 Malinowski argued that meaning is
not inherent to words or to propositions, but is dependent upon what
he termed the ‘context of situation’.
 speaking with
someone, as a social act, can be the ‘meaning’ of the speech event,
and
the propositional content exchanged is irrelevant. This is the phatic
function of language. Familiar examples include the ‘small talk’ we
make with strangers and new acquaintances, the classic example
being
remarks about the weather.
 He proposed the term phatic communion for such utterances, defining
it
as ‘a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere
exchange of words’ (ibid., p. 478)
 Although he says it is as much a part
of the speech of civilized people as ‘savages’, he believed that phatic
communion constitutes the original, primitive form of human language.
 His claim that ‘in pure sociabilities and gossip we use language exactly
as savages do’ (ibid., p. 479) came as a surprise to readers of the time.
 Malinowski’s view aligns with the traditional one discussed above
which equates expression with emotion and restricts the domain of
reason to propositional content. Thus Malinowski insists:
 “Are words in Phatic Communion used primarily to convey meaning,
the meaning which is symbolically theirs? Certainly not! They fulfil
a social function and that is their principal aim, but they are neither
the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessarily arouse
reflection in the listener. Once again we may say that language does
not function here as a means of transmission of thought. (Ibid., p.
478)”
 The performative function was first identified by the philosopher
J. L. Austin (1911–60; see Austin, 1962, and Joseph et al., 2001, Chapter 7).
Certain utterances, although similar in form to ones used for describing
(representing) a situation or communicating information about it, in
fact do neither.
 The verb name in ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’
(uttered while smashing a bottle of champagne against the stern) and
bet in ‘I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow’ do not refer to something that
has already happened – rather, the uttering of the
sentence is itself the ‘happening’, the naming of the ship or the placing
of the bet.
 As Austin put it, ‘it seems clear that to utter the sentences
[ . . . ] is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so
uttering
to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it’ (Austin, 1962, p.
6).
 Bourdieu has had a very significant impact on studies of language and
identity through his assertion that claims of identity are in fact a sort of
‘performative’
 The notion of identity as a ‘performative discourse’ has become
a powerful one in recent years, well beyond the ‘ethnic’ and ‘regional’
categories to which Bourdieu originally applied it. By the late 1990s it
had become commonplace to assert that group identities in general –
be
they national, sexual, generational or what have you – are claims made
through performance. An identity exists by virtue of the assertions of it
people make.
Does identity constitute a distinctive
function of language?

 There might well be cause for considering identity as a third, distinct

major function of language. For now, we should be hesitant to sever
links where they partially exist. One’s self-representation of identity is
the organizing and shaping center of one’s representations of the
world.
Similarly, in communication, our interpretation of what is said and
written to us is shaped by and organized around our reading of the
identity of those with whom we are communicating.
 It has been the business of sociolinguistics, as it has developed over
the course of the twentieth century and particularly in the second half
of the century, to examine those features within a language by which
we read a person’s geographical and social origins, level of education,
ethnicity, age, gender and sexuality – the whole range of categorial
identities into which we routinely group people (in the case of age, as
age groups or generations). When I receive a phone call from a
stranger,
I decide within seconds, instinctively, whether it is a man or a woman,
where they are from and roughly how old they are, and what sort of
background they come from
 This is not information that we treat neutrally. The consistent result
of research into ‘language attitudes’ since the 1960s has been to show that we
make further inferences on the basis of these initial ones. We decide whether
and how much we consider the person to be intelligent, likeable, reliable,
trustworthy and so on. The classical method of language attitudes research is
to play tapes of people saying essentially the same thing in different accents,
and in some instances with the same person speaking in more than one
accent, spaced apart so that the subjects (those listening) will not realise that
it is the same person. The subjects are then asked to rate the people they have
heard in terms of intelligence and the other features listed
above.
 in the present context, is that all of us instinctively
make these decisions about the people with whom we come in contact,
largely on the basis of their language – indeed, wholly on that basis if
the communication is by telephone or e-mail or some other form of
writing.
‘Over-reading’: identity and the
evolution of language
 Sociolinguistics is concerned with how people read each other, in two
senses. First, how the meanings of utterances are interpreted, not just
following idealized word senses and rules of syntax as recorded in
dictionaries and grammars, but in the context of who is addressing
whom in what situation. Secondly, how speakers themselves are read,
in the sense of the social and personal identities their listeners
construct
for them based on what they say and how they say it.
 One thing which understanding-based research on language
acquisition
has taught us is that the first thing infants learn to respond to in the
language spoken to and around them is intonation. They learn to read
the emotions of the speaker based upon patterns of melody, volume,
pitch, rhythm, eventually the repetition of phonological patterns
(alliteration, assonance, rhyme), all before understanding the
meanings of
words and sentences.
 Thus a baby will respond joyfully to the sentence
Drop dead ya little bugger uttered in a soft, lilting tone, and will burst
into tears upon hearing the sentence How’s daddy’s little darling then
uttered in a loud, raucous one.
 Speakers, knowing this intuitively, tend to ‘baby talk’ to infants. What is
true here of infants remains true when they grow into adulthood. They
continue to read and react to patterns of various sorts below the surface
of the words and sentences being spoken to them, and the people who
speak to them continue to adjust their utterances, again in a patterned
way, according to how they perceive their audience. Uncovering these
patterns is a large part of the work of sociolinguistics.
 What seems like the paradox of identity can also be understood in
this evolutionarily connected way. On the one hand, identity is about
‘sameness’ (its etymological root) – being Chinese or Muslim connects
one with other Chinese or Muslims to form a category of Chineseness
or Muslimness, of which a particular individual may be a prototypical
or marginal member.
 On the other hand, identity is about who one is uniquely – first of all a
name, then a self that consists of the various identities (in the first
sense) of which one partakes, and finally, for some people, a
completely individual essence that escapes all categorization beyond
association with this particular person.
 Note that these oppositions actually intertwine: identity-as-sameness is
principally recognized through contact with what is different, while
identity-as uniqueness is established largely through the intersection of
identity-as sameness categories.