Identity in Sociolinguistics

Ben Rampton
King’s College London
ben.rampton@kcl.ac.uk
(‘Interaction, Ethnicity and Popular Culture in Contemporary Urban Classrooms’)

In the next 10 minutes, I would like to do two things: first, I’ll say a bit about how identity gets treated
in socio-linguistics, and then after that, I’ll suggest one or two reasons why this might be interesting for
other people. (For an indication of the very broad definition of sociolinguistics that we are operating
with in our project, see the Appendix.)
Sociolinguistics studies the relationship between language and society, researchers talk a lot about
identity, and historically, they have looked at it in two ways. Some treat identity as the end-point of
their analysis, as the product of the communicative actions that they are really interested in. Others see
it more closely integrated into communication as a motile, active ingredient that gets ratified,
reformulated or rejected as the activity unfolds from one moment to the next. But in both cases,
researchers tend to look at HOW a given identity gets activated, displayed and processed in situated
discourse, rather than whether & how the identity’s historically new, whether and how it changes over
the life-course etc etc.
I certainly wouldn’t claim that the communicative ‘how’ of identity is all that researchers should
attend to – very far from it – but it is still very rich empirical territory.
• First, there are the semiotic materials, most of them socially and historically derived, positioned
and positioning: accents, intonations, pauses, grammatical patterns, words, and discourse-types.
• Second, there are the ways we handle all this semiotic superabundance from moment-to-moment
in interactional time: our expectations in different situations about how patterns of sound, grammar
and vocabulary are going to cluster together in specific genres and communicative styles; the ways
one bit of talk is both constrained by the bit before, and partly conditions what follows next; and
the strategies we use to deal with the gap between what we expect and what actually gets done.
• And third, there are the ways in which all of this comes together to project, ratify or contest
different identities in very delicately nuanced ways, carrying all sorts of different levels of
ambivalence or conviction. In Erving Goffman’s 1981 analysis, for example, speaking breaks
down into at least three different roles: in our capacities to give physical expression to a message,
we’re ‘animators’; when we choose the words and propositions to express it in, we’re ‘authors’;
and if we ourselves identify with the message, then we’re ‘principals’. These speaker roles often
overlap, but they don’t have to, and I’d like to illustrate the identity implications of this and the
rest of what I’ve been saying with a piece of data.
The extract below comes from a London secondary school, and in it, the teacher is trying to
persuade a class of 14 year olds to try hard in their National Curriculum oral assessment test:

Data extract from a London comprehensive

Background: Mr Newton (Anglo descent), a popular, committed but not very commanding teacher (admired for
his sharp turn-of-phrase by Hanif (Bengali descent), John (Ghanaian descent) and Masud (Bengali)), is trying to
get the English class started on their oral assessment activity, and in part-exhortation, part-warning, he has
mentioned some recently published league tables of schools performance, telling them that in this school, pupils of
fourteen have been achieving the level expected of eleven year olds (Level 4). He is now saying that they should
be getting Level 5, and in line 8, he is referring to official curriculum specifications (eg DFE 1995:26) (blex 33):

1 Mr Newton: ((three claps))

2 Ninnette:::
3 listen (.)
4 listen (2)
5 to get a level Five it starts:
6 to be a little bit more difficult because
7 Shahid (.)
8 the words Standard English start to crop up
9 Rafiq: ((in a constricted sing-song voice:)) ⎡oh
10 |thats
|
very | ⎡(good)
11 Mr N: | and (.)
12 Shahid: I don’t ( | )
13 Mr N: | so:
14 Anons (male): ((laughter))
15 Mr N: sort of people who er answer every question (.)
16 with lots of aints and innits (.)
17 ?Hanif: ((quietly:)) yeh
18 Mr N: are in fact (.)
19 handicappin’ ‘emselves (.)
20 so unfortunately
21 Hanif: >yeh I know
22 Daily Times<
23 Mr N: because you’re all from (.)
24 Hanif: >Ban|gla/desh<
25 Mr N: |because youre all from ⌠Lon|don
26 Hanif: |>Bangla/desh<
27 oh (.)
28 Several: ((laughter, nois|e levels rise gradually))
29 Rafiq ((in hyper-Cockney)): ||so|nar |ban|gla((laughs))
[σ↔ΥνΑ⎤ βΘ)ΝγλΑ)⎤⎤]
30 ?Masud: ((hyper-Cockney accent:)) |so|nar |ban|gla
[σ⎤↔)Υ)νΑ) βΘ)Νγ]
31 John: ((hyper-Cockney accent:)) |so|n/ar |ban|gla
[σ↔)Υ)ν↔) βΘ)ΝγλΑ)]
32 Mr N: (you know) I’m getting fed up with ( back )
33 (1) ((quite a lot of talk going on))
34 because you’re from London
35 you’re handicapped
36 to a certain ext|ent
37 Several: | ((loud laughs))
38 Mr N: because erm: (.)
39 your everyday language (.)
40 if you’re at Eton (.)
41 wouldn’t include too many innits
42 would it (1)
43 alright
44 |listen
45 Anon (m): | ((in a posh voice:))
(because they’re very) posh
46 Mr N: ((fast and quieter:)) yes exactly

There is a huge amount going on here, but for the politics of identity, there are probably two points that
a sociolinguist can draw out.
• First & most obviously, the artful mixture of Bengali and very broad London in lines 29 to 31:
overall in this extract, there’s quite a bit of difficulty finding explicit words and sentences to
express where these kids live at the intersection of class, race and ethnicity, but Rafiq stretches the
resources of language to offer an encapsulation that clearly resonates with Masud and John.
• Second and more subtly, there is some interesting play around Goffman’s notions of ‘author’ and
‘principal’, and there are important ways in which people in this episode articulate a gap between
what they say and what they personally believe in.
o At first glance, Mr Newton looks like he’s articulating naked prejudice, and in lines 5 to 8, if
he’d just said “if you want to get a level 5, you’ve got to use Standard English”, it would
sound as though he’d fully assimilated National Curriculum requirements into his own
discourse. In fact, though, what he actually says is “the words Standard English start to crop
up”, and in doing so, he’s evoking a text elsewhere as the source and authority on this. So
rather than positioning himself as an agent of the government’s curriculum, he’s constructing
himself as another of its legal subjects, effectively locating himself closer to the students than
he might otherwise have done.
o Similarly, if it’s taken out of context, Hanif’s equation of Bangladesh and linguistic handicap
in lines 24 and 26 looks very uncomfortable politically, but in fact you can’t really say either
that he believes this himself, or that he sees Mr Newton as a racist who’d actually take this
line. What he’s doing is trying to help Mr Newton find the word he’s looking for – in
Goffman’s terms, he’s helping with the ‘authoring’ - and when the other kids laugh, I’d say
that in the first instance it’s just the sight of a show-off stumbling that sets them off, even
though there is a potentially very tense coalescence of class, ethnicity, language and stigma at
this point.
For sure, both Hanif and Mr Newton are recognising heavy-duty discourses circulating in their
environment, but these discourses can be taken and used in all sorts of unpredictable ways. In their
practical activity together, people continuously nuance, inflect or rework the pressures and resources
they’re immersed in, and I’d say that it’s the apparatus sociolinguistics offers for talking about these
reworkings that is one of its most significant inter-disciplinary contributions.
Any strip of activity you focus on is configured by processes operating on time-scales ranging
from the historical through the biographical and quotidian to the momentary, and these processes carry
identity-affordances and identity-determinations that are embedded in one another in hugely complex
ways (see Zimmerman’s view of different levels of identity in the Appendix). So to mention just a few
in the episode I played,
• first, there are people working in an arena configured by globalisation and by an educational blend
of market economics and cultural authoritarianism; and
• then behind Mr Newton’s formulation of the test requirements there’s continuing struggle over the
national curriculum.
• Getting more micro, Hanif’s position as a star pupil and the general decentring of authority in this
class feed into the confidence with which Hanif offers turn-completions;
• and moving into processes with quite a short life span, “sonar bangla”’s been circulating for about
a week as a catch-phrase in Hanif’s friendship group, lifted from the cover of a workbook on
imperialism in India.
These processes obviously vary a great deal in the scope for agentive intervention that they offer Mr
Newton and these kids, but even so, when they coalesce in situated activity, processes like these play
off against each other in unpredictable ways and there’s still is a little room for people to at least
partially modulate the impact of even the most general. In the episode I’ve played, we can see the
participants’ manoeuvring themselves to make their habitat just a little bit more congenial, and as well
as illuminating the to-ings and fro-ings of hegemony, I’d say that sociolinguistics is particularly well-
equipped to pick up on what Raymond Williams calls ‘creative practice’, moments when tensions “at
the very edge of semantic availability…, active, pressing but not yet fully articulated” find new
“articulations… in material practice” 1977:134).
There’s a lot more to say about the interface between sociolinguistics and other disciplines, and
given time, I’d say something
• about (a) the productive tension between linguistics and ethnography
• about (b) the relationship between distributional analysis, extended case study methods, and
cumulative comparison with other studies
• and about (c) the ways the interaction order serves as an enormously subtle arena where classical
sociological processes like ritual, liminality and resistance get materialised, where, for example,
new ethnicities take shape and consumer identities struggle for ascendance, and where there is
very fine-grained instantiation of the concerns that scholars like Williams, Bakhtin and Bourdieu
write about.
But asked to encapsulate its relevance in a programme like this, I’d say that sociolinguistics offers a lot
of purchase on the meaning of social processes in the lived experience of everyday communication,
and that it’s a particularly good place to look if one’s interested in the fine-grain of how identity gets
done, actually putting ‘social action’ in front of ‘identity’ in the interpretation of this Programme.
 APPENDIX

A FEW INDICATIVE SOCIOLINGUISTIC IDEAS AND FRAMEWORKS

THE MICRO-ANALYTIC CHALLENGE: Mixing ethnography and micro-interaction analysis, Varenne &
McDermott (1998) argue that:
• “In the routine performance of their everyday life, people seldom answer directly questions about
the wide-scale constraints on their lives. Rather, they point at those aspects of their environment
that at a particular moment are most salient to what they must be doing” (20)
• “It is not easy to capture people in the real time of their practice. When we perform practical
research tasks,… apparently paradoxical things happen as we notice how actors are both
continually sensitive to [convention], and also slightly ‘off’ the most conventional version of what
they could have been expected to do…. [W]hat subjects construct in the real time of their activity
can never be said to be what it would be easiest to say it is… We, as analysts, must always take the
position that it is something more, something other, something that cannot be named without
replacing it within the very frame the act attempted to escape” (177).

IDENTITIES SPEAKING: Goffman (1981) breaks the notion of a ‘speaker’ down into at least three
elements:
• animator: the ‘emitter’, the physical source who transmits the message
• author: the person who selects the words and meanings
• principal: the person who takes/holds responsibility for the import of the message
These three ‘speech roles’ may overlap in a particular utterance (and this frequently happens in e.g.
casual conversation). But they can also often be distributed across different people (as in reported
speech, or in e.g. newscasting).

IDENTITIES IN SOCIAL PROCESS: Zimmerman (1998) provides a useful framework for considering the
way identities are positioned in processes operating over different time-scales when he distinguishes
between:
• discourse (or interactional) identities, such as ‘story teller’, ‘story recipient’, ‘questioner’,
‘answerer’, ‘inviter’, ‘invitee’ etc, which we are continuously taking on and leaving as talk
progresses;
• situated (or institutional) identities, such ‘teacher’, ‘student’, ‘doctor’ & ‘patient’, which come into
play in particular kinds of institutional setting;
• ‘transportable’ identities which are latent, travel with individuals across situations, and are
potentially relevant at any time (e.g ‘old man’, ‘working class woman’)
These identities can either be ‘oriented to’, actively influencing the way that people try to shape both
their own actions and the subsequent actions of others, or they may be merely ‘apprehended’, noticed
but not treated as immediately relevant to the interaction on hand. And the interactional and
institutional identities that a person projects at any moment may be ratified, reformulated or resisted in
the actions of the people that immediately follow.

DEFINING ‘SOCIOLINGUISTICS’

We operate with a very broad conception of sociolinguistics, encompassing and/or borrowing from
linguistics, pragmatics, (critical) discourse analysis, conversation analysis, the ethnography of
communication, linguistic anthropology, micro-sociology, and cultural studies. Indicative texts
(including quite a few by members of our project team):

Androutsopoulos, J & A Georgakopoulou (eds) 2003 Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities.

Amsterdam: Benjamins
Cameron, D. 2001. Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage
Creese A and C. Leung 2003. Teachers' discursive constructions of ethno-linguistic difference:
Professional issues in working with inclusive policy. Prospect, 18(2), 3-19. (with A Creese)
 Duranti, A. 1997 Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Georgakopoulou, A. & D. Goutsos 2004 Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. 2nd Edition.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ Press.
Georgakopoulou, A. 1998 Narrative. In J Verschueren et al (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics.
Benjamins
Georgakopoulou, A. 2002 Narrative & identity management: discourse & social identities in a tale
of tomorrow. Res. Lang. & Soc. Int. 35: 427-451
Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell
Harris, R. 2003 Language & new ethnicities - multilingual youth & diaspora. Working Papers in
Urban Language & Literacies 22. KCL. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/education/ wpull.html
Harris, R. & B. Rampton 2002 Creole metaphors in cultural analysis: On the limits & possibilities
of (socio-)linguistics. Critique of Anthropology 21/1:31-51
Harris, R. & B. Rampton 2003. The Language, Ethnicity and Race Reader. London: Routledge.
Mohan, B., C. Leung & C. Davison 2001. English as a Second Language in the Mainstream:
Teaching, Learning, and Identity. London: Longman.
Rampton, B. 1995. Crossing: Language & Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.
Rampton, B. (forthcoming). Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School.
Rampton, B., R. Harris & C. Dover 2002 Interaction, media culture & adolescents at school: End
of project report. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies 20. KCL.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/education/wpull.html
Rampton, B., K. Tusting, J. Maybin, R. Barwell, A. Creese & V. Lytra 2004. Linguistic
ethnography in the UK: A discussion paper. At http://www.ling-ethnog.org.uk
Varenne, H. & R. McDermott 1998. Successful Failure. Colorado: Westview Press
Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: OUP.
Zimmerman, D. 1998. Identity, context, interaction. In C. Antaki & S. Widdicombe (eds)
Identities in Talk. London: Sage. 87-106

PROJECT TEAM working on ‘Interaction, Ethnicity & Popular Culture in Contemporary Urban
Classrooms’
• Prof Ben Rampton (Project Director)
• Dr Roxy Harris (roxy.harris@kcl.ac.uk)
• Dr Alexandra Georgakopoulou (alexandra.georgakopoulou@kcl.ac.uk)
• Dr Caroline Dover (c.dover@virgin.net)
• Dr Constant Leung (constant.leung@kcl.ac.uk)
• Research Assistant (to be appointed)