Language and cultural identity

In 1915, Edmond Laforest, a prominent Haitian writer, stood upon a bridge, tied a French Larousse dictionary around his neck, and leapt to his death. This symbolic, if fatal, grand gesture dramatizes the relation of language and cultural identity. Henry Lous Gates, who recounts this story, adds “While other black writers, before and after Laforest, have been drowned artistically by the weight of various modern languages, Laforest chose to make his death an emblem of this relation of overwhelming indenture”.

Cultural identity

It is widely believed that there is a natural connection between the language spoken by members of social group and that group’s identity. By their accent, their vocabulary, their discourse patterns, speakers identify themselves and are identified as members of this or that speech and discourse community. From this membership, they draw personal strength and pride, as well as a sense of social importance and historical continuity from using the same language as the group they belong to.

But how to define which group one belongs to? In isolated, homogeneous communities one may still define group membership according to common cultural practices and daily face-to-face interactions. But in modern, historically complex, open societies it is much more difficult to define the boundaries of any particular social group and the linguistic and cultural identities of its members.

Take ethnicity for example. In 1982 survey conducted among the highly mixed population of Belize (former British Honduras) it was found out that different people ascribed themselves to different ethnicities as either Spanish, Creole, Maya or Belizean, according to which ethnic criterion they focused on – physical features (hair and skin), general appearance, genetic descent, provenance, or nationality. Rarely was language used as an ethnically defining criterion. Interestingly, it was only under the threat of a Guatemalan takeover as soon as British rule would cease, that the sense of a Belizean national identity slowly started emerging from among the multiple ethnic ascriptions that people still give themselves to this day.

Group identity based on race would seem easier to define, and yet there are almost as many genetic differences, say, between members of the same White, or Black race as there are between the classically described human races, not to speak of the difficulty in some cases of ascertaining with 100% exactitude a person’s racial lineage. For example, in 1983 the South African government changed the racial classification of 690 people: 2/3 of these, who had been Coloreds, became Whites, 71 who had been Blacks became Coloreds, and 11 Whites were redistributed among other racial groups. And, of course, there is no necessary correlation between a given racial characteristic and the use of a given language or variety of language.

Regional identity is equally contestable. As reported in the London Times of February 1984, when a Soviet book, Populations of the World, claimed that the population of France consisted of French, Alsatians, Flemings, Bretons, Basques, Catalans, Corsicans, Jews, Armenians, Gypsies and others, George Marchais, the French Communist leader, violently disagreed that for them every man and woman of French nationality is French, France is not a multinational state, it is one nation, the product of a long history.

One would think that national identity is a clear cut either/or affair (either you are or you are not a citizen), but it is one thing to have a Turkish passport, another thing to ascribe yourself to a Turkish national identity if you were born, raised and educated in Germany, a native speaker of German, and happen to have Turkish parents.

Despite the entrenched belief in the one language=one culture equation, individuals assume several collective identities that are likely not only to change over time in dialogue with others, but are liable to be in conflict with one another. For example, an immigrant’s sense of self, that was linked in his country of origin to his social class, his political views, or his economic status, becomes, in the new country, overwhelmingly linked to his national citizenship or his religion, for this is the identity that is imposed on him by others, who see in him now, for example, only a Turk or a Muslim. His own sense of self, or cultural identity, changes accordingly. Out of nostalgia for the “old country”, he may tend to become more Turkish than the Turks and entertain what Benedict Anderson has called “long distance nationalism”. The Turkish he speaks may become with the passing of years somewhat different from the Turkish spoken today in the streets of Ankara; the community he used to belong to is now more an “imagined community” than the actual present-day Turkey.

 

Cultural stereotypes

The problem lies in equating the racial, ethnic, national identity imposed on an individual by the state’s bureaucratic system, and that individual’s self-ascription. Group identity is not a natural fact, but a cultural perception. What we perceive about a person’s culture and language is what we have been conditioned by our own culture to see, and the stereotypical models already built around our own. Group identity is a question of focusing and diffusion of ethnic, racial, national concepts or stereotypes. Focusing is an anthropological concept referring to the process by which stereotypes are formed by selectively focusing on certain classificatory concepts prevalent within a certain discourse community. Diffusion is an anthropological concept that refers to the process by which stereotypes are formed by extending the characteristic of one person or group of persons to all, e.g., all Americans are individualists, all Chinese are collectivists.

E.g. A man in Singapore claimed that he would never have any difficulty in telling the difference between an Indian and a Chinese. But how he would instantly know that a dark-skinned non-Malay person was an Indian (and not Pakistani), and that the light-skinned non-European was Chinese (not Korean), unless he differentiated the two according to the official Singaporian ethnic categories: Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others? In another context with different racial classifications he might have interpreted differently the visual clues presented to him by people in the street. His interpretation was focused by the classificatory concepts prevalent in his society. In turn this focus may prompt him, by a phenomenon of diffusion, to identify all other Chinese along the same ethnic categories, according to the stereotype “All Chinese look alike to me”.

Societies impose racial and ethnic categories only on certain groups: Whites do not usually identify themselves by the color of their skin, but by their provenance or nationality. They would find it ludicrous to draw their sense of cultural identity from their membership in the White race. Two Danish women in the US were startled when a young African-American boy asked them about their culture. Seeing how perplexed they were he explained that he was Black. They answered that they spoke Danish and came from Denmark. The boy did not use language as a criterion of group identity, but the Danes did.

European identities have traditionally been built much more around language and national citizenship, and around folk models of “one nation=one language”, than around ethnicity or race. But even in Europe the matter is not so simple. For example, Alsatians who speak German, French and Germanic Platt may alternatively consider themselves as primarily Alsatians, or French, or German, depending on how they position themselves vis-à-vis the history of their region and their family biography. A youngster born and raised in France of Algerian parents may, even though he speaks only French, call himself Algerian in France, but when abroad he might prefer to be seen as French, depending on which group he wishes to be identified with at the time.

Examples from other parts of the world show how complex the language-cultural identity relationship really is. The Chinese, for example, identify themselves ethnically as Chinese even though they speak languages or dialects which are mutually unintelligible. Despite the fact that a large number of Chinese don’t know how to read and write, it is the Chinese character-writing system and the art of calligraphy that are the major factors of an overall Chinese group identity.

A further example of the difficulty of equating one language with one ethnic group is given by the case of Sikhs in Britain. Threatened to lose public recognition of their cultural and religious distinctiveness, for example, the wearing of the Sikh turban in schools, Sikh religious leaders have tried to bolster the group’s identity by promoting the teaching of Punjabi, endogamy, and patterns of behavior felt to be central to Sikhism, including hair styles and the wearing of turbans. However, seen objectively, neither the Punjabi language nor the wearing of turbans is peculiar to Sikhism either in India or Pakistan or Britain.

Many cultures have survived even though their language has virtually disappeared (for instance the Yiddish of Jewish culture, the Gullah of American Black culture, the Indian languages of East Indian culture in the Caribbean); others have survived because they were part of an oral tradition kept up within an isolated community (Acadian French in Louisiana), or because their members learned the dominant language, a fact that ironically enabled them to keep their own. Thus, in New Mexico, a certain Padre Martinez of Taos led the cultural resistance of Mexican Spanish speakers against the American occupation by encouraging them to learn English as a survival tool so that they could keep their Hispanic culture and the Spanish language alive.