Language, Identity and Community

Andrew Barke discusses the issue of the internationalization of university education in Japan. Within the scope of his interest falls the way that non-native academics integrate in an educational system that has historically been treated as monolingual and monocultural. Barke anticipates that lack of competency in L2 can hinder the ability of academics to manage the construction of their professional identities, and raises questions concerning the speaker’s legitimacy, both as an academic and as a member of the workplace. The analysis of several audio recordings of discussions among non-native academics in Japan has revealed that the participants tended to position themselves and others through references to language proficiency. Thus, in addition to the construction of their professional identities as academics, they constructed their foreigner identity.

Anne Bruehler draws attention to a different aspect of identity construction in educational contexts, namely religion. She explores how first-year students at Indiana Wesleyan University use religious terminology, referred to as Christianese, to construct a particular kind of identity within the Christian college community. She argues that testimony as a genre plays an important role in the identity construction, and by examining the testimonies of six participants with the use of Swales’ (1990) rhetorical move analysis as a framework, she manages to successfully present how stories of conversion and transformation are used to construct and index membership in the Christian community at the tertiary education institution.

The title of the paper by Zayneb Al-Bundawi contains a quote, “I always say, if they give me a mansion in Baghdad and for free, I won’t leave (Karbala),” excerpted from a text produced by a participant in Zayneb Al-Bundawi’s research, Asma. This quote is indicative of the author’s aim to construe place attachment as constitutive of identity. In particular, Zayneb Al-Bundawi investigates how a master narrative of ‘place-attachment’ is used by Asma (a PhD student from Karbala at Cardiff University) as a marker of identity within the diasporic population. In a sense, this paper is similar to the one by Bruehler, as they both touch upon religion as a marker of identity. Yet, Zayneb Al-Bundawi shows how religious texts and practices related to the Muharram rituals are employed to develop and maintain ‘place-identity,’ which becomes more prominent than either professional or educational aspects of identity. Place becomes a metonym of all the experiences of the majales and of everything that is related to Hussein (the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad). Hence, place-identity no longer carries the characteristics of space alone but stands for everything that relates to the socialization of an individual in that place.

Zurina Khairuddin investigates the performance of national identity in academic contexts, hypothesizing that national identity could be an aspect of academic identity intentionally employed by interactants to signal it. In her paper, “Malaysian Students’ Identity in Seminars: Malaysian English”, she focuses on code-switching as an identity index employed by Malaysian students in academic environments in the United Kingdom and Malaysia. Her study reveals that the varied patterns of language use and code-switching employed by Malaysian students are subject to change in situational and cultural contexts. In particular, she finds that the Malaysian students construct and negotiate their national and ethnic identity of students by code-mixing between Malay and Malaysian English in the United Kingdom when talking to other Malaysian students, and adopt Standard English when interacting with their tutors. In contrast, the context of Malaysian seminars encourages the use of Malaysian English regardless of the ethnicity or academic position of the interlocutor.

Code-switching, termed as linguistic polyphony, is also the focus of Izabela Szymańska’s paper “Behind Adventure Stories. R. L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona as Narratives of Identity” in which she emphasizes interpretive possibilities of the original text that may arise from its linguistic polyphony. She argues that Stevenson’s adventure stories should be interpreted as political novels and narratives about discovering complexities of identity. Stevenson is claimed to consciously use the genre of adventure story to interweave into his novels his vision of difficult Scottish history and heterogeneous Scottish society; by doing so, he also makes a significant statement about Scottish identity being distinct from English or British, and one that deserves acknowledgment. The linguistic polyphony of Stevenson’s two novels is argued to be a metonymy of Scottish identity in which individual and societal multilingualism is essential.

Place and time, as well as language and religion are also argued to be constitutive aspects of discursive identities in a paper by Dominika Baran. Drawing on Meinhof and Galasiński’s (2005) concept of the ‘language of belonging’, she explores the shifting positions and stances that the participants of her study take with respect to nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, and family when they share narratives of belonging on Facebook. She shows the way the women invoke and reinterpret shared memories of their life in Italy and subsequent experiences of immigration to the United States, Canada, and Australia, and how these shared stories become a resource of co-producing a new group identity. Baran’s paper also highlights the role of language in constructing and maintaining a translocal and transnational community formed online. She argues for a privileged role of English as the language needed for transnational online communication, as well as the primary language of internet use for the participants of the study.

The aspects of identity that fall within the focus of the paper by Aleksandra Gajda and Kamila Ciepiela are gender and nationality performed in online communities. Having analyzed over thirty posts published by Polish migrants to the UK on social media, the authors present certain tendencies in the construal of national identity by the two sexes. Their analysis reveals that Polish males tend to foreground their national identity rather than other collective identities, and that they also appear to demonstrate their national membership more frequently than females by referring to Polish symbols, traditions and history. In contrast, in posts written by female subjects, their gender identity prevails and inheres in their making identification with their compatriots, whom they tend to nurture. In the context of another culture, females frequently feel lost and in need of help, yet they are ready to accept a helping hand from ‘the other’ and more often than not relate and affiliate with the new culture. Males make stronger and direct affiliations with their native culture and disaffiliate from the culture of the host country.

The issue of identity ascription and imposition is further considered by Rosemary Reader who analyses the comments of three articles from the Daily Mail. The articles are concerned with the issue of migration, and Reader looks at the labels that migrants to Europe are referred to. She makes a claim that the term ‘migrant’ has negative connotations, and overrides other divisions of personal or group identities. Her analysis of the articles and their comments reveals that media enforce identities upon people, in a way that weakens or wipes out other facets of their personal identity in the eyes of others. This leads her to the conclusion that personal construction of identity can be unique to the individual, yet imposed identities may have negative effects on them, be it short or long-term, and personal or political.

Amanda Haste draws on her own life experience of a British musician living in France to explore the issue of musician identity. Viewing language as an “emblem of groupness” (Edwards, 2013, p. 55), she focuses on the disruption of self-image due to miscommunication in an intercultural environment. She notes that language problems lead to an inability to communicate among musicians about their shared experience of music, as well as leading to cultural miscommunication, which, in turn, results in defining the individual as ‘the other’ and the disruption of a musician self-image. She concludes that this “meta-identity as a musician” (Haste, this volume) is as crucial an aspect of the sense of self as gender or nationality.

A reverse perspective on the language-identity relationship is taken by Katarzyna Nosidlak, who claims that the personality of an individual plays a key role in the process of foreign language learning. Recognizing the influential role of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) on the area of foreign language pedagogy, Nosidlak examines its text in order to find references to the personality of the language learner. The analysis enables her to point to three groups of traits that are promoted in the text: cooperation, adaptation and intercultural traits. Hence a foreign language learner’s personality profile that transpires from the CEFR includes tolerance, respect, openness to experience, sociability, communicativeness, independence in thought and actions, responsibility for oneself and others, friendliness and helpfulness. This seems to confirm the thesis that certain personality traits are believed to facilitate foreign language learning and thus they are promoted in the European Union countries.