Language as an identity practice
Hello! I’m back in Berlin and have settled back into my routine of work, gym, roller derby, and sleep. Last week, I went to see an exhibition of paintings by one of the most important German Romantic landscape painters, Caspar David Friedrich, which I enjoyed. They didn’t have his most famous painting, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” which depicts, arguably, the most famous back in history. (If there are people in his paintings, you mostly see them from the back.) I particularly liked “The Abbey in the Oakwood” and “The Sea of Ice.”
My friend and I took a little detour through the rest of the first floor, where I saw what may be the best painting I’ve ever seen. It’s by Wilhelm Trübner, a German realist painter, and it shows that people have always loved silly images of animals!
News
I got page proofs for Amplitudes, so the publishing work on that is moving along. There are some great stories in there, so I look forward to sharing it with everyone! (As soon as I have a pre-order link, I’ll let you know!)
4th St. Fantasy was, as always, amazing. I love being surrounded by smart writer people who talk about smart writer things and who have read so many books I’ve never even heard of. (Hi, new subscribers I met there!) This year, I went to the seminar, which was given by C.L. Polk, about how to take an idea you’re not sure what to do with and turn it into a story. They talked about a character diamond, which is a kind of cheat-sheet for character building, and I tried it with the protagonists of my to-be-revised novel in preparation for revisions, and it turns out that one of them doesn’t have much of a personality, so I need to fix that.
Being at conventions always reminds me how science fiction & fantasy fans speak their own dialect(s) and how writers have another dialect with a lot of overlap. Every convention has its own vibe, a set of rules for conduct and, yes, its own linguistic practices. 4th St. is so small that most people go to all the panels (there’s only one track, so it’s possible!), and there are existing in-jokes from previous years, to which new ones are added. (Last year was all about “vibes.”)
SFF, fandom, and conventions as Communities of Practice
Sociolinguistics, as you may guess from the name, looks at the social aspects of language use. There are a lot of sub-branches, and the whole subfield is very nebulous, but in general, sociolinguists want to know why people chose this way of saying things instead of that way, or what it means socially that they did it.
In the 1960s, sociolinguists (and also non-socio-linguists) developed the concept of the “speech community,” which is basically a group of people who speak the same language and share the same cultural norms about its use. One of the big problems with this concept is that it assumes a homogeneity that doesn’t exist. For example, you could define the entire US as a speech community, but you can also see how there are just too many different ways of speaking (regional, cultural) for that to be true. So, what do you do now?
You take a whole nother tack. Penelope Eckert, in her paper “Adolescent Social Structure and the Spread of Linguistic Change” (Language in Society, vol. 17, no. 2 (June 1988), pp. 183–207), describes the social variables at play in whether or not teenagers in a Detroit-area high school use the shifted vowels of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and it’s much more complicated than the speech community theory can account for. The major defining factor of the community to her (at the time of this paper) was what the members of the community considered important — culturally, socially, etc. The Burnouts were united by a desire to separate themselves from their parents and get jobs after high school; they were much more likely to use the shifted vowels than the Jocks, for whom fitting in with and being like their mentors, who would help them get into college, was most important. Speaking a certain way defined them as belonging to a specific community (social group).
But this model wasn’t quite there yet, either, at least not for Eckert and her colleagues and collaborators. So they turned to sociology and the Community of Practice (COP) concept, which was originally published in 1991 by a cognitive anthropologist (Lave) and an educational theorist (Wenger). In their original conception, a COP is a group that comes together because of a shared interest and over time becomes better at doing whatever that interest is. It could be a chess club, a birdwatching society, or a group of people who are interested in music, and they share information with each other and learn more about chess, birds, or music. In this sense, the Society for Creative Anachronism is absolutely a COP, because it is a group of people who are interested in medieval life who come together to learn about (and re-create) various aspects of medieval life.
When sociolinguists got wind of this theory, they realized they could apply it to speech communities, and they did. You had to expand the reasons people come together beyond “learn more about a shared interest,” of course, because not all social groups are built around learning things, but the idea of a (linguistic) community being defined by a set of (linguistic) practices was revolutionizing. It could account for a lot of the things that the speech community model couldn’t (or did poorly), and it was much easier to discuss language as a part of one’s identity with the COP model.
Everyone has a set of practices that help define their identity. It can be wearing a certain style of clothing, projecting a particular attitude, listening to a certain type of music, or speaking a certain way, among other things. These practices can change over time as one’s identity shifts or as one needs to highlight different aspects of their identity. It’s how a person can dress appropriately for their corporate job during the day and put on full Goth attire to go to the club Friday night. It’s why nerds of a certain era use a lot of Monty Python quotes in their speech, and it’s also why tumblr users write their posts like that. (I like your shoelaces, by the way.)
Side note: I wrote a paper for a class in grad school about bilingual humor on German tumblr and presented it as a poster at a conference, which meant I got to explain what “shitposting” was to my thesis advisor’s dissertation advisor. He’s a delightful guy, and he grew up in western North Carolina, so he understood what I meant by “It’s Waffle House at 2 a.m.” (He also opened the first talk I ever saw him give with “Rhotics are a problem.” It’s true, R is a completely bullshit letter, and I have a placeholder file for a future newsletter about them.)
Anyway. People have both positive and negative identity practices. A negative identity practice is, for example, not dressing the way a group you don’t want to be part of dresses, or not acting the way they act. A positive identity practice is putting on your nerdy t-shirt when you go to the con: it affiliates you with the groups “con-goer” and “fan” and, depending on your relationship to the terms, “nerd/geek.”
Mary Bucholtz, in her paper “‘Why Be Normal?’: Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls” (Language in Society, vol. 28, no. 2 (June 1999). pp. 203-223), describes the set of positive and negative identity practices of six self-described nerd girls at a Berkeley, California, high school, but first she lays out the groundwork for why COP theory is better than the speech community model for this type of linguistic research.
Although the COP model “was introduced into sociolinguistics to specifically address issues of gender” (Bucholtz p. 204), it can also be applied to other intersections, like language and race or language and sexuality or even the Venn diagram of all three. One of the questions researchers in this area ask is “how can linguistic data illuminate the social world?” (ibid.), and the speech community model doesn’t provide the right framework to answer that question. Bucholtz argues that the COP model does provide this framework because it factors in the speaker’s agency in making decisions about how to use language to project their identity. Additionally, because a person doesn’t exist in a vacuum, their identity doesn’t, either, and it is intertwined with other social, societal, and cultural factors.
I won’t reproduce her entire argument here, or her brief history of the concept of “the social world as a set of practices” (ibid.), partly for space reasons, and partly because you can read it on JSTOR (which I recommend! The article is fun.) The gist of it is this list of criticisms she levels (p. 207), which she briefly elaborates on over the following few pages.
Its tendency to take language as central.
Its emphasis on consensus as the organizing principle of community.
Its preference for studying central members of the community over those at the margins.
Its focus on the group at the expense of individuals.
Its view of identity as a set of static categories.
Its valorization of researchers’ interpretations over participants’ own understandings of their practices.
Whereas Eckert’s Jocks and Burnouts were focused on being “cool” (by choosing expressions of coolness in direct opposition to one another), the group of nerd girls who get the focus of Bucholtz’s paper have no desire to be “cool.” Being a nerd, she argues, “is about rejecting both Jockness and Burnoutness, and all the other forms of coolness that youth identities take” (p. 211).
What linguistic identity practices do these girls perform? They have a set of negative identity practices — things they perceive that the “cool kids” are doing and, thus, they want to not do — which includes phonological practices (not using colloquial pronunciations, like contractions and simplification of consonant clusters), syntactical practices (avoiding nonstandard forms), and lexical practices (avoiding current slang). They also have a set of positive identity practices — things they believe make them different from the “cool kids” and, thus, they want to do to create their nerd identity — which is almost but not quite a mirror of the negative set. The positive practices are using “superstandard and hypercorrect” forms of pronunciation and syntax, using more formal vocabulary words (the Greek and Latin terms that we called “SAT words” when I was in high school), and the discourse element of word play (punning, parody, and word coinage).
Bucholtz gives examples of these and performs a discourse analysis on them over the next few pages of the paper. Since this newsletter is already extremely long, I won’t reproduce them here or go into detail.
But if you’re on the nerdy end of things, you probably recognize yourself or your friends (or maybe your younger self) in that description of linguistic identity practices. I am, personally, really bad at making puns, but some of my friends are known for being inveterate punsters. I have an unfortunate tendency to use SAT words when a normal word could do, but at least now I can blame it on being in college/grad school way too long.
I’m not sure where in-group references (in-jokes, movie references, etc.) falls into the COP model, but I would put it under the positive-identity-practices umbrella: I talk like this because I want my fellow nerds to know I am one of them.
Media I have enjoyed
A few months ago, I went to see Monkey Man, written and directed by and starring Dev Patel. It’s been marketed as an Indian John Wick, which honestly does it a disservice (though there is an explicit reference to JW in MM, and, in case you’re worried, the dog is unharmed). It’s the story of a young Indian man who is alternately called “Kid” and “Bobby.” (I saw it dubbed into German, because I didn’t pay attention when I bought my tickets, so the English version may vary.) He learns to fight so he can get revenge on the cop who killed his mother and take down the religious nationalist political leader who instigated the cop’s action (and a whole bunch of human traffickers and other unsavory people along the way). It is very much about current politics in India, about which I am only tangentially informed via the occasional news stories in German and US media, but I definitely noticed the parallels.
One of the aspects of it that my writer-brain latched onto was the frame narrative. Throughout the film, it flashes back to young Kid being told the story of Hanuman by his mom, and each time, the tale goes a little further and the audience can see where Kid’s story is going. The movie gave my brain a lot to chew on for a lot of reasons. (Content notes: violence & blood; sexual assault (offscreen/implied)
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