Language crossing as act of identity

One way of surviving culturally in immigration settings is to exploit, rather than stifle, the endless variety of meanings afforded by participation in several discourse communities at once. More and more people are living, speaking and interacting in-between spaces, across multiple languages or varieties of the same language: Latinos in Los Angeles, Pakistanis in London, Arabs in Paris, but also Black Americans in New York or Atlanta, choose one way of talking over another depending on the topic, the interlocutor and the situational context.

Language crossing is the switch from one language code or variety to another, or stylization of one variety, or creation of hybrid varieties of the same code, as an act of identity or resistance. Such language crossings are frequent in inter-ethnic communication. They include the switching of codes, i.e. the insertion of elements from one language into another, be they isolated words, whole sentences, or prosodic features of speech. Language crossing enables speakers to change footing within the same conversation, but also to show solidarity or distance towards the discourse communities whose languages they are using, and whom they perceive their interlocutor as belonging. By crossing languages, speakers perform cultural acts of identity. Act of identity is the way in which speakers display their cultural stance toward their membership in a specific culture, and toward the culture of others through their use of language. E.g. two teenagers from Mexico in the US American schools discuss their things in Spanish, but discussing the fact that one has the piano they switch into English. As it is the mark of belonging to different culture.

Language crossing can be used also for more complex stances by speakers who wish to display multiple cultural memberships and play off one against the other. Frequently speakers who belong to several cultures insert the intonation of one language into the prosody of another, or use phrases from one language as citational inserts into the other distance themselves from alternative identities or to mock several cultural identities by stylizing, parodying, or stereotyping them all if it suits their social purposes of the moment.

When speaking of cultural identity, we have to distinguish between the limited range of categories used by societies to classify their populations, and the identities that individuals ascribe to themselves under various circumstances and in the presence of various interlocutors. While the former is based on simplified and often quite stereotypical representations, the latter may vary with the social context. The ascription of cultural identity is particularly sensitive to the perception and acceptance of an individual by others, but also to the perception that others have themselves, and to the distribution of legitimate roles and rights that both parties hold within the discourse community. Cultural identity is a question of both indenture to a language spoken or imposed by others, and personal, emotional investment in that language through the apprenticeship that went into acquiring it. The dialectic of the individual and the group can acquire dramatic proportions when nationalistic language policies come into play.

 

Linguistic nationalism

Linguistic nationalism is association of one language variety (standard or national language) with membership of one national community. For example, during the French Revolution, the concept of a national language linked to a national culture was intended to systematically replace the variety of regional dialects and local practices. Between 1790 and 1792 a questionnaire was sent to lawyers, clergymen, and politicians in the French provinces under the pretext of documenting and cataloguing the linguistic and ethnographic uses of the thirty local “patois” spoken in France at the time. In fact, through this survey the Jacobins established a blueprint for the subsequent systematic eradication of these ”patois”. Historians have debated whether the conscious governmental policy of annihilation of local dialects in France at the time was done for the sake of national and ideological unity, or in order to establish the dominance of bourgeois Parisian culture over the uncouth peasant culture, or in order to break strong cultural monopoly of the Catholic Church who catechized its faithful in the local vernaculars.

Linguistic wars are always also political and cultural wars. Efforts by present-day France to cultivate a network of French speakers around the world, and link it to francophone identity must be seen as the way of countering the overwhelming spread of English by offering speakers a supernational cultural identity that is exclusively monitored by Academie Franҁaise, a French national institution that is seen as the guarantor of cultural purity.

Linguistic utopia – language as shared patrimony, a self-contained, autonomous, and homogeneous linguistic system based on a homogeneous social world. E.g. The Basque and Catalan identities cross, linguistically and culturally, the national borders of France and Spain, and thus replace the nation by the region. Nation-states respond to such tendencies by refocusing national identity either around a national language or around the concept of multiculturalism. Besides being used as a means of excluding outsiders, the use of one language is often perceived as a sign of political allegiance.