Style and Social Identities: Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Heterogeneity (LPSP 18) (Language, Power and Social Process)

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Style and Social Identities

≥

Language, Power and Social Process 18

Editors Monica Heller Richard J. Watts

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Style and Social Identities Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Heterogeneity edited by Peter Auer

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Style and social identities: alternative approaches to linguistic heterogeneity edited by / Peter Auer. p. cm. ⫺ (Language, power, and social process ; 18) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-019080-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-3-11-019081-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Language and languages ⫺ Variation. 2. Language and languages ⫺ Style. 3. Group identity. 4. Identity (Psychology) I. Auer, Peter, 1954⫺ P120.V37S789 2007 410⫺dc22 2007027565

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

ISBN 978-3-11-019080-9 hb ISBN 978-3-11-019081-6 pb Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 쑔 Copyright 2007 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider. Printed in Germany.

Preface

This book has various sources. Its first and early roots were a colloquy on “Acts of Identity” held at the University of Freiburg in 2002 which, in turn, emerged from a research project on the “Linguistic symbols of ethnic identity” (Sprachliche Symbolisierung ethnischer Identität) co-directed by the editor and Christian Mair within the framework of the Research Institute (Sonderforschungsbereich) “Identitäten und Alteritäten” (SFB 471). Some of the papers presented at the colloquy are contained in the present volume, while others have been published in Christian Mair (ed.) Interactional Sociolinguistics and Cultural Studies (a thematic issue of Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28-2). A second and equally important source of input for this volume was a Panel on “Identity and Style” organized by Werner Kallmeyer and myself at the 2003 International Pragmatics Conference in Toronto. A number of chapters of this volume were presented first as papers to this Panel. However, there are also additional chapters written especially for this publication. My thanks go to Werner Kallmeyer, who not only co-organized the Toronto Panel with me but also helped in recruiting the contributors to the present volume, and provided stimulating intellectual input on communicative social style. I would also like to thank Monica Heller who suggested including the book in the LPSP series and guided me with her advice through the editorial process which, in this case, was not without obstacles. Finally, my thanks go to Hanna Beier and Elin Arbin who substantially helped in the copyediting.

Contents Preface ..................................................................................... v Chapter 1 Introduction Peter Auer ................................................................................. 1

Part 1. Bilingual styles and social identities Introduction to Part 1 Peter Auer ................................................................................ 25 Chapter 2 Language alternation as a resource for identity negotiations among Dominican American bilinguals Benjamin Bailey.......................................................................... 29 Chapter 3 Style and stylization in the construction of identities in a card-playing club Anna De Fina ............................................................................ 57 Chapter 4 Being a ‘colono’ and being ‘daitsch’ in Rio Grande do Sul: Language choice and linguistic heterogeneity as a resource for social categorisation Peter Auer, Jacinta Arnhold, and Cintia Bueno-Aniola.............................. 85 Chapter 5 Names and identities, or: How to be a hip young Italian migrant in Germany Christine Bierbach and Gabriele Birken-Silverman................................ 121 Chapter 6 Socio-cultural identity, communicative style, and their change over time: A case study of a group of German–Turkish girls in Mannheim/Germany Inken Keim.............................................................................. 155 Chapter 7 Bystanders and the linguistic construction of identity in face-to-back communication Kathryn A. Woolard ................................................................... 187

Part 2. Monolingual styles and social identities – From local to global Introduction to Part 2 Peter Auer .............................................................................. 209

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Contents

Chapter 8 Aneurin Bevan, class wars and the styling of political antagonism Nikolas Coupland ...................................................................... 213 Chapter 9 Identity and positioning in interactive knowledge displays Grit Liebscher and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain ......................................... 247 Chapter 10 Style online: Doing hip-hop on the German-speaking Web Jannis Androutsopoulos ............................................................... 279

Part 3. Identity-work through styling and stylization Introduction to Part 3 Peter Auer............................................................................... 321 Chapter 11 Playing with the voice of the other: Stylized Kanaksprak in conversations among German adolescents Arnulf Deppermann .................................................................... 325 Chapter 12 Identity and language construction in an online community: The case of ‘Ali G’ Mark Sebba ............................................................................. 361 Chapter 13 Positioning in style: Men in women’s jointly produced stories Alexandra Georgakopoulou ........................................................... 393 Chapter 14 The construction of otherness in reported dialogues as a resource for identity work Susanne Günthner ...................................................................... 419 Chapter 15 The humorous stylization of ‘new’ women and men and conservative others Helga Kotthoff .......................................................................... 445 Chapter 16 A postscript: Style and identity in interactional sociolinguistics John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz ......................................... 477 Index..................................................................................... 503

Chapter 1 Introduction Peter Auer This volume presents a collection of studies which focus on heterogeneity in linguistic practice such as the use of more than one language within a conversation by bilingual speakers, the use of different grammatical, phonological or lexical options for realising one linguistic category, within what is generally considered to be one language, or the selection of features from various linguistic systems (such as dialects) which are structurally closely related. In this sense, all the papers in this volume deal with phenomena which fall within the core domain of sociolinguistics as they are known from variationist sociolinguistics, (social) dialectology, or research on bilingualism. That the subtitle of this book nonetheless refers to alternative approaches implies that the way in which they investigate heterogeneity does not follow the standard pattern of research methodology in variation studies though (cf. Chambers, Trudgill and Schilling-Estes, eds., 2002 for a useful summary). The reason for abandoning these established methodologies despite their undeniable success is, for many of the contributors to this volume, a certain uneasiness about the (growing?) neglect of social meaning and how it is created through language in variation studies. The present volume focusses on two relatively recent concepts of sociolinguistic research which have a potential for remedying this neglect: social identities and (social) style. This introduction aims at introducing these two terms and their relevance for sociolinguistic studies on linguistic heterogeneity.

1.

Identity/Identities

1.1. Collective identities The linguistic concern with identity began with an interest in collective rather than social identities, i.e. with the discourse of ‘languages’ as the ‘natural’ reflexes of national identities, as it started in the 18th and gained momentum in the 19th century. In a way, this discourse uses the notion of

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identity in a metaphorical sense, modelled on the discourse of the individual as defined by his or her, self-reflexive sameness.1 Collectivities are treated as unique quasi-beings which express their identities through certain features equally unique to them. Among these features, the national (standard) language has a privileged role. The idea that collective identities and languages are connected in an essentialist way has been a key concept of European modernity; it underlies the formation of the European nation states and continues to be deeply rooted in our language ideologies. According to this idea, each collectivity (particularly a nation, or a Volk) expresses its own individual character through and in its language. The term ‘essentialist’ is justified here since it is assumed that there is a ‘natural’ link between a nation and ‘its’ language. Against this view, the dominant paradigm in the social sciences today is more or less radically constructivist. Collectivities – nations, but also ethnic or social groups – are no longer assumed to ‘naturally’ exist, for instance on the basis of genetics (race), ancestry (blood) or birth (social class), but are seen as social and ideological constructs (see Niethammer 2000 for a summary of the arguments) which, in the European tradition, happen to rely on language. The discourse of European nation-building has been thoroughly investigated (see, e.g., Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1990). Nation-building is not only a matter of the past but continues to be in progress in parts of Eastern and particularly south-eastern Europe. Examples such as the (re-)creation of Croatian and even Bosnian as independent national languages also make it clear that language has not lost its prominent role in this discourse. However, collectivities other than nations may also use language in order to establish their identity (and may equally fall into the essentialist trap). Bilingual minorities are an example. Instead of the national standard varieties, it is now the specific ways in which the majority and/or the minority language are spoken, as well as the various mixing and switching styles, which are considered to be the straightforward, ‘natural’ expression of the bilinguals’ identity. Frequently, a simple iconic relationship between ‘mixed’ or even ‘hybrid identities’ and ‘mixed’ (or fragmented?) languages and an equally iconic relationship between fuzzy language boundaries and fuzzy group boundaries is assumed.2 The link between these linguistic practices and the collective identity appears as self-evident as the link between a standard language and a nation was in the nationalist discourse of the 19th century (and beyond). Again, language – albeit in different forms – is assumed to be ‘determined’ by the nature of the collectivity to which it belongs. And once again, this equation of language and the identity of a col-

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lectivity fails to capture the way in which collectivities are constructed (through language and other means of expression). 1.2. Social identities However deep the link between linguistics as a discipline and the discourses about collective identities may have been, collective identities are not the topic of this volume. We are not interested here in the discourses (in the Foucaultian sense of the word) in and through which collectivities are defined, justified, delimited against each other, etc., and how languages are used as an arguments in these discourses. Rather, we are interested in the construction and management of social identities in interaction. Here, the categorisation of participants in an interactional episode as social personae is an issue, not the definition and delimitation of collectivities.3 Social identity work of this kind is linked to social-communicative practices and needs to be investigated as such. A good deal of sociolinguistic and sociological research has addressed the question of how terms for social categories (such as ‘male’, ‘upper class’, ‘Jewish’) are employed in conversation and how their link to category-bound activities/characteristics is exploited as a resource for creating social and interactional meaning.4 This explicit categorisation work plays role in some of the papers in this volume (such as the ones by Liebscher and Dailey O’Cain, Deppermann, Georgakopoulou or Günthner), but no role at all in others (such as Auer, Arnhold and Bueno-Aniola or Coupland). Once again, the employment of category names to refer explicitly to the person whose identity is at stake, or the naming of category-bound activities which make such identity-related categories inferrable, is not our main concern. What will really take us to the heart of sociolinguistic research is another issue: to what extent can participants mobilise heterogeneity within or across the linguistic system(s) of their repertoire – grammar, phonology, lexicon – in order to symbolically express their social identities? How can social identities be accomplished, not by explicitly categorising people and by explicating category-bound activites/characteristics, but by selecting one variable realisation over another (for instance in the inflectional system of English or in the vowel system of German, one language instead of another in a speaker’s repertoire, or one lexical expression instead of another) where these realisations have no denotational-semantic content whatsoever which could be the basis for this accomplishment?

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1.3. “Acts of identity” The interest in (social) identity and its linguistic-communicative ‘management’ has become mainstream in sociolinguistics during the last decade, but its roots are older. It was as early as 1982 that Gumperz and CookGumperz edited a book in which they state programmatically (1982: 1, our emphasis): We costumarily take gender, ethnicity, and class as given parameters and boundaries within which we create our own social identities. The study of language as interactional discourse demonstrates that these parameters are not constants that can be taken for granted but are communicatively produced. Therefore to understand issues of identity and how they affect and are affectd by social, political, and ethnic divisions we need to gain insights into the communicative processes by which they arise.

Even before Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, Robert Le Page introduced his notion of “acts of identity”, coming from a different perspective and a background in creole studies (cf. Le Page 1978; Le Page and TabouretKeller 1985). His model plays a considerable role in a number of papers in this volume. Its main components are summarised in Sebba’s chapter. In a nutshell, Le Page claims that our socio-stylistic choices are made in order to conform to the behaviour of those social groups we wish to be identified with. Le Page’s model was conceived as an alternative to correlational sociolinguistics as it was about to emerge in Labov’s work in New York City at the same time (Labov 1972). While the latter reduced the individual to multiple memberships in a social class, gender and age group, respectively, which were seen to determine his or her linguistic behaviour, Le Page foregrounded the individual as an actor who – within certain limits – chooses his or her affiliations and expresses them symbolically through language. But Le Page’s acts of identity also anticipated important aspects of the constructivist approach to social identities. He dissolved the unity of the individual as a social actor into an array of acts of identification.5 He thereby transformed identity into identities, and thus reanalysed sociolinguistic variables from symptoms into symbols (cf. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985: 182). Le Page views incumbency to social categories as an achievement; it is informed by the situation in which it occurs, and lacks the kind of transsituational stability (reflexive equivalence) which the very notion of iden-

Introduction

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tity presupposes. Le Page’s acts of identity thus have little to do with identity in the traditional sense of the word. The stress is on ‘acts’, not on identity: it is these acts that bring about those only seemingly reliable features which social actors ascribe to themselves and to their fellow interactionalists as features of the social world taken-for-granted. Note that this questions the validity of constructs such as ‘social class’, ‘gender’, ‘ethnicity’ and the like which are no more (but also no less!) than lay categories which we use in order to make sense of the social world around us. A final point bears mentioning: in Le Page’s terminology, a speaker “projects” an image of him- or herself when s/he wishes to identify with a (real or imagined) social reference group. But Le Page also stresses that such projections seek and need to be reinforced by others. If the speaker receives this reinforcement, his or her behaviour may become more regular, or “focussed.” On the other hand, if acts of identity are not met with positive feedback, the speaker’s behaviour will tend to remain (or become) more variable (“diffuse”). From a modern viewpoint, some parts of Le Page’s model are of course debatable. To begin with, there is a touch of overdone individualism in Le Page’s approach. Le Page does acknowledge that our autonomy as speakers to create “systems for ... verbal behaviour” is restricted by four “riders” – i.e.: (i) the extent to which we are able to identify our model groups, (ii) the extent to which we have sufficient access to them and sufficient analytical ability to work out the rules of their behaviour, (iii) the strength of various (possibly conflicting) motivations towards one or another mode and towards retaining our own sense of our unique identity, (iv) our ability to modify our behaviour (1978: 15). However, there is good reason to believe that there are further constraints on the autonomy of the speaker which could be modelled along the lines of Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field (to mention just one possibility) and which involve issues of power and hegemony (cf. Bourdieu 1979). Also, the idea of a “unique identity” is at odds with the identity-ininteraction approach outlined above according to which acts of identity are situationally occasioned and therefore potentially conflicting (even contradictory) across situations. Another problem with Le Page’s model may be even more important. Some of the linguistic choices which are made by speakers by reference to the factual or imputed behaviour of a certain social reference group are systematically non-affiliative, i.e. they are made in order not to be subsumed under the respective membership category. These acts have been

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widely discussed in the recent sociolinguistic literature under headings such as crossing, mocking, styling/stylising, parodying, etc. (cf. the contributions by Deppermann, Günthner, Kotthoff, Bailey and others in this volume). The distinction between affiliative and non- or even disaffiliative stylistic choices is not a trivial one (cf. Coupland, this volume, and Woolard, this volume). One may even go one step further: the use of a particular feature which is associated with a certain social group is open to an affiliating as well as a disaffiliating interpretation. The preestablished association between linguistic variants and social reference groups as such can be questioned. In fact, speakers may re-create their own social identity by drawing on linguistic materials taken from various groups and rearranging them into a new ‘style’. We will come back to this approach to identity as stylistic performance (stylisation) in section 3 of this introduction. For the time being, we can summarise the discussion of Le Page’s model as follows. It is necessary to differentiate between the social group A from whose (stereotyped) linguistic behaviour a linguistic act of identity draws its semiotic resources, and a social group B with whom the speaker wishes to identify. A (linguistic) act of identity can then be defined as the selection of a linguistic element which indexes some social group A and which is chosen on a particular occasion (in a particular context) in order to affiliate oneself with or disaffiliate oneself from a social group B. A and B often but do not necessarily coincide. Of course, Le Page’s early model has not remained the only approach to identity-formation through linguistic choices. Widely used is, for instance, Harré and van Langenhove’s theory of social positioning (1991) which forms the theoretical basis of Liebscher’s and Dailey O’Cain’s as well as Georgakopoulou’s chapters in the present volume. Coming not from (socio-) linguistics (like Le Page), but from social science, the authors propose an alternative approach to social categorization which is more flexible than traditional role theory and also emphasizes the negotiable nature of selfand other-positioning. Consequently, the focus on linguistic indexes to categorization is less strong here. Although some linguistic features are linked in the most straightforward way to a social or ethnic category, a region or a milieu, their meaning is always open to situational revision, transformation, and refinement. The best-known of these reinterpretations is the case of regional to social indexing. Variable features indicative of some regional provenance of the speaker are often metonymically extended to some (stereotypical) attribute imputed to speakers of that region which eventually comes to index a social attrib-

Introduction

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ute. A case of such a reinterpretation is Canadian raising as described in Labov’s classic study of Martha’s Vineyard in which a regional feature of Atlantic coast island dialects (raising of the onset in the diphthong /ay/) is reinterpreted and takes on a new, social meaning: it symbolises the speaker’s stance toward mainlanders (cf. Labov 1963 and Eckert’s 2004 interpretation of his results). Linguistic features therefore do not ‘mirror’ social identity categories in the simple sense of the word (cf. Cameron 1990). A simple lexical example can show this. In the pre-unification period, Zielsetzung was a purely ‘East German’ lexical item for ‘(West) German’ Zielstellung (‘aim’): West German dictionaries (such as DUDEN 1973) only listed the latter word (while the East German Handwörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache had both). Given this clear association of the word Zielstellung with East Germany, what does it mean if somebody uses the word today, say, in a written document in a company? A simple view of language as an index to social identity would lead to the conclusion that the writer wants to claim/invoke his or her East German identity by using an East German word, even more so as the general trend has been to replace East German by West German words. However, although this is one possibility, there are other ways in which this particular lexical choice can come to index (in a given situational context and in a given community of practice) the user’s identity: – The writer may have used the East German word ‘innocently’, i.e. without knowing about its identity-rich potential. She or he may not be aware of the lexical difference at all and not be able to interpret the lexical variation at hand in social terms. Depending on who the recipients are, the lexical choice may then remain irrelevant for social categorisation (for ‘innocent’ readers), or it may assume a non-intended meaning (when the readers ascribe East-Germanness to the writer against his or her intentions, and perhaps against his ‘real’ background). – The writer may have used the East German word ‘metaphorically’ i.e. in order to invoke an East German ‘voice’ although he or she is known to be West German. Here, we would be dealing with a kind of crossing (cf. Rampton 1995; Auer 2006; Quist and Jørgensen 2007). For readers who share this knowledge about the writer’s background, a ‘double-voicing’ becomes visible in which the writer’s ‘real’ voice and that of the East German influence each other (cf. Voloshinov 1929). – The writer may want to pretend to be East German, in some kind of role-play as is not infrequent in internet chat communication (and doubt-

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lessly in other contexts as well). In this case, a social identity is ‘faked’. To complicate things even further, the recipient may know and take into account that in the type of activity at hand (e.g., chats), identities can be and even tend to be faked. – The East German word may have taken on a different meaning in the community of practice in which it is used (for instance, it may be a fashionable way of speaking which indexes up-to-dateness, but not East/West German background). What these alternative interpretations show is that often, there is no way of describing the indexical value of a linguistic variable (i.e., its capacity to point to a social category) without looking into the conversational and situational context in which it is employed. In addition, the interpretation of a linguistic feature is often supported by (and sometimes only made possible on the basis of) its co-occurrence with other features with which it forms a social style. We will turn to this issue in section 2. 1.4. Social identities in interaction The critical appraisal of Le Page’s models of “acts of identity” of the last section leads us to an approach to social identities which is grounded in interaction. Such an approach is not new and has been proposed by several sociolinguists (starting with Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz in their “interactional sociolinguistics”, cf. the quotation above). The basic principles upon which the identities-in-interaction approach is based are summarised by Antaki and Widdicombe (1998: 3) as follows: (i)

Having an identity means “being cast into a category with associated characteristics or features”; incumbency in this category may both be claimed by a participant of an interaction and ascribed to him/her by co-participants. (ii) Identity-relevant activities in interaction are “indexical and occasioned”, i.e., they cannot be understood unless their embedding into the conversational and larger context at hand is taken into account. (iii) Identity as an occasioned and achieved category incumbency needs to be made relevant in an interaction in order to become consequential for it; this holds for brought along and brought about identities. In accordance with ethnomethodological principles, the analyst’s task is to

Introduction

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reconstruct this ‘making relevant’ of a category. It need not imply the overt naming of an identity-relevant category, but can be achieved through symbolic means. (iv) ‘Having an identity’ is consequential for interaction, since the respective category is linked to category bound expectations of action; this consequentiality may become visible in a shift of footing of the interaction; however, it may also lead to the somewhat trivial consequence that ‘nothing special’ happens precisely because co-membership is established. (v) This consequentiality opens up the possibility for the analyst to reconstruct the identity-relevant category in question from category bound activities. Of course, speaking of the occasioned nature of identity is not be taken to mean that identity-relevant categories have no reality outside the interaction. In fact, their interactional relevance hinges on (more or less) shared social knowledge. This has been shown compellingly in Harvey Sacks’ work on membership categorisation (Sacks 1972; cf. Watson 1997); one of the upshots is that many categorisation devices are duplicatively organised such that bringing into play one social category evokes the antonym as well. 6 Sacks, in turn, relied on older approaches particularly in the tradition of Alfred Schütz and his theory of types (Schütz and Luckmann 1975). The more general point is that identity-work is very often done by referring to alterities – the construction of some ALTER through which one’s own identity is indirectly highlighted. The multi-faceted nature in which variants are employed and interpreted as indexes to social identity has been investigated empiricially in recent sociolinguistic research (e.g. Ostermann 2003; Podesva, Roberts and Campbell-Kibler 2002; Schilling-Estes 2004; Zilles and Cambell 2005). These studies analyse the choice of linguistic variants within their conversational and social context, often in ways analogous to the investigation of code-switching in conversation (cf. Ostermann 2005, drawing on Auer 1995). The way in which these studies link up with more traditional, quantitative studies of linguistic variation still remains to be discussed. It is obvious that it is at odds with a correlationist view of sociolinguistic structure, but not necessarily with quantitative methods which may be useful and even necessary to establish the common knowledge against which a single case of variable selection may become meaningful.

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Identity work in interaction is – as stated above – the work invested by participants in ascribing and claiming incumbency to social categories or Schützian types. To narrow down this focus somewhat, Zimmerman (1998: 90f.) suggests distinguishing between discourse, situational and transportable identities, each of which is characterised by “different home territories”, i.e., by a different temporal reach and contextual constancy. Discourse identities such as ‘current speaker’, ‘teller of a story’, ‘repair initiator’ would not normally be subsumed under identity relevant categories in the everyday use of the word. They are, however, intimately linked to Zimmerman’s situational identities which are bound to particular, mainly institutional agendas (and informed by the respective schematic/frame knowledge which are the blueprints for acting within these institutions); thus, an ‘interrogator’ at court will have access via his or her situational identity to other discourse roles than the ‘interrogated’; the ‘examiner’ at the university will have different discourse roles at his or her disposal than the ‘examined,’ ‘student’, etc. Most central for the sociolinguistics of identity work in interaction, however, is Zimmerman’s third type, that of transportable identities, by which he means “latent identities that ‘tag along’ with individuals as they move through their daily routines”, often based on “physical or culturally based insignia”. It is these transportable identities which are meant when we speak of ‘social identities’ in the following. Zimmerman’s model is drawn on in particular in Woolard’s chapter in the present volume. Treating orderly selection from heterogeneous linguistic resources as a way of symbolising identities in interaction also raises a number of methodological issues. Here are just a few of them. One obvious question is whether all variable realisations can be treated in the same way or whether the approach is limited to salient features (Labov’s stereotypes) – those features of which members of a given speech community are more or less aware. Clearly, these do not exhaust the range of heterogeneity in language. Linguistic heterogeneity may be socially patterned (for instance, across social class, gender or age) without speakers being aware of it. It can be argued of course that awareness does not equal salience. But we are then faced with the methodological issue of how to establish salience, and how to prove co-participants’ orientation a certain identity-relevant category. (For instance, one would want to be careful not to conflate Le Page-type symbolic identification with a certain prestige group with mechanistic accommodation to a particular co-participant’s speech.)

Introduction

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Another methodological problem refers to the suitability of single variable analysis for the investigation of linguistic acts of identity. While variationist studies often focus on one particular variable, interactionally oriented studies usually provide a more holistic picture of a web of interrelated features which is used by a given speaker on a given occasion. This constellation of features may or may not shift over the course of an interaction. This question has received some attention recently and brings us to the notion of sociolinguistic (social, communicative) style.

2.

Style in sociolinguistics

2.1. Style as a holistic concept Sociolinguistic discussions of style often start with a critical appraisal of Labov’s concept of contextual styles (Labov 1972, cf. Coupland 2000 for a critique) and then open up the perspective to theories of social and cultural styles which have played an important role in ethnographically oriented, interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology over the last years. But in fact, Labov’s linear style dimension which is constructed to capture speakers’ monitoring of their own speech production has little if anything to do with modern studies on style in sociolinguistics; the latter follow a very different rationale. In these studies, style is seen as a concept which can overcome the shortcomings of single-variable studies and can integrate linguistic variation (in the narrow sense of the word, i.e. Coupland’s “dialect style”, 2000) into a comprehensive theory of the ways in which choices on all levels of semiotic organisation relate to social practices of sense-making, categorisation, and identity management (cf. Rickford and Eckert 2001: 1). Despite earlier pioneering attempts to move from traditional stylistics (with styles as objects) to a theory of social style and stylisation (with styles as processes, cf. Hinnenkamp and Selting, eds., 1989), and to revise the Labovian approach to variation (Bell’s theory of audience design, 1984, which owes much to Le Page’s acts of identity), style did not make its big appearance on the stage of sociolinguistic research until the 1990s. A number of aspects are important to understand the relevance of style for sociolinguistic research. First of all, social style is a holistic and multilevel phenomenon. It directly challenges the more traditional approach to linguistic variation which

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usually focusses on single variables. As the “California Style Collective” (incl. P. Eckert) stated in an influential paper at NWAVE 22 (1993): “We are defining style as a clustering of linguistic resources, and an association of that clustering with an identifiable aspect of social practice. ... Rarely can an individual variable be extracted from this style and recognized as meaningful; variables carry such meaning only by virtue of their participation in identifiable personal or group styles” (Manuscript: 14). Exactly how broad styles need to be defined in order to capture relevant linguistic and social practices is open to debate. It is generally assumed that social-communicative styles, in addition to language choice and linguistic variation in a narrow sense, include prosodic patterns, but also verbal practices of categorisation, pragmatic patterns such as politeness, preferences for specific communicative genres, rhetorical practices, etc. Often, the notion of social style is also taken to include embodied features of verbal and nonverbal actions (voice quality, facial expressions, gesture, ‘expressive body language’) as well as aesthetic choices (‘taste’) in appearance, clothes, etc. In the widest sense, style becomes similar to life-style as described by Bourdieu as the surface correlate of habitus (1979 [1984: 171 et passim]). Note that any notion of style which includes preferences for certain genres, rhetorical patterns, etc. goes beyond variation studies which are usually restricted to referentially (denotationally) neutral variables. It is obvious that ‘style’ in the sense of different “ways of speaking” (Hymes 1972) implies more than saying the same thing in different ways. In fact, what can be said and what cannot be said is a central part of a socialcommunicative style. The sociolinguistic analysis of style claims, then, that the social meaning of linguistic heterogeneity does not (usually) reside in individual linguistic features but rather in constellations of such features which are interpreted together. If we hear somebody ‘speak posh’, ‘speak like a havak’ (immigrant youth, see Deppermann, this volume) or ‘speak like an old Nazi’ (Günthner, this volume), we do not interpret single variables but a gestaltlike stylistic expression. Having said that, we immediately need to add that stylistic analysis can also be less comprehensive than traditional variation studies. First of all, there are situations in which a single word or a single vowel can function as a shibboleth – no holistic style analysis, and no statistical averages are necessary to arrive at this interpretation. Perhaps more important, there are many social-communicative styles in which certain features stand out as the most salient ones which are, for instance, used as mock features in stylisa-

Introduction

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tion and crossing. These strategies of social discrimination through language reduce complex styles, but in such a way that they are still easily recognisable. In sum, style in modern sociolinguistic theory is a concept which mediates between linguistic variability and practices of social categorisation of self or other: linguistic variability is seen as a resource for constructing socially interpretable and interpreted styles (Eckert 2004: 43). In doing so, style filters out certain variables and attributes special status to others. Or, to take the perspective of the speakers: participants’ representations of styles combine unambiguously indexical core features with fuzzy borders. But style is not only a holistic and multilevel phenomenon, it is also socially interpreted. There is social knowledge involved about how to relate constellations of features to social groups, milieus, life-worlds, etc. How is this knowledge organised, how does it come into being, and how does it relate to communicative practices? At the heart of the answer to this question are processes of opposition-building. Social communicative styles can be considered the outcome of communities’ adjustment to their ecological and social-political environment; they have a fundamentally strategic grounding. Social positioning, i.e. finding one’s place in society, is one of its motivating forces. Seen from this perspective, styles are constructed so as to build up contrasts between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as shown in many studies from Norbert Elias (1939) to Pierre Bourdieu (1979). Or, as Judith Irvine put it recently: “Whatever ‘styles’ are, in language or elsewhere, they are part of a system of distinction, in which a style constrasts with other possible styles, and the social meaning signified by the style contrasts with other social meanings” (2001: 22). The ecological nature of style as a way to position oneself or others in social space implies that the knowledge about relevant oppositions and (consequently) social meanings is in itself socially distributed: what from a distance may look ‘all the same’ may display a filigrane pattern of distinctive differences when seen under the lookingglass of the social groups directly involved. Here, social space is not organised differently from geographical space (cf. Auer 2005): the raising of std. /ai/ (> MHG /i:/) to [æi] in Swabian and to [´i] in Lake Constance Alemannic may sound all the same for a speaker from Hamburg or Munich, since no relevant oppositions are at stake other than between ‘Swabian’ and ‘Northern standard German’ or ‘Bavarian’; but for speakers in the area itself, the distinction is an unmistakable index to Swabian vs. Badenian affiliation which has played an important role for regional and political identity-building for a long time.

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2.2. Style as social practice However, neither Elias, nor Bourdieu nor Irvine give us a clue about how this process of opposition-building is grounded in practice. Features are combined into holistic meta-signs, and they are invested with social meaning through talk; styles emerge from discourse – but how? Explicit social categorisations may serve to establish shared knowledge about how certain constellations of verbal and non-verbal features can and should be socially interpreted. These cooccurrences of overt categorisation and (often stylised) displays of behaviour can link identities and styles and establish indexing relationships between them. But in a community of practice which already shares knowledge about how certain agents stereotypically perform activites, social identities can be indexed (contextualised) by these features alone. On the other hand, explicit self- or other-categorisation which is not supported by stylistic evidence is difficult to imagine. Claims to incumbency in a social category must receive evidence from social style: categorisation without style – without indexing – does not work. Penelope Eckert has argued in a series of recent publications (see Eckert 2004, 2000, 1996) that style-building occurs in smaller sections of the lifeworld, which she calls “communities of practice” (after Wenger 1999). The emergence of local styles in such a social environment involves oppositionbuilding, and often the profiling of the opposing spheres (‘we’ and ‘they’) by exaggeration (see Deppermann, this volume; Günthner, this volume; Kotthoff, this volume). Eckert argues that styles are always “processes of bricolage”. In this bricolage, elements from other styles are incorporated (appropriated) as resources which come from “a broad sociolinguistic landscape” (Eckert 1996). But although they carry social meaning (being part of other social styles), this meaning is not simply imported but changed and adapted, sometimes even subverted or converted in stylisation. For instance, Keim (2002) describes how an adolescent girl of a Turkish immigrant background in Germany uses broken gastarbeiter German in interaction with her mother. As Keim shows, no identification with the social group of her mother is intended (with whom it is associated in general socio-stylistic knowledge). Rather, the gastarbeiter style is subverted to provide the girl with a means to distance herself from her mother. Eckert argues that the origin of social styles lies in individual acts of linguistic choice such as this one. And surely, styles are adapted to changing contexts. However, even though the interpretation of a particular linguistic choice may be locally established and valid, we believe that there needs to

Introduction

15

be some consistency in the choice of semiotic features in order for it to be considered a sociolinguistic style in its own right. The construction of a style within and for a community of practice requires continuity of semiotic practices across situations. How much continuity is required, and how much variability is possible across situations unless a style become unrecognisable is an open empirical question.

3.

Outlook on the following chapters

The following fifteen chapters explore the link between social identity and (social-communicative style) in more detail. They draw on multilingual contexts (in the first part), variation within a single language system (in the second part), and they address issues of styling the other (in the third part). Each part of the book is introduced by a short theoretical and methodological chapter. In the final chapter, John Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz frame modern sociolinguistic research on identities in the development of the discipline at large and discuss some main points and open questions. There are two recurring themes which run through the whole book. One is the question of which linguistic variables can become part of socialcommunicative styles, and thereby serve to positioning the speaker in social space. The first part of the volume looks into bilingual contexts in which switching between or mixing of the two languages indexes some kind of social (self- or other) categorisation. In language choice and code-switching, it may be the mere fact of choosing one language over the other which indexes social categories. Often it is not only the social identity of the speaker but also (or even dominantly) that of the addressee which is at stake here. But some chapters in this part of the book also show that codeswitching may be part and parcel of a social-communicative style which includes other stylistic choices, such as the way in which the two languages are spoken. (Standard vs. dialect is an important distinction here.) In yet another case, it is the specific way in which the two languages are combined which becomes relevant as a social index. In the second part of this volume, the linguistic variables used for identity-display and identityascription partly fall under the rubric of what could be investigated using the established methodology of variation studies (such as phonetic features), but the papers in this section also make it clear that a style- and identity-oriented approaches quickly go beyond the limits of this approach. Most of the papers in this section include stylistic features which would not

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easily fit into the quantitative paradigm, such as politeness strategies, lexical choices, including technical terms and categorizations, and discursive routines and phrases. The chapters in the third part of the book address cases of stylizations in which the linguistic portrayal of the other serves to construe the identity of the self. In these cases, single variables, often used in an exaggerated way, can take on very dense social meanings. But again, several of the studies included in this section show that the traditional variables considered in variation studies are not sufficient to account for the linguistic basis of social categorization; this holds in particular for prosodic stylizations. The second theme which runs through the chapters of this book is the link between contextualised practices of identity-display and identityascription which can and need to be described in their interactional contexts, and their place in/relevance to society at large. Most contributors to this volume subscribe to a (semi-)constructivist point of view according to which small-scale processes of social categorization are constitutive for the working of society; but they would equally agree that social actors which take part in these processes are subject to often unconscious and ‘habitualized’ constraints. Identity-relevant features may be performed in a context-creating, sometimes intentional way, but they may also be part of the ‘habitus’ of a speaker which is cannot be manipulated easily. Some papers address these issues directly, such as Inken Keim who argues that style is linked to success in the school system, or Nikolas Coupland who shows the tension between class-based (miners), regionalised (Wales) and milieu-related (power élite) stylisations in Nye Bevan’s political speeches in postwar Britain. Other papers refer more indirectly to larger-scale processes of social marginalisation (Auer et al.; Deppermann; Bailey) and the rebellion of the marginalised against it (Bierbach and Birken-Silverman; Sebba); to fundamental schisms in a society (East/West Germany: Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain; Catalan/Castilian: Woolard; ‘Nazi’ vs. ‘good’ Germans: Günthner); to the interaction between global and local social processes (Androutsopoulos) and to gender as a fundamental orientation line in society (Georgakopolou). The major structurations of modern societies, from social to ethnic, from global to local, from gender to class, are all reflected in and translated into the socio-linguistic practices of styleformation and identity work in everyday interaction; but they are also formed by these practices which are the site where social structure and its cognitive representation in the individual meet.

Introduction

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Notes 1. We are not concerned with the justification of this discourse about individual identities here, as this has its own cultural and historical embedding. 2. Cf. for instance: “Such mixed varieties may be seen as emblematic of the mixed cultual affiliation” (Pfaff 2003: 209). 3. This, of course, is not to deny that discourses about collective identities and the management of social identity in interaction can be related to each other; however, the link is indirect, complex, and little understood in sociolinguistics. 4. Cf. recently: Bueno Aniola (2007) on the use of the categories Brasilianer/ neecha (‘Brasilians’, ‘Negroes’) vs. Daitsche by Brasilians of German descent in Rio Grande do Sul, as well as many contributions in de Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg (eds.) 2006. 5. He and Tabouret-Keller (1985) use the term ‘identity’ in the sense of social (or ethnic) category, therefore in the plural. 6. A recent German example of how MCDs are developed and used in a community when socio-political changes make it necessary to cope with new realities is the pair Ossi/Wessi (an invention of the Wende period around 1990 for designating East and West Germans and for linking them to category-bound activities and characteristics; see Hausendorf 2000 for details).

References Anderson, Benedict 1983 Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe 1998 Identities in Talk. London: Sage. Auer, Peter 1995 The pragmatics of code-switching: A sequential approach. In: Milroy, L. and P. Muysken (eds.), One Speaker – Two Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 115–135. 2006 ‘Crossing’. In: Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics, Vol. 11. New York: Elsevier, 490–493. 2004 Sprache, Grenze, Raum. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 23(2), 149–180. Bell, Alan 1984 Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2), 145– 204.

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Bourdieu, Pierre 1979 La distinction: critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les Ed. de Minuit. English translation: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. 1980 Le marché linguistique. In: idem, Questions de sociologie. Paris: Minuit, 121–137. Bueno-Aniola, Cintia 2007 Soziale Stereotypen und ihre sprachliche Indizierung in den „deutschen Kolonien“ in Südbrasilien. Bern: Lang. [The] California Style Collective 1993 [MS] Variation and personal/group style. Paper presented at NWAVE 22, Ottawa: University of Ottawa. Cameron, Deborah 1990 Demythologizing sociolinguistics: Why language does not reflect society. In: Joseph, John and T. Taylor (eds.), Ideologies of Language. London: Routledge, 79–93. Chambers, J. K., P. Trudgill and N. Schilling-Estes (eds.) 2002 The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Coupland, Nikolas 2000 Language, situation, and the relational self: Theorising dialect-style in sociolinguistics. In: Eckert, P. and J. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 185–210. De Fina, Anna, Deborah Schiffrin and Michael Taylor (eds.) 2006 Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DUDEN 1973 Rechtschreibung der deutschen Sprache und der Fremdwörter, 17th ed. Mannheim: Bibliograph. Inst. Eckert, Penelope 1996 Vowels and nail polish: The emergence of linguistic style in the preadolescent heterosexual marketplace. In: Warner, N. et al. (eds.), Gender and Belief Systems. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, 183–190. 2000 Linguistic Variation and Social Practice. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2004 The meaning of style. Texas Linguistic Forum 47, 41–53. Eckert, Penelope and John R. Rickford (eds.) 2000 Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Elias, Norbert 1939 Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Basel: Haus zum Falken. English translation: The Civilizing Process, vol. I. The History of Manners, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969, and The Civilizing Process, vol. II. State Formation and Civilization, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. Gumperz, John and Jenny Cook-Gumperz 1982 Language and the communication of social identity. In: Gumperz, J. J. (ed.), Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harré, Rom and Luk van Langenhove 1991 Varieties of positioning. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 21, 393–407. Hausendorf, Heiko 2000 Zugehörigkeit durch Sprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hinnenkamp, Volker and Margret Selting (eds.) 1989 Stil und Stilisierung. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hobsbawm, Eric 1990 Nations and Nationalism since 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, Dell 1972 Models for the interaction of language and social life In: Hymes, Dell and J. Gumperz (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 35–71. Irvine, Judith 2001 “Style” as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentation. In: Eckert, Penelope and John Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 21–43. Kallmeyer, Werner 2001 Perspektivenumkehrung als Element des emanzipatorischen Stils in Migrantengruppen. In: Jakobs, Eva-Maria and Annely Rothkegel (eds.), Perspektiven auf Stil. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 401–422. Keim, Inken 2002 Bedeutungskonstitution und Sprachvariation. Funktionen des „Gastarbeiterdeutsch“ in Gesprächen jugendlicher Migrantinnen. In: Deppermann, Arnulf and Thomas Spranz-Fogasy (eds.), Be-deuten. Wie Bedeutung im Gespräch entsteht. Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 134–157. Labov, William 1963 The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19, 273–309. 1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Le Page, Robert 1978 Projection, focussing, diffusion, or, steps toward a sociolinguistic theory of language, illustrated from the Sociolinguistic Survey of Multilingual Communities, Stages I: Cayo District, Belize (formerly British Honduras) and II: St Lucia. York Papers in Linguistics 9, 9– 31. Le Page, Robert and Andrée Tabouret-Keller 1985 Acts of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niethammer, Lutz 2000 Kollektive Identität – Heimliche Quellen einer unheimlichen Konjunktur. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Ostermann, Ana Cristina 2005 Localizing power and solidarity: Pronoun alternation at an all-female police station and a feminist crisis intervention center in Brazil. Language in Society 32(3), 351–381. Pfaff, Carol 2003 Ideological and political framing of bilingual development: Reflections on studies of Turkish/German in Berlin. In: Fraurud, Kari and Kenneth Hyltenstam (eds.), Multilingualism in Global and Local Perspectives. Stockholm: Center for Research on Bilingualism, 191– 220. Podesva, Robert, Sarah J. Roberts and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler 2002 Sharing resources and indexing meanings in the production of gay styles. In: Campbell-Kibler, K. et al. (eds.), Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 175–190. Quist, Pia and Jens Normann Jørgensen 2007 Crossing – negotiating social boundaries. In: Auer, Peter and Li Wei (eds.), Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication (Handbooks of Applied Linguistics 6). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 371–389. Rampton, Ben 1995 Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Sacks, Harvey 1972 On the analyzability of stories by children. In: Gumperz, John and Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehardt and Winston, 325– 345.

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Schilling-Estes, Natalie 2004 Constructing ethnicity in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8, 163–195. Schütz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann 1975 Strukturen der Lebenswelt. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Voloshinov, Valentin 1929 [1973] Marksizm I filosofija jazyka. Leningrad. English as: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press. Watson, Rod 1997 Some general reflections on ‘categorization’ and ‘sequence’ in the analysis of conversation. In: Hester, Stephen and Peter Eglin (eds.), Culture in Action. Washington DC: International Institute for Ethnomethodology, 49–75. Wenger, Etienne 1999 Communities of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zilles, Ana M. S. and Kendall King 2005 Self-presentation in sociolinguistic interviews: Identities and language variation in Panambi, Brazil. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(1), 74–94. Zimmerman, Don 1998 Discourse identities and social identities. In: Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, 87–106.

Part 1. Bilingual styles and social identities

Introduction to Part 1 Peter Auer It is a curious fact that the category ‘bilingual’ does not have a straightforward identity dimension. There is no such thing as a ‘bilingual identity’ if ‘bilingual’ merely refers to the use of more than one language. Rather, in various discourses, the term ‘bilingual’ may refer to social groups in which membership is determined through very different criteria other than the use of two or more languages. For instance, in the ongoing public debate in Denmark the immigrant population (mostly with an Arabic- or Turkishspeaking background) is referred to as the ‘bilinguals’ (tosproget). This term appears to be both politically correct and euphemistic, but it oddly misrepresents reality: only a fraction of bilingual Danes are ‘bilinguals’ in this sense, since those who speak, for instance, Danish and English or Danish and German are excluded, and a monolingual immigrant may be considered ‘bilingual’. By contrast, ‘bilinguals’ in the Canadian context are those who speak French and English, but not those who speak, e.g., Somali and English, i.e. in this discourse, the term is restricted to the nonimmigrant part of the population and to languages which play a particularly important political role for the country. It seems that in both discourses ‘bilingual’ is a synecdoche – a surface fact about a certain part of the population is used as a symbol for category membership which is based on very different (for instance, ethnic) criteria. The term serves to camouflage the basis of categorization which, for whatever reason, is not made explicit. While it is impossible to designate a ‘bilingual identity’ on linguistic grounds alone, and the term may refer to something other than the use of two or more languages, it also goes without saying that bilingual performances and bilingual communicative styles are employed for displaying (and ascribing) identities in interaction. They are the topic of the first part of this volume. In Chapter 2, Benjamin Bailey explores several ways in which Dominican American high school students use language to construct and make sense of their social identities in everyday interaction. Second-generation Dominican immigrants negotiate distinctive issues of identity in the United States: as a group whose members are of Hispanic, American, and to vary-

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ing degrees of African descent, individuals face competing ascriptions of identity, such as ‘Black’, ‘White’ and ‘Hispanic’. They negotiate these identities with and through a bilingual, multi-variety repertoire of language varieties that reflects Dominican immigrant heritage and multi-ethnic, urban United States socialization. This linguistic repertoire draws from Dominican varieties of Spanish, various American sociolects, including African American Vernacular, and forms resulting from Spanish-English contact. Using these diverse linguistic resources, individuals discursively constitute shifting ‘we/they’ dichotomies between themselves and others, e.g. between ‘Black’ and ‘Spanish’, ‘White’ and ‘non-White’, and ‘Dominican’ and ‘Puerto Rican’. As Bailey shows, the ways in which intra- and inter-group boundaries are situationally highlighted belie static one-to-once correspondences between linguistic forms and social identities. While Dominican Spanish forms, for example, are commonly associated with a shared Dominican identity, they can also be used to mark intra-group boundaries between different kinds of Dominican identities. Forms associated with AAVE can index urban American youth identities, but they can also be used situationally to highlight differences between urban and rural Dominicans. In a similar vein, Anna De Fina (Ch. 3) investigates language, style and language choice in an Italian American Club in the United States as (part of) the social practices and activities in which processes of attribution and negotiation in identity work are grounded. She analyzes the particular identity claims that participants in an all male Italian American card game club make relevant within this context, and the bilingual strategies that they use to build ‘Italian’/’American’, but also gender and social role identities (‘father’, ‘family member’, ‘professional’, ‘club member’) as well as situated identities such as ‘card player’. She also shows that the personae invoked through these stylistic devices do not necessarily correspond directly or consistently to the identities claimed by the participants, but may be part of local stylizations of particular identities in a particular interactional context. In the processes in which speakers project individual or collective identities, code-switching and mixing between Standard Italian, Italian dialects and English play a central role. Ch. 4 by Peter Auer, Jacinta Arnhold, and Cintia Bueno Aniola investigates social-communicative styles and identity work in the German/Portuguese bilingual ‘colonial zone’ in Southern Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul). The authors investigate language choice and code alternation as well as the varieties of German and Portuguese used to characterize these styles, but they

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also explore communicative (rhetorical) strategies employed by the speakers in various situations, e.g. to formulate an argument, a complaint, a problem, or give advice. Looking in detail at institutional exchanges between clients and employees at a farmers’ sindicato, the study shows that in this institutional context, the choice of a certain style – which in this case essentially includes monolingual vs. bilingual ways of speaking – is consequential for the way in which the client is construed as a social persona and dealt with by the institution. In the given context, the selection of styles illustrates attributes of ‘Germanness’ and ‘ruralness’, in addition to institutional roles such as ‘buyer’/’seller’. Ch. 5 by Christine Bierbach and Gabriele Birken-Silverman takes a slightly different approach to bilingualism as an index of social identities. The authors look at the performed naming practices of Italian-German youth in Germany which involve the use of Italian, Italian dialects and German. Proper names are linked directly to identities. However, the authors also show that naming performances are highly context bound, recipient designed and embedded in specific discourse types and communicative genres. Especially young people – and even more so in a immigrant situation, where identity may constantly be at stake – enact ‘hybrid’ identities through naming and elaborating on (nick) names in a playful way. By doing so, they sometimes impersonate popular role models relevant to the (sub)culture of their age group, and they claim/invent their personal territories which are situated between those of their parents (their ethnic ‘roots’), their actual social environment in Germany and the global space of cosmopolitan youth culture. These playful performances of naming not only model a personal ‘profile’ for each participant and eventually shape participation structure and hierarchies in the peer group, they also constitute a specific social-communicative group style. Inken Keim’s study on immigrant females in Mannheim with a Turkish family background (Ch. 6) is of particular interest because it includes issues of development and style change as the speakers grow older and adapt to mainstream societal norms. She compares two stages in the development of this group. In the first phase, the adolescent girls define their social group through a communicative style which is based on ‘coarse language’. In doing so, they place themselves at the periphery or even outside of German mainstream society (what Keim calls their ‘ghetto identity’), but at the same time distance themselves from the role of the ‘young traditional Turkish woman’ associated with their parents. This ‘coarse’ style is associated with the aggressiveness and roughness of the male immigrant ‘ghetto’, and

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it makes extensive use of Turkish/German mixing in order to maximize distance from ‘the Germans’. In the second phase, and as a consequence of the exclusion from the educational system which the members of the group experienced as a result of this style, the same Turkish-German young women are observed construing a different kind of identity for themselves, based on a more elaborate and polite way of speaking. They learn to alternate between these styles, and present themselves in different ways, according to the social worlds they act in. In the final chapter in this section, Ch. 7, Kathryn Woolard addresses a highly relevant methodological problem of identity research, i.e. ‘transportability’. How can identities which have become relevant in one interactional episode become relevant in a subsequent one as well? On the basis of data from Barcelona (Catalan/Castilian bilingualism), Woolard shows that it is the bystander in one encounter who may play a significantly active role in the next encounter. Linguistically displayed identities such as ethnicity can thus be exported beyond transitory encounters and reified as features of individuals through chains of participation in social networks and institutions. Bystanders’ access to an encounter is partial and their standpoint is different from that of ratified participants, occurring in what can be termed ‘face to back’ or ‘face to side’ rather than ‘face to face’ communication. Bystanders’ formulations of identity may thus differ systematically from those of participants in an encounter, even when they invoke the same interpretive rules. Individuals can find their identities are diagnosed and regimented differently by bystanders because of the structural particulars of overheard interactions.

Chapter 2 Language alternation as a resource for identity negotiations among Dominican American bilinguals Benjamin Bailey 1.

Introduction

All language is heteroglot (Bakhtin 1981) and provides individuals with resources, i.e. linguistic and discursive forms, for the negotiation of identity. Bilingual, bicultural individuals have both an expanded set of resources for these omnipresent social negotiations, and a broader range of social categories that can be made relevant through talk as compared to monolingual, monocultural individuals. On the linguistic level, bilinguals can draw forms from two languages as well as hybrid forms resulting from language contact. On the social and cultural level, many are familiar with relatively diverse cultural frameworks for interpreting and evaluating the world and positioning themselves and others within it. This chapter explores several ways in which a group of bilingual Dominican American high school students in Providence, Rhode Island, exploit language alternation in the negotiation of social identities in everyday peer-group talk. They negotiate these identities with a bilingual, multivariety repertoire of language varieties that reflects Dominican immigrant heritage and socialization in a multi-ethnic, low-income, urban United States context (Bailey 2001a). This linguistic repertoire draws from various Dominican and American sociolects and forms resulting from Spanish– English language contact. Like many children of international migrants, second-generation Dominicans must negotiate between the linguistic and cultural worlds of their parents and those of the dominant society. They regularly confront questions of how to situate themselves and others within these worlds and how to construct a positive self in a broader social context that disparages their linguistic, ethnic/racial, and class identities (cf. Zentella 1997: 13). These Dominican American negotiations are particularly salient to monolingual white Americans because of the ambiguous fit of many Do-

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minicans into dominant U.S. social categories and because of the relatively diverse social origins of their linguistic forms. Phenotypically, Dominicans span the categories of black and white, which are popularly understood as representing an unbridgeable distance in the U.S. (Smedley 1993; Bailey 2001b). Linguistically, they draw forms from grammatical codes that count as distinct languages (Spanish and English) and those who are socialized in low-income, urban areas also draw from African American English, which is popularly understood to imply stark social difference. In this chapter, I first define the terms identity and style as I use them, emphasizing that both are subjectively and ideologically constituted. After a brief methods section, I describe and illustrate with transcript examples an everyday form of linguistically unmarked language alternation – code switching as a discourse mode (Poplack 1981, 1988) – that is common among second-generation Dominican youth, as well as other children of international labor migrants (Auer 1984; Gal 1988; Zentella 1997). While this form of language alternation can be considered a style, I argue that its social implications for identity are very different at the local, interactional level than they are in the wider socio-political context. In each of the next three sections, I consider short sequences of interaction in which specific instances of language alternation are socially and metaphorically loaded and explicitly linked to identity negotiations. In the first sequence, a relatively dark-skinned male student switches from English to Spanish in addressing a Guatemalan American female who has been led to believe that he is Haitian rather than Dominican. Addressing this student – with whom he otherwise speaks English – in Spanish serves to bolster his argument that he is Dominican rather than Haitian. In the second sequence, two female friends code switch into Spanish to negotiate a common understanding of the term hick, a term they apply to a category of more recent, male immigrant against which they define themselves. In the final section, I illustrate how two Dominican American teenagers alternate between Spanish and several varieties of English to differentiate themselves along a variety of dimensions from a fellow, more-recently-arrived immigrant teenager. The social meanings of these metaphorical code switches (Blom and Gumperz 1972) are both “brought along” to the interaction as well as “brought about” in the interaction itself (Auer 1992). They are brought along in that codes, and specific forms within codes, have social associations that pre-exist particular interactions. They are brought about in that codes have myriad social associations, and interlocutors creatively exploit

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particular associations in situationally specific ways. Thus, a switch into Spanish can be an index of Latino identity (example 5, below) or a way of making fun of a fellow Latino immigrant (example 6, below). A switch into English can highlight comity among Dominican Americans or it can be a way of communicating differences in family class origins in the Dominican Republic (example 7, below).

2.

Identity and linguistic style

I approach both identity and linguistic style as dimensions of on-going, contingent processes of differentiation rather than as static essences or meanings that inhere in social groups or linguistic forms, respectively. My notion of identity draws from Barth’s (1969) seminal argument that ethnic groups are defined by the boundaries that groups construct between themselves, rather than the characteristics of group members. It has long been noted that individuals have multiple characteristics and allegiances, so it is the situational and selective highlighting of commonalties and differences that is characteristic of identity groupings (Moerman 1965; Cohen 1978). Identities thus center on the processes through which individuals and groups create, maintain, or diminish social boundaries, marking themselves and others as the “same”1 or “different”. From this phenomenological perspective, identity is a function of “self-ascription” – how one defines oneself – and “ascription by others” – how others define one (Barth 1969: 13). Analysis of naturally occurring discourse is a means to understanding how individuals, as social actors, selectively highlight or diminish social boundaries and activate facets of identity. Interlocutors publicly display and continuously update for each other their on-going understandings of talk – including identity negotiations – as talk unfolds turn by turn, thereby making these negotiations of meaning visible for analytic treatment by social scientists (cf. Heritage and Atkinson 1984: 11). Since identity is a function of self- and other-ascription, the constitution of identities – through the negotiation of congruent ascriptions – can be visible in the turn-by-turn talk of individuals. I see style in complementary, processual terms. Following Irvine (2001: 22), the key to style is distinctiveness. Styles draw meanings from contrast with other styles; they are themselves constituted as styles through this contrast, rather than through any inherent characteristics, just as identities

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are constituted through boundary marking processes (or lack thereof). Whether two ways of speaking constitute distinct styles is a phenomenological question that is ideologically mediated. To a linguist whose perspective privileges formal categories, for example, any language alternation may be highly salient because of the alternation of two codes, thus constituting a distinctive style. To the monolingual, Anglophone majority in the U.S., English monolingualism is an emblem of citizenship and belonging, and any language alternation is an exercise in distinctiveness. To a bilingual child of international migrants, however, code switching in intragroup peer interaction is not commonly perceived by members as very distinct from speaking to such peers in English, or in Spanish, without alternation. This conception of style – based on a semiotics of distinctiveness – is very different from the concept of style in U.S. sociolinguistics, which has been primarily concerned with correlations between linguistic and social variables (see Rickford and Eckert (2001) for a discussion of style in U.S. sociolinguistics and points of difference and overlap between U.S. sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological perspectives). Social categories in this tradition have been treated as given, i.e. pre-existing any interaction, and the agency of individuals and the role of ideology in language use has been downplayed, or even denied (Labov 1979: 328). These formulations of identity and style emphasize the discursive and situational fluidity of meanings, but negotiations of meaning are always tethered to social structure and history. Our phenomenological understandings develop in an historical world in which history is omnipresent in embodied form, as habitus (Bourdieu 1990: 56). Individuals only ascribe identities to themselves, for example, that are imaginable and available in a particular social and historical context, and they are only ratified in identities (through other-ascription) that social history makes available to them. Negotiations of identity thus take place within the parameters that history has imposed in a particular time and place. Similarly, the capacity of linguistic forms to index social meanings – and thus activate a position in a social system of distinction – has bases in social history. The base-line indexical meanings of linguistic forms are not idiosyncratic but are related to actual, historical usages by speakers in particular social positions. It is only through recurrent connections between a social phenomenon or context and a linguistic form that non-referential indexical meanings are constituted (Peirce 1955). Individual speakers creatively exploit and negotiate indexical form-meaning relationships, but these negotiations rely, at one level, on conventional associations.

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3.

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Methods

Data in this chapter come from fieldwork conducted in Providence, Rhode Island during 1996 and 1997 (see Bailey 2002). Data collection methods included ethnographic observation, over 30 audio recorded interviews with high school students, and video recording of naturally occurring interaction of six principle subjects, aged 16 to 18, in school, home, and community contexts. Selected segments of interaction were transcribed in detail following conversation analytic conventions (Heritage and Atkinson 1984). Bilingual Dominican American consultants, including the six principle subjects, aided in the transcription and translation of talk and offered interpretations and explanations of interactions. The six principle subjects were students at Central High School, a Providence city school of 1,350 students, which is over 20% Dominican. Roughly 60% of the student body is Hispanic, with Puerto Ricans and Guatemalans comprising the second and third largest Hispanic groups. About 16% of the students are of non-Hispanic African descent, 16% are Southeast Asian, primarily first and second-generation Cambodian and Laotian refugees, and about 5% are white American. Almost ninety percent of the students at Central High School are categorized as poor based on federal guidelines, and more than half of the students officially enrolled in the 9th grade drop out by the 11th grade. The transcripts presented here are from recordings made at Central High School, except for the last one, which was made at a Friday evening Spanish language, Catholic youth group meeting.

4.

Code switching as a discourse mode

Like many language practices, code switching is polysemous and multifunctional. Social and interactional functions of individual switches can range from highly metaphorical negotiations of identities, meanings, and obligations (Blom and Gumperz 1972; Myers-Scotton 1993: 84) to much less marked, local discourse management (Gumperz 1982; Auer 1984; Myers-Scotton 1993: 149; Alfonzetti 1998; Bailey 2000). Metaphorical meanings in code switching are typically generated by the partial violation of conventional associations between code and particular contexts. In cultures and contexts where codes are highly compartmentalized by domains (Kroskrity 1993) or are taken to represent particular political positions

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(Heller 1992, 1995), code switching tends to be relatively less frequent and to communicate metaphorical meanings when it occurs, as it violates ideologies that link particular codes to particular and disparate social worlds. The majority of code switches that I recorded among bilingual Dominican American high school students in peer interaction did not involve any evident metaphorical negotiations of identity or highlight indexical meanings of one code or another. Like children of many international labor migrants, second-generation Dominicans have access to both sending and host society languages and sociocultural roles. They straddle national, linguistic, cultural, and ethnic boundaries, embracing multiple social and linguistic worlds. With this relative lack of compartmentalization among languages and cultural worlds in their teenage lives, codes are not so conventionally linked to situations and domains as in many other situations, and metaphorical meanings are not generated by most switches. Code switching among this group tends to be relatively frequent and unmarked, resulting in what Poplack (1981, 1988) calls “code switching as a discourse mode.” Many switches in this style of speaking serve local discourse management functions, signaling shifts in speech activity or footing or helping to maintain discourse cohesion across turns. For many individual switches in this style of speaking, it can be difficult or impossible to assign a discrete interactional function.2 The following two switches are typical of those that I recorded in interactions among U.S. raised Dominicans in that they consist of relatively short bits of Spanish inserted into interactions that are otherwise in English, the dominant language of high school students who were U.S.-born or who arrived in the U.S. during their first school years. (1) [(JS #2 10:51:30) Janelle, U.S.-born, and Jose, arrived in the U.S. at age 8, have been chatting in English during class. Janelle describes how she had her brother-in-law, Benny, give her a ride to a fashion show practice session that turned out to be cancelled.] Janelle: Jose: Janelle:

I hope I don’t have fashion show practice today. No? Cause yesterday I was mad, de balde yo fui para allá. ‘I went there for nothing’ I told Benny to take me de balde. ‘for nothing’ ((Talk continues in English with occasional switches to Spanish))

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In this example, there is no obvious function of these switches related to the structure of the discourse or to metaphorical meanings of English and Spanish. When codes are not compartmentalized by a group, the search for a function of a particular switch may be akin to trying to explain why a monolingual speaker selects one synonym or phrasing over another (Zentella 1997: 101). In the following example, in contrast, there is a clear discourse contextualization function of the switch into Spanish, as the switch coincides with a change in footing, a temporary reframing of talk (Goffman 1979; cf. Zentella 1997: 93): (2) [(JS #2 10:50:10) Discussing whether she needs new immunizations to do her summer job at a hospital.] Janelle:

I don’t know if I – I don’t know if I have to go again cause– dizque no es verdad que ‘supposedly isn’t it true that’ after a certain time– after a certain time you have to do it again? You gotta get shots again?

Janelle is unsure whether she needs new immunizations before beginning her summer job. She moves from reporting this uncertainty in the first part of her turn, to directly asking her interlocutor to confirm that one needs to be re-immunized after a certain period of time. This switch from a statement to a question coincides with a cut-off of cause – a shift in pitch and tempo, and a change of code, from English to Spanish. Code switching is a linguistic resource – like prosody or body alignment – that can be activated to highlight this shift in footing, or communicative activity, but it does not appear to have any greater social or metaphorical meaning related to conventional associations of Spanish or English language. Group members do not see such individual switches as metaphorically loaded or as a means to constituting a distinctive style, and many individuals are not discursively conscious of why they code switch, or that they are code switching at any given moment.3 This is not the same, however, as arguing that such code switching has no meanings or implications for social identities. One must distinguish between local functions of particular code switches and the more global sociopolitical functions of code switching as a discourse mode (cf. Myers-Scotton 1993: 149; Zentella 1997: 101). Regardless of whether individual code switches serve identifiable conversa-

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tional functions, the discourse mode, or style, of frequent switching has profound implications for social identity formation in the U.S. The meanings that one finds in such switching are largely a function of one’s subject position and analytical perspective. For many monolingual adults, both Spanish-speaking and Anglophone, code switching is a haphazard jumble of linguistic elements that is emblematic of the inability to speak what those adults see as the correct language, i.e. the ideological standard (Milroy and Milroy 1985; Silverstein 1996; Lippi-Green 1997). Many academics of the last 30 years, in contrast, have celebrated the linguistic sophistication displayed in code switching (McClure 1977; Sankoff and Poplack 1981; Lipski 1985) and the social ‘strategies’ that some forms of it imply (Gumperz 1982; cf. Myers-Scotton 1993: 74; cf. Woolard 2004). For more sociologically and anthropologically oriented analysts, unmarked code switching as a discourse mode can be seen as a form of resistance to dominant discourses of unquestioning assimilation (Gal 1988: 259) and a means to constructing a positive self in a political and economic context that disparages immigrant phenotypes, language, class status, and ethnic origins (Zentella 1997). Frequent switching as a style is always socially marked in a wider U.S. society in which being a monolingual English speaker is an ideological default against which difference or distinctiveness is constructed (Urciuoli 1996). Various nativist English-only groups, for example, have sponsored legislation to limit or prohibit the use of languages other than English in many contexts, including school, government, and workplace. This ideology is part of a larger Western tradition of linguistic purism intertwined with a belief in a primordial unity among language, race, and ethnic/national identity (see Auer, this volume). This assumed unity – explicitly claimed and celebrated by European philosophers Herder (Gal 1989: 355) and, earlier, Condillac (Aarsleff 1982; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994) implicitly underlies Western social and linguistic categorization systems. Even single code switches can thus have great significance for identity constitution, depending on whether bystanders (Goffman 1979, see Woolard, this volume) are present who see Spanish speaking as a direct index of Latino or Dominican identities. This is particularly significant for Dominican Americans who are native speakers of English and whose phenotypes might lead others to identify them as black American or white American rather than Latino. Many such individuals report having been perceived as black American, or having perceived other Dominicans as black American, until Spanish language use called attention to a Latino identity:

Language alternation as a resource for identity negotiations (3) BB: Maritza:

(4) BB: Francisca:

37

Who thinks you’re black? White Americans, Dominicans...? Black Americans. It’s kind of, it’s kind of different, because they should know their own people. I would know who’s Dominican. Actually, no, there was this guy, he’s Dominican, and I thought he was black. And then when I heard him speak Spanish, I was like, “He’s Spanish! He’s a Dominican.” Do people ask you what you are? They mostly assume I’m black, they never really ask, but when they hear me speaking Spanish, “Oh, what are you, Dominican? I didn’t know that.” They get all shocked and surprised because they didn’t think that I was Dominican...

Regardless of the local conversational function of an instance of language alternation, it can be used by any bystander to position the speaker within an overall semiotic system of distinction.

5.

Code switching as metaphorical resource for identity negotiations

5.1. Aren’t you supposedly from Haiti? While the majority of code switches in bilingual Dominican American peer interaction are unmarked to members in terms of social identities, some switches are metaphorically loaded. In the three sequences presented in this section and the following two sections, interlocutors exploit the indexical potential of particular codes or forms to claim and enact identities in context-specific ways. Such negotiations provide a window onto the workings of the local social and linguistic worlds that these young Dominican Americans constitute and inhabit through their talk. In Example 5, transcribed below, a student’s ethnic/racial identity becomes a reference point for a joke in a bilingual conversation. In this conversation, a recent Dominican immigrant, Eduardo, jokingly claims that a relatively dark-skinned Dominican American, Wilson, is Haitian. This joking claim is directed (minimally) at Claudia, a Guatemalan American, who is sitting in front of Wilson and Eduardo, and is turned around to face them. Wilson initially goes along with this counterfactual claim, but then challenges it. This interaction involves not only Eduardo teasing the dark-

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skinned student, but also Eduardo and Wilson collaborating to put on another student, a Guatemalan American. Through their talk, these teenagers negotiate racial identities and meanings that are popularly understood as inherent and immutable. Code choice and alternation play a central role in the constitution of these negotiations of identity and social meanings. The recent immigrant Eduardo, whose English is limited, produces turns only in Spanish. Claudia, who is English dominant, produces turns only in English. Wilson, an English dominant bilingual, produces two turns in Spanish and four in English during this sequence. (He produces a longer series of turns in Spanish directed at Eduardo after this transcribed section.) Wilson’s Spanish turns (boldfaced) after he addresses Claudia in English have particular metaphorical import for his identity. (5) [(WR #2 1:20:07) Setting and participants: Early in an 11th grade class period in May. There is a substitute teacher, and students are talking, flirting, and fooling around. Wilson, the student I was recording, has been speaking in both English and Spanish to various classmates. He came to the U.S. around age 7. Claudia’s parents are from Guatemala. Eduardo came from the Dominican Republic as a teenager.] Wilson:

((singing)) dame del pollito ‘give me a little bit of that chicken’ Eduardo: Tú no dizque ere(s) de Haití? Tú no ere(s) dominicano, Wilson. ‘Aren’t you supposedly from Haiti? You’re not Dominican, Wilson.’ Wilson: Yo nací en Haití, ((Wilson turns to Eduardo, smiling)) ‘I was born in Haiti’ Eduardo: //( ) ((motions toward camera, Wilson turns to camera)) Wilson: //pero me crié en Santo Domingo. ‘but I was brought up in the Dominican Republic’ ((Eduardo holds up both hands, palms forward, with middle and ring fingers curled down – the sign of the cuckold – behind Wilson’s head; Wilson turns back toward Eduardo and hits him in the leg with the back of his open hand)) (1.5) Claudia: So you’re Haitian, huh? Wilson: No I’m Dominican Claudia: You were born in DR? Wilson: Yeah Eduardo: Nació en Haití ‘He was born in Haiti.’ Wilson: En Santo Domingo. ‘In the Dominican Republic.’

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Eduardo:

E(s) haitiano. ‘He’s Haitian.’ (3.0) ((Wilson gives two lateral head shakes in the direction of Claudia.)) Eduardo: ( ) Wilson: E(s) mentira, ven acá, a quién tú le va(s)- a quién tú le va(s) a creer, a mí o a e(s)to(s) do(s) loco(s)? ((turning his head laterally first to one side then the other, indicating Eduardo and an accomplice (?) on his other side.)) ‘It’s a lie. Come on, who are you going– who are you going to believe, me or these two crazy guys?’ (.8) Eduardo: A mí. ‘Me.’ (1.5) Wilson: Eh, ‘mano ((looking down at magazine)) ‘Hey, man’ Wilson: Azaros(o) ((Hits Eduardo sharply on leg with the back of his hand)) ‘Jerk.’

In their first turns at talk in this segment, Eduardo and Wilson speak Spanish, which is the language in which they address each other throughout this class. They jokingly create a counterfactual frame in which Wilson is not Dominican, but a Haitian who was raised in the Dominican Republic. They both know that this is not true. Their Spanish language use helps to constitute a Dominican sociocultural framework for interpreting and joking about phenotype and race that is linked to historical constructions of race and nation in the Dominican Republic (Silie 1989; Duany 1994; Moya Pons 1995). In Dominican contexts, calling a relatively dark-skinned individual a Haitian is a form of ritual insult that is common among adolescent males (see examples in Diaz 1996). Although Eduardo and Wilson are ostensibly addressing each other – Eduardo uses the second-person tú to address a first-pair part question to Wilson, to which Wilson responds with a second-pair part – their talk is directed to a wider audience of bystanders who understand Spanish, including Claudia. Claudia is likely unfamiliar with the Dominican social framework in which relatively dark-skinned Dominicans are jokingly accused of being Haitian. Claudia responds to these claims by proffering a candidate understanding of Wilson’s identity – that he is Haitian – in English, the only language that she is observed speaking during this class period. This repair-like can-

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didate understanding may be necessary because of ambiguity regarding Wilson’s identity. Eduardo and Wilson’s presentation of claims about Wilson may have been seen as unserious – Wilson smiles as he asserts that he was born in Haiti and Eduardo makes a cuckold gesture over Wilson’s head – casting doubt on the veracity of the claims. Claudia may also have an understanding of identity that privileges birthplace in assigning identity. After Wilson other-corrects her candidate understanding that he is Haitian, she proffers a candidate understanding of his birthplace – the Dominican Republic – that Wilson confirms. The language choices in the first six turns here can be explained most simply in terms of language fluency. Wilson thus addresses Eduardo in Spanish and Claudia in English, but his subsequent use of Spanish for two turns (En Santo Domingo and E(s) mentira, ven aca…) to Claudia violates this pattern. This is a triadic exchange in which Claudia is Wilson’s primary addressee (his gaze is oriented toward her, Eduardo has begun addressing Wilson in the third person, and Wilson addresses Claudia in the second-person), but his turns are shaped as other-corrections (Schegloff, Jefferson et al. 1977) of Eduardo’s Spanish turns. Wilson’s use of a code that matches that of Eduardo’s utterances helps to link his turns to Eduardo’s, which is of some import for countering them. At one level, this use of Spanish contributes to discourse cohesion, serving a discourse contextualization function. Wilson’s use of Spanish in addressing Claudia also has metaphorical import related to his social identity, however. The joking line that Wilson is Haitian, initiated by Eduardo, and maintained by Wilson, is so successful that Claudia displays uncertainty about Wilson’s identity despite his new claim that he’s Dominican. The condition upon which this verbal play and put-on is predicated – the implausibility of Wilson’s being Haitian – is not recognized by Claudia. For Wilson, the distance between the joking world that he and Eduardo have constituted and the immediate world of bodies in face-to-face interaction may have narrowed too much. Wilson’s use of Spanish for a longer turn directed at Claudia (E(s) mentira, ven acá, a quién… ) highlights his fluency in Spanish. He relies not only on the referential dimension of his words but also the indexical associations of speaking Spanish. In the Dominican Republic, the ability to speak Spanish has historically been treated as evidence of a Dominican or Latino identity (Gonzalez 1975), and in the local context, it is treated as a direct index of Dominican identity, both by Dominicans and their peers (Bailey 2000).

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41

Identity negotiations operate at many levels in this interaction. In terms of explicit identity categories and referential meanings, it is about whether Wilson is Haitian or Dominican. In terms of affiliation and disaffiliation among interlocutors, there are shifting negotiations. Eduardo and Wilson collaborate in creating a Dominican cultural framework through the use of Dominican Spanish – implicitly affiliating with each other – to tease a Guatemalan American female by getting her to believe something that is (to them) patently not true. While this collaborative joke draws a boundary between the two males and Claudia, it is simultaneously an attempt to engage her, an effort that Wilson and Eduardo repeat many times during this class period. At the same time that Eduardo and Wilson initially collaborate in this joke, the joke symbolically differentiates between them by invoking phenotypic differences (Wilson has darker skin than Eduardo), and this symbolic differentiation seeps into the interaction itself, creating disaffiliation. 5.2. They be like “loca, loca, epa, epa, huepa” In the segment of transcript in this section, Isabella models the speech of a local category of immigrants, hicks, in both Spanish and English, in talking with her friend Janelle. Through affecting the voice of members of this category in a marked way, she mocks aspects of their speech and identities. This segment shows that metaphorical meanings of code switching can be locally brought about. While Spanish language use is conventionally an emblem of Dominican immigrant solidarity, the code switch into Spanish in this case is used to differentiate among desirable and less desirable Dominican immigrant identities. (6) [(JS #2 12:40:58) Janelle and Isabella are sitting outside of their school. Janelle has noticed some students staring in her direction. Their attention is likely attracted by the spectacle of her being videotaped by the adult, white researcher.] Isabella: Janelle: Isabella: Janelle: Isabella:

I like Bulivan’s dress. ((gazing at a fellow student)) I know. If it was sleeveless, it’d be nicer. What’s up with them people looking over here, them hicks? And stuff. . ((deep pitched, husky voice; assuming slack-faced, dull stare))

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Janelle:

Isabella: Janelle:

What do you call a hick? Cause Jose says a hick is someone ridiculous, somebody stupid. Isn’t a hick someone who just came back from the country and they can’t really dress, they can’t speak English? And they, you know, They be like loca, loca, //e:::::: pa, epa::: , huepa: ‘honey, honey, he:::::::y, alright!, alri::::ght!, alri:ght!’ //Yeah, right?

Janelle initially uses the term hick to refer to a group of students who are staring across the school grounds in her direction. Isabella then intones No hicks, taking on the voice of a “hick” by using a deep-pitched, husky, slow tempo pronunciation and assuming a slack-faced stare. In terms of linguistic surface features, this is not an accurate characterization of recent immigrant speech, in that recent immigrant teenagers speak more Spanish than English and speak English with distinct Spanish phonology. However, in American English, the slow tempo, monotone pronunciation, and slack face contribute to the impression of a slow-witted person. The overall accuracy of the mocking voice is less important than highlighting some features of the other’s speech that are seen as emblematic of the targeted identities. Both the propositional content of her utterance (No hicks) as well as her marked pronunciation construct hicks as different and disparaged. Janelle then checks her understanding of the meaning of the word hick, contrasting her understanding with that of her friend Jose, who understands hick only in terms of its local connotations of “stupid” or “ridiculous.” Janelle offers a candidate understanding of a hick in referential terms: as someone who just came from the (Dominican) countryside, is not acculturated to urban American youth clothing fashions, and can’t speak English. The fact that Janelle explicitly seeks to confirm a shared understanding of the category hick suggests that the meanings of such identity categories are not structurally fixed but are locally negotiated forms of attribution. Isabella confirms Janelle’s candidate understanding of “hicks” not through reference but by giving a representative direct quotation of their speech: loca, loca, e:::::, epa, epa, huepa. She squints and scrunches her face, using a nasal, slightly high-pitched register. In English Isabella uses a deep pitch with a blank stare and slack face to mimic a hick, while in Spanish she uses a nasal voice with slightly high pitch and a tensed face, i.e. squint, wrinkled nose, and lifted upper lip. She introduces this direct quote with the African American English habitual be, meaning that this category of person habitually and repeatedly says things of this sort. Janelle displays

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agreement with this characterization of “hicks” with an affirmative, overlapping Yeah, right? This code switch into Spanish sets off directly quoted speech from surrounding talk, helping Janelle to take on the voice of a third party, which is an oft-noted discourse contextualization function of code switching. When a code switch is serving only such a local contextualization function, the code used for the quotation is not necessarily the same one that the speaker originally used, but simply one that contrasts with the immediately preceding talk. In this case, however, the code match between the quoted speech and the actual speech of members of the category “hick”, which Isabella is modeling, is of significance. Code switching here – along with the prosodic and visual features of the quoted speech (cf. 'marking' in Mitchell-Kernan 1972) – serves to index a stereotyped island Dominican gender style that is being constructed as inappropriate for an American urban youth context. Loca, loca, e:::::, epa, epa, huepa may be associated with the relative directness of heterosexual Dominican males and giving of piropos in Dominican contexts, i.e. unsolicited expressions of romantic interest and admiration directed by males to females in many Latin American contexts (Andrews 1977; Suarezorozco and Dundes 1984; Moore 1996). Piropos tend to be much more direct, frequent, and intense than analogous expressions in Anglo American U.S. culture, and many Anglo Americans would interpret them as a form of sexual harassment. Consultants as well as literature on Dominican gender roles (Pessar 1984, 1987; Grasmuck 1991) indicate that migration to the U.S. results in an increase in female authority in heterosexual, romantic relationships. “Hicks” not only know little English and fail to dress according to urban U.S. youth styles; they fail to adhere to appropriate local cultural frameworks and practices for heterosexual interaction. Isabella’s code switch into Spanish allows her to capture these social associations of a particular Dominican male way of speaking and being that might be difficult to capture in English. At the same time, she displays a stance toward a particular Dominican male way of speaking, a stance that is at least partly shared by Janelle. Isabella and Janelle collaborate in coming to a shared perspective on a disparaged category, thus constituting themselves, as interlocutors in the here-and-now as the same. This disparaged category is both modeled in marked fashion and explicitly named, while the category to which Isabella and Janelle belong remains implicit. The use of a locally marked style and explicit category names for constituting an “other” against which one defines oneself may be characteristic of relationships

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between linguistic style and social identities more generally (see Günthner, this volume). One’s own identity and ways of speaking are generally treated as normal, natural, and unmarked, so it can be difficult to call attention to them. It is through the highlighting of boundaries – through exaggeration of linguistic features seen as emblematic of other identities – that one’s own style and identities are constituted as distinct and discrete. 5.3. C’mon, dude In the following segment, Alejandro and Jonathan use a variety of Spanish and English linguistic resources to negotiate identities and differentiate themselves from a third teenager, Samuel. This segment has several parallels to the last example: Alejandro and Jonathan came to the U.S. by their first school years, while Samuel, whom they tease, is a more recent immigrant; Alejandro code switches to assume a mocking voice to make fun of Samuel; and the interaction highlights comity between Alejandro and Jonathan. It differs from the last example in several other dimensions, however: urban versus rural origins in the Dominican Republic are the primary basis for differentiation, Alejandro uses an English language voice to mock Samuel, and Samuel is a party to the interaction. Like the other examples in this paper, this segment highlights the creativity of individual social actors in selecting from among linguistic forms and the local and interactional negotiations of the meanings of such forms. (7) [(LD #SM 8:30:44) Jonathan, Alejandro, and Samuel are sitting next to each other in a larger circle of about 12 members at a Friday evening Catholic youth group. The adult group leader is discussing, in Spanish, upcoming summer activities for the group.] GL:

El viernes ellas empiezan, el viernes el cuarto de julio. // Entonces..... [They’re starting Friday, Friday the fourth of July. So...’] Alej.: //((chanting)) I ain’t gonna be here! /u::/ DR! ((Slaps hands with Jonathan after /u::/, then bobs his shoulders in a merengue style)) (1.5) Alej. →J: Al estilo Will Smith, al estilo Fresh Prince. Kpsh:::. [‘Will Smith style, Fresh Prince style’]

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((Slaps hands with Jonathan, then does a synchronized over the shoulder pointing gesture with thumb accompanied by /kp5/ rushing sound)) (4.5) ((Group leader continues discussing, in Spanish, the schedule of summer meetings.)) Jon.: (to S) You going to DR? (.5) Jon.: You’re ( ) Alej.: You gonna be in this campo [‘farm, countryside’] Jon.: ( ) Alej.: C’mon dude ((holding up his hands, palms forward; assuming a goofy expression)) Jon.: No phone, they got telegraph ((mimes tapping and makes beeping noises)) Alej.: No, jugando Nintendo [‘No, playing Nintendo.] ((mimes staring at handheld game and playing slowly)) Jon.: Con palitos [‘With little sticks’] ((mimes tossing sticks into the air)) Alej.: I want– I want to go to the beach– ((White voice; facing forward)) Alej.→J: Oh, el papá mío me dará cinco mil ( ) – cinco mil pesos, loco. [‘Oh, my Dad is going to give me five thousand ( )– five thousand pesos, man.’] Jon.: In DR?

Alejandro’s first utterance follows the adult leader’s mention of the fourth of July, a date when Alejandro will be in the Dominican Republic. He turns to Jonathan, one of his best friends, who is also going to spend the summer in the Dominican Republic, to celebrate his and Jonathan’s impending trips. This turn represents a code switch in that his most recent utterances have been in Spanish and the reference to the fourth of July that triggered his utterance was made in Spanish as well. Alejandro’s interaction with Jonathan and Samuel is a separate activity from the group leader’s talk, and the switch helps to contextualize it as such. Participants themselves treat it as distinct from the dominant communication by relaxing normally exigent turn-taking rules (Sacks, Schegloff et al. 1974), and extensively overlapping with the group leader’s talk. However, Alejandro’s use of English here also carries local metaphorical meaning. Church youth group games and Bible-study activities that involve the whole group are generally carried out

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in Spanish, and the adult leader speaks little English. Spanish speaking helps to constitute these religious activities, and for many individuals there is a fairly strong language-domain link between Church and Spanish.4 English dominant individuals speak to each other in English or both languages, however, and bilingual male members of the group often use English to resist the Bible-reading and discussion activities in Spanish. In this case, Alejandro’s use of English serves to metaphorically resist the ongoing official group frame, the leader’s discussion of upcoming activities. In his next turn, Alejandro switches to Spanish, but uses nonce borrowings of English proper names – Will Smith and Fresh Prince – unassimilated to Spanish phonology. Jonathan and Alejandro both treat this utterance as a cue to engage in a second hand slap and an over-the-shoulder pointing gesture with the thumb, which they execute in unison. This gesture comes from the television situation-comedy The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which starred African American actor and rap artist Will Smith and played on the American network NBC from 1990 to 1996. The gesture was used by Will Smith’s character to signal departure. Alejandro is thus using Dominican Spanish with English borrowings to coordinate a gesture drawn from a Hollywood version of African American male youth behavior to celebrate an upcoming trip to the Dominican Republic. This brief exchange highlights the relative hybridity of semiotic resources that interlocutors can activate in marking affiliation with each other. After turning briefly back toward the group leader, Jonathan turns toward Samuel, directing a question at him in English, You going to DR? This question is topically tied to Alejandro and Jonathan’s immediately preceding interaction – impending summer trips to the Dominican Republic – which was visually and acoustically available to Samuel, but Samuel is only now ratified as a participant in this talk. The choice of code to address Samuel is marked because Samuel is a recent Dominican immigrant who speaks little English. He had just minutes before volunteered to the entire group that he couldn’t follow activities when English predominated, and in both the school and church group contexts that I observed, Alejandro and Jonathan addressed him otherwise only in Spanish. This use of English therefore violates basic expectations of situational code choice (Blom and Gumperz 1972) that Alejandro and Jonathan otherwise follow. Samuel does not audibly respond to this question, but Alejandro and Jonathan’s subsequent turns suggest that Samuel gave an affirmative visual

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response (he was off-camera), perhaps a vertical head nod. It is likely that being addressed in English deterred him from responding verbally. While Alejandro and Jonathan jointly celebrated the fact that they were both going to the Dominican Republic, they treat Samuel’s upcoming trip as grounds to make fun of him. Their subsequent turns addressed to Samuel are in English and have a derogatory tone, e.g. Alejandro tells him You gonna be in this campo, switching only on a word for which English equivalents fail to capture the appropriate connotations. Rural areas of the Dominican Republic contrast sharply with the urban centers in wealth, infrastructure, and education. Many rural areas lack electricity, pavement, safe drinking water, health care, and schools, and rural illiteracy and poverty rates are high.5 Following Jonathan’s inaudible turn, Alejandro switches to a marked white English variety, C’mon, dude. He uses a relatively high pitched and slow tempo voice, and he uses the term of address dude, which was a common way for young white American males to address each other during the late 1990’s (Kiesling 2004) but which I never heard Alejandro or other Dominican Americans that I observed and recorded use. While speaking he holds his hands up even with his shoulders, palms forward and directs his gaze forward as if performing a role for others to view. While white English is the prestige standard in educational, business, and many institutional contexts in the United States, it is a marked variety in many local Dominican American youth contexts, where it can suggest a lack of urban cool and authenticity. In this case, white English is being used by Alejandro to differentiate himself and Jonathan from Samuel. Marked white English is not normally an index of rural Dominican identities, but in this specific context, the negative connotations of such English are being used to communicate negative connotations of rural Dominican life for Alejandro and Jonathan. Jonathan then claims in English that in Samuel’s campo they do not have telephones, only telegraphs, and he mimes the tapping on a telegraph key. Alejandro counters in Spanish that they don’t even have that contact with the outside world there – that the most exciting activity there is to sit by oneself and play Nintendo, and he mimes playing with a small, selfcontained game. Jonathan continues in Spanish that individuals there don’t even have Nintendo for entertainment (perhaps because Nintendo has positive value for them and does not capture their attitude toward rural Dominican life), just little sticks, and he mimes tossing little sticks up into the air and catching them.

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Alejandro again switches footing, speaking in white English, his upper body stiff and upright, facing forward rather than to the side toward Jonathan or Samuel, his voice slightly high pitched and strained I want to go to the beach–. These prosodic and visual features suggest that he is enacting a role, perhaps a mocking of Samuel or similar individual stuck in the campo. Alejandro had described to me his extensive plans for going out to nightclubs that summer and for going to various beaches. Dominicans are proud of the island’s beaches, and middle- and upper-class urban youth, like Alejandro, regularly visit them in the summers. In contrast to Samuel, both Jonathan and Alejandro could expect a summer not just of socializing with relatives, but of enjoying urban entertainment such as nightclubs and taking trips to various beaches. Alejandro cuts off his own speech, breaking off the white English voice and the teasing frame by turning to Jonathan, sitting less upright, and using the disjunct marker oh to display “sudden remembering” (Jefferson 1987), and describing, in Spanish, the spending money that he will receive in the Dominican Republic. Referring to the limitations of Samuel’s summer entertainment options may have triggered pleasurable anticipation of his own summer plans. Alejandro and Jonathan no longer address Samuel, directly or indirectly, but engage in talk of spending money, a relative’s vehicles in the Dominican Republic, and plans for summer activities there. In contrast to the immediately prior code switching, in which code and variety switching had clear metaphorical implications, this code switching is the unmarked sort common among bilingual Dominican Americans in everyday talk. In this interaction, Alejandro and Jonathan exploit a wide range of linguistic resources, including language alternation, to constitute rapidly shifting interpretive frames. Their speech activities serve to disparage Samuel and differentiate him from themselves, thus indirectly constituting a nondisparaged category for them to inhabit. They say who they are by describing who they are not, both referentially and through indirect indexicals (Ochs 1992). Alejandro and Jonathan’s code switching and assumption of different voices rely on metaphorical meanings of codes, styles, and referents in ways that are much more complicated than suggested by “we” vs. “they” codes and identities. The social connotations and implications for identity of their communicative resources – whether code switches, specific referents, or gestures – are highly context specific, requiring situated interpretation rather than reliance on just conventional meanings.

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Conclusions

Like other bilingual children of international labor migrants, Dominican Americans straddle linguistic and sociocultural worlds, and their language alternation in intra-group peer interaction is emblematic of this straddling. Their form of frequent, unmarked switching – code switching as a discourse mode – is distinct from other ways of speaking in their communities and the wider society, and, as such, constitutes a style. The meanings that one attributes to this style are largely a function of one’s subject position. For members, such language alternation is an unmarked way of speaking and doing the things that high school student do with talk: gossip, flirt, tease, make social plans, ask about schoolwork, etc. Non-members often evaluate this style of speaking in very different terms that are tied to Western ideologies of linguistic purism and a unity of language, race, and nation. Frequent code switching is seen by many monolinguals as a sign of linguistic and cognitive deficiency, by nativist groups as a rejection of incorporation into U.S. society, and by many academics as a sophisticated, agentive, and strategic way of negotiating social and political structures and meanings. At the everyday phenomenological level, language alternation has salient practical implications for ascriptions of individual identities among Dominican Americans. In the U.S., phenotype is the preeminent criterion for social classification, and many individual Dominican American phenotypes match those associated either with the category black American or the category white American. Displays of Spanish speaking trigger ascriptions of Latino identities from bystanders who might otherwise see individuals, based on physical appearance, as black or white. Negotiations of identity through language alternation are often more fleeting and context specific than the terms style or social category might imply. As is evident from data in this chapter, cultural frameworks, linguistic indexes of social categories, and the ways individuals fit into categories are not static and pre-determined but are negotiated and constructed at the local level. Both in monolingual and bilingual contexts, interlocutors display rapidly shifting stances toward each other, the activities in which they are engaged, and dimensions of the wider world, e.g. the relative value of various membership categories or individual members of them. These negotiations unfold on a turn-by-turn basis, both at the referential level and in terms of indexical meanings. Interlocutors can create and display alignment or disaffiliation with co-present interlocutors, they can position themselves

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with respect to abstract categories referenced through talk, or, more commonly, do both simultaneously. Because interlocutors display these meanings and negotiations to each other, we, as analysts, can look over their shoulders and gain a window onto the workings of social worlds.

Notes 1. The English word “identity” is derived from Latin, idem, meaning “the same”. 2. In a corpus of 1,685 switches among young New York Puerto Rican girls, Zentella (1997: 101) assigns fewer than half of her switches to specific conversational strategies, or functions, because most of the individual switches do not have a clear, analytically defensible function or do not co-occur with particular interactional patterns. 3. Zentella (1997: 1) artfully highlights this taken-for-granted, unmarked nature of code switching as a discourse mode in the opening of her book Growing Up Bilingual: “One day in El Barrio (New York City’s east Harlem) in 1979 I asked a nine year old of Puerto Rican background what language she spoke with sisters and brothers. ‘Hablamos los dos. We speak both,’ she answered casually, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to speak two languages and to alternate between them. I was struck by her offhand tone and the seamless welding of Spanish and English which proved her point vividly.” 4. Many English-dominant informants, for example, found the notion of attending English-language Catholic Mass strange if a Spanish-language Mass was available, and several reported that they prayed only in Spanish, even in non-Church contexts. 5. Alejandro, who came from an upper-middle class, urban background, was well aware of urban-rural hierarchies in the Dominican Republic. He alluded to this in discussing difficulties of acculturation faced by Dominican immigrants: “It depends on where they come from, if they come from the campo or the farm or whatever, it’s kind of different than if you’re over there from a city. If you come from the campo, from the farm, it’s different, cause you live with the cows and everything.”

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References Aarsleff, H. 1982 From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Alfonzetti, G. 1998 The conversational dimension in code-switching between Italian and dialect in Sicily. In: Auer, J. C. P. (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity. London/New York: Rout ledge, 180–211. Andrews, D. H. 1977 Flirtation walk – Piropos in Latin-America. Journal of Popular Culture 11(1), 49–61. Auer, J. C. P. 1984 Bilingual Conversation. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1992 Introduction: John Gumperz’s approach to contextualisation. In: Auer, J. C. P. and A. DiLuzio (eds.), The Contextualisation of Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Bailey, B. 2000 Language and negotiation of ethnic/racial identity among Dominican Americans. Language in Society 29(4), 555–582. 2000 Social/interactional functions of code switching among Dominican Americans. IPrA Pragmatics 10(2), 165–193. 2001a The language of multiple identities among Dominican Americans. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(2), 190–223. 2001b Dominican-American ethnic/racial identities and United States social categories. International Migration Review 35(3), 677–708. 2002 Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity: A Study of Dominican Americans. New York: LFB Scholarly Pub. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barth, F. 1969 Introduction. In: Barth, F., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Boston: Little Brown and Co., 9–38. Blom, J.-P. and J. J. Gumperz 1972 Code-switching in Norway. In: Gumperz, J. J. and D. Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 407–434. Bourdieu, P. 1990 The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Gal, S. 1988

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Ethnicity – Problem and Focus in Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 7, 379–403. Drown. New York: Riverhead Books. Ethnicity, identity, and music: An anthropological analysis of the Dominican Merengue. In: Behague, G. (ed.), Music and Black Ethnicity: The Caribbean and South America. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 65–90. The political economy of code choice. In: Heller, M. (ed.), Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 245–264. Language and political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology 18, 345–367.

Goffman, E. 1979 Footing. Semiotica 25, 1–29. Gonzalez, N. 1975 Patterns of Dominican ethnicity. In: Bennett, J. (ed.), The New Ethnicity: Perspectives from Ethnology. New York: West Publishing, 110–123. Grasmuck, S. 1991 Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gumperz, J. J. 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M. 1992 The politics of code-switching and language choice. In Eastman, C., Codeswitching. Cleveland, Avon: Multilingual Matters, 123–142. 1995 Language choice, social institutions, and symbolic domination. Language in Society 24(3), 373–406. Heritage, J. and J. M. Atkinson 1984 Introduction. In: Atkinson, J. M. and J. Heritage, Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1–15. Irvine, J. T. 2001 “Style” as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In: Eckert, P. and J. R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 21–43.

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Jefferson, G. 1987 Sequential aspects of story telling in conversation. In: Schenkein, J. N., Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction. New York: Academic Press, 219–248. Kiesling, S. 2004 Dude. American Speech 79(3), 281–305. Kroskrity, P. V. 1993 Language, History, and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Labov, W. 1979 Locating the frontier between social and psychological factors in linguistic variation. In: Fillmore, C. J., D. Kempler and W. S-Y Wong (eds.), Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior. New York: Academic Press, 327–340. Lippi-Green, R. 1997 English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. London/New York: Routledge. Lipski, J. M. 1985 Linguistic Aspects of Spanish-English Language Switching. Tempe, AZ: Center for Latin American Studies Arizona State University. McClure, E. 1977 Aspects of code-switching in the discourse of bilingual MexicanAmerican children. In: Saville-Troike, M. (ed.), Linguistics and Anthropology. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 93– 115. Milroy, J. and L. Milroy 1985 Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation. London/Boston: Routledge & K. Paul. Mitchell-Kernan, C. 1972 Signifying and marking: Two Afro-American Speech Acts. In: Gumperz, J. and D. H. Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 161–179. Moerman, M. 1965 Ethnic identification in a complex civilization. American Anthropologist 67, 1215–1230. Moore, Z. 1996 Teaching culture – a study of Piropos. Hispania – A Journal Devoted to the Teaching of Spanish and Portuguese 79(1), 113–120. Moya Pons, F. 1995 The Dominican Republic: A National History. New Rochelle, NY: Hispaniola Books.

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Myers-Scotton, C. 1993 Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ochs, E. 1992 Indexing gender. In Duranti, A. and C. Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 335–358. Peirce, C. S. 1955 Logic as semiotic: The theory of signs. In Buchler, J. (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover Publications, 98–119. Pessar, P. 1984 The linkage between the household and workplace of Dominican women in the U.S. International Migration Review 18, 1188–1211. 1987 The Dominicans: Women in the household and the garment industry. In: Foner, N. (ed.), New Immigrants in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 103–129. Poplack, S. 1981 Syntactic structure and social function of codeswitching. In: Durán, R. (ed.), Latino Language and Communicative Behavior. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX, 169–184. 1988 Contrasting patterns of codeswitching in two communities. In: Heller, M. (ed.), Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 215–244. Rickford, J. R. and P. Eckert 2001 Introduction. In Eckert, P. and J. R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–18. Sacks, H., E. A. Schegloff, et al. 1974 Simplest systematics for organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4), 696–735. Sankoff, D. and S. Poplack 1981 A formal grammar for code-switching. Papers in Linguistics 14, 3– 46. Schegloff, E. A., G. Jefferson, et al. 1977 Preference for self-correction in organization of repair in conversation. Language 53(2), 361–382. Silie, R. 1989 Esclavitud y prejuicio de color en Santo Domingo. Boletin de Antropologia Americana 120, 163–170.

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Silverstein, M. 1996 Monoglot “Standard” in America. In: Brenneis, D. L. and R. K. S. Macaulay (eds.), The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 284–306. Smedley, A. 1993 Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Suarezorozco, M. M. and A. Dundes 1984 The Piropo and the dual image of women in the Spanish-speaking world. Journal of Latin American Lore 10(1), 111–133. Urciuoli, B. 1996 Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Woolard, K. A. 2004 Codeswitching. In: Duranti, A. (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Malden, MA, Blackwell, 73–94. Woolard, K. A. and B. B. Schieffelin 1994 Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23, 55–82. Zentella, A. C. (1997) Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Chapter 3 Style and stylization in the construction of identities in a card-playing club Anna De Fina 1.

Introduction

In recent years a widely accepted shift in sociolinguistic studies has taken place: from a paradigm stressing the stable relationship between social categories and linguistic phenomena, towards a more interactionally oriented paradigm in which such a relationship is not taken for granted, but rather becomes the focus of attention. Many scholars are now trying to define the nature of the relationship between linguistic variables and aspects of the context, and they do so by starting from a careful and at times painstaking analysis of what participants do in interaction, and of how they assign meanings to linguistic and other semiotic aspects of social encounters. Thus, from this perspective, what counts is “how the indexical ties of discourse to other texts, situations, or kinds of speakers serve as resources for the production and interpretation of social meanings” (Bauman 2001: 77). The shift in paradigm has affected the discussion and revived the debate on key sociolinguistics concepts and phenomena. Among them, style has had a particular prominence because of its centrality in the study of how individuals and groups signal aspects of their identity in interaction. Research on style has moved from a variationist perspective in which it was seen as reflecting rather stable associations between the use of linguistic variables and membership into social categories, towards a more interactive framework in which it is regarded as a highly context sensitive discourse strategy to present personas or groups (Coupland 2001; Eckert 2000). In this view, based on a conception of language as practice and of meanings as socially constructed, style is, therefore, a situational resource for identity displays that are negotiated between participants through discursive work within significant social practices. However, the discussion on what style is, on what basic parameters can be used to define it, and on how

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it can be differentiated from other phenomena is still very much alive and these basic questions have not found definitive answers. In this chapter I explore aspects of the interactional management of style and illustrate some differences between style-related phenomena: personal style and stylization. I focus on the relationship between style management, language choice and social identity, taking up the case of a multilingual community and looking at the role of Italian dialects and Standard Italian as a resource for identity construction in conversation. I argue that shifts into dialect are often accompanied by stylization features and that their function as contextualization cues indexing particular kinds of social personae relies on the existence of ideological assumptions about the status of dialects as language varieties that are shared by participants. I also illustrate some strategies through which code-mixing from English into Italian can be used as an element of style indexing Italianness, and thus contribute to the construction of individual and collective ethnic identity. The analysis shows that Italian and Italian dialects as symbolic resources can index a variety of identities that depend on the community, the kinds of activity in which participants are engaged and the ideologies and other kinds of cultural assumptions that they share. The data discussed were gathered in an ethnographic project on the interactional construction and negotiation of identity among Italian Americans belonging to a card-playing club in the Washington area. Examples are taken from transcripts of two audio and two video-taped club sessions, one audio-taped interview, and 28 issues of the bulletin: Briscola News. The chapter is organized as follows: In section 2, I discuss the concept of style and illustrate the basic ideas underlining constructionist approaches to the study of identities. I also present a reflection on the different kinds of identities that can be expressed and negotiated in discourse. In section 3, I describe the data and subjects on which the study is based. In section 4, I offer some background on the kinds of identities made relevant and negotiated in my data. In section 5, I discuss how language choice and switching relate to identity work. In section 6, I analyze how both stylization and personal style are used by speakers to build and project identities and how these acts of identity rest on shared ideologies and conceptions about self, others and the meanings of language use. Finally, I discuss the relevance of the findings for sociolinguistic research on style.

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Social identity and style

Research on style has been closely intertwined with research on identity as an interactional achievement. Recent studies have contributed to the strengthening of a widely accepted social constructionist conception of identity in which the latter is seen as “an emergent construction, the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others” (Bauman 2000: 1). Within this framework, people do not possess just one identity related to the social categories to which they belong, but rather they present and represent themselves by choosing within an inventory of more or less compatible identities that intersect and/or contrast with each other in different ways, and in accordance with changing social circumstances and interlocutors. Social constructionist perspectives have also influenced our view of identity construction and attribution as a process grounded in different kinds of social practices and activities (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998; Edwards 1998). Thus, scholars dealing with identity within a social constructionist paradigm have underscored the importance of firmly grounding their analyses in interaction.1 Style has played an important role in this kind of research because it has been shown that it is often through style management that individuals and groups convey their affiliation or rejection of identities. It is surprisingly difficult to find a single definition of style in the linguistic and anthropological literature. Irvine (2001: 22) provides a useful starting point when she argues that “whatever ‘styles’ are, they are part of a system of distinction, in which a style contrasts with other possible styles, and the social meanings signified by this style contrast with other social meanings”. From a linguistic perspective we can think of style as deriving from a cluster of features that characterize a way of speaking (or writing) and differentiate it from others. Among the dimensions of identity that have been investigated in connection with style are ethnicity (Rampton 1995; Bucholtz 1999; Bell 1999), regional identity (Johnstone 1999), peer group/gender affiliation (Eckert 2000; Barrett 1999), and the enactment of particular social or personal roles (Hymes 1981; Bauman 2001; Coupland 2001). All these aspects of identity can be expressed through discourse and participation in social practices at an individual or at a collective level. People

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can build identities at an individual level, by projecting themselves as specific kinds of persons in terms of the social categories to which they belong, or they can project collective identities when they speak or act on behalf and as part of a group or an institution (see Holmes 2006 on this point). However, social identities expressed at an individual or collective level are not necessarily independent of each other since often when individuals negotiate their belonging to social categories, they redefine the meanings of those categories also for others in their groups or communities, thus projecting and building new collective images. Individual and collective identities can be built around inclusion in or exclusion from many different types of categorizations such as ethnic affiliation, gender roles, social, personal and situational roles, etc. Personal roles may involve categorizations based on personal qualities, i.e. individuals can project themselves as being a certain type of person in moral or interactional terms. For example by managing positive or negative “faces” (Goffman 1967), they can come across as collaborative or kind, respectful of the social space of others or worried about their own social space. Situational roles may involve positioning within categories that are very specific to institutions or communities. Zimmerman (1998: 95) calls identities based on situational roles, “situated identities” and stresses their importance in connecting local interactional meanings to larger contexts of interpretation. According to this author, situational identities “are the portal through which the setting of the talk and its institutional surround ... enters and helps to shape the interaction, which in turn actualizes the occasion and its institutional provenance”. Thus, social identities can be expressed at an individual or collective level, and they can involve different facets or aspects such as membership in social, situational, moral and interactional categories. In the study that I present here, I analyze how participants in an Italian American card game club make relevant different types of social identities and illustrate the role of stylization and personal style in the interactional construction of those identities. In particular, I look at ethnic identity and at the management of various kinds of ‘personas’ in connection with facework in games and other interactional situations. I also show how in many cases identity projections and negotiations managed at an individual level contribute to the construction of collective identities for the club since they not only depend on shared ideologies and conceptions, but also create new contexts of interpretation of social categorizations. Style shifts in my data are closely related with language choice and for this reason I need to give some background information on the Circolo

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della Briscola, its origin and present activities, and the roles that different languages play in interactions among its members, before I turn to the analysis of identity and style phenomena.

3.

The Circolo della Briscola

Il Circolo della Briscola is an all-men club founded in 1991 by an ItalianAmerican pediatrician, whom I will call the President, an American of Calabrese background, born in New York. The President started playing cards with a few friends as a way of relaxing and spending time together. The word spread that there was a group of people playing briscola and through time the Circolo grew and became an organization with members, rules and specific activities. At the moment when I conducted my research, the Circolo had 48 members who met monthly to play. However, the number of active members always fluctuates since every month players bring guests who are potential members, and sometimes old members may leave the Circolo for a while. Circolo members organize a card tournament once a year at a Washington parish (which is recognized as an important center of activities related to Italy and Italians) in order to raise funds for the church. Until November 2001, games used to take place at an Italian restaurant, otherwise before that, players met at members’ homes. The host used to cook dinner for the party of players and the menu was published on the club’s bulletin, since there was a prize at the end of the year for the best cook. At the end of 2002, however, the club started meeting at a local language school and cultural center, located very close to the Church. Results of the games and general information are published in the Briscola News, written and distributed by the President. Club meetings follow a fixed ritual. Members gather to have some hors d’oevres and wine at about 6:30. The first half hour is a time to chat and exchange news. At this time the President and Treasurer collect the money for meals and dues and start preparing the draw for the composition of the tables for briscola players. Then comes dinner, which is eaten at a huge long table where members continue to chat. During dinner, announcements are made by the President and issues are discussed and sometimes voted on. Decisions have to do with financial or organizational matters, news regarding the score, members’ activities considered relevant to the circle, or the admission/presentation of new members. In fact, admission has never been voted on, but seems to be automatically granted if the new member has an

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interest in joining the club. After dinner, the composition of the playing tables is announced. Usually players are assigned to tables through a draw, but they accept the fact that the President sometimes makes his own decisions when he feels that certain combinations will not work. The President also organizes a table for new players who want to become familiar with the game. If there is such a table, he is always one of the “instructors”. There are around 30 people each night and players play in tables of four. Most players play briscola, but there are also one or two tressette tables. Tressette is regarded by the players as a more difficult game than briscola. Each table has four players who play in pairs. At the end of all the games the score is updated. During games there is practically no other activity. Players are very focused on their own games and do not interact much with members at other tables, although often when they are finished with their games, they go to other tables to exchange teasing or joking comments. At the end of the year the winner (or winners, if there is a draw) gets a trophy. The members of the Circolo are all men. The admission of women has been voted on and rejected numerous times, and the official explanation for it is that men want to spend the evening by themselves, or, as one of the members said, “with the boys”. Most of the members are between fifty-five and sixty-five, so many of them are retired. There are very few younger members. The social background is middle and upper middle class. Some of the men are professionals such as architects, medical doctors, others are public employees, school teachers, travel agents, etc. These men are second or third generation Italian immigrants who have reached a comfortable economic level and are generally well assimilated into American society, or first generation immigrants who have come to the United States after the war and who are also well assimilated. In terms of identity, language and the dynamics of the play, it is important to keep in mind this double composition of the club: that of Italian born and American born players. Italian born members came to the United States at different points in their lives, mostly for work or study related reasons. They can speak Italian fluently (whether they choose to speak it or not is another matter). Americans, on the other hand, are second or third generation immigrants who often come from traditional areas or cities of migration in the North East such as New York State or City, Baltimore, or Pittsburgh. They have varying passive or active competences in Standard Italian and the dialect2 spoken in their families (there are many members of Sicilian or Calabrese origin, but also men who come for Abruzzo and Molise, Friuli or Veneto). There are few American born members who speak fluent Italian. Among them is the

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President. He was born in New York from a family of first generation immigrants from Calabria. He “relearned” Italian as an adult and now speaks it fluently. There are, however, a number of American born members who have tried to learn Italian through formal instruction or through contact with relatives. Some of them have succeeded in speaking a little. Some Italian born members speak their dialect or minority language fluently, while some Americans report passive knowledge of the dialect that their parents spoke at home, but are not able to speak it except for stock phrases or isolated words.

4.

Social identities in the Circolo

When we look at identity construction, it is apparent that people in the Circolo, as in other communities of practice (Eckert 2000), enact, project and negotiate identities of different kinds and at different levels (collective or individual). Among the repertoire of social identities that were made salient in the activities observed in the Circolo, I found: a. Ethnic identities such as ‘Italian’, ‘American’, and their combinations b. Gender identities such as ‘male’ or ‘female’ c. Social role identities such as ‘father’, ‘family member’, ‘professional’, ‘club member’ d. Situated identities such as ‘card player’ Situated identities are important in this context because roles pertaining to card playing are often taken as central to identity displays in the interactions that take place among the members. Another important point about identities is that they are not managed in a unique way: they can be conveyed, performed, hinted at, negotiated, openly proclaimed, etc. Identities are made relevant in context sometimes through open categorizations, but often implicitly through reference to social norms, schemas, and prejudices that are in some way attached to social roles and figures. For example, gender identity is often performed and implicitly conveyed through the telling of jokes or narratives that position the speaker and others in certain roles. See the following example3 in which A, an American born player, is referring to my tape-recording:

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A:

R: A:

Don’t take my picture R. because I told my wife I was out with my girlfriend tonight, if she finds out that I’ve been playing cards, I’m in trouble. @@ Then I won’t give it to your wife. Ok. Don’t give it to my wife, I’m in real trouble!

Here identity work is not explicit, but A is “acting” out an identity implicitly associated with traditional family roles where the husband is a person who goes out and typically lies to his spouse about his whereabouts, while the wife is a person who stays at home. A is implying that husbands tend to cheat on their wives by going out with other women, but his joke is based on the substitution of card playing for cheating. My laughter and response to A’s comment show that I am aware of this implicit role-play, in which I also somewhat position myself as an “accomplice” (line 04) by aligning with A against his wife. Thus social norms and schemas allow the implicit pairing of social categories with socially assigned attributes and qualities. Identities can combine with each other in the sense that a member performing, claiming or discussing an identity as a “father”, can at the same time claim an identity as an “Italian father”, or a member that is claiming an identity as a “professional” can also claim an identity as a “male”, etc. However, in the Circolo Italian ethnic identity has an overarching meaning since, as it will become clearer from some of the data analysis, the club is presented and perceived as a fundamentally Italian institution, whose objective is not only that of playing cards but also of fostering a sense of belonging to Italian culture and customs (see De Fina forthcoming on this point). Such identity work is achieved not only through linguistic strategies, but also through other symbolic practices. Symbols of Italian identity and symbolic practices of various kinds have been consciously or unconsciously chosen in connection with the Circolo’s activities and play a role in constructing this Italian identity for the group, for example, in the choice of the meeting places: Italian Restaurants or a center for Italian Studies. Another area through which identity work is done and Italian identity is symbolically conveyed is food preparation and consumption within the Circolo. Food and food practices are more or less implicitly presented as “traditional” as shown by the choice of menus, the practice of bringing food made at home by the wives, and also the preparation of specific Italian foods related to religious or mundane occasions. However, food is also often commented upon and discussed, and these discussions often consti-

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tute an arena for identity displays. Other non-linguistic symbols of identity are the choice of colors in written printed material and in items used during the card games. For example, the choice of green, white and red often used for the Briscola Newsletter and the badges that players wear at card games symbolize Italianness in that the colors selected are the ones of the Italian flag.

5.

Style and language choice

The strategies that members use to claim social identities as individuals, but also to build normative identities as a group are multifold. Among them are the use of symbolic practices (such as those mentioned in section 4), topic management, socialization practices (such as teaching the game) and storytelling.4 However, among the linguistic resources that have been “traditionally” associated with identity work and that also seem very relevant for my data are language choice, code-switching and mixing. From an interactionally grounded perspective it is now clear that speakers create affiliations through contextualized uses of language and that there is no one-to-one correspondence between categorical identities and language varieties, as work on language crossing, code-switching and style shifting (Rampton 1995; Sebba and Wootton 1998; Woolard 1999) has clearly indicated. The relationship between the choice of language varieties and identity needs therefore to be investigated within specific interactional contexts (see also Auer 1998 on this point). In the case of the Circolo, language choice or switching do not mechanically correlate with identity work, in the sense that speakers do not necessarily associate with their language of origin and that switching does not always have a symbolic status. Let us first consider the language repertoire of the Circolo again. Languages spoken within the Circolo include: English, Italian in its regional varieties, Italian dialects (Abruzzese, Calabrese, Molisano, Siciliano) and minority languages (Friulano). As mentioned in section 3, members have varying competences in these varieties. Language choice, however, does not appear to be necessarily related to language ability, since there are many cases in which men who are not particularly fluent in Italian try to speak it, while men who are very comfortable in Italian speak English. This can be seen in the following example taken from a tressette game. The participants E and C (and D, who is not speaking in the fragment) are Italian born and came to the United States as

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adults, while P is American born. However, language choice does not appear to be related to language competence, since E speaks to C in English even though they are both Italian, while he addresses P, who is English dominant, in Italian. In this fragment C and E are trying to explain some rules of the game to P who is a learner.5 (2) 01 02 03 04 05

E: C:

06

P:

07

E:

08

C:

09

E:

10 11 12 13 14

15

C: E:

P:

((beats the table with his hand and laughs looking at C)) I’m not gonna say anything C. ! No:::! ((to P)) Cosa fai? Ma cosa fai? Adesso che hai messo giù la carta hai fatto così o hai bussato6? ‘What are you doing? But what are you doing? Now that you have put that card down did you do that or did you knock?’ Ho [ bussato! ‘ I knocked’ [ Ha bussato! ‘He knocked’ Ok, good! Quello che vogliamo sapere noi. ‘That’s what we want to know.’ ((Looking at P.)) I tempi di questo gioco ‘the timing of this game’ ((looking at C.)) I’ve got to tell him because otherwise he’s never gonna learn it! I know! (( to P.)) Il primo gioco ho fatto io, il primo gioco dove l’ho fatto io? Dove ho bussato io? ‘I did the first move, the first move where did I do it? Where did I knock?’ Non ricordo. ‘I can’t remember’

Notice that both Italian dominant speakers, E and C, speak to each other in English (lines 01, 02) even though the others at the table are fluent in Italian. Notice also that they code-switch in a way that is unrelated to speaking ability or interlocutor’s identity. The switch by E in line 10 can rather be explained as marking a shift in the participation framework (from talking to P, to talking to C). Thus language choice and language use in the case of English and Italian do not seem to be univocally related to participants’ linguistic competence and background, except in cases where one of the participants is unable to speak Italian. They often appear to be functionally

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motivated (Gumperz 1982) such as marking shifts in the participation framework or in topic, repetitions or emphasis, etc., but sometimes they do not carry a specific discursive function either. However, even if in individual cases there is no one-to-one relationship between language and contextual factors, there is in general a relationship between domains of activity and the choice of language in that one language is generally preferred over another one in certain circumstances. As a general rule, for example, English is predominant in “official business” and in written communications. But code-switching into Italian is accepted and may happen at all times. Thus, while in official business English is expected, Italian can also be used. In informal communications all speech varieties of the language repertoire seem acceptable, although dialects are not frequently used. As I will show below, switching from English or Italian into dialect is one of the linguistic practices that clearly constitute acts of identity precisely because it usually conveys and builds upon a shift in style. In fact, speakers exploit dialect as a contextualization cue to index a change in the persona that they are presenting to other interactants. Such persona is marked as representing something other than their ‘usual’ self. The analysis of how shifts into dialect coincide with stylistic shifts constitutes an interesting site for theoretical reflections on style and will be the focus of the following section.

6.

Stylization

In this section I illustrate how “stylized” switches from English or Italian into dialect are used in conversation to convey particular personae or “voices” that do not necessarily correspond to “usual” identities claimed by the speakers. In the following conversation a switch into dialect corresponds with such “stylization” of a particular personal identity. The conversation reproduced below took place when one member of the Circolo L came to me to ask what “baking powder” was called in Italian. L is a first generation immigrant from Abruzzo who came to the United States when he was thirteen years old. Another Circolo member, designated as O, also came over now and then to participate in the conversation, as illustrated at the end of the fragment. O is also a first generation immigrant who moved to the United States as a young man.

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(3) 01 02

L: R:

03

L:

04 05

R: L:

06

R:

07

L:

08 09

R: L:

10 11 12

R: L: R:

13

L:

14 15 16

R: R:

17 18

19

R:

20

L:

21

R:

My wife (is fabulous), I learned a lot except the word @ E che cos’è la ricetta? ‘And what’s the recipe?’ I looked it up in the dictionary and it said levito and then I remembered that that’s yeast! She said “no no no!” And what did you, what were you going to cook? Oh, uh it’s a long story but listen, these people came to visit us last year, and my wife made baking (puffs), pancakes, Sì ‘Yes’ They loved those pancakes, uh? And so What did you do? Is there a special mix or something? No you can use regular flour she said, “Send me”, she called us recently, “Send me the recipe,” but she- of course my wife is American, the recipe she didn’t even have a recipe it came out of her mind and I’m thinking Boh! and I got to that baking powder, Who knows! @@@You got stuck on the baking powder! So I looked it up and I said “but that’s yeast,” “No::” she said “You don’t wanna do that, you’ll mess it all up!” @@Of course!@@ Well, (….) but I know what I did, I put baking powder au:: Tra virgolette ‘In inverted commas’ And then (…) ingredienti and I copied the ingredients from ‘ingredients’ the baking powder bicarbonated [(…… ) [Oh my god! Che pazienza!@ ‘How patient!’ L: I could have sent it fresco!@@@ ‘fresh’ But my wife said she saw it over there, I mean there is, so it’s levito uh? ‘yeast’ Sì sì lievito loro lo chiamano lievito per do:lci, ‘Yes, yes yeast they call it yeast for cakes,’ Lievito per dolci. ‘Yeast for cakes’ I’ve got to write that [down. [Per distinguerlo dal lievito [che= ‘To distinguish it from the yeast that’

Style and stylization in the construction of identities in a card-playing club 22

L:

23 24

R:

25

R:

26

L:

27

R:

28ĺL: 29

R:

30

L:

31 32

R: L:

33

R:

34

L:

35

O:

36

L:

37

O:

38

R:

69

[dal= ‘from’ = lievito di birra, =‘beer yeast’ = che dici tu =‘you are talking about’ Esattamente! ‘Exactly!’ Ahhh! Mai più, mai più! ‘Never again, never again’ Allora la prossima volt‘Then next tim-’ Ma nu pover analfabet com me come posso saper? @@@@ ‘But a poor illiterate like me how would I know?’ @@@@ @@@Un analfabeta della cucina@@ ‘an illiterate of cooking’ E altre cose @@@ ‘and other things’ @@ L’italiano mio è abruzzese 1938 ‘My Italian is abruzzese 1938’ Però lo parli benissimo. ‘But you speak it very well’ E insomma! ‘More or less!’ Allora te l’ha detto? ‘So, did she tell you?’ Sì ‘Yes’ Come si dice? ‘What is it called?’ Eh lievito!

When the fragment starts, L had asked me for the Italian translation of the word “baking powder” and in line 01 he explains that he had learned many things from his wife, but that he had not learned that word. In lines 04–05 I ask why he wants to know and he explains that he had been asked for a pancake recipe by some Italian friends. Since he didn’t know how to say “baking powder” in Italian and his wife had not been of much help, he had copied all the ingredients from a can of baking powder hoping to provide his Italian friends with a clue (lines 13–14). At this point I show surprise

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and amusement at his patience (lines 15–16), to which L jokingly responds that it would have been easier to send the pancakes “fresh” instead of writing all the ingredients (line 17). The conversation takes a more serious tone when another attempt is made on the proper translation of baking powder (18–25), and L concludes that he would never again engage in recipe writing. At this point L (who is Abruzzese) switches into Abruzzese dialect, joking on his inability to understand the words, or the recipe (line 28): Ma nu pover analfabet com me come posso saper? @@@@ ‘But a poor illiterate like me how would I know? @@@@’

This kind of dialectal use represents a case of stylization (Bell 1999; Rampton 1999; Eckert 2000). According to Coupland (2001: 346), “single utterances can be stylized when speakers are being studiedly ‘artificial’ or ‘putting on a voice.’ Stylized utterances have a performed character and index a speaker’s identity switch of some kind, in the sense that he/she makes clear to other interactants that the identity taken up is not the one that would be expected of him/her in that context.” In this case, the speaker is stylizing an ‘ignorant’ persona through describing himself as “a poor illiterate abruzzese”, but, crucially, also through the use of dialect. That the message is carried across is clear from my reaction in line 29, where I qualify the statement and try to reduce the face threat by limiting the scope of the term illiterate: “An illiterate in the kitchen.” L, on the other hand, expands the boundaries of his self-deprecation by qualifying himself as an illiterate person in other ways as well, including language (line 32), since according to him, his Italian is just an old (1938) version of his native dialect. This last self-deprecation clearly relates to his inability to write the recipe in Italian. Notice that the status of this utterance as stylized is confirmed by the presence of other cues, specifically laughter in lines 28–31 and the verbal play among interactants that follows it (lines 29–30). These elements help set it apart from the rest of the conversational fragment as having a “performed” character. Thus, in accordance with Coupland’s definition, L’s utterance can be seen as stylized in the sense that: a) it signals the speaker’s switch from a “normal” identity as a competent person to a locally occasioned identity as an incompetent one, and b) it signals that such identity is not to be taken as a stable characteristic of the speaker, but that he is rather “putting on a show”. In fact, stylization here serves the speaker’s need to do face work (Brown and Levinson 1987) in the presence of elements that may threaten

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his position with respect to the interlocutor: his lack of knowledge of Italian vocabulary and his inability to fulfill his Italian friends’ request properly. Remember also that the briscola players know that I am a professor of Italian, which could explain their hypercritical attitude towards their own performance in Italian. By acting as an ignorant person in a jocular fashion, L implicitly conveys the image that he is not, in fact, ignorant. Another aspect of stylization illustrated here relates to what Irvine calls the “distinctiveness” of varieties (Irvine 2001). As mentioned before, switches into dialect stand out among other switches (and they are “distinctive”) because of their rarity and because speakers know that most of the time their interlocutors do not know or speak their dialect. Thus in example (3), like in others, although there is a number of switches from English into Italian, or vice versa (see for example lines 20, 22, 26), and although entire turns are in Italian, there is only one switch into Abruzzese dialect. But the distinctiveness of the dialect is also at a social semiotic level. As Irvine notes when talking about the relationship between different language varieties in Javanese (2001: 31–32), language varieties and dialects are socially conceptualized in specific ways and these conceptualizations are ideological. They constitute the basis for the interactants’ construction and negotiation of meanings on specific occasions. These kinds of meaning-making processes can be seen at work in the interactional sequence analyzed. L enacts an illiterate person through the use of dialect, and thus the dialect becomes in a sense ‘iconic’ of its associated social category.7 The allusion to ignorance and inability is quickly taken up as the central meaning of the stylization by both interactants. The partners’ understanding of each other (demonstrated in their subsequent collaboration in the verbal play about illiteracy in lines 29–30) illustrates this important feature of stylization: its reliance on shared ideological constructs. In this case, the ideology to which the interactants refer is one that puts Italian language varieties on a prestige continuum: standard Italian is seen as a ‘high’ speech variety, dialects are placed at the lower end of the continuum and therefore, people who speak a dialect are perceived as more ignorant and less refined than people who don’t. It is the same ideology which has dominated the development of the Italian language policies, which (until recently) have de facto stigmatized and highly discouraged the use of dialect in educational settings and the development of a bilingual competence in children. As Gensini (1988: 382) puts it: “For a long time, thanks to the repressive action of the school, the dialectophobia of the Fascist regime and of state institutions, dialect has been conceived as a fault, a shame: something that needed to be

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hidden, censored, lest it would negatively impact one’s possibilities of participation into society”8 [my translation]. The view of dialect as a ‘shame’ is amply documented in the literature on Italian immigrants in the U.S., but it is also confirmed in the interviews that I conducted with Circolo members. See for example the following fragment from an interview with the President of the club: (4) P: R: P:

Un tipo molto bravo Alberto. ‘A very good guy Alberto’. Parla italiano? ‘Does he speak Italian?’ Credo di sì un po’. Sai come succede? Questi americani che hanno- italoamericani che hanno imparato un po’ e che può darsi parlavano il dialetto a casa, come io, io volevo non mi piaceva parlare affatto con nessuno italiano perché il mio italiano era calabrese, bastardo. ‘I think so, a little. You know what? These Americans who have- Italian Americans who have learned a little and that maybe spoke dialect at home, like me, I, I wanted I didn’t like it at all to speak Italian with anybody because my Italian was Calabrese, a bastard [language].’

Thus, although stylization is a highly creative individual process, in order to succeed at an interactional level it needs to resort to common knowledge which, in turn, is based on language (and other kinds of) ideologies that are socially constructed and shared. Another important point that comes out from this analysis is that dialect use should not be identified per se as a sign of the speaker’s affiliation with a social category. For example, Ferguson (1994: 20, quoted in Bauman 2001: 77) states that “speech style associated with a social category of speakers is what we commonly designate a dialect”. However, as we have seen in the example above, using a dialect in interaction can be a stylistic choice that not only does not automatically imply social affiliation with a certain group, but whose meaning and social significance can only be inferred on the basis of a careful analysis of the interactional (and wider) context. However, dialect ideologies are not monolithic. Dialects are not always seen as non-prestigious, but may be considered more informal, more spontaneous, closer to the heart and to tradition, etc., an image undoubtedly related to the fact that dialects were spoken at home in most of Italy until the 1960s at least. Irvine (2001: 29) notes in her discussion of Javanese

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language levels that higher and lower styles are defined by differentiation in terms of affect, so that more formal styles are seen as more depersonalized, while more informal ones are regarded as affectively charged. These ideological representations of dialects as more personalized varieties constitute the background for different kinds of stylization through dialect in my data. For example, dialect use may mark shifts into a more relaxed relationship between interactants and a move into different identities. This was observed in the context of the games. Games are a very delicate business in terms of interactional equilibrium since players very often need to manage face threats (Brown and Levinson 1987). Losing a game can represent a threat to the player’s face, but excessive winning may constitute a threat to the positive face of other players. One of the many strategies in order to reduce or counter face loss is dialect use in joking and for rebukes. Moving closer to the dialect in the continuum of Italian seems to add an informal tone and presents the speaker as a non-aggressive person. In these cases dialect is also stylized, in the sense that the persona to which identity is shifted through the language change is marked as different from the one usually presented by or associated with the player. In the following examples A is complaining to his companion about the fact that he has made the wrong moves and ruined the game. His complaints are in English in his first two turns (01 and 04). In the last turn A switches into dialect in order to emphasize his disappointment with his companion’s moves. The utterance in Sicilian (line 06), is preceded by a very colloquial expression “oh man!” and accompanied by extra-linguistic markers of dissent (shaking of the head). The clustering of these devices with the utterance in dialect indicates that A is “performing”, i.e. that the critical stance is voiced by an aggressive persona that is marked as not being his normal self. This enactment helps mitigate the threat of criticism since it allows the speaker to signal that the “critical” remark is not to be taken seriously: (5) 01 02 03 04 05 06

A: C: A: C: A:

((to C.)) You’re losing a Briscola? Oh god! You know this game is shattered! I know that // I can tell that already. // Absolutely shattered! Here, you got the ace? I could have told you that already! Oh man! ((Shakes head)) Semo consumati! ‘We are ruined’

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In the following example dialect is used again to complain about another player’s winning move. Notice that in this case it could be argued that L is crossing (Rampton 1995) into dialect since he does not speak Sicilian, but knows it only a little because his mother used to speak it. This is a clear indication of stylization since L is using a variety which is not his own: (6) 01

L:

02 03

L: J:

04

L:

05

L:

06

J:

07 08 09

J: M: J:

Well I think, I’m gonna take this (....) (.....) Uh my lord, these guys are unbelievable, UNBELIEVABLE, ok Coppe. ‘Cups.’ A coppe pigghio. ‘I take with cups’ (.) Oh, Fig[ghio, m’ha rrovenato figghio, m’ha rrovinato, m’hai rrovenato! ‘Oh son you ruined me, you ruined me, you ruined me!’ [ bastoni ‘batons’ I have to give him points, unfortunately Eh I get ( ) Unfortunately,

The switch into Sicilian in lines 04–05 corresponds to a brag about winning (line 04) and a complaint about losing (line 05). L and his partner are playing against J and M. L is at first bragging about having put down a good card (line 04), but immediately after (line 05) he is complaining about the move by J who has put down a better card, thus earning points for his team. It is interesting how stylization is achieved here through exaggeration since L strongly rolls the [r] sound at the beginning of the word “rovinato” and repeats the utterance three times. As in the example above, L is at the same time “putting on a show” and representing a persona that does not coincide with his normal self, but which allows him to avoid a face-threat. Example (7) is similar to the ones discussed above in that it is a complaint, but it took place during a conversation, not a game. The players are scolding G for not honoring his promise to bring some Centerba (traditional Italian liquor) instead of wine. Notice that B’s complaint starts in Italian but ends in Abruzzese:

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(7) 01 O: Hey L. excuse me for interrupting where is your Centerba, I brought mine 02 where is yours? 03 B: Eh ma quella bott- , la bottiglia che porti qua è sempre vino ‘Eh but that bottle that you always bring here is wine’ 04 ‘do sta’ la centerba? ‘where is the Centerba?’ 05 G: La centerba è a casa mia! ‘the Centerba is at my home’ 06 O: I keep hearing that -

In sum, members of the Briscola Circolo seem to identify the use of dialect with the building of a more relaxed atmosphere and through utterances in dialect often succeed in presenting a non-aggressive self. The analysis of these examples shows that stylization is an interactional strategy that individuals exploit to put up voices and project identities that they signal as not normally being associated with them. Such “exceptionality” is indicated through the performed character of stylized utterances, which in the cases discussed, included a clustering of features such as codeswitching or crossing, exaggerated or marked pronunciation, laughter, verbal play, use of informal expressions, and body language. Stylization thus rests on non-literal and ironic uses of language. Insofar as this process is based on the signaling of types of identity that are not “normally” associated with a person, stylization also tells us what kinds of linguistic features and, in this case, varieties are seen as marked and, to a certain extent, “other” to a person or a group. In this case dialectal varieties can be exploited in stylization acts precisely because they are presented as marked uses of the language. To the extent that linguistic features are stylized in different occasions and by different speakers, we also get a sense of how individual identity displays relate to collective ones, i.e. of how individual acts of identity contribute to the building of a collective identity for the group. The fact that in all the examples speakers use dialect as one of the central features of the projection of a performed persona, together with the absence of dialect usage in normal interaction in the transcripts, indicates that part of the collective identity of this group is a disaffiliation with the use of dialect as an unmarked option. This, in turn, symbolizes the possibility of using dialect as a choice, not a necessity, as was the case with many members of older generations of Italians, and therefore an overall projection of the collective identity of a group of people who have over-

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come the humble origins associated with the use of dialect as a central means of communication.

7.

Personal style and acts of identity

The example I discuss in this section helps demonstrate the difference between style and stylization. While stylization implies performance, putting on a show, and to a certain extent constructing a persona that is not the “normal” self, style helps build a certain identity through the repetition of patterns of behavior. In this section I look at the President’s personal style as an example of how style works as an “act of identity” in the sense given to the term by LePage and Tabouret-Keller. According to these authors, “people create their linguistic systems so as to resemble those of the groups with which from time to time they wish to identify” (1985: 182). To illustrate how stylistic choices serve the purpose of identity building, consider the case of the writing of the Briscola News by the President of the Circolo della Briscola. The Briscola News is published at least once a month, but sometimes more often if there is need for further communications. It used to appear only in print form, but since 2003 the President has started sending it out electronically as well. The news reported in the journal relate to the briscola games (who won, what the standings in the games are, when the next game is, etc.), activities taking place within the Circolo or outside of it, financial matters, members’ achievements, etc. The President’s writing has a distinctive style, made up of his particular use of grammar, pragmatic routines, rhetorical strategies, punctuation, graphics, etc. What I want to argue here is that a central element in the way this style is used to convey a certain identity is language mixing. Messages in the Briscola News are written mostly in English, but with a careful and nonrandom insertion of Italian words and expressions, as can be seen in the following extract: (8)9 Ciao cari soci: ‘Hi dear members’ A preliminary, provisional notification to you of our next partita [game]: WEDNESDAY, FEB. 12TH, or TUESDAY, FEB 11TH. I'm awaiting Father10 X’s return from a Provincial meeting in New York for final confirmation. What an auspicious start to the 2003 season we had two nights ago!

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Enthusiasm for our meetings seems to have grown greatly. Is it time to consider playing twice monthly now, or is that still only a chauvinistic fantasy? The Circolo welcomes two new guests: L.N & J.B.We hope they would like to join our prestigious Circolo. As the Awards Dinner was so successful, most of the soci [members] with whom I had spoken on Jan 15th seemed to be in favor of having a picnic, to be held in June, and to have a true “Pot Luck” affair. Let's plan for it! As our wives obviously had such a wonderful time (as did the soci [members], naturalmente [obviously]), many of us are inclined to have more social affairs (outside the partite [games], themselves) in which to include the ladies. So, stay tuned for the exact date of the next partita [game]. A REMINDER: FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT REMITTED THE ANNUAL “PLAYERS’ FEE”, please do so at your earliest convenience. Mille Grazie. ‘Thanks a lot’ President’s Name

Most of the writing is in English, but there are switches into Italian at certain points. For example, both the greeting and the leave-taking formulas are in Italian. The other words in Italian are the term for ‘members’ (soci), the term for ‘game’ (partita), the term for ‘club’ (Circolo, which is also part of the club’s official name) and the adverb naturalmente (‘obviously’). Except for the latter case, these switches reflect regular choices in the President’s messages. I have analyzed 28 issues of the Briscola News and have found that both partita and soci are very frequently (and in the case of soci, almost exclusively) in Italian. In fact, the following words are the most frequent words in Italian in the Briscola News: Soci (33 vs. 3 instances of members) Partita (35 vs. 16 instances of game) Classifica (18 instances vs. 1 instance of monthly standings) In the 24 out of 28 messages where there is a greeting at the beginning of the message, the greeting is in Italian. What kinds of other words and expressions appear in Italian in the Briscola News? Besides leave-taking and greeting, we find words for food such as antipasti, lasagna, primi piatti, words relating to the game (such as classifica and partita), to game-related items, such as trofeo (‘trophy’), carte napoletane (‘Neapolitan cards’), or to roles that members play in the games such as professore di briscola11 (‘briscola instructor’). We also find

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nicknames for members, such as Ludovico il silenzioso (‘Ludwig the Silent’). Finally, Italian exclamations such as auguri felicissimi! (‘lots of luck!’), Basta! (‘Stop’), Forza! (‘Go!’), etc. make their appearance now and then. Most of the time, these insertions consist of non-translated words. Cases in which the Italian words are translated are rare. An example is: (9) A special gustatorial – buongustaio – committee will be selected at our next partita. The absence of a translation is important because it indicates that the President considers these words and expressions as part of a common lexicon of the Circolo members and/or that if they are not known they should be learned. I have used the term personal style in a rather orthodox fashion to refer to the President’s individual use of language and I have given examples of how language mixing contributes to this style. We have seen that such mixing is not random as the President inserts Italian words that refer basically to food and the games, or words that give a general “Italian flavor” to his messages. If we look also at the other aspects of his style – his warm greetings and the fact that he often jokes – we can say that such style contributes to the projection of an easy going persona, an individual who likes to have fun and to encourage his fellow players to also have fun, a person who likes informal communication and puts other people at ease. However, the codemixing also adds to this picture the fact that he presents himself as an individual of Italian origin who knows Italian and is happy to use it. In fact, here the use of Italian seems to work as a mechanism of identification with the members of a group, as an “act of identiy” in LePage and TabouretKeller’s sense. However, an important point is that while building and projecting his own identity, the President also works toward the construction of a collective identity for the Circolo. He does so by underlining at the same time two of its fundamental aspects: briscola playing and being Italian-American. Being Italian-American is in fact iconically present, through language alternation, as an inseparable trait of briscola playing. In this way, the Circolo della Briscola is presented not so much as a card playing organization, but rather as an Italian-American organization. As briefly discussed above, the centrality of this ethnic self-presentation is echoed and strengthened in many other symbolic practices that take place in the Circolo such as socialization practices, food consumption, use of symbols, etc. The process of construction of a personal identity is closely intertwined with

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the process of construction of a collective identity. Thus, personal style is both based on and creates a preferred identity for the Circolo. But personal style, like stylization, works to index identity through its recourse to shared representations about social identities. In fact, the President’s style contributes to building a collective image of the Circolo precisely because it is based on associations between linguistic features and socially constructed identities that can be recognized by Circolo members. In this case, the President conjures up an Italian-American identity through adherence to and imitation of a style of speaking (the insertion of Italian words in utterances that are fundamentally in English) that characterizes the way Italian-Americans are represented as speaking in films, T.V. series, and literature. Thus the President’s personal way of speaking becomes culturally associated with Italian-American ethnic identity. At the same time, the tone of the messages and the domains from which Italian words are selected – food, sports, card-playing, historical characters – also symbolically display features stereotypically associated with a common representation of the Italian character: love for good food and leisure, friendliness, and adherence and respect for traditions. In this sense, the President’s personal style reflects and builds upon consolidated and shared representations about social identities.

8.

Conclusions

In this paper I have attempted to show how style, as a strategy, contributes to the construction of identities in interaction. Although style as a general term covers different phenomena, I have shown that we need to distinguish between stylization, the performance-oriented assumption of a voice or voices that are distinct from the speaker’s self, and personal style, as the manifestation of a coherent “way of being” through regular linguistic (and non-linguistic) choices. Style contributes to identification with a group: for instance, it allows the speaker to affiliate with Italy and Italians through regular use of their language. Of course stylization can in principle be used to the same end, to express solidarity with a group, as there is nothing inherent in the interactional functioning of style and stylization. Rather, the difference lies in the way we define the two terms and in the mechanisms through which stylization and personal style are manifested in discourse. Another important point that has emerged in the discussion is that the meaning of stylistic choices and the range of resources used to express

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them can only be fully appreciated through a close interactional analysis. Thus, for example, the use of dialect, as of any other linguistic resources, should not be automatically seen as a symptom of affiliation with the social group speaking it, since dialects can be used in interaction to express a wide variety of meanings and also to distance oneself from dialect speaking groups. I have underlined the importance of relating style and identity with social semiosis and ideology in order to ground interpretations of what is going on in interaction on shared representations and knowledge, and in order to show how meaning is constructed at the intersection between individual creativity and social knowledge. Finally, an important point that has been made through the analysis is that although it is sometimes analytically useful to separate the mechanisms and strategies through which individual and collective identities are constructed, these are not necessarily separate phenomena, and they interact in interesting ways. In fact, on the one hand, individual acts of identity reflect and rest upon shared associations between properties and social categories, but on the other hand they help to continuously build collective identities either emphasizing socially accepted associations between social categories and associated meanings or by creating new contexts for their interpretation.

Appendix. Transcription conventions ((smiling)) (...) (.) . ? ,

word-> = Bold

Non-linguistic actions Inaudible Noticeable pause Falling intonation followed by noticeable pause (as at end of declarative sentence) Rising intonation followed by noticeable pause (as at end of interrogative sentence) Continuing intonation : may be a slight rise or fall in contour (less than ““.”” or – “?”); may be not followed by a pause (shorter than ““.” or “?”) Listing intonation self interruption Latched utterances by the same speaker or by different speakers Emphatic stress

Style and stylization in the construction of identities in a card-playing club

CAPS :: [ ĺ (line) @ italics italics

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Very emphatic stress Vowel or consonant lengthening Overlap between utterances Highlights key phenomena. Laughter (the amount of @ roughly indicates the duration of laughter) Utterance in Italian Utterance in dialect

Notes 1. For an overview of recent approaches to identity, see De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg (2006:1–23). 2. It is important to stress here that the so called “dialects” spoken in Italy are not varieties of Italian, but different vernacular languages. 3. I use capital letters to refer to individual players in all examples and I refer to myself as R. 4. On the centrality of story-telling in the expression of identity, see De Fina 2003. 5. In the examples I have used italics to signal that the utterance was spoken in Italian and underlined italics to signal that the utterance was spoken in dialect. 6. Bussare (‘to knock’) is a technical term to refer to a tressette move. 7. Again, I refer to Irvine’s proposal on iconicity in style processes: “Iconization is a semiotic process that transforms the sign relationship between linguistic features and the social images to which they are linked. Linguistic differences appear to be iconic representations of the social contrasts they index – as if linguistic features somehow depicted or displayed a social group’s nature or essence.” (2001: 33) 8. “Per lungo tempo, grazie all’azione repressiva della scuola, alla dialettofobia del fascismo e delle istituzioni dello Stato, il dialetto è stato vissuto come colpa, come vergogna: qualcosa che occorreva nascondere, censurare, pena il risentirne nelle proprie possibilità di inserimento nella società ”. 9. Briscola News, January 17, 2004 10. The President refers to the fact that the games will be played in a building belonging to the Church. 11. Members act as teachers in games with newcomers where they initiate the latter to the briscola cards and rules.

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References Antaki, Charles and Susan Widdicombe (eds.) 1998 Identities in Talk. London: Sage. Auer, Peter 1998 Introduction: Bilingual conversation revisited. In: Auer, Peter (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation. London: Routledge, 29–48. Barrett, Rusty 1999 Indexing polyphonous identity in the speech of African American Drag Queens. In: Bucholtz, M., A. Liang, and L. Sutton (eds.), Reinventing Identitities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 313–332. Bauman, Richard 2000 Language, identity, performance. Pragmatics 10(1), 1–5. 2001 The ethnography of genre in a Mexican market: From, function, variation. In: Eckert, P. and J. R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 57–77. Bell, Alan 1999 Styling the other to define the self: A study in New Zealand identity making. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3, 523–541. Brown, Penelope and Steven Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bucholtz, Mary 1999 You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4), 443–460. Coupland, Nikolas 2001 Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30(3), 345–375. De Fina, Anna 2003 Narrative Identities: A Study of Immigrant Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. forthcoming Code-switching and the construction of ethnic identity in an Italian American club. Language in Society. De Fina, Anna, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg (eds.) 2006 Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, Penelope 2000 Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Edwards, Derek 1998 The relevant thing about her: Social identity categories in use. In: Antaki, C. and S. Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, 13–33.

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Ferguson, Charles A. 1994 Dialect, register and genre: Working assumptions about conventionalization. In: Biber, D. and E. Finegan (eds.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 15–30. Gensini, Stefano 1990 Elementi di storia linguistica d’Italia. Milan: Minerva Italica. Goffman, Ervin 1967 On face work. In: Interactional Ritual. New York: Anchor Books, 5–46. Gumperz, John 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, Dell 1981 In vain I tried to tell you. Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Holmes, Janet 2006 Workplace narratives, professional identity and relational practice. In: De Fina, Anna, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg (eds.), Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 166– 187. Irvine, Judith 2001 ‘Style’ as distinctiveness: The culture and the ideology of linguistic differentiation. In: Eckert, P. and J. R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 21–43. Johnstone, Barbara 1999 Uses of Southern-sounding speech by contemporary Texas women. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4), 505–520. LePage, Robert and Andrée Tabouret-Keller 1985 Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, Ben 1995 Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, Ben (ed). 1999 Styling the other. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4), 421–427. Sebba, Mark and Tony Wooton 1998 We, they and identity: Sequential versus identity-related explanation in code-switching. In: Auer, P. (ed.), Code-switching in Conversation. London/New York: Routledge, 262–289. Woolard, Karen 1999 Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8, 3–29.

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Zimmerman, Don H. 1998 Identity, context and interaction. In: Antaki, C. and S. Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, 87–106.

Chapter 4 Being a ‘colono’ and being ‘daitsch’ in Rio Grande do Sul: Language choice and linguistic heterogeneity as a resource for social categorisation* Peter Auer, Jacinta Arnhold, and Cintia Bueno-Aniola 1.

Style and identities in interaction

Choosing a certain way of speaking has social meaning. In recent years, this basic insight of sociolinguistics has been reformulated by many researchers using the concepts of (communicative, social) style and (social) identities (see the introduction to this volume for further details and bibliographical references). A ‘certain way of speaking’ can be called a (verbal) style, if its features are perceived and interpreted in a holistic way by the members of a given group or community. It has social meaning and therefore becomes a social style if this interpretation links it to social categories (such as ethnic, gender, age, or a certain milieu) such that speaking in a certain way is seen as an index to this category. Ascribing category membership of this type to a person, or displaying one’s own membership in this category, is what we mean by social identity work. In this paper, we will investigate social styles and identity work in the German/Portuguese bilingual ‘colonial zone’ in Southern Brazil. We will refer to language choice and code alternation as well as the varieties of German and Portuguese used in order to characterise these styles, but also to communicative (rhetorical) strategies employed to formulate an argument, a complaint, a problem, etc., in an institutional context. One of the points we wish to make is that bilingualism is more than a mental disposition or a set of cognitive abilities. It is a resource for constructing meaning, in two ways. On the one hand, bilingualism can appear in interaction as code-switching, by which we mean the juxtaposition of two semiotic (in our case, linguistic) systems in order to create local meaning in conversation. For instance, code-switching may contrast different participant constellations, different verbal activities, different modalities (keys) such as ironic and serious talk, etc. But on the other hand, the use of two languages

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(or in some cases, the lack of using two languages where this is expected) can also display a speaker’s belonging to a certain social group, i.e. it may index category membership. Bilingualism is therefore both a resource for creating conversational structure and for doing identity work in interaction. The identity-relevant categories we will be concerned with are on the one hand an ethnic category (‘German’/‘daitsch’)1, and on the other hand the economic/cultural category ‘colono’. Although these category labels are never used explicitly in our data, we claim that they are relevant as indexes to the participants’ identities in the data we want to look at. Before analysing the data in more detail, it may be useful to recall the basic principles upon which the identities-in-interaction approach rests; they have been formulated by Antaki and Widdicombe (1998: 3) as follows: (i)

(ii)

(iii)

(iv)

(v)

Having an identity means “being cast into a category with associated characteristics or features”; incumbency in this category may both be claimed by a participant to an interaction and ascribed to him/her by co-participants Identity-relevant activities in interaction are “indexical and occasioned”, i.e., they cannot be understood unless their embedding into the conversational and larger context at hand is taken into account Identity as an occasioned and achieved category incumbency needs to be made relevant in an interaction in order to become consequential in/for it; this holds for brought along and brought about identities. In accordance with ethnomethodological principles, the analyst’s task is to reconstruct this making relevant of a category. It need not imply the overt naming of an identity-relevant category though but can be achieved through symbolic means. ‘Having an identity’ is consequential for interaction, since the respective category is linked to category bound expectations of action; this consequentiality may become visible in a shift of footing of the interaction; however, it may also lead to the somewhat trivial consequence that ‘nothing special’ happens precisely because co-membership is established. This consequentiality opens up the possibility for the analyst to reconstruct from those category bound activities (“people’s exploitation of the structures of conversation”) the identity-relevant category in question.

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Our primary aim is to discover how certain linguistic ‘variables’ (or rather, their constellations) can index social categories and do the identity work described by Antaki and Widdicombe. For the sociolinguist, this implies that the variation space is defined, not so much within a language, but within a (group of) speaker’s linguistic repertoire. However, this variability is not of interest in itself but only to the degree that its symbolic potencies are actually exploited by social actors (consciously or unconsciously) in order to present their own social persona in a given social context. After a short introduction to the field of inquiry (section 2) we will discuss three speakers’ different social styles and their interactional embedding (recipient feedback) in a bilingual, rural context in Rio Grande do Sul (section 3). We will show how these social styles can come to index the categories of a Portuguese of German descent and of a colono.

2.

The Germano-Brazilians in RS as a field of sociolinguistic inquiry

A large area in the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul (RS), is socially, economically and culturally shaped (and looks upon itself as being shaped) by settlements of European labour immigrants, mainly from Germany and Italy. We will focus here on the German immigrants who arrived first in the 1820s and today form the largest German-speaking community outside Europe, with several hundred thousand active speakers. As in most immigrant communities, membership is not categorical but rather graded in subtle ways. Among the explicit grading devices observed among our informants and reflected in their system of social categorisations is a difference between “Germans” (Daitsche) and people “of German descent” (descendência alemã: mai vatter wòr Daitscher...), which reflects a way of positioning oneself closer to or more distant from the ‘core’ of the community. This gradedness of membership is also reflected in and achieved by the use of symbolic means which express Germanness; apart from a number of resources which could be called folkloristic (such as house-building and house-keeping, folk dances, folk music, cooking, certain sports such as bowling or shooting rifles, fairs such as Oktoberfest imitations), an important resource here is the language varieties used, including the specific way in which Brazilian Portuguese and German are spoken and in which they are intertwined. The (graded) social (membership) category Daitsch is complemented in the area by the category Italie-

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ner (Italians) (the two being the core of the secondary category imigrante); both Daitsche and Italiener are opposed to the category ‘Brazilian’ (Brazilianer, brazileiros) which is used by the ‘Germans’ as a residual (nonethnic) category, i.e. for all Brazilians of non-(recent) immigrant background (cf. Bueno-Aniola 2007).

‘Daitsche’ ‘Brasilianer’ ‘Italiener’

Figure 1.

To understand the following discussion of linguistic choices and their interpretation, it is necessary to introduce some background information. The social and economic success of the Germano-Brazilians in Brazilian society has been characterised by a tension between what could be called an assimilationist and an autarkistic/segregationist path to economic welfare. The autarkistic way (which should not be confused with a separatist movement, which it never was) counts on autonomy and solidarity within the ethnic group which is more or less sharply delimited against the other groups (in particular against the Brasilianer). It was the traditional way of reaching (some moderate) prosperity in the peasant colonies in the 19th century which could not survive without a system of mutual assistance; it reached its climax early in the 20th century. What made it possible was a relatively uniform population of German colonists with a similar social and cultural background (i.e. small farmers, craftsmen and industrial workers from various parts of Germany) and with similar political and economic interests. Of course, the German settlements have always depended on trade with Brazilian society, particularly within the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and although the ‘Germans’ were basically autarkistic in orientation, they were never autarkous in an economic sense of the word. However, they organised their own infra-structure, originally centred around the Protestant and to a lesser

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degree Catholic parishes and their priests, who often also set up a community-run, German language school. Until about the time of the first world war, the owners of the so-called private (in contrast to state-owned) colonies also played a role in this creation of a ‘German’ infrastructure. In the early 20th century, a cooperativist movement was established, leading to the foundation of ‘German’ agricultural cooperatives and cooperative banks. The viability of the autarkistic path to economic welfare was reduced if not blocked by the fascist-socialist estado novo of Getulio Vargas in the 1930s, which had the effect of extending the reach of the state administration into those parts of the Brazilian society which up to then had been organised and structured in a largely self-administered way; this included the so-called immigration zone in the south. The formation of the Brazilian nation-state under Vargas therefore led to the forced disruption of ‘German’ autarky in the South of Brazil, inter alia to the closing down of all German-language, private schools, and a ban on languages other than Portuguese. Part of the programme of the state penetration of society was the foundation of unions (sindicatos) which have survived up to the present day. One of them, the union of the peasant workers, which also subsumes small land-owners, is the institution from which the data presented and discussed in the following section were drawn. Despite the disruption of the German autarkistic infrastructure in Southern Brazil, the segregationist stance has not disappeared completely; up to the present day, some of the German-origin families live in remote areas of the hinterland in relatively homogeneous, monoethnic groups with restricted contacts with main-stream Portuguese-speaking Brazilian society. They form the core of the popular stereotype of the ‘German colono’ (cf. Bueno-Aniola 2007). These settlers/peasants mainly survive and rely on ethnically founded community bonds. However, their numbers have been greatly reduced over the last approximately 70 years. The autarkistic position never was the only one though. From the very beginning of the immigration another, much smaller, more assimilationist group of Germans settled mainly in the developing urban centres such as Porto Alegre, the state capital. They contributed in important ways to the establishment of commerce and industry in the area, but quickly gave up their German language and culture (despite some German cultural centres in Porto Alegre which survived until the 30s), such that Porto Alegre is today a monolingual Portuguese-speaking city. What is characteristic for the last decades is a shift from the autarkistic to the assimilationist position by many Brazilians of German descent also in the hinterland (interior) of

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RS. The shift is due in the last instance to the fact that the German peasant settlements in Southern Brazil have not been a 100% success story after all. It was not only due to the estado novo that the German settlements were in danger of decaying economically, but also to the over-exploitation of the soil, an unskilled and untrained labour force lacking in agricultural competences in a climate and under conditions which diverged considerably from those in Middle Europe, and unsuitable marketing conditions for the agricultual goods produced. One of the consequences of these economic difficulties which set in as early as in the late 19th century, was a continuous process of colonial migration by settlers of German descent within Brazil, first (and starting in the same period) to the north of the old (primary) colonies within the state of Rio Grande do Sul, later into the adjoining Brazilian states in the north. Another consequence was a shift away from pure agriculture; many Germano-Brazilians today work in and/or own small factories, and, particularly in some of the primary colonies (to which we will turn below) in the tourism industry. These economic developments have made the previous forms of autarkistic life obsolete. A third possible consequence was the abandonment of the colonies and migration into the larger cities, a pan-Brazilian process which is perhaps less dramatic in the South than in other parts of the country (since the economic situation in the countryside on the whole is not bad) but nonetheless severely affects some of the areas in which we did our field-work (particularly in the secondary/daughter colonies, e.g. in São Paulo das Missões). As these very superficial remarks already make it clear, the distinction between autarkistic and assimilationist stances maps onto a second distinction which is of central importance to an understanding of Brazilian society in general, and to that of the ‘German’ settlements in particular: the distinction between urbanity and rurality, or between city and hinterland (interior). The more one advances into the interior of RS, the less prosperous the population becomes. This is also an ideological issue. As already mentioned, the stereotypes which the non-immigrant Brazilians in Rio Grande do Sul (as well as most Italian-origin immigrants) share about ‘the Germans’ mainly target the colonos (peasants) of German origin in the ‘innermost interior’ of the country (cf. Bueno-Aniola 2007). These stereotypes are not very positive, ranging from character traits such as being stubborn (teimoso), impolite and unsophisticated (grosso), to outer characteristics such as being badly dressed and groomed, and lacking in hygiene standards. Of course, these stereotypes are also known by the GermanoBrazilians; for instance, a regular radio comedy programme in Nova

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Petrópolis, the town from which the following data originate, recurrently plays with the stereotype of the German colono who hates to take showers in a jokular manner. (The programme is produced for the German-speaking population.) It is not surprising then that there is a certain social pressure on the previous autarkistic population of German descent to turn to a more assimilationist stance. In this paper, we will look at linguistic acts of identity in a specific institutional context in the town of Nova Petrópolis, a town in which we did extensive field work in the year 2000. The institution is the local office of the union of rural workers. Nova Petrópolis is a town of roughly 17,000 inhabitants the large majority (90%) of which is of German descent. It is located some 100 km to the north of Porto Alegre in the Serra Gaúcha, a hilly area in one of the earliest German settlement areas and today an area which is attractive for tourists because of its mixture of immigrant culture and scenic beauty. In many ways, Nova Petrópolis is one of those places in which the conflicts between the segregationist/autarkistic and the assimilationist positions become most acute. On the one hand, Nova Petrópolis is the first stronghold of ‘German’ language, culture and economic strength one encounters when one moves from the capital into the interior. In Nova Petrópolis, the dominating social groups are almost exclusively ‘German’; and the town is generally perceived by its inhabitants (of German descent or not) and by the outsiders as ‘German’. The ‘Brazilians’ are seen as a threat by most ‘Germans’, and there is a clear tendency to keep them out of power positions. On the other hand, and counteracting these segregationist tendencies, the economy of the region no longer rests on agriculture alone. Although the countryside around Nova Petrópolis (its immediate interior) is still very much agricultural, there is also a considerable number of small industries (mainly leather and knitwear) which depend on outside labour, basically of non-German ethnic background. A somewhat half-hearted commitment to tourism also reflects a certain ambiguity towards letting the town become ‘spoiled’ by large scale (‘Brazilian’) tourism. The town is thus ideologically speaking conservative, but it also presents the image of a ‘modern’, up-to-date place which is integrated into the Brazilian (or at least Riograndese) economy. Although Nova Petrópolis is linked to the ethnic category ‘daitsch [German]’, the town has its own hinterland, i.e. the differences between colonos and town-people cross-cuts the ethnic distinction between “Germans” and “Brazilians”.

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Within this context, the sindicato dos trabalhadores rurais plays an important role by catering for the social and economic needs of the small farmers in the area. One of the main reasons for which the colonos come to town is in fact the sindicato. In a way, it mediates between the autarkistic and the assimilationist position, or between the Brazilian state/economy and the peasants of the interior. To the European eye, the sindicato presents an mixture of state welfare, political organ and remnants of the cooperativist movement unusual for a union. The colonists become members of the sindicato (and pay membership fees). For those fees, they can claim social and economic benefits. The economic benefits are basically related to buying agricultural materials such as seeds from the sindicato and selling one’s products through the sindicato on the market. This is partly done within a pre-monetarian exchange system (troca-troca: ‘barter’). The social benefits are perhaps even more important; they extend to all sorts of social welfare, starting from the posto de saúde (a general practicioner’s office) to advicegiving about the state administered social security system. In general, the economic, legal and administrative system of the Brazilian state is translated by the sindicato for the colonists who in turn to the sindicato in order to find solutions for their various problems. Although the sindicatos historically speaking have not originated from the traditional Germano-Brazilian infrastructure (and are not related to the cooperative movement of the early 20th century), the local office is today considered by the Germans in the município of Nova Petrópolis as one of their institutions. While supported by the state, the sindicato is not looked upon as a state institution. This is also reflected in its language policy: while state institutions are always monolingual Portuguese, the sindicato is thoroughly bilingual. All the employees we were able to observe and taperecord were perfectly fluent in both languages. They preferred to speak Portuguese with some German code-switching when among themselves, but they adapted easily and freely to the German language choices of their custumers, many of whom were clearly dominant in German. These employees of the sindidaco were thus ideal brokers; not only in a linguistic sense, but also in a cultural sense. Since most of them had grown up in the interior themselves, they knew the colonists’ life from their own experience. On the other hand, they had become acquainted with the state administration through their training and studies.

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3.

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Displays and ascriptions of identities in the sindicato

In this section, we will present three farmer-clients at the sindicato office in somewhat more detail, each of whom uses a specific social-communicative style, and each whom is responded to differently by the employees. The three custumers can be ordered linguistically by the way in which they combine German and Portuguese – from a next-to-monolingual German mode to a next-to-monolingual Portuguese mode over a bilingual style which combines the two languages by switching and mixing. However, the issue of language choice is just one of a co-occurring set of linguistic and non-linguistic communicative features which includes the selection of linguistic resources from the German and the Portuguese domain of the linguistic reportoire of the community, but also prosody, posture and gesture. The deployment and interactional relevance of the resulting verbalcommunicative styles will be analysed sequentially, i.e. by looking at how the interaction unfolds in terms of the subject matters dealt with. In order to analyse identities-in-interaction, the sequential method is particularly suited since it allows (and requires) taking into account the way in which the representatives of the institutions (the employees at the sindicato) respond to the client. In the institutional context of the sindicato, another set of identityrelevant categories must be added to ethnic (‘German’) and economiccultural ones (‘colono’). These are the situated categories of ‘employee’ and ‘client’. As we shall see below, linguistic choices – particularly the choice of Portuguese vs. German dialect – are sensitive to the selection of this category pair which contrasts with the non-institutional category-pair ‘German’/‘Brazilian’ but can also combine with it. (Socio-)linguistic (and in general, stylistic) choices become meaningful by being opposed paradigmatically to other, alternative choices. It is therefore necessary to know the linguistic repertoire of the community in order to be able to understand the meaning of the choices. In the research area, the base dialects brought along from Germany have largely disappeared in favour of a dialect koiné which is often called Hunsrückisch (from a mountain area in Germany from where many of the first settlers originated), sometimes simply Daitsch (cf. Auer 2005). This koiné has next to completely absorbed the dialects of the Rhineland, of Silesia, of Pomerania, of Swabia, etc., which also used to be spoken in the area. However, it varies internally on a basilect–acrolect continuum, the latter being closer to standard German. The acrolectal form clearly carries more prestige than the

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basilectal one. The leading classes, to the extent that they speak German in public (and also the employees in the sindicato) use this acrolectal form. Brazilian Portuguese is spoken by all Brazilians of German descent today; however, their Portuguese varies between a speech style which is indistinguishable from the one used in Porto Alegre over one in which local gaúcho elements of rural (non-immigrant) Rio Grande do Sul speech are present, to one which clearly betrays their German language background. It is a small set of phonological and phonetic features which is responsible for this German accent.2 Given the negative attitudes of the monolingual Brazilians towards these features, it is justified to call them basilectal as well. But note that the terms acrolectal and basilectal refer to the overt prestige of the variants on the ‘official market’; their covert prestige may be quite different. A customer who comes to the sindicato can exploit this whole variation space provided of course that s/he has it as her or his disposal. The employees will understand all variants. The social semantics of these variants differ widely, however. 3.1. Client 1: The seeds In our first example, a man, presumably in his fifties (k1), has come to the sindicato office. He wants to exchange maize seeds of the type ‘Agromer’ 303 which he was given by mistake, for those of type ‘Agromer’ 122 which he had originally ordered. There are three employees in the office; one of them (a2) serves the client while the others enter and leave the space behind the counter, sometimes taking part in the interaction between A2 and the client as well. (Sindicato 1) (the recording starts when interaction between the client and the employee of the sindicato who serves him has just passed beyond the initial greeting sequence, the identification of the client by name, and a first problem exposure. Portuguese underlined.) 01

k1:

die wollt ich um ‘those I wanted to ex-’

Being a ‘colono’ and being ‘daitsch’ in Rio Grande do Sul

02 03 04

a2:

05

k1:

06 07

a2:

08

k1:

09 10 11

a2:

12

k1:

13

14 15

a2: k1:

16

a1:

17

k1:

18 19

95

die harre ich jo verkehrd äh ‘I had them (i.e., the seeds) by mistake uhm’ han die geSCHIGGT; ‘they sent them’ hunnerdzwoienZWANzich harrich; (type) ‘122 I had’ (i.e., ordered) sim ‘yes’ jetzt (.) muss ich de dreihunderddrei (.) nomme brInge, ‘now I have to bring the 303 again (=back)’ GREcht ich nomme hunnertzwoienzwAnzich; ‘(and) I would get the 122 again’ hast dreihunnertdrei GUT; ‘then you have a credit on the 303’ agrME glob (1.0) ‘‚Agromer’ I think’ de agroMER; (.) ‘the ‘Agromer’’ die dun ich dann Omdrogge; (.) ‘so I exchange them’ ((3.0, looks down on his desk and starts working in his files; in the meantime, A1 approaches the front desk and sits down next to a2)) do hon ich jetz zwoi naije‘I have two new ones (=seeds) now’ die sore wärre gut fer SIlo (gewe). ‘they say they are good for (making) silo’ ((i.e., for growing crop to be stored for feeding the cattle)) <

hmhm,> (wollt ich mal prove uf mal) (‘I wanted to try them’) ((during this turn, K1 and A1 establish eye contact)) pa SORde? ‘some sorts?’ die harre mer n SORT geb,> (.) ‘they had given me a sort’ zwoi päck, ‘two small sacks’ ich weeß net was fer SENN das do. (0.5) ‘(I don’t know) what kind they are’

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20 21

a1: a2:

22

k1:

23 24 25

a2:

26

k1:

27 28

a2:

29

k1:

30 31

a2:

32

k1:

33 34 35

a? a3:

36

a?:

37

a2:

38

k1:

39 40 41

agr[oMER? [agroMER? ‘Agromer?’ Ijo; (.) ‘yes’ die (wolld ich) agroMER; (.) ‘(I wanted) them, agromer’ ich han noch ni: gePLANZT;= ‘I have never planted (them)’ =cê=e=associado? ‘are you a member?’ Ijo. ‘yes’ awwer die so:re die wärre gUet fer sillo. ‘but they say they were good for the silo’ ich da(ch)t du wollst misst verzich kilo dann hon. ‘I thought you wanted had to have 40 kilo then’ ha? (-) ‘sorry?’ <Ijo.> ‘yes’ verzich;= ‘forty’ =Ijo. ‘yes’ [de ande midedot Omdrogge. ‘the others exchange with those’ [( ) ((a3 enters the room and passes by)) (mor[gen) ‘morning’ [( ) hunnertzwaiezwanz[ich. ‘one hundred and twenty two’ [Ijo. (3.0) ‘yes’ ich hatt ai (.) ‘I had’ pur nekst von denne i han’= ‘very similar to those I have’ sen awwa net so vill KOMM;= ‘but not so many came’

Being a ‘colono’ and being ‘daitsch’ in Rio Grande do Sul 42 43

a3:

44 45

k1: a3:

46 47

k1:

48

a3:

49

k1:

50

a3:

51 52 53

k1:

54 55 56 57 58 59

60

61

a2:

97

hon ich net so vill gri:d; ‘I didn’t get so much’ das DOO jahr woor des (.) ‘this year it was’ AH das DOO joor woor das schE:jn gewes (.) med de (pflanzmilje). (-) ‘this year it was fine with the seed maize’ sen (schu) zu we:nich [(komm von ) ‘too few came of ( )’ [wesst (.)ich hatt (.) fenef päck (.) von denne bestellt gehat. (.) ( ) ‘you know I had ordered five packs of those’ vleicht grie me ja nEchscht [jahr meh <

( )> ‘maybe we will get more next year ( )’ [ijo ‘yes’ awwer das do: jahr sen se schon NÄCHST nommo AAL.(.) ‘but this year they are next to gone already’ un me sen erscht im okTO:ber; ‘and it is only october’ ((2.0; K1 signs a form for a2)) NE: das dO: joor wimmo GLAICH. (.) ‘no this year I will right now’ vo:rjes jahr sen ich hingang= (.) ‘last year I went there’ ba die la:d dennere abgemach;= ‘to the people (and) took off’ ((=peeled)) (some of their maize) das woor puur POTT. ‘this was pure crap’ hon ich re geplanst wo ich kO:f hat= ‘I planted some which I had bought’ sollst mo sin wi das schEjne milje wor(d)= ‘you should see like they became good maize’ anre ere PUUR ((makes a disdainful hand gesture)); (.) ‘those of the others just’ [so STECkcha [geb; [((makes hand gesture indicating the height of the maize)) ‘became little sticks’ [hast de hast de pack (.) wo hAs de pack? ‘have you have you your sacks where do you have your sacks’

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im KARre ‘in the car’ 63 a2: kommst ai: (.) unne (durchrinn dann). ‘come through downstairs to the back then’ 64 k1: Ijo. ‘yes’ 65 a2: driwwe in de FUNd[os. ‘over there into the back entrance’ 66 k1: [tá bom. ‘o.k.’ ((Customer leaves the room.)) 62

k1:

In the first 11 lines of the extract, the customer (k1) and one of the employees of the sindicato (a2) are involved in a business transaction. K1 has stated that he wants to exchange (maize) seeds. The deontic formulation in 05/06 suggests that he has talked to somebody else before who instructed him to bring along the wrong seeds (type 303, line 05: ‘I have to bring them’) and that he would then get the right ones (note the conjunctive grecht = std.Germ. kriegte ‘would I become’ in line 06). The employee confirms that he will get a credit for the returned seeds (line 07), and the customer adds the brand name about which he is not entirely sure (cf. the hedged phrase in line 08). He concludes by formulating once more his intention to exchange the seeds, and the employee starts to fill in the forms, averting gaze and looking down at his paperwork. Two things are noteworthy up to this point. First, the client selects German (dialect) for the interaction. He insists on this language choice although the employee’s sim in line 04 can be heard to invite either a change to Portuguese or a mixed language use. Second, the communicative style which K1 employs is highly ‘elliptical’, i.e. it depends on background knowledge and inferencing on the part of the employee. For instance, his lines 02 die harre ich jo verkehrd ... ‘I had ... them by mistake’ and 03 hunnerdzwoienZWANzich harrich ‘122 I had’ both leave the predicate (inferrable: ‘been given’ and ‘ordered’) implicit, since the main verb is lacking. In 08/09, it is unclear whether the brand-name Agromer refers to the seeds received or those ordered, or both. But note that neither the fact that the customer insists on German dialect, nor his implicitness lead to major problems for the interaction: it proceeds smoothly, and the customer gets what he wants.

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In the following section of the interaction, K1 introduces a different topic which is unrelated to the business at hand but linked to the topic of the seeds. K1 in fact attempts to start a chat while he has to wait until A2 has completed the paper work, and since A2 is not available as a recipient (he is still looking down at the papers), he after some initial problems manages to establish eye contact with another employee of the sindicato (from line 15 onwards), who has just entered the room and sat down behind the counter, next to A2. The customer talks about two different types of (maize) seeds (12) which he apparently has tried out (15) because they are said to be particularly well suited for the production of cattle feed (13). However, the chat is not successful, presumably because of referential difficulties linked to K1’s once more highly elliptical and implicit way of speaking. After a rather non-committed continuer in line 14, A1 requests a clarification (16) which the customer is unable to give; neither does it becomes clear who gave him the seeds (17: ‘they gave me...’ with unpersonal ‘they’) nor which seeds exactly he got (19). Intermingled with questions the first employee asks about the seeds the customer wants to exchange (20– 23) and about the customer’s membership in the sindicato, the customer tries to continue the topic of the chat (lines 24, 27), but there are no further contributions from A1 (or A2). The chat has failed, K1 has not received uptake from either of the employees. From the point of view of language choice, note that the employee switches into Portuguese for the question about K1’s membership in line 25. This is a typical code-switching which contextualises the employee’s incumbency in the institutional category of the sindicato’s employee, and thereby invites the co-participant’s categorisation as a member of the opposite category, that of the client. K1 does not accept this use of code-switching in order to re-contextualise the situation, however, but once again answers in German dialect (25–26). The following sequence (28–38) once more deals with technical details of the exchange of seeds, this time concerning the quantity of seeds the customer wants to take with him (40 kg). At this point, the third employee (A3) enters the room and greets the customer in passing (35). A1 now makes a second attempt to initiate small talk, this time with A3. He starts with what may be heard as a very weak complaint (39–42) that he didn’t get as much seed as he wanted. A3 responds with a general remark about how good this year’s harvest was (45: ‘it was a good year for seed maize’), but that the sindicato got too little seed to satisfy the demand. K1 repeats that he had ordered five sacks (47) (and presumably didn’t get them), and A3 suggests that the next year the sindicato may have a better supply, but

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that this year the stocks were already sold out almost entirely although it was only October (spring in Brazil) (50–51). While A2 hands over a form to be signed by the customer (which presumably marks the end of the official business transaction), K1 starts a third attempt to embark on small talk. He tells a story about how it pays to buy proper seed maize from the sindicato instead of growing it oneself. Once more, his style is elliptical and can only be understood on the basis of a good deal of contextual inferencing. Line 53 pre-announces the point of the story, but is broken off (‘this year I will ...’, to be continued: ‘buy seed maize from the very start’). He switches into the story mode by introducing a time in the past (‘last year’, 54) and reports that he went some place to ‘the people’ and ‘took off’ something (by inference: he went to the other peasants’ places and peeled off their maize), and it turned out to be of poor quality (56). He himself (so he continues) had bought seed maize instead (and thereby invites the retrospective inference that the other peasants had not done so, i.e. they had grown their own seed maize) (57) and it came off very well (58). He again refers to the bad quality of the self-grown maize by saying that the others had only got little ‘sticks’ in their fields (60) (instead of proper maize plants). But this story-telling has the same fate as the first attempt to initiate a chat with A1: there is a complete lack of uptake both from A3 and A2. Instead, A2 overlaps the customer’s last evaluation with a technical question which clearly invites closing of the interactional episode: he asks where the customer has stored the seed sacks he wants to exchange (61). The customer answers that they are in his car (62); the employee tells him to drive it into the backyard, which leads the episode to closure. It finishes with the customer’s only Portuguese contribution (tá bom); neither the customer nor the employees A1 and A3 exchange final salutations with him. The sequential development of this interactional episode as described so far gives a number of clues to its interpretation. We are dealing with a typical example of an institutional transaction which takes place between one of the employees (A2) and the client-customer (K1). The representatives of the institution usually dispose of organizational and procedural knowledge not equally accessible to the client. Note that K1 is not well acquainted with the maize types available; neither is he sure about the brand name Agromer (cf. line 08), nor does he know the names of the other maize types he talks about in the following sequence with A1 (cf. lines 08, 12, 17–21). This visible lack of professional knowledge establishes a clear asymmetry of competences – the employees and the customer are not of equal standing – and even impedes understanding between A1 and K1 (cf. 16–21).

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The asymmetric relationship between A1–3 and K1 as incumbents of the institutional categories of ‘employee of the sindicato’ and ‘customer/client at the sindicato’ is further enhanced by another important problem in this sequence. As in many institutional contexts, talk between the participants in their institutional roles can be complemented (or replaced on occasion) by talk outside these roles (‘small talk’). Such talk would establish a different, symmetric relationship between the participants, often implying some kind of co-categorization. In the context of the sindicato, such co-categorization could be done (and often is done) using the membership category ‘German’. K1 makes three attempts to change the frame of the interaction in such a way, none of which is successful. In the first case (12–27), he starts small talk about a new sort of maize which he is about to try out; K1 gets some initial attention from A1 but fails to establish the topic. A second attempt is made in lines 39–55, when K1 starts to talk about his seed purchases. In this case, A3 joins into the interaction, but instead of taking up K1’s slight complaint in 39–42 directly, he answers with a general statement about the shortage of maize seeds (45–46). The third attempt to establish small talk starts with K1’s story-telling in lines 53ff; in this case, none of the employees takes up the (point of the) story (although its up-shot is clearly supportive of the sindicato: seeds should be purchased there). Instead, particularly A2 insists on terminating the interaction in a business-like, impersonal way. In sum, we argue that the appearance of K1 at the sindicato office evokes the stereotypes of the colono: a somewhat unsophisticated man who is not very familiar with the administrative and professional aspects of agriculture. There is some evidence in the employees’ behaviour which shows that they actually perceive the man’s performance in these terms. In particular, the employees refuse to take up K1’s initiatives to change the footing of the interaction from business to small talk, and the interaction fails to display any features of personal co-membership and co-involvement. We propose that the social categorization of the customer as a colono is based on the style in which he presents himself. Part of this style is the exclusive use of German dialect, as we shall now show by considering alternative stylistic choices in the following sections. The client fails to pick up on the employee`s various invitations to switch (momentarily, at least, i.e. for bureaucratic issues tied to the institution) to Portuguese. It is this lack of bilingual language use which is interpreted in an identity-related way.

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3.2. Client II: The unsuccessful buyer of sorgo Our second case is in many ways almost the opposite. Another man roughly of the same age enters the sindicato office and approaches the counter; the two employees, who have been talking to each other in Portuguese in the back of the room so far, establish eye contact with him immediately. (Sindicato 2) ((employees are talking to each other in Portuguese when customer km10 enters)) 01

km10: (alguma vez

02 03

a?

04

a2:

05

k10:

06 07

a2:

08

k10:

09 10

a2:

11

k10:

12

a2:

13

k10:

) (‘sometimes’ ) bom DIA ( ) ‘good morning’ <

bom DIA> ‘good morning’ bom DIA; ‘good morning’ aqui não se trabalha mais com a semente e essas coisas lá, ‘here you don’t work with seeds and like those things’ (.) <

(puta) [ma:s eh> ‘damn it but...’ [de milho nós temo ainda (.) alGU[:ma coisa ‘maize we’ve still got a bit’ [ e::hh de ‘no’ milho não ‘maize I don’t want’ eu queria:: (.) SORgo;= ‘I wanted (.) millet’ =[não. ‘no’ [não existe MAIS; ‘doesn’t exist’ mir han BLOSS milje. ‘we only have maize’ bloß milje. (-) ‘only maize’

Being a ‘colono’ and being ‘daitsch’ in Rio Grande do Sul < puta como é difícil;

14 15 16

a2:

17

k10:

18 19 20 21 22

a2

23

a1:

24 25

a1:

26 27

k10:

28 29

a1:

30

k10:

31 32

a1: k10:

33

a2:

34

k10:

35

a2:

‘my God how it is difficult:’ não sei pra que que eles fazem isso ah!> ‘I don’t know why why they do it!’ na (piA isso) também não tem? ‘at (the XXX3) they haven’t got it either?’ NÃO ‘no’ eu SEI (.) ‘I know’ mas (.) só de deiz quilo (.) ‘but only (in) ten kilo (sacks)’ mas com dez quilo(.) não vai (.) ‘but with ten kilos (.) it doesn’t work (.)’ não (--) ‘no (--)’ sim; (-) ‘yes’ é; (.) ‘well;’ infelizmente. ‘unfortunately.’ isso é lei (ele) ‘it’s a law’ se não (não) [(te trouxe ) ‘if it wasn’t (we’ld have it)’ [mas essas leis são (.) ‘but those laws are’ PUta mas que SA: [co; ‘shit, what a drag!’ [É::H ‘right’ (se vê) quem tem uma coisinha pequena (eh) ‘(if somebody comes) who has a small piece’ ((of land)) (‘yes’) ( [ ) [zehn kilo du:sd=de (.) ‘(with) ten kilos you can do’ <eu sei eh > ‘I know yes’ wieviel INseie né> (.) ‘how much sowing right?’ Ijo;= ‘sure’

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36

km10: =um monte de coisa né

37

a2:

38

a1:

39

40

k10:

41

a1:

42

k10:

43

a1:

44 45

k10: a2:

46

k10:

47

‘a load of things right’ (tá isso é [claro) ‘(that’s it that’s clear)’ [ÉH: que ‘right also’ eu acho ruim (.) que nem pro pessoal vem aqui ‘I think ((it is also)) bad (.) also for the people who come here pra pegar milho né to take ((=buy)) maize right’ não eu [SEI ‘no, I know’ [quero tantos quilos tantos quilos ja aber ‘‘I want so many kilos so many kilos’ well but’ ja das GEHT ja [net ‘this doesn’t work of course’ [(a gente faz escondi:do assim) eh ‘(they do it under the counter like that) right’ (-) ( ) o que dava né> < ‘what can you do, right’ (Éh:: ma mais éh éh) é uma uma merda (-) ‘(right but it’s it’s) it’s shit’ tá OK dann obrigado ‘it’s o.k. then thanks’

The customer, as it turns out, has a small piece of land on which he wants to sow sorgo (‘millet’); his problem is that millet seeds are only on the market in large sacks, not in the small quantities he needs. The episode starts with an exchange of greetings (bom dia). The customer then formulates his reason-for-coming by asking a somewhat underspecified question, too vague to be dealt with adequately immediately, but which, since it is negated, already implies a declination of the request it implies, i.e. a dispreferred second: ‘you don’t deal with those seeds here, shit’. Taken literally, this statement is obviously wrong – no doubt the sindicato sells seeds. Employee A2 lets pass the first possible turn completion point at the end of line 5, presumably expecting some kind of specification about ‘those seeds’; when this does not follow (and the client goes into an evaluation of the presumed fact instead, line 6), A2 interrupts to state the obvious, i.e. that there are some maize seeds (7). At this point, and once

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more in interruption of the previous, not-yet-completed utterance/turn, the customer becomes more specific: he doesn’t want maize, but rather millet seeds (9). Employee A2 confirms that millet seeds are not available (10) and once more states that there is only maize (12); this statement is repeated as an affirmation by the customer (13). At this point, the exchange could be over since the subject matter is sufficiently dealt with, and the customer’s wish responded to – albeit negatively. The following part of the interaction is a metapragmatic sequel for the purpose of mutual face work. The main strategy is to blame a third party – ‘them’, i.e. the state authorities and their unreasonable laws. Transition into this metapragmatic sequel is contextualised by the client’s slight curse puta como é difícil in line 14, uttered in a low voice, as if the customer was speaking to himself. It is the customer who also introduces the vaguely designated third party culprits, eles (‘them’), in the same line (15). Following the employee’s question whether the agricultural cooperative of the town could not be of help (16), the client explains what has not been clear up to that point: that sorgo is principally available but only in larger packs than what he needs (i.e., 10kg sacks; 19–21). The second employee also joins in now (24), expressing his regrets for not being able to serve the customer. Once more, a possible termination point for the interactional episode is reached. This time it is employee A2 who expands the interaction, taking up the notion of the third party culprit. He brings up another aspect of the problem: millet is not only unavailable, but the sindicato would not be allowed to sell it anyway in small quantitites by law (25–26). (Since this is presumably known to the customer, the negative way in which he formulated his initial request becomes more understandable now in retrospect.) In line 27 an exchange starts in which the customer and employee A2 agree that ‘the law’ doesn’t make sense since small farmers do not need large sacks of seed (30–36): ‘for those who own only a small piece of land – how much could they sow with 10 kg! A heap of things!’. Employee A1 adds that the same problem also applies to farmers who want to buy maize seed in small quantities (38, 39). ‘They want some kilograms of maize, but ...’, and the customer completes, duetting: ‘... this doesn’t work of course’ (42). One tries to do it surreptitiously, the employee adds, and the other employee concludes ‘what can you do’ (45) – another invitation to close the interaction. The customer has the final word; with another slight curse (merda, 46) for the authorities, a pre-closing ta o.k. and a final ‘thanks’ he leaves the office.

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It is not difficult to see that this interaction evolves completely differently from the one discussed before. Maybe most striking is the difference in the way in which the employees respond to the two clients. As the customer in the first example, the man in the second example seems to be unknown to the employees in the office. However, both employees immediately focus their attention on him as soon as he enters the room, and they continue to be focussed on him until he leaves. The client, in turn, sets the pace, and keeps the initiative most of the time. The equal standing of the client, on the hand, and the representatives of the institution, on the other, is both reflected in and achieved through the complaint about the counterproductive state regulations which keep both the client (as a farmer) and the sindicato (as the provider of goods for the farmers) from functioning effectively, and lifts the responsibility for the failed deal from both of them. This sequence at the same time enables all three participants to enact a categorization device which allows them to co-categorize themselves, i.e. the device ‘us/the state’. Compared to the first example, the communicative style used by the customer is very much an “involvement style” (Tannen 1984): there are numerous overlaps, simultaneous starts and interruptions which, however, do not seem to inhibit or disturb the flow of interaction, but rather support it. The stylistic choices the customer makes on the linguistic level also show a different pattern from the one we observed in the first example: the interaction is almost completely in Portuguese. The Portuguese spoken by the client does not have a German accent; rather it conforms to the variety used by most speakers in that area of RS, regardless of their ethnic background. Note, however, that the interaction is not entirely monolingual, which betrays the German background of the speaker. It is employee A2 who first turns it into a bilingual one (line 12: mir han BLOSS milje), and it is only through the client’s German repetition in 13 that we get to know for the first time that he is a bilingual and therefore of German descent. The second excursion into Hunsrück dialect is initiated by the client in 30, 32, 34 where he starts a turn (and, presumably, complex sentence) in Portuguese (se vê quem tem uma coisinha pequena...), continues in German (zehn kilo du:sd=de wieviel INseie né?) and finishes in Portuguese again with an answer to his own rhetorical question (um monte de coisa). The employee responds partly in Portuguese (33, 37), partly in German (35), thus acknowledging the bilingual nature of the on-going turn. The third excursion into German occurs in the duetting sequence 41–42 in which the employee switches in mid-sentence from Portuguese to German (ja aber), a

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sentence which is completed by the client (das GEHT ja net). Finally, there is small bit of admixture of German in the final turn by the client (dann obrigado). The German utterance parts are only minor components in a basically Portuguese interaction.4 However, they do not happen without producing social meaning. Particularly the first exchange of German utterances (lines 12/13) is relevant here. On the one hand, the employee’s mir han BLOSS milje is closure-implicative: it could terminate the failed business interaction. On the other hand, the switch into German opens up the possibility to switch from that business interaction into another, less institutional type of interaction since it implies a ‘metaphorical’ move away from institutional talk. As such, it is followed by the first German utterance of the client in this interaction which establishes his German-descent background. This cocategorisation may be instrumental in the transition to the metapragmatic sequel of the interaction. In sum, this speaker avoids activating the social category of the German colono in the interior, which is associated with a monolingual style in which dialectal German plays the most important role. Both the client and the employees activate their German ethnic background en passant, but they see to it that for the bulk of the interaction, the symbolic resources employed do not differ from those which would be used by monolingual Brazilians as well. He comes across as a professional – even though the land he owns may be small and not larger than the one owned by K1. The social category indexed first and foremost is that of a male rural Southern Brazilian, the category ‘German’ remains in the background and the category colono is avoided. 3.3. The story of the selos Our third example documents yet a third, typical way of managing one’s social identity by using a bilingual communicative style on the stage of of the sindicato office. The client is once more male, and of approximately the same age as in the previous examples. One of the brought-along and brought-about differences is that the client and at least two of the employees (A2 and A1) seem to be known to each other.

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(Sindicato 3) ((as K11 enters the room, the two employees who are present, A2 and A1, are located in the back of the room, A1 sitting, A2 standing. The both turn to K11 as he enters.)) 01

a2:

02

k11:

03

a2:

04

k11:

05 06

a1: a2:

05a a1: 07

k11:

08 09

a1:

10 11

12 13

k11:

14 15

a1:

16 17

k11:

((nods as a greeting to k11 as he sees him entering)) guten MORgen;

‘good morning’ MORgen; ‘morning’ alles GUT? ‘everything o.k.?’ [Ijo (.) [alles gut ‘everything o.k.’ wenn=s mo sche:n wedda gebt [nOch besser ,sure if the weather becomes better even more (so)’ [gut, (.) ‘o.k.?’ is das do kEEn WEDda; ‘is this no weather;’ ((=isn’t that a (fine) weather!)) Ijo s=IS? (.) ‘sure it is!’ [sche:n AUSgehn- (.) ‘go out’ [((A2 gets up and slowly starts to approach the counter; at the same time, A5 enters the room, takes a chair from the table behind the counter and moves it to a table on the window to the right where he sits down to work)) spaZIEre gehen‘go for a walk’ duut=s aich on ‘you take it’ duut=s onnehme wie=s kOmmt?= ‘you take it as it comes’ Ijo; ‘sure’ h h h h h [ma ‘we’

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[MISS ma MISS ma [( ) ‘we have to we have to’ 19 k11: [< MACH ma was ‘you (SG) do something about it!’ ((=there is nothing to do about it)) 20 =machd=a da was dron> ‘you (PL) do something about it!’ 21 a1: MACH=mo was [droon; ‘you (SG) do something about it!’ 22 [((A2 is sat down next to K11 now behind the counter)) Ijo. 23 ‘sure’ (1.5) ja awer (.) que que mAnda.> 24 a2: < ‘yes but what what can I do for you’ (4.0) 25 k11: eu não sEi; ‘I don’t know’ 26 a2: net zu VIEL reden h h h ‘don’t talk too much’ ((general laughter, appr. 6 sec.; A1, still standing in the background, looks at K11 while he starts to describe his problem, until line 54, when he disengages from the on-going interaction between K11 and A2)) (1.0) 27 k11: ((from now on mostly in a subdued voice until 54)) eu tEnho um cadastro aí (.) de sElo não SEI; ‘I have a registration (.) of a stamp, I don’t know’ 28 a2: para aproVAR. (1.0) ‘to approve’ 29 k1: eu tenho o (.) (os quitado); (-) ‘I have (paid ones)’ 30 a2: hm (-) 31 k11: simples e (.) e wie=s (.) wie=s wor (-) ‘simple ones like like it used to be’ 32 das ENde= ‘the end’ 33 ich han=s uf=m noome um ma bru (.) bruuder das administriere. ‘it’s under my name, and my bro brother, (does) the administration’ 18

a1:

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Peter Auer, Jacinta Arnhold, and Cintia Bueno-Aniola (1.0) aí ele

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

a2:

43 44

k11:

45 46

a2:

47 48

k11:

49

a2:

50

k11:

51

a2:

52

k11:

‘now he’ da hat der dat so mir abgeschn ‘now he he cut me tha’ abgschnidd hat de das= ‘he cut off it’ e agora o homem sumIu; (-) ‘and now the man has disappeared;’ faz mais (-) de dois meses o homem sumiu.(2.0) ‘it is more than two months ago (that) this man disappeared’ e tem lenha lá prá vender; (2.0) ‘and there is wood to be sold’ eu posso renovar uma coisa pra (-) ‘can I renew something in order to’ consegui (.) selo (.) ou consegui‘get the stamp or get...’ como o homem sumiu; (.) ‘how do you mean the man disappeared;’ [dei BRU:der?= ‘your brother?’ [su ѵ ‘dis’ Ѷ ja. (1.0) ‘yes’ (un) SElos; (.) ‘(and) stamps;’ hat der selos geHAT oda was= ‘he had stamps or what’ =NAo:; (-) es wa: nur uff m NOOme; ‘no it was only under the ((=my)) name’ ta. ‘right.’ e praticamente isso caiu no meu caD[Astro; ‘and practically it fell under my registration’ [sim. (--) ‘yeah’ (e eu) (.) pra vende(r) ‘(and I) in order to sell [também lá pra vende(r) (.) e tem as well there in order to sell I need to’

Being a ‘colono’ and being ‘daitsch’ in Rio Grande do Sul 53

a2:

[((gets up and moves towards the filing cabinets to the left)) k11: <

que usar os sElo.>

54 55 56

57

58

a2:

59

k11:

60 61

a2:

62

k11

63 a2: 64 65

a2:

66

k11:

67

a2:

68

k11:

69 70

111

‘use the stamps.’ < und wolld ich das mo NACHschaue(n). ( ) ‘and I wanted to look it up.’ ( ) então eu precisava ess (.) ‘well I needed those’ [agora uns pra cem metros mais ou menos e pro ano que vEm cem metros.> (.) ‘now ones for 100 meters more or less and for next year 100 meters’ [((while talking, K11 moves to the left, following a2)) <

cento e vinte;> ‘one hundred and twenty’ (convêm) da situa[ção; ‘(it fits) the situation’ [<ja guck mo was dot LO:::S=is ‘yes have a look what is up there’ (se dá [pra renovAR ou) ‘(if it can be renewed or...)’ [não eu sei ‘I don’t know’ (.) como=é que fica (-)a situaÇÃO ‘what it is that the situation is like’ <

( ) sim che) ( ) ‘yes that’ ((ca. 12 sec silence while the employee looks up in the books)) renovou no ano passa:do né ‘he/you renewed it last year right?’ hen? ‘what?’ renovou no ano passado=eh ‘he/you renewed it last year’ não sei (.) ‘I don’t know’ ( ooch ) so e bissche habe;(.) ‘( also) have a little bit;’ de STALL glauw=ich eh honma da (.) (misst) n poor stick SElo MEHR hon;= ‘the shed I think eh we did... (.) (should) have some more stamps’

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71 72

73

a5:

74 k11: 75

a5:

76

k11:

77

a2:

78

a5:

79

a2:

80

k11:

81

a2:

82

k11:

83

a5:

84

a2:

85

k11:

86

a5:

87 88 88a 89

k11:

aí ach=que ele (.) fez (.) um: (6.0) ‘there I think that he (.) did (.) a: ...’ ((intervening sequence in Portuguese between employees A2 and a5 about the records during which a5 gets up and also moves to the filing cabinets where they are both looking for/at something)) sie HAN des stick land gell? ‘you (FORMAL) own this piece of land don’t you’ hen? ‘what?’ sie HAN das stick land; ‘you (FORMAL) own this piece of land;’ m; (1.0) ‘yes’ wieviel hektar HAST du. ‘how many hectars have you (INFORMAL) got.’ <

vinte e UM> ‘twenty one’ <

vinte [e UM> ‘twenty one’ [vinte e um (.) o outro é::[: ‘twenty one and the other one is’ [(modelo?) ‘type?’ do:ze vírgula se::TENta. ‘twelve point seventy’ tinha que faze sobre a Outra área daí. (2.0) ‘it would seem to be necessary to do the stamp on the other piece of land there.’ musst=uns was SCHIGge; ‘you have to send us something’ <hm.> (1.5) ‘yes’ pois é (.) ‘that’s it’ e nessa área aQUI né; ‘and in this land here, you see’ lá já entregaram pouca (gasse) né ( [ ) ‘there they have already given out ( ) (fazê de novo). (do it again).’ [sim ‘yeah’

Being a ‘colono’ and being ‘daitsch’ in Rio Grande do Sul 90 91 92

93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106

107 108

113

sim ‘yeah’ a2: tem que trazê [éh ah ‘it’s necessary that you bring along ehm ahm’ a5: [misst=a die landpapiere? ‘you (SEMI-FORMAL) have to (bring) the land registration’ ((a5 moves away and sits down at the window, disengaging from the conversation)) tem que trazer a outra escritura e fazer o: o:= a2: ‘it’s necessary that you bring along the other land registration5 and do the: the:’ a5: INcra. ‘INCRA.’6 fazer tudo de novo éh ‘do everything from the start again right’ tudo. ‘everything’ (.) e trazer as duas daí né ‘and bring along the two (documents) from there right’ a2: é ‘right’ k11: aha, traz tua escritura tá a2: ‘bring along your(Tu-FORM) document that’s it’ <

talão tá> ‘receipt book you have’ k11: certo, ‘sure’ a5: < a sua ( ) > ‘his ( )’ (1.0) k11: das mache [ich ‘I’ll do it’ a2: [<> dá pra fazê; sim; > ‘that can to be done; yes;’ k11: das mache ich [dann mo dann ‘I’ll do it then when’ a2: [Ijo ‘sure’

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109

k11: wenn ich zeit hon

‘when I have the time’ ijo ‘sure’ ((A2 starts to write down a list of things to be brought along in order to get the “stamps”)) k11: wenns mo nommo re:n gibt ‘when it rains again’ a2: escriTU:ra- (.) Incra- (.) das DUAS Áreas. ‘registration, INCRA-Papers of the two pieces of land.’ ((9.0 without talking during which am2 continues writing)) cpf (.) tu traz o talão também. (.) ‘CPF you take along as well.’ k11 ((nods head, takes piece of paper and reads it)) a2: certo ‘sure’ k11: certo ‘sure’ a2: [dann MACH ma=s so. ‘then let’s do it like that’ [((turns away from the counter and seems to be terminating the interaction with k11)) k11: hm. (3.0) ken problE:m (2.0) ‘no problem’

110 a2: 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

120 121 122

((conversation continues beyond this possible closing point))

The topic of this sequence is a somewhat complex administrative matter. Since it is forbidden today in RS to clear wood without state approval, the farmers, who are often also owners of a small area of forest, have to get a stamp (selo) for cutting down trees. The quantity of wood which can be cut down per year depends on the size of the land somebody owns, and it is registered on the land. This client wants to sell some of his wood. However, since the land which is nominally in his possession was ‘administered’ by his brother, he isn’t sure whether his brother has already used up his share of wood-cutting this year. The problem has arisen since the brother has suddenly disappeared.

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The sequence is structured in four parts. The first part (lines 1–23) consists of an initial exchange of greetings and small-talk about the weather between the employees A2 and A1 and the customer. During this sequence, one of the employees, who in the beginning of the interaction had been talking to the customer from the back of the room, slowly approaches the counter and sits down behind it. When the trajectory of this movement comes to an end, transition into the second part of the interaction is initiated by this employee who asks what the client came here for (24). The second part contains the exposition of the problem by the client, starting in 27, and coming to completion in 63. The transition into the third part of the interaction is once more marked, not only verbally but also by body movement: as soon as he understands that the customer wants him to look up in the books whether he can get a selo for this year, the employee gets up from his desk behind the counter, approaches the filing cabinets to the left and starts to search for the land registration file. This part of the interaction (until 82) mainly consists of the search process in the papers which is mainly done by A2 and his colleague and boss A5 whom he has asked for help; during this process, the two employees of the sindicato ask the customer a number of questions about the size of the land and the legal possessor. The fourth and final part starts with the superordinate employee’s decision that the stamp needs to be issued on a different piece of land (which is also owned by the client) (83); while A5 retreats from the interaction, A2 explains the situation and the proposed solution to the client who agrees to bring along the documents necessary for the administrative process. The interaction comes to a possible closure by the customer’s repeated affirmation that he will go along with the employees’ suggestions as soon as the weather is bad (i.e. it is raining) and he is not needed in the fields, which will enable him to come to the sindicato again. Without going into a detailed reconstruction of this interactional episode, let us point out some of its central features. First, it is clear that this interaction is invested with a lot more politeness routines and face work in general than the previous two. The episode is introduced by a longish sequence about the weather (which just previously to the time of the recordings had been notoriously bad; in fact, the region had been badly devastated by heavy rainfall and storms in the past days). The sequence is full of joking and laughter. In terms of language choice, it is purely German, i.e. in dialect. Note in particular the typical how-are-things-going-formula by the customer right in the beginning after the exchange of greetings, i.e. alles GUT? (line 04), a loan translation of Portuguese todo bom?, which is

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heard everywhere in the German colonies and clearly indexes belonging the the German community. (The employees, incidentally, uses a more acrolectal variety of German than the customer; note in particular the verb ausgehen ‘go out’ instead of the more basilectal maie-gehen in 10.) The shift from small-talk into business is initiated by the employee who for that purpose switches into Portuguese, using a formula typical of service encounters (que manda, 24). The customer’s long silence before answering, as well as his ‘I don’t know’ preface make a complicated exposition expectable (which is jokingly criticised by A2 in his German admonition ‘not to talk too much’, 26, an aside still outside the business transaction and therefore marked by code-switching). The customer accepts the new language-of-interaction for the new frame ‘business talk’ and starts to explain what his problem is in Portuguese. In addition to the new language choice, the new footing is also contextualised by reduced loudness (27ff). As in the previous two extracts, particularly in the first one, the initial exposition of the problem is not very clear and full of vagueness. The client starts to say that he is registered to receive stamps (selos, 27); the employee conjectures that he has come to renew (renovar) this registration (28), but K11 disregards this conjecture and continues to explain that the registration has been paid (quitado), and that it is a simple one, ‘as it used to be’ (31). The registration is under his name but his brother was in charge of the land (33). The next step in the exposition of the problem is also referentially vague; something has been cut off (35/36; we can infer from the later parts of the interaction that the client probably is talking about wood). Equally vague is the reference of o homem (‘the man’) who ‘disappeared’ (38); neither do we know who this man is nor how he connects to the previous story. Again judging from the later parts of the interaction, we assume that KM11 at this point failed to state that ‘this man’ refers to his brother who was previously mentioned as having been in charge of the administration of the land. He continues that there is wood to be sold there (39), and he concludes by asking (albeit in an affirmative clause) whether he can renew ‘something’ in order to ‘get a stamp’ (40/41). During this problem statement, the employee remains silent and does not verbally display his recipiency. After the possible turn completion point in 41, however, he starts with a series of questions through which he attempts to reduce some of the vagueness in K1’s problem statement (42/43: who disappeared? and 46/47: did the brother have stamps?). At that point, the business interaction which began in Portuguese has already turned into a bilingual one in which both the client and the employee use German in addition to Portuguese, in what

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we call (opposing switching to mixing) a mixing style (cf. Auer 1999): without being motivated by changes in the contextualisation of the situation, or achieving such a change of footing, this style seem to be the unmarked way of talking between these two men. In the third part of the interaction, the two employees speak Portuguese between themselves, but the information they request from the client is once more asked for and given in both languages. For instance, A2 asks the client in Portuguese whether it is true that the selos were renewed the year before, and K11 first answers in the same language (65–68), but then elaborates in German and Portuguese (that in order to build the shed they presumably had to have the stamp; 69–71). On the other hand, the German question by A5 in line 73/75 whether K11 owns that piece of land, and A2’s follow-up question of how many hectares he owns (77), are responded to by the customer in Portuguese. When the superordinate employee decides on the matter and states that the selos can be issued, but only on another piece of land (83ff), he does so in Portuguese, thereby underlining his superior position; it is A2, the client’s acquaintance, who explains the decision to the client, sometimes in German, sometimes in Portuguese (91ff). The final routines (k11: das mache ich wenn ich zeit hon, 105–109; A2: dann mach ma=s so, 119, k11: ken problE:m, 122) are mainly in German, leading back to the language choice in the beginning of the episode. What kind of identity does this customer display through his linguistic choices? First of all, he acts in a polystylistic way – he is able to switch from the German-only mode in the initial small-talk exchange to a codemixing style between Hunsrück dialect and a variety of Portuguese marked by a German accent. Monolingual German is not considered adequate by him for dealing with business matters in an institution such as the sindicato. It is, however, employed to establish solidarity and co-categorisation with (at least) one of the employees (A2). The symbolic value of switching and mixing as a communicative style implies that the speaker can be neither subsumed under the category of the backwardish colono of the hinterland, who is naive in dealing with business and administrative matters and does not speak Portuguese well; nor does he actively distance himself from the category of the ‘Germans’ (as does the man in the second example, who has an equal standing vis-à-vis the institution but does not establish cocategorisation as a Daitscher). This customer symbolises through his language choice that he has some kind of understanding of how the state administration works and how it can be made to work for his own benefit. By

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mixing Hunsrückisch and Portuguese he at the same time displays this kind of understanding, and indexes the employee’s and his own common ethnic background, i.e., he establishes co-membership.

4.

Conclusions

In this paper, we have presented three typical Brazilians of German descent who come to the sindicato’s office in a small town in the colonial zone (Rio Grande do Sul) in southern Brazil. Each of them uses the linguistic resources available in the community differently to index (or not) economiccultural (colono) and ethnic (daitsch) categories. None of these categories is ever made explicit by the speakers in the data. This lack of explicit categorisation reflects a stable social and sociolinguistic situation in which the structure of the life world is by and large beyond dispute and shared by everybody. There is no need to categorise other participants (whether copresent or not) by using category names, since categorisation is hardly ever the focus or topic of the interaction. This, however, does not mean that social categorisation is irrelevant; rather, it is done all along the way while participants deal with their everyday affairs such as buying seeds, doing bureaucratic work, exchanging small talk about the weather, etc. While attending to the business at hand, they index their own social belonging (their position in a social space, and hence their social identities), they ratify other participants’ self-displays of their identities, and they categorise others implicitly. The means by which this is done can include all semiotic systems, but language plays a prominent role among them. In the case under consideration, linguistic indexes to social categories can be found on all levels, from phonology to ellipsis, from language choice to rhetorical strategies. It has been argued that a more promising way of theorising such indexing than looking at individual ‘variables’ is to resort to the notion of social style. The three customers at the sindicato’s office all share a German ethnic background with the employees. This ethnic background comes in play to very different degrees though, and it combines with a self-positioning along the dimension of rurality/urbanity. To be sure, there are overlapping stylistic features; for instance, the way in which the costumers present their concern is similarly vague. There are commonalities of conversational style relating to discourse structure, sequentiality, the organization of complex (extended) turns, and so on which do not distinguish sharply between the

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three customers. However, there are also important differences. One of them which we have been particularly interested in this paper is their different ways of displaying bilingualism, and to speak German and/or Portuguese. It has been argued that these displays have important consequences for the way in which they are treated by the representatives of the institution: both the ‘Portuguese’ style and the ‘mixing/switching style’ occur in episodes in which the employees of the sindicato are easily engaged in cooperation with the customer, while the first, German-speaking customer fails to establish co-involvement from the employees beyond the minimum necessary to carry out the business transaction. In this sense, the styles in which the three speakers act become the interpretive resources for the ascription of identity-related categories which are indeed, as Antaki and Widdicomb claim, consequential for interaction.

Notes *

1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

This paper emerged from a research project on the „Sprachliche Symbolisierung ethnischer Identität“ (Linguistic symbols of ethnic identity) co-directed by the first author and Christian Mair at the University of Freiburg within the framework of the research unit „Identitäten und Alteritäten“ (SFB 471) funded by the German Research Council (DFG). We wish to thank Gilvan Mueller de Oliveira for his comments on the conference version. The term will be used here in the sense in which it is used both by Brazilians of German descents and those of non-German descent, i.e. excluding Germans from Germany. Among them, the distribution of the /R/-variants (with a merger of the Portuguese phonemic contrast between and , /h/ vs. /r/), loss of nasalisation in the vowels (particularly in the ending –ão, in its extreme form pronounced as /n0/), lacking palatalisation of /t/ before /i/ and lack of voicing in the voiced stop system (cf. Bueno-Aniola 2007 for details; also cf. Zilles and King 2005). Name of an agricultural cooperative in the town. Where he does speak German, the client uses a very broad, basilectal variant of Hunsrückisch, though. Note in particular the monophthong and the high onglide in the diphthong in inseie (std. German einsäen). What is meant is a deed of sale. INCRA (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária) is the state run institution (national institute) for agricultural reforms.

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References Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe 1998 Introduction. In Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage. Auer, Peter 1999 From code-switching via language mixing to fused lects: Toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech. International Journal of Bilingualism 3(4), 309–332. 2005 A(nother) scenario for new dialect formation: The German koiné in Rio Grande do Sul. In Melander, Björn (ed.), Språk i tid. Studier tillägnade Mats Thelander på 60-årsdagen. Uppsala: Institutionen för nordiska språk, 57–70. Bueno-Aniola, Cintia 2007 Soziale Stereotypen und ihre sprachliche Indizierung in den ‘deutschen Kolonien’ in Südbrasilien. Bern etc.: Lang. Tannen, Deborah 1984 Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends. Norwood NJ: Ablex. Zilles, Ana M. S. and Kendall King 2005 Self-presentation in sociolinguistic interviews: Identities and language variation in Panambi, Brazil. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(1), 74–94.

Chapter 5 Names and identities, or: How to be a hip young Italian migrant in Germany Christine Bierbach and Gabriele Birken-Silverman Carmelo:

1.

isch hab beide ausweise ok isch kann misch/ wenn isch mal bock hab Italiener zu sein nehm italienischen ... wenn isch bock hab deutsch. ‘I’ve got both passports, okay, I can/when I’m in the mood to be an Italian, I take the Italian one, when I’m in the mood, the German.’

Introduction: Identity as a sociolinguistic concept

Social identity, with regards to linguistic minorities or migrants, has in the past been viewed above all in terms of ethnic background and national membership. Since nationality, in terms of passport and citizenship, is decisive for a person’s legal status and thus for his or her prospects of social participation, it certainly plays a crucial part in the construction of a young migrant’s self-image, as is suggested by the above cited utterance of an Italian youngster with a migration background. Being defined as a ‘foreigner’ – or, in the case of second generation immigrants, as a descendant of people with discrepant social and cultural roots – means being placed on the edge of the receiving society, ‘in between’ cultural systems. It thus modifies how one’s actions are perceived, categorized and evaluated. As these frames of perception and categorization are passed down to the members of the minority group, they react by creating a ‘public image’ of immigrants in a given society – young Italians in Germany, in our case. However, social identity is not only much more complex and manifold, including different types of membership, it is also highly context-bound, and its construction is embedded in recipient designed communicative activities. Ethnicity is just one dimension of identity that can be foregrounded; it cannot be isolated from other identity-relevant social features such as gender, age group, social positioning with regard to relevant others,

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and, in the case of our research on an adolescent peer group, participation in a common youth (sub-)culture (Birken-Silverman 2003). We therefore assume that being ‘young’, male or female, and belonging to a group sharing specific subcultural orientations is at least as important as being ‘Italian’ or an ‘immigrant’, viz. that all these aspects mingle and condition each other to produce specific and variable expressions of personal and group identity. In the framework of interactional sociolinguistics, social identity is conceived as a social and cultural co-construction (Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou 2003; Hu 2003; Keupp et al. 1999), emerging in communicative events through a dynamic and continuous process of mutual categorization, attribution, and negotiation of a bundle of features made relevant for specific social contexts. Its dynamic character can be explained both diachronically – as a continuously revised and re-adjusted result of personal experience, biography, and cultural influences during socialization – and synchronically, in the sense that different social and communicative contexts evoke different aspects of identity. As a result, its manifestations are always situated or “occasioned” (Auer, Introduction to this volume). Communication always implies “acts of identity” (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) – an idea already present in ‘classical’ semiotic and pragmatic theories which include the expressive dimension of the sign as a ‘symptom’, i.e. carrying (implicit) information about the speaker, besides its mere referential function (Bühler 1934). A similar idea underlies the ‘dramaturgical’ concept of verbal interaction (Goffman 1959; Habermas 1981) as a means of self-presentation, which implies the construction of a social ‘persona’ for a participant audience. In a more radical perspective, Iain Chambers (1996) postulates that identity does not exist independently from language, but emerges as an ensemble of representations or ‘fictions’ constructed in everyday discourse, where the interactants “(re-)invent” themselves and others using language as a “tool of cultural construction” (Chambers 1996: 28). Interactants are at the same time authors and actors of their identity ‘stories’ (Chambers 1996: 32–33) which they elaborate and perform together in their daily activities. Identity may be defined as the “situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others” (Bauman 2000: 1, cf. also Bauman 1978).

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Finally, contextualization theory (Gumperz 1982, 1992 etc.) remains a fundamental analytical instrument, as it makes explicit how interactants use linguistic and paralinguistic features to make a message locally meaningful and, at the same time, to symbolize and to interpret aspects of social identity (made) relevant in a given context. As Gumperz’ own studies and many others have demonstrated,1 language choice and variation, and particularly code-switching, function as powerful contextualization cues in migrant communities, due to the semiotic potential inherent in choosing among different linguistic alternatives, and to the shared sociosymbolical values attached to these choices in the group’s communicative repertoire. In our own study of the communicative practices of young Italian migrants in Mannheim, the performative character of conversational identity construction is a striking feature. By this we mean the transformation of an ongoing conversational sequence into a mise-en-scène, where different, often ‘spectacularized’ parodic or fictitious identities are displayed. This type of performativity may be a typical practice of young people in a migrant context, for whom identity is constantly at stake. On the one hand, they are confronted with stereotyped and conflicting identity ascriptions (Kallmeyer and Keim 2003), and, on the other, they are used to dealing with a much more variable, multifaceted repertoire of identity features than their non-migrant peers. One means to handle such a situation is to experiment with the different types of social representations related to the migrant condition in a humorous, playful or subversive way which exploits the semiotic resources available to highlight a variety of ‘distinctive features’. These are recognizable and meaningful in the peer group as well as, to a certain extent, to outsiders. Language variation, i.e. the use of different dialects and (approximate) standard varieties (in this case: Sicilian, italiano popolare, Standard Italian, German and the local Mannheim dialect) constitutes a basic tool in such performances. It contributes to the construction of a range of discourse types and communicative genres as well as to the symbolic representation of different social characters or features. Another resource is the elaboration and recontextualization of mass media discourse and its rhetorical figures. Among these, we will focus on the evocation and performative mise-en-scène of ‘famous names’, i.e. those of show business and media stars which link the peer group to the global, or rather ‘glocal’ space of urban youth culture (Bierbach and Birken-Silverman 2002a). Glocalization (< global + local), a term which was introduced by Roland Robertson (1995), designates the combination of global (transnational) and local elements as one of the most striking characteristics of postmodern

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cultures, contributing to the construction of patchwork identities as they emerge particularly in youth subcultures, in urban and migration contexts. One of the most popular verbal games we observed in our group of young second generation migrants involves elaborating on proper names and nicknames. Speakers use these names to impersonate popular ‘heroes’ relevant to the (sub)culture of their age group as well as to attribute certain social features to group members. Being strategies of situating oneself and others in specific social worlds, these ‘acts’ or ‘games of identity’ not only contributed to modelling a personal profile and eventually to claiming leadership within the peer group, but also defined a specific ‘territory’ or cultural space distinct from that of their parents as well as from mainstream society. Finally, these naming practices contributed to the construction of a specific social style that made group members recognizable and distinct from relevant others. In the present contribution we will give a short description of the peer group and its social context, followed by a discussion of naming practices and the repertoire of nicknames and pseudonyms used by the group. We will then analyze a number of conversational sequences related to these practices including verbal games, teasing and parodies which we interpret as performative acts indicative of how group members situate themselves and others in their respective social worlds.

2.

Names and cultural identity: An Italian breakdance group in Mannheim

The members of the peer group we have studied and documented over several years belong to the close-knit network of Sicilian immigrants, established in the inner city of Mannheim since 1960. Despite this long-term residence (Italians constitute the oldest and most stable ethnic group of immigrant workers in Germany) the ‘colony’ maintains close ties to their villages of origin with annual visits or even temporary return.2 Transmigration and chain migration, leading to the transfer of substantial parts of the Sicilian village population to the same Mannheim neighborhood, have also contributed to maintaining a pronounced endogenous orientation, including endogamous marriage, frequent contacts with relatives and compaesani (fellow countrymen). Endogenous friendships and even professional and business relations favor language loyalty, i.e. the maintenance of local Sicilian dialects.

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Although the second and third generation youths have adopted German – with the local Mannheim accent – as their preferred (and most developed) code, they use Sicilian (mixed with German) in family and ingroup conversation, whereas standard Italian, which is taught in voluntary classes (doposcuola), is used almost exclusively in formal and institutional contexts. These different components of the linguistic repertoire certainly do not mechanically represent specific social domains, but they can be exploited, together with other semiotic resources, to contextualize sociosymbolical meanings which are relevant for identity construction. Despite the fact that these young people often distance themselves from the world of their parents and relatives, most of them maintain an endogenous orientation typical of the Sicilian ‘colony’ with regards to social relations. In the breakdance group we are considering here, the members of the ‘crew’, as well as the more marginal members (such as girlfriends and companions who do not dance), all share a common geographical and cultural background. However, the central activity of the group, breakdancing, clearly distinguishes them from traditional Sicilian ethno-cultural practices and integrates them into modern urban youth culture. Hip hop as an actively chosen style thus becomes a way to assert distance from their parents and to gain recognition and prestige within the peer group, compensating for failure, exclusion or marginalization from those social domains which are controlled by mainstream society (such as school, professional career, and social mobility). As suggested above, the use of names, and particularly the creation of pseudonyms, code or nicknames, is a common practice in the hip hop scene. It aids in creating a particular cultural space and provides a strong symbolic means to express autonomy and distance from the traditional Italian background (Bierbach and Birken-Silverman 2002a). Personal names constitute an elementary ‘act of identity’ in formally identifying self or other. In communicative interaction, knowledge of the participants’ names is necessary to establish a personal relationship. At the same time, names are indexical since their linguistic form (language, specific endings, etc.) can hint at a person’s ethnic and/or cultural background. As ‘legal items’, however, personal names are not chosen by the bearers themselves, but are inherited or acquired by marriage (patronymics), or chosen by parents or relatives (first names), in accordance with the sociocultural context of the family which, in our group of Sicilian immigrants, is rather traditional. Thus, all the girls and boys of our adolescent peer group bear traditional Italian Christian names, such as Giovanni,

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Giuseppe, Mariangela or Rosaria, in most cases given in honor of a family member who functions as madrina or padrino (Gueli Alletti 2003). This is quite contrary to the habits of modern (urban) German society, where first names are chosen from a large international repertoire and are rather indicative of contemporary trends and, in some cases, social status (Koß 1990: 26–32). Hence, Italian first and family names can easily become a problem for a young immigrant, and pseudonyms or nicknames may be a means to indicate self-chosen identities. To change or modify one’s name, or that of a relevant other, constitutes an autonomous act that demonstrates a cultural orientation other than that of the parents. At the same time, assuming or giving nicknames among young peers constitutes a strong symbolic group bond, an act of expressing and reinforcing membership, especially since teasing and other playful and humorous activities are often derived from or tied to nicknames (Lytra 2003). In the following paragraphs, we will present the names, nicknames and pseudonyms used in the adolescent peer group (Table 1), discuss the cultural reference systems they indicate, and finally demonstrate how these and other names are exploited in in-group interaction. A first remark concerns the group’s name which gives it an ‘official’ status in the breakdance scene: The original label Italian B-Boys, with a clear ethnic reference6 (though using English as the appropriate medium of hip hop culture), was later replaced by Invasion of Beat. This made the group label more neutral, more music oriented, but still maintained an implicit – and ironic – reference to their migrant background, since it alludes to the xenophobic categorization of immigrants as ‘invaders’. 7 While these names are the official ones in the hip hop business, there is a third one only used among the group members themselves: Fische (‘fishes’), a positive semantic re-interpretation of a derogatory slang term from local German, which originally means ‘coward’. Considering the individual code or nicknames,8 a multidimensional system of cultural references can be discerned. First of all, we note that only Giovanni (Gio), a very dominant boy who often acts as the group’s speaker and is treated as a kind of boss, claims a typical hip hop code name – Master G – or B-Boy Earthquake (see example 2). He is also the only one who can boast of a whole series of pseudonyms which refer to a Mediterranean folkloric universe (Filippu Mangiaficu, ‘Philip Fig-eater’, etc., see below, example 4). In a similar, but less caricatural vein, Vossia, as a respectful address for the oldest (female) member of the peer group (Giovanna, born and raised up to age 7 in Sicily) mimicks popular Sicilian habits.

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Table 1. The breakdance group and friends: Names and cultural references (In parentheses, the age of the members in 1999 is given, when the group was first documented and analyzed.) Group name:

Giovanna (18)

Italian B-Boys later (1999) Invasion of Beat Fische (‘fishes’) (speaker (boss) of the group) > Master G, B-Boy Earthquake; > Filippu Mangiaficu, > Sucabrodu > Vossia (‘Your honour’)

Pino (15)

> Pinocchio

Carmelo (17) Flavio (16) Silvia (15)

> Calimero Incognito > Flamingo > pesce (‘fish’)

Mariangela (18)

> Bloody Mary

Claudia (15)

> Schlaudia Kiffer

Dani (13)

> Fruchtzwerg

Giovanni (17) (Gio, Giuvà)

Italy + breakdance international, media local German slang hip hop; Southern Italy, folklore Southern Italy (popular polite address term) popular Italian literature (film, comics) Italian comic (assonance), unspecific local German slang, astrology3 urban lifestyle (a cocktail) 4 fashion, media; 5 soft drugs, subculture media, advertising (German)

The reported names of the other members allude to various cultural domains. Some of them point to Italy and popular literary or media figures, like Pinocchio or Calimero, a Sicilian comic figure. Both names are formally based on alliteration or assonance (< Pino, Carmelo), as is Flavio > Flamingo, a name for which we did not find a meaningful (semantic) explanation. Silvia, the only female breakdancer, goes by the German pseudonym Fisch, referring to her group membership as well as to her astrological sign (Pisces). Finally some of the names evoke the world of the (German) media, show business and advertising, such as Schlaudia Kiffer, an onset cluster reversal of Claudia Schiffer, which was adopted by the youngsters from a popular German TV comedy show (“RTL Samstag Nacht”). It alludes simultaneously to the German top model and to mari-

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juana smoking (< kiffen, ‘to smoke grass’). Fruchtzwerg is a yogurt product for children made by the brand Danone, and hence applied to Dani, the youngest group member. Bloody Mary for Mari(angela) evokes a wellknown cocktail beverage (thus ‘lifestyle’) and produces a certain ‘dramatic fictionalization’ and de-ethnization of the very traditional Italian name Maria. A basic (linguistic) motivation for the creation of pseudonyms is form: alliteration, assonance or rhyme with the real name. At the same time they are chosen in accordance with some personal features of the bearer and his or her relation to a certain cultural milieu.9 This raises the question of how such names are created and used in interaction, which will be discussed under different perspectives in the following sections.

3.

Presenting oneself as a hip hopper

Most of the nicknames presented above could not be directly observed in our recorded data. All of them have been reported and confirmed by group members, but when our recordings of group interaction took place, only a few of them were used. Although they function as code names in the framework of hip hop culture, they may not necessarily be used as a form of address, but rather as ‘artists' pseudonyms’, to (re-)present, or refer to, participants and their posse in hip hop related events (Bierbach and BirkenSilverman 2002a). The following sequence extracted from an ingroup conversation is a good example of a situation where group members display their ‘glocal’ hip hop identity. During a rather technical conversation about breakdance, one of the boys (Gio – ‘the boss’) suddenly changes the interactional key and initiates a scenario in which an ‘internationally famous’ Bboy greets the group in a fictitious encounter among breakdancers: (1) B-Boy Earthquake – Paris meets Mannheim (21.7.1999) The different languages involved in conversational code-switching are represented by different typographies: Sicilian; Italian; German; English/French. The following transcription symbols are used: K = comment referring to the line above; GK = general comment; #xxxx# = metalinguistic comment; |xxxxx| = parallel sequences; + quick response; / breakoff; * pause; >piano<; ; (...) unintellegible. Relevant expressions (names) are put in bold letters.

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1

Pino:

er iddu fa ca Francoforte fino a/ ‘and this one says that Frankfurt until/’

2

Gio:

#<<mmiaum>> #* #>na vuci< con calma |(...)|# ‘#<<mmiaum>> # * # >a voice < calmly |(...)|#’ #IMITATES PLANE NOISE# # SINGS #

K 3

Francesco:

| ja | | ‘yes’ |

4

Gio:

frati boni eh << ou isch bin Bi-Bo Earthquake * jo oright my name is Deko, ‘good brothers eh << ouh I am B-Boy Earthquake * yo (yeah?) all right my name is Deko,’

5

Gio:

komm from Pä-ris >>

‘I come from Pa-ris’ >> 6

Pino:

äh sein Name/ se name (...) ‘eh his name/ the name (…)’

7

Gio:

jo isch komm os Braunschweig un isch finds toll hier die B-Boys ‘yo I come from Braunschweig and I see it’s real great here, the Bboys’

8

Gio:

und heut viel Party abgeh * ‘and a big party going on today’ *

9

Silvia:

#LAUGHS#

In the framework of hip hop culture, this performance is an act of boasting: the naming, the allusion to hip hoppers from abroad, the evocation of a spectacular entrance by imitating the noise of an airplane, and finally the compliment made to the Mannheim group by the fictitious visitor adds up to produce an upgrading of their own group. Besides the use of hip hop names (B-Boy Earthquake, Deko) and a prestigious toponym (Paris), a dense pattern of code-switches can be observed which serve to contextualize different speakers and localize them in different cultural settings: The first turn, which triggers the following scene, starts in Sicilian, with a shift to Italian (l. 1: Francoforte fino a). It is interrupted by Gio’s imitation of an airplane, who then continues in Sicilian and Italian, in a singsong mode, marking the beginning of a scene (l. 2: ‘a voice, calmly’). Francesco gives a back channel signal in German (l. 3), and Gio goes on with a greeting (l. 4: frati boni, a Sicilian adaptation of the hip hop address term ‘brothers’) which presumably represents the voice of the arriving guest star, who ad-

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dresses the Mannheim Italians. Gio then introduces himself as ‘B-Boy Earthquake’ in Mannheim dialect pronouncing his hip hop code name in Italianized English (bi-bò < ‘B-boy’). He then switches to English for the answer of the fictitious visitor, thus suggesting – together with the emphatically pronounced reference to Paris – that he is dealing with an internationally renowned personality (l. 4–5). Pino starts a quest for (more) information in German and self-corrects in English, but he is interrupted by Gio’s next turn – again in Mannheim dialect, despite the reference to a city in Northern Germany (l. 7: Braunschweig). This last turn of the fictitious encounter is a bit cryptic, as it is not quite clear whether the code-switch back to German represents another (third) person who compliments the group, or still the famous ‘Deko’ from Paris, since no further name is introduced. In any case, the sequence presents a nice example of polyphony evoking a multilingual and multicultural hip hop world which is created spontaneously in conversation by the use of appropriate code names and a few formulaic expressions.

4.

Media experts: Interviewing fellow Italians in Germany

Naming, as has been shown in the preceding section, constitutes an important element of verbal interaction. It occurs in opening sequences to introduce oneself and/or other co-present participants and, more recurrently and more freely, in addressing and in referential expressions. The choice and form of names vary according to situational parameters, communicative genre, etc.; in fact, as basic indexical items, name forms, together with other stylistic cues, contribute to contextualize genres, (formal) situations and social relations. Of course, to introduce oneself or others formally would be inadequate in in-group communication, unless a stranger comes in – or when a microphone evokes a media setting and transforms copresent group members into media professionals, guests or an audience. In fact, one of the striking features in our data is that a sequential format (‘introducing oneself’) is often performed as a game or ludic scenario – as in example (1) – staging desirable cultural identities and social membership relevant to the group members at that moment. The performance of media genres is another important resource to construct presentations of self and to relate oneself and others to specific social worlds. The presence of a microphone may be an occasion for such a performance. The following sequences were recorded during the group’s journey to Paris in which Sara,

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131

our Sicilian fieldworker, participated as a relative and friend of some of the group members. During this informal and relaxed situation, her nevertheless omnipresent microphone came into the sight of some of the group members, who turned this into an occasion to embark on ‘microphone related’ performances: (2) Interviewing Italians in Germany (Journey to Paris, 8.6. 2001) Participants: Giovanni (Gio), Sara (sara), Lino, Francesco (F) GK

#THE BOYS ARE FOOLING AROUND, SOMEBODY IMITATES FARTS# still still / alle ruhisch sara nimmt auf, scheisse ‘quiet quiet/everyone calm down sara is recording, shit’

1

Gio:

2

?:

(#UNINTELLIGIBLE#)

3

?:

voll unauffällig ‘real subtle’

4

sara:

#LAUGHS#

5

Gio:

halló ‘hello’

6

sara:

<< a va >> << ‘oh go’>>

7

Gio:

#PRETENDS TO HOLD A MICROPHONE# Mein Name ist Casella mit C und 2 L, und ‘my name is Casella with c and two l’s, and’

8

Gio:

neben mir steht öh Spoto mit S und P. Und was sagen Sie zu dieser Situation dass ‘next to me is ah Spoto with s and p. What do you think about that situation that’

9

Gio:

wir nach Frank#reich gehen#? ‘we are #going to France?#’ #LAUGHING #

K 10 ??:

#LAUGHTER# sì sì (#INCOMPREHENSIBLE #) #LAUGHTER# ‘yes yes’ (#UNINTELLIGIBLE #)

11 Gio:

okay danke und jetz rüber zu mein Assistent Francesco Incoglionito ‘okay, thank you, and now to my assistant Francesco Incoglionito’

12 ?:

äh ‘uh’

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13 Gio:

mit In- noch nich Incoglionito mit ähm Invegliuto was sa’n Sie zu Frankreich? ‘with In-, not yet Incoglionito with uh Invegliuto what do you think about France?’

14 Lino:

talíu a tía talíu ‘I look at you I look’ (= I’m watching you) # LAUGHTER #

K 15 F:

je tali-a tia je talíu ‘I (= French ‘je’) look at you’

16 Gio :

#soga in Französisch machn die mein Vata nach # #‘even in French these guys are imitating my father’# # UPSET VOICE AND LAUGHTER #

K

In this sequence the actual situation – a holiday trip to Paris among friends – is redefined by Gio upon discovering that Sara is carrying her microphone, even in this informal situation where she was not supposed to ‘work’. He takes the floor and contextualizes the script of a radio or TV-interview, first by an opening signal (5, halló, which may be a greeting or a microphone test), then by an opening formula typical of media talk: he introduces himself (Casella) and a partner (Spoto), to whom a question is addressed, to a fictitious audience. The interesting aspect in this self-presentation – which, as the whole sequence, is performed in German – is the (partial) spelling of the Italian family names. This certainly alludes to a well-known experience of migrants, i.e. that their names are unfamiliar to the Germans and must be spelled out to be understood correctly.10 The choice of the spelled items seems quite appropriate, as in Casella – C and double L – which denotes ‘typically Italian’ orthography, while the pronunciation /S/-/P/ in Spoto would be unusual in German. It is therefore legitimate to interpret this particular way of presenting the speakers’ names as ‘performing being Italians in Germany’ in a scenario addressed to a fictitious German audience. The following part of the ‘interview’, however, becomes more in-group oriented. Calling up the next speaker (labelled as ‘my assistant’, in accordance with genre specific conventions in the mass media, and at the same time confirming the established ‘real life’ hierarchy in the group), Gio distorts his partner’s family name to create a pun (10): Incoglionito, meaning something like ‘stupid’ (or ‘being made an idiot’), with obscene connotations due to the etymology of the word (< coglioni, ‘balls’). Apparently such a pun is perceived by the speaker himself as a bit strong in this context

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(and there is no sign of appreciation by the other participants, such as laughter), so he initiates a repair, first by adding an attenuating modifier to the nickname (‘not yet’), and then using the correct name when addressing him directly (l. 13). The first reaction to this turn is a code-switch into Sicilian by Lino (who was not addressed): talíu a tia talíu ‘I’m watching you’ (l. 14) is pronounced like a warning, thus interrupting the interview format and challenging the speaker’s role as a ‘media professional’. This ‘inappropriate’ turn is repeated with a slight variation by Francesco, the addressed speaker, who adds a French clitic pronoun to the Sicilian verb – ‘je talí-a tia je talíu’ –, certainly triggered by the preceding question concerning France. He is therefore interpreted by Gio as ‘imitating my father – even when speaking French’, since the use of Sicilian, together with the prosodic mode of the utterance and tone of voice which cues it as a reprimand or warning, connotes elder family members, mostly parents, in the sociosymbolic repertoire of the group.11 The fictitious performance of mass media genres is one of the most popular rituals to construct a common peer group culture (Bausch and Sting 2001). Here, it is used by a dominant group member, first to stage an Italian identity by the choice of markedly Italian family names, but also to tease a companion by exploiting his patronymic for a pun. The interview format, in return, is subverted by two (rival) participants, who use code-switching into Sicilian to frame a different script: not that of the clever TV-reporter ‘on mission’ to Paris, but that of the overprotected son of an Italian immigrant, controlled by his father wherever he goes. The construction of competing cultural models – a ‘modern’ and a ‘traditional’ one, the fictitious (and prestigious) world of mass media vs. the trivial reality of Sicilian family norms – is thus mingled with rivalry games in the peer group. Several minutes later, the TV script is brought up again briefly, this time using the names of popular German television hosts: (3) TV hosts – with “mezzogiorno” looks (Journey to Paris, 8.6.01) 1

F:

Mikro is schwer isch gebe weiter mein Kollege Kai Ebel ‘microphone is heavy I go to my colleague Kai Ebel’

2

Lino:

+ ja, und hier im Studio von Kai Pflaume #cu capiddi tisi com un calabrisi# + ‘yes, and here in the studio of Kai Pflaume (‘plum’) with his hair straight like a calabrese’

K

#LAUGHS#

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Both names introduced here refer to well-known TV hosts, the first triggering the second by the coincidence of the first names. Moreover, Pflaume (‘plum’) as a family name produces a funny effect by its literal meaning as well as by its colloquial connotation when used as a pejorative form of address meaning ‘coward’ or ‘incompetent’, which, in the sequential position, refers to the first speaker, Francesco. The teasing effect is heightened by a rhymed apposition in Sicilian, which transforms the addressed interactant into a hybrid: a German TV host with the physiognomy of a Southern Italian provincial. Summing up, we have shown that Italian and German names (real and adopted as well as attributed ones) are used to evoke specific social worlds as well as to tease and to experiment with social status within the peer group. We shall return to this second aspect later and first discuss another scenario where fictitious Italian names play an important part.

5.

Mangiaficu – the Southern peasant and macho

Let us now look at another episode, where the format ‘introducing oneself’ is used in a subversive way, this time constructing a Southern Italian macho identity vis-à-vis a German woman who is perceived as an intruder into the group’s territory. The group has gathered in the basement of a neighborhood center (‘Café Filsbach’), in the multiethnic neighborhood where most of them live and where the breakdance group is allowed to use a room for practicing. They call this room ‘our place’; hence an elderly German woman – in fact a school teacher known to one of the boys, who passes by chance – is not expected in this environment, and is actually felt to be there ‘illegitimately’. Contrary to the examples discussed so far, it would be a normal and polite act in this encounter to introduce oneself formally. However, some of the boys subvert the format parodistically. This scene is interesting for our discussion because it operates with a pseudonym to represent a stereotypical (southern) Italian identity: (4) Mangiaficu. Performing a ‘Southern Macho’ (Café Filsbach, 8.2.1999) 1

Dani:

2

Gio:

| oh die Frau B. | is ja do ‘| Oh, Mrs. B. | is over there’ | cu è chista ? | |‘who is this one’|?

Names and Identities 3

Dani:

#LAUGHS #

4

Gio:

Frau B., #Mangiaficu # ‘Mrs. B., # Mangiaficu #’ #INTRODUCES HIMSELF#

K 5

Silvia: K

# Frau B. # #‘Mrs. B.’! # #TINY VOICE#

6

Dani:

7

Gio:

8

Gio:

|Mangia|ficu Filippu ‘|Mangia|ficu Filippu’

9

Silvia:

#|LAUGHS|#

10 Gio:

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s/ dis is meine Lehrerin, | also | meine alte Lehrerin, geil, Frau B. ‘this is my teacher, | well |, my former teacher, great, Mrs. B.’ | signó | |‘Signora’|

hallo Sucabrodu ta/ ‘hello Sucabrodu’

11 Frau B: was macht ihr hier ? Mrs.B: ‘What are you doing here?’ 12 Gio:

(..|.......|) (..|.......|)

13 Dani:

|redn| grad, wir |tanzn hier ‘|we are| just talking, we |dance here

14 s: 15 Gio: K 16 Frau B: Mrs.B: 17 Gio:

| |’

| ich inter|view die grade ‘|I’m just having| an interview with them’ #|interviu:en |# #|‘interviu:wing’|# #IRONIC, IMITATING SARA# | Interview | wozu ? ‘|an interview, | for what?’ ja B/ Invasion of Beat de break dance group * forever ‘yes B/ Invasion of Beat the break dance group * forever’ (#IN ENGLISH#)

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Let us first take a look at language choice and code-switching in this sequence. Dani’s first turn, announcing the presence of Mrs. B, is in (Mannheim) dialect, i.e. the unmarked and ‘public’ variety which is used in ‘normal’ in-group communication as well as for communicating with nonItalians. Tone of voice and the syntactic construction express surprise (l. 1). Gio’s almost simultaneous question in Sicilian, with the rather impolite demonstrative cu è chista (‘who is this one?’), cue this turn as in-group directed. Dani’s reaction (l. 3) is short (nervous?) laughter. Gio then performs a parody of a polite introduction (l. 4), using a German address term (‘Frau B.’) followed, probably with a corresponding gesture, by a fictitious and rather grotesque Italian name, or rather soprannome (nickname), to introduce himself: Mangiaficu (‘Fig-eater’, with a marked Sicilian pronunciation). Silvia’s backchannel echo of the German address term, in a tiny, high pitched voice (l. 5), seems to indicate that she perceives the parody and the inherent provocation the name implies (see below). Dani then introduces his former teacher to the group, in near standard German and with a rather neutral formula, followed by an exclamation in youth language (geil) which, addressed to a teacher, seems rather out of place (l. 6).12 This turn overlaps with Gio’s reformulation of his first self-introduction, this time in Sicilian. The dialectal honorific signó and the expansion of the chosen pseudonym add to the parodic character of the scene he is performing (l. 7). Silvia laughs, and this may encourage Gio to go on with another funny Sicilian surname (Sucabrodu, ‘brothsucker’), preceded by an informal (English) greeting signal (hello, l. 10). He is interrupted by the woman, who apparently does not react to his humorous advances (l. 11), and the conversation continues for a short while in a neutral question–answer format between the teacher and Sara (accompanied by Gio’s short ironic echoes), until the term interview and Mrs. B.’s question (l. 16) trigger an English reply, as Gio mentions the breakdance group, adding an appraising forever (l. 17). Here again the use of different language varieties is indexical of different social worlds, and corresponds to different interactional configurations. Moreover, the choice of the fictitious names in the performance of the introduction format carries additional symbolic meaning: Mangiaficu embodies the comical image of the stereotypical Southern maschio, suggesting a poor mezzogiorno country man who is nonetheless a notorious womanizer, convinced of his irresistible charm – a meaning which is reinforced by the obscene connotations the lexical components of the names imply.13 All these connotations are present in a satirical song by the Sicilian cantautore

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Brigantony (“L’intervista”), which is well-known and often alluded to in the group. Especially Gio often claims this name (Mangiaficu) and variations like Sucabrodu for himself when performing the Sicilian macho ‘dragging’ or provoking a (non-Italian) woman, or in competitive discourse referring to other Southern Italian males. Thus, the use and performance of these names conveys a double message: addressed to the German woman – who is certainly aware of, and irritated by, the parodistic gesture of the ‘introduction’ and the inappropriate use of a foreign language in this situation – it represents a simple provocation (exploiting her ignorance of the Italian dialect), and to the group members, who capture the more precise double meanings of the names, it provides amusement. The provocative effect of this opening sequence is further built up by the subsequent splitting of the conversation in two parties (not shown in the extract): while Sara and Dani try to keep up a normal conversation with the teacher in German, Gio grabs the microphone and, joined by an ‘ally’ (Carmine), continues to address her in Sicilian, in a sort of ‘dissing’ or ‘signifying’, resembling the ritual insults described by Labov (1972). Both boys compete, in a fast exchange of turns, in formulating grotesque fictitious descriptions of the woman’s physique and looks, some of them rhyming, and summing up to a series of subverted (negative) ‘compliments’. 14 Evidently, what is at stake here is not only ethnicity (as expressed by the use of the dialect), but also gender relations as well as relations between different age groups. By their performing and subverting a Sicilian–German male–female ‘dragging’ scenario, the boys establish maximum social distance between themselves and the German woman. She is excluded from their in-group territory by the use of a language she does not understand and by the refusal of normal (polite) communicative behavior, and finally by the ridiculous image the boys construct of her with names, descriptions and labels.15 This implies at the same time a subversion of power and status relations: from the perspective of Mangiaficu, or the Southern macho, the woman – representing German mainstream society, adulthood and authority as a school teacher – and the low status young immigrant school boys change places. The boys embody superior young, strong males, disposing of a language and insider knowledge which are not available to the older woman. However, this scenario is also parodic. By the choice of the names, the hyperbolism of the expressions, and laughter, it can also be understood as a caricature of the stereotypical Italian (and particularly Sicilian) male that

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prevails in German society, i.e. it embodies an ascribed stereotypical immigrant identity. While in the preceding example an identity cluster of masculinity, ethnicity and youth is staged to ward off a female ‘intruder’ and at the same time amuse the in-group, the emblematic names with which this scenario was initiated can be used in other contexts with quite different functions. In the following sequence, for instance, they are used to downgrade a compaesano rival in the hip hop scene, contextualizing bad manners, incompetence and provincialism. (5) Michele Sucabrodu – or the phoney DJ (Café Filsbach, 8.2.1999) 1

Carmine: Michele hats gesagt (...) ‘It’s Michael who said that (...)’

2

Gio:

3

Carmine: Michele Mangiaficudín ‘Michael Cactusfigeater’

4

Carmine: des is kein DJ ‘he’s not a DJ’

5

Gio:

#LAUGHS AND APPLAUDS#

6

Pino:

ma Italy DJ ‘but (an) Italy DJ’

7

Carmine: ein DJ mit CD ‘a DJ (operating) with CD’

8

Silvia:

<< Michele / Michele Sucabrodu oouuu >> << ‘Michael / Michael Brothsucker ouh’ >>

calmati signorino * > senti< ‘calm down young man * >listen< ’

In this case of intra-ethnic conflict talk, the unacceptable behavior of a member of the Italian community who gossips about group members is implicitly categorized by the attribution of pejorative mezzogiorno peasant labels such as Sucabrodu and Mangiaficudín to mark social distance. It should be noted that these names are used here in the same combination as in example (4), but by two speakers (Gio and Carmine) complementing each other, as if mentioning one name triggered the other, indicating that these belong to a shared repertoire of indexical cultural formulae.16 Such emblematic names seem to function as prototypical labels of a well-defined

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range of sociosymbolical meanings evident to all group members. In the context of the hip hop scene, labelling someone a ‘backward Italian Southerner’ draws a demarcation line between ‘us’ and ‘him’, in this case between ‘authentic’ and ‘unauthentic’ hip hoppers or DJs. The critique of a compaesano’s bad manners is thus extended to his lack of professional (or artistic) competence in the urban hip hop world, suggesting that such a character could hardly be a good DJ, but merely an ‘Italy (i.e. ‘provincial’?) DJ’ (l. 6) – a case of dissing. With this categorization of the adversary, the boys implicitly place themselves ‘on the right side’: they know what a real hip hop DJ is and how he is supposed to behave as a friend. In opposition to the boys participating in the dissing sequence, one of the girls (Silvia, l. 8), reprehends the most vehement speaker, switching to Italian and addressing him by the honorific signorino. This is a rather archaic term of address for young upper class men in Southern Italy which, used among equals, and specially when addressing a working class boy, can only be used to mark irony and/or disapproval. In this context, Silvia’s turn, formulated in standard Italian which is unusual in in-group communication, ironically ratifies the social distance the boys construct between themselves and their adversary, and evokes at the same time the inappropriateness of the quarrel, i.e. cues a reprimand: this is a futile case of male rivalry.

6.

Boys talking, girls joining? Communicative style and gendered identities in the peer group

The synthesis of rustic, backward and masculine (or macho) values inherent in emblematic names like Mangiaficu etc. tends to be attached to Sicilian and mezzogiorno culture in general. This is certainly one of the main reasons that most of the girls in the group reject the dialect. Some of them explicitly call it ‘a peasant language’ and claim not to use it themselves, unless they have to communicate with elder relatives, or during holidays ‘back home’. In some of the recorded conversations, the girls label the boys masculi siciliani when they criticize their macho behavior, thus confirming the ethnicity-masculinity identity cluster illustrated above. In fact, all the examples discussed so far are similar in that they are performed by male group members. Considering the overall communicative behavior of boys and girls in our data, we note that it follows clearly gendered patterns: boys show off, boast, and provoke, while girls join in as secondary speakers and evaluate the boys’ performances either implicitly

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(e.g. by laughter) or explicitly (e.g. with critical comments, as in example 5). In the encounters we were able to document, the girls were much less inclined to perform ludic or fictitious presentations of self and preferred ‘straight’ communication when talking about themselves and the group.17 One of the rare exceptions where several girls participate in a joking round will be presented below (example 8).18 We do not claim that these observations reflect general gender patterns in the Italian migrant community. Though it is known that migration tends to favor traditional cultural patterns, it also encourages particularly the female members of migrant communities to break away from (disadvantageous) gender roles and the cultural patterns that sustain them. 19 Our assumption is that the recurrent communicative patterns we find in our data are due first to the mixed group setting (and particularly breakdance, a usually male-dominated subculture) and, second, the age group of (post-)adolescence where ‘doing gender’ is a specifically relevant issue. Considering these aspects, many of the performative self-presentations of the young men can be interpreted as ‘gendered’ reactions to the presence of young females, heightened by the participation of a young female Sicilian fieldworker. A more or less spectacular mise-en-scène of both masculinity and ethnicity thus functions as a method to compete for female attention and to gain recognition among male companions. Also, the following examples belong to a type of exclusively male game in our group, similar to the facetious verbal duels reported in research on urban youth subculture (see below). While in the preceding examples provocation was mainly directed towards outsiders, the following teasing sequences, based on funny and rather downgrading rhymes derived from participants’ first names, seem to challenge internal group status and thus are a means of competing for (the girls’?) attention. 6.1. Names and teasing rituals Teasing based on interactants’ names seems to be a universally cherished practice in children’s and teenage peer groups as a ludic method to construct social identities and express in-group relations. Lytra (2003) found that nicknames and teasing are closely related, nicknames being mostly used to frame teasing formats in the pre-adolescent peer group she studied. Lepoutre (1997), who observed teasing practices as part of the ritual verbal behavior of young immigrant boys in a Parisian suburb, classifies teasing

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based on members’ names among the two most salient verbal games in this milieu. He calls them vannes directes because they address co-present parties, whereas vannes référenciées refer to non-present thirds (mostly ritual insults of the mother) and correspond to the signifying practices or ‘dozens’ described by Labov (1972). Contrary to real insults, the performance of vannes is marked as a ritual format and thus not considered an offence, but rather a socially accepted practice in male peer groups (Lepoutre 1997: 173–180, 206–213), although they too can be quite rude and often question the opponent’s virility or gender identity. Besides teasing formulae referring to physical properties of the opponent, second meanings and rhymes based on first or family names are frequent. Lepoutre suggests that such teasing practices, by repetition and conventionalization, might in fact be at the origin of nicknames (sobriquets)20 as socially meaningful identifiers of peer group members. This type of vannes directes, or teasing rituals based on names, appears in our data particularly in very informal in-group settings such as the bus journey mentioned above (example 2). In the following extract, the principal target is Giovanni, the most dominant group member. The episode occurs shortly after his microphone performances which we discussed above. (6) Teasing rituals: Challenging the leader (Journey to Paris, 8.6.2001) 1

Lino:

jaja Giovanni du-u bis n g/Kakadu #LAUGHS # ‘yeah, Giovanni you- / are a cockatoo’ #LAUGHS #

2

F:

#INCOMPREHENSIBLE #

3

Gio:

va caccari ‘go and shit’

4

Sara

#LAUGHS #

5

Lino:

Kakadu Giovanni macapu #LAUGHS # ‘cockatoo Giovanni macapu’ #LAUGHS #

6

Gio:

Giovanni (mi (...) tu?) ‘Giovanni (me (#UNINTERPRETABLE#) you?)’

7

Lino:

Giovanni cacca li banni ‘Giovanni shits in his diapers’

8

(all):

#LAUGHTER#

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Christine Bierbach and Gabriele Birken-Silverman Lino:

Giovanni cacca otto anni ‘Giovanni shits eight years’

10 X:

#INCOMPREHENSIBLE #

11 Y:

#INCOMPREHENSIBLE #

12 F:

Giovanni senza panni ‘Giovanni without his diapers’

13 (all):

#LAUGHTER#

14 Lino:

ma chi dici #Giovanni CU i panni# ‘but what are you saying #Giovanni WITH diapers #’ # LAUGHING #

K 15 Gio:

ca ü’hai i palli ‘that’s where you have your balls’

This teasing sequence is started by Lino, next to Gio the most dominant and active speaker in this episode. He opens up a rhyming format addressed to a ‘target’ interactant who is addressed by his first name. Note that the first rhyme is actually not based on the name itself, but uses a postponed personal pronoun in order to rhyme with Kakadu (‘cockatoo’). This first turn is thus formulated in German. Gio, however, replies in Sicilian, picking up the first syllable of the attributed noun which – certainly on purpose – contains an assonance to the Italian (and German homophone) cacca (‘shit’). This scatological reference becomes the basis of the following series of rhymes with Giovanni (hence in Italian) in which mainly Lino, but also other male group members, participate. This seems to be a rather childish game, with its constant reference to faces, certainly a main resource of children’s humor (cf. Bierbach 1996), but as Còveri (1993) found, it is a central feature of Italian youth language as well, which he calls coprolalia. The effect of this coprolalia sequence is to put the target person on an infantile level, made even more explicit by reference to diapers (panni, l. 7), i.e. attacking Gio’s status as a young man and a group leader. The game ends with Gio’s reply to Lino’s insisting on presenting him in diapers (l. 14), which gives the teasing a sexual turn, focussing on Lino’s masculinity, which infantilizes him in return (l. 15). The reactions of the group members (laughter, increasing participation of other – unidentified – boys) show that this game, playfully questioning a leader’s status by bringing up age and gender identity, is quite successful.

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Similar yet less extensive formats are addressed to other group members. They contain rhymed nonsense attributes, often scatological allusions and formulaic expressions in Sicilian or German, and seem to be drawn from a common (group) repertoire which makes them sometimes hard to understand for outsiders.21 In other cases, names of group members are inserted in song texts, converting them to (pseudo-)romantic lovers in stereotypical Mediterranean settings, or similarly in fictitious (and mostly ‘dirty’) narrative sequences, co-constructed by two or more boys. 6.2. Names, teasing and membership The more or less ritualized performative acts which involve members’ names contextualize aspects of male adolescent identity. They contribute to testing status as well as expressing membership in the peer group. Moreover, there are other forms of nicknaming, used in less marked interactional formats among the boys, e.g. in-group terms of address, such as cornuto (‘cuckold’) in Italian, but most of them in German, e.g. du Fisch (‘fish’, with a pejorative or sexual connotation) du Affe (‘monkey’), and Kacker, Waldkacker, Kakalake22 (‘shitter’, ‘forest shitter’, ‘cockroach’) based on coprolalia. The most neutral and most frequently used term among the ‘big boys’ (Lino, Pino and Gio) is Langer (‘tall one’). They differ from individual nicknames insofar as they can apply to any of the group members; some of them (Langer, Alter) are just common youth language, but the more original ones (like Kakerlake) might also be promoted to a personal nickname. Despite their rudeness, these forms of address seem to express nothing but peer relations and male companionship; together with the more spectacular performative formats they make up an essential part of the boys communicative group style. Moreover, the use of dominantly German expressions produces a sort of de-ethnization and ties them to the local urban youth culture. In contrast, Sicilian name varieties – like Giuvà (Giovanni), Carmè (Carmelo), Francè (Francesco), appear to be more marked and can be used to perform a Sicilian persona, e.g. to mimic the speech of (elder) relatives or other members of the Italian community, as in the typical greeting formula: ou Giuvà, tuttu appostu? (oh G., ev’rything all right?), quoted by Lino to evoke a Sicilian relative.

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Up to now, we have found only one short instance where a girl’s name gives rise to a short teasing–nicknaming sequence, addressed to Sara and alluding to her Sicilian background: (7) Sara (Journey to Paris, 8.6.2001) 1

F:

lass die SaRahaRa (#INCOMPREHENSIBLE #) ‘leave SaRahaRa (in peace)’ (#INCOMPREHENSIBLE #)

2

(all):

#LAUGHTER#

3

Gio:

SaRahaRa ‘SaRahaRa’

4

Lino:

<< Sarahara Sarahara Palermo >> << ‘Sarahara Sarahara Palermo’ >>

5

Gio:

Salermo ‘Salermo’

The joke is obviously based on the resemblance between Sara and Sahara, additionally highlighted by a very salient apical (= Italian) pronunciation of the /R/. After several repetitions, Lino adds a Sicilian toponym as ‘family name’, both being finally fused into Salermo. This not very elaborate nicknaming format is interesting insofar as it focuses on Sara’s Sicilian identity, which she often asserts and puts into practice by the ostentative use of the dialect (unlike the other girls in the group). Hence the teasing might be interpreted as mocking her patriotism. But more than that it demonstrates that she is integrated into the group by the bonding effect of nicknames and teasing (Lytra 2003: 48).

7.

Toponymy and social status

As the last examples have shown, teasing practices in the group relate to internal status and membership as well as to different aspects of social identity involving age, gender and ethnicity (with the social values these imply). The last conversational example we would like to discuss exploits toponymy and local references as a resource for joking about participants’ social status. As much as personal names or nicknames, local references expressed by toponyms can function as highly symbolic indicators (Le-

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poutre 1997; Melliani 2000), concerning place of residence (stigmatized vs. prestigious neighborhoods in a city, rural vs. urban areas etc.) as well as places where people (pretend to) spend their holidays (long distance and exoticism produce increasing prestige). The following sequence is interesting not only because, contrary to most of our conversational data, girls participate actively in the joking, but also because it demonstrates participants’ acute awareness of social categorization and social positioning. It therefore contradicts recent studies on youth culture and identity, according to which social class is hard to detect as a relevant category in young people’s conversation (Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou 2003: 5). (8) Samalú: globetrotting around the neighborhood (15.7.2000) 1

Pino:

<< isch und Fran warn gestern >> letztes Jahr in Samalú << ‘I and Fran were yesterday >> last year in Samalú’

2

Lino:

wo? ‘where?’

3

Pino:

Samalú ‘Samalú’

4

Francesco: Sandhofen Mannheim Lu/ Ludwigshafen ‘Sandhofen Mannheim Lu/ Ludwigshafen’

5

GK

# LAUGHTER#

6

Gio:

#Samalú # #‘Samalú’# #SINGING#

K 7

s:

# in Samalú # #‘in Samalú’#

8

K

# LAUGHING#

9

Mari:

Terrasien ‘Terracia’

10 Pino:

des is Tarrazien, wo warn wir noch? ‘this is Tarrazia, where else were we?’

11 Gio:

isch war auch/ ‘I was also/’

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12 Mari:

Balkonien ‘Balconia’

13 Pino:

konien ‘konia’

14 Gio:

wir fahrn doch hin oder? ‘will we go there or not?’

15 Pino:

he? ‘huh?’

16 Gio:

wir fahrn nach ding äh/ ‘we’ll go to (thing äh) /’

17 Silvia:

Fenstonien ‘Window-nia’

18 Pino:

+ onien Fenstonien + ‘ow-nia Window-nia’

19 Gio:

wo is H fünf Mannheim ‘where H five Mannheim is at’

20 GK

# LAUGHTER #

21 Gio:

da um die Ecke beim | Dönerladen ‘at the corner where the | döner shop is at

22 Lino:

| |’

| oa weißt noch | weißt noch? ‘| oah do you still remember| do you still remember?’

23 Gio:

+ wa/ + ‘wha/’

24 Lino:

+ des ah diese äh da quannu c'e(ra) die eine kleine Blonde "hey wir warn schon überall in Eu/ wir warn schon überall in Europa" "ja ja Australien Amerika"

25

+ ‘that ah this äh there when there was that small blonde girl “hey we've already been all over Eu/ we've already been all over Europe” “oh yes Australia America”’

26 GK

# LAUGHTER #

27 Gio:

in Europa (...) ‘in Europe (...)’

28 GK

# LAUGHTER #

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In this conversation about the summer holidays, the (fictitious) toponym Samalú introduces the point of the joke already at the beginning, making the narrative opening a sort of riddle, the solution to which is given by the co-narrator (Francesco). The exotic sound, suggested by (open) syllable structure and word-final accentuation, stands in sharp contrast to the trivial reality since it turns out to be an acronym of a working class neighborhood (Sandhofen) and the two neighboring industrial towns (Mannheim, Ludwigshafen). This is in fact the area where the young people live, a low prestige region in terms of lifestyle, environmental qualities and leisure commodities. The success of the verbal creation is several times ratified by repetition and laughter (Gio’s singing version in line 6 underlines the ‘exotic’ sound of the name) and leads to an expansion of the format. From l.9 to l.17, Mari and Silvia cooperate, proposing German pseudo-regionyms which ironically refer to ‘staying at home during holidays’. The potential loss of face which the evoked situation implies is compensated for by the ludic transformation of words referring to trivial places at home (terrace, balcony, window) into pseudo-regionyms, using the corresponding derivational suffix (-ien). The conventionalized model of the series is Terrasien, to which the girls add Balkonien and Fenstonien. Up to l.18 the boys intervene only as secondary speakers,23 until Gio proposes additional – socially and subsequently also ethnically marked – localizations: H5, a low prestige inner city neighborhood, ‘the döner shop’ as an emblematic place related to immigration and popular, low priced food (l.19). As a conversational coproduction all these contributions give a perfect illustration of what the acronym Samalú means to the group, and how living and spending holidays there is perceived socially. In the third part of this episode, the first speaker, Lino (l.22), adds a further expansion, a narrative containing a (fictitious?) boasting dialogue with a ‘blonde girl’ (representing mainstream society), which stylizes the boys (himself and Gio) as experienced world travellers. Laughter confirms the unrealistic contents of the performed narrative. In this sequence, the social meaning of the message is exclusively cued by the emblematic toponyms, evoking clearly defined social values shared by all participants.

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Conclusion: How to do things with names

As we have shown in this article, personal names, pseudonyms or nicknames play an important role in the construction and performance of social identities. This is due to their emblematic potential and their capacity to evoke different cultural contexts as well as different social features of a person in a condensed form. The list of code names attested for the Italian breakdancers and their peers gave a first clue of the range of cultural references relevant to the group. At the same time, the (plurilingual) diversity of the names shows how all kinds of linguistic and cultural (re-)sources are used in name creation, from brand and product names to literary characters and, most often, prominent public personalities from the world of mass media and show business. We then showed how fictitious, adopted, or variants of real names are exploited, together with language or dialect variation (code-switching), to contextualize and perform specific communicative genres, social characters and cultural milieus, such as the world of hip hop or the media. These scenarios contribute to the construction of modern urban identities and thus enhance the image of the interactants. At the same time, the boys’ parodies of the stereotypical Southern macho (Mangiaficu), performed in Sicilian dialect, serve to establish boundaries and to protect their territory against outsiders as well as to disqualify ‘unworthy’ members of the Italian community. What is of special interest in these episodes is the syncretism of ethnic, socio-cultural and gender identities. Our data represent particularly male adolescent identity constructions and the communicative style of a male peer group in the presence of and presented to female members as an audience, and is thus an additional strong incentive for spectacular performative acts. The very caricatured presentation of the ‘Southern macho’ as a sort of ‘ethno-comedy’ (Kotthoff 2004) is also a subversive reply to mainstream prejudices. Social categories like age and gender (more than ethnicity) were shown to have an important part in teasing rituals centered around members’ first names. In this respect, our observations coincide with research findings on adolescent peer groups, e.g. in France and Greece. Our focus on naming practices is not meant to suggest that this is the only communicative device, or contextualization cue, with which identities and sociosymbolical meanings are constructed. The data show that there is always a range of linguistic and pragmatic resources which are exploited simultaneously, such as code-switching or other types of code variation, or

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sequential and formal properties contextualizing communicative genres or formats. The choice of examples we presented might give an insight into the methods and the material resources young second generation immigrants use to construct sociocultural identities related to relevant aspects of their social world by creating a communicative style that makes them recognizable as a peer group and confirms them as legitimate members of ‘glocal’ urban culture.

Notes 1. Among others, and specifically with reference to Italian and identity construction, cf. di Luzio 1984; Auer and di Luzio 1986; for contextualization in general, Auer and di Luzio (eds.) 1992. 2. Sending the children to school in Italy for a couple of years is in fact one of the reasons why perform poorly at school in Germany. 3. Pisces, one of the astrological signs. 4. The historical origin of the name, i.e. the popular nickname for Mary Queen of Scots (Maria Stuart), is probably not known by the group members. 5. Claudia Schiffer is a German top model, very present in the media at that time. 6. Cf. Carmelo, 8.2.99: Isch bin stolz auf den Namen, wir ham ein nationalen Namen genomm von unsre Nationalität (‘I’m proud of that name, we chose a national name from our nationality’). 7. It is probably also an intertextual reference to popular film titles, i.e. the series of ‘space invasion’ movies in the 90s; cf. Bierbach and Birken-Silverman 2002a. 8. It is not always possible to distinguish between a ‘code name’ in terms of hiphop culture (i.e. a self chosen ‘pseudonym’ for crew members, similar to artists’ names in the world of show business) and nicknames, which are usually attributed by other group members or friends (in Italian, soprannomi, or nomignoli, cf. Ruffino 1988), but can also, as in the case of internet communication, be created by the user himself as a pseudonym (cf. Wilhelms 2002). 9. Cf. Ruffino 1988 for a detailed classification of Sicilian soprannomi, according to form and function. The names created by our migrant adolescents differ from the traditional ones in the sense that they are not always dialectal and because of their international references, but correspond in this latter aspect to recent trends among young people in Sicily, as reported by Paternostro and Sottile 2005. 10. Such a procedure is rather reminiscent of school or other institutional settings, but is also possible in interethnic encounters and evokes in any case a situation that is familiar to the participants.

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11. It is remarkable how a very subtle cue such as the insertion of a French clitic pronoun into a Sicilian dialect utterance is perceived by the addressee and used to turn a previous communicative failure and potential loss of face into a joke: self irony demonstrates being ‘a good sport’ and allows the speaker to keep the last word. 12. The expression geil (‘sexually aroused’) has lost its original meaning and is widely used as a qualifying adjective or, often, as an interjection (almost synonymous with cool); however, its use is still perceived as being appropriate only in youth in-group communication. 13. Figs and broth evoke rustic and easily available food in the mezzogiorno; at the same time, fico viz. fica and succare have obscene sexual connotations. 14. The whole sequence is too long to be reproduced here; for a more detailed presentation and discussion cf. Bierbach and Birken-Silverman 2002b. 15. The ‘dissing’ sequence ends comparing the woman with the British comedy figure Mr. Bean, with ‘Mr. Bean’s wife’, and with ‘Fantozzi’s daughter’, an Italian comedy figure represented by a stout male actor, i.e. funny and awkward comedy figures very familiar to adolescents. 16. The subtle semantic variation – Mangiaficu (fig eater) > Mangiaficudín (cactus fig eater) – reinforces the pejorative value of the name, as cactus figs (< fichi d' India) are characterized by thorns and are picked by shepherds in the country, and are therefore associated with poor people’s nutrition in Sicily. 17. In one of the recorded conversations, where the boys mostly fooled around, one of the girls tells the interviewer: “Wir Mädels ham eigntlisch nur die Wahrheit gesagt …” (‘Us girls just told the truth’). 18. Particularly revealing with respect to gendered patterns is an interactional episode of a playful interview performed by the boys in the role of the interviewer and the girls as the interviewees, discussed in detail in Bierbach and Birken-Silverman 2004. 19. This has been confirmed by recent empirical research on different populations, cf. Bednarz-Braun and Heß-Meinig 2004. 20. This is actually the procedure which is at the historical origin of family names, cf. Koß 1990. 21. We were not able, for instance, to find out the meaning and the source of the expression magapu, repeated over and over in this episode. 22. “Aber des is zweideutig gemeint” (‘but with a double meaning’), i.e. with a scatological connotation like the preceding. 23. Possibly the variant Tarrazien, introduced by Pino as a repair, gives a more Italianized version of the place name.

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Habermas, Jürgen 1981 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Hu, Adelheid 2003 Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung, Identitäts- und Kulturtheorie: Tendenzen der Konvergenz. In: De Florio-Hansen, Inez and Adelheid Hu (eds.), Plurilingualität und Identität. Zur Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung mehrsprachiger Menschen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1–24. Kallmeyer, Werner and Inken Keim 2003 Linguistic variation and the construction of social identity in a German–Turkish setting: A case study of an immigrant youth group in Mannheim, Germany. In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 29–47. Keupp, Heiner, Thomas Ahbe, Wolfgang Gmür, Renate Höfer, Beate Mitzerlisch, Wolfgang Kraus, and Florian Straus 1999 [2002] Identitätskonstruktionen. Das Patchwork der Identitäten in der Spätmoderne. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Koß, Gerhard 1990 Namenforschung. Eine Einführung in die Onomastik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kotthoff, Helga 2004 Overdoing culture? Sketch-Komik, Typenstilisierung und Identitätskonstruktion bei Kaya Yanar. In: Reuter, Julian (ed.), Doing Culture. Bielefeld: Transcript. Labov, William 1972 Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Le Page, Robert and Andrée Tabouret-Keller 1985 Acts of Identity. Creole based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lepoutre, David 1997 Coeur de banlieue. Codes, rites et langages. Paris: Odile Jacob. Lytra, Vally 2003 Nicknames and teasing: A case study of a linguistically and culturally mixed peer-group. In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 47–74. Melliani, Fabienne 2000 La langue du quartier. Appropriation de l’espace et identités urbaines chez des jeunes issus de l’immigration maghrébine en banlieue rouennaise. Paris: L’Harmattan.

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Paternostro, Giuseppe and Roberto Sottile 2005 L’antroponimia giovanile tra nickname e ncúria. Un indagine in area palermitana. Paper presented at the Convegno “Giovani, lingue e dialetti”, Sappada/Plodn, 29 giugno – 3 luglio 2005. Robertson, Roland 1995 Glocalization: Time–space and homogeneity–heterogeneity. In: Featherstone, Mike, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities. London: Sage, 25–44. Ruffino, Giovanni 1988 Soprannomi della Sicilia occidentale. Onomata. Revue Onomastique 12, 480–486. Wilhelms, Nike 2002 Gästebuchkommunikation italienischer HipHop-Fans im Internet. Unpublished MA thesis, University of Mannheim.

Chapter 6 Socio-cultural identity, communicative style, and their change over time: A case study of a group of German– Turkish girls in Mannheim/Germany Inken Keim 1.

Aim of the study

In this paper, I present some aspects of a youth group’s construction of a communicative style and show how the group’s stylistic repertoire changes over the course of their growing into adulthood. My paper is based on an ethnographic case study of a group of Turkish girls, the ‘Powergirls’, who grew up in a typical Turkish migrant neighborhood in the inner city of Mannheim, Germany.1 The aim of the case study was, on the basis of biographical interviews with group members and long-term observation of group interactions, to reconstruct the formation of an ethnically defined ‘ghetto’-clique and its style of communication and to describe the group’s development into educated, modern, German–Turkish young women. In this process, a change in the group’s stylistic repertoire could be observed. I will analyze the group’s socio-cultural identity in terms of its communicative style. From my perspective, identity is not to be regarded as an ‘essential’ phenomenon representing a predictive or explanatory variable to human behaviour as it is, for example, in social identity theory (e.g. Tajfel 1978). Following the conversation analyst’s perspective as it is outlined in Antaki and Widdicombe (1998a and b), I argue that identity is something that is produced in interaction. The analysis of identity is concerned with its occasioned relevance ‘here’ and ‘now’ and with its consequences for the interaction and the local purposes of interlocutors. From this perspective, the construction of socio-cultural identity is part of the routine of everyday life and everyday interaction, where identities can be produced in order to affiliate with or to disaffiliate from relevant others and relevant social groups (e.g. Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995). In the following analysis, style is regarded as a central means of expression of the ‘Powergirls’ socio-cultural identity. From this perspective, the

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construction of a genuine peer group style is motivated by key experiences of social life, and the choice of stylistic features is closely related to the group’s self-conception and their positioning in relation to relevant others. Stylistic transformations that can be observed in the process of the girls’ growing into adulthood are conceptualized as indices to their changing selfconception at different phases of their lives. After a short outline of the present migration situation in Germany and a short characterization of the socio-cultural context in which the peer-group formation took place (2), I will present the concept of style as it is applied in this paper and focus on those stylistic aspects which are constitutive for style construction (3). In the following sections (4 and 5), some of the features that are constitutive of the Powergirls’ peer group style are presented in more detail. The final sections focus on the gradual stylistic changes in the course of the girls’ growing into adulthood and the widening of their stylistic repertoire, first in out-group (6) and then in in-group communication (7).

2.

The ‘Powergirls’ migration context

Migration from Mediterranean countries to Germany began after the erection of the Iron Curtain and of the Berlin Wall. From the late 1960s onwards, German industry needed workers for skilled and unskilled jobs. ‘Guest workers’ were recruited, especially from Italy, Spain, former Yugoslavia, and Turkey. Since the guest workers’ residence in Germany was planned for only a short period of time, a temporary residence permit as well as a temporary work permit restricted their legal and social status. But gradually, the guest workers’ stay became longer and longer; the workers brought their wives and children, who grew up in Germany and went to German schools. Many migrant families have been living in Germany for over 30 years, and most of their children view Germany as their home country. In the course of time, migrant ‘ghettos’ emerged and stabilized in many inner city districts. Preschool institutions and schools were and still are badly equipped for the instruction of children from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Many teachers saw and still see migrant children as double semi-linguals with serious deficits. A high percentage of migrant children are not successful in school and have few opportunities on the job market.

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Out of frustration with their children’s educational and professional failure and out of fear that they would become more and more estranged from ‘their culture’, many Turkish parents tried to educate their children with increasing rigidity along their own traditional norms and values. One of the central problems for young migrants has been coming to terms with their parents’ traditional demands and, at the same time, experiencing failure in and exclusion from more advanced educational and professional worlds in Germany. The children’s ability to cope with often contrasting traditions and demands from different social worlds is fundamental in the process of forming their own socio-cultural identity. The ethnographic research on which this paper is based was carried out in an inner city district of Mannheim, an industrial town of 320,000 inhabitants in southwestern Germany. Over 21% of Mannheim’s population are migrants,2 most of them of Turkish origin. The district under study, traditionally a working class district, has a migrant population of over 60%; it is called a ‘migrant ghetto’ by inhabitants of the district as well as by outsiders. The Turkish population has a highly organized infrastructure and lives in close networks where Turkish or ‘migrant Turkish’ (see below) is the dominant language.3 In everyday life, standard German is not necessary, and most children come into contact with it, for the first time, in preschool with their German teachers. Since up to 100% of the preschool children have a migration background, they soon begin to develop bilingual practices, code-switching and code-mixing, as well as morphologically and lexically reduced German learner varieties mixed with elements from other languages. When they start school, their competence in standard German – a precondition in the monolingually oriented German school – is not very high. Up till now, the district’s primary schools have not succeeded to build upon the children’s bilingual abilities and to foster their proficiency in standard German. As a consequence, most migrant children are not very successful in school. In the German school system, children have options between three school types at the end of primary school (at the age of ten): children with the best marks go to the Gymnasium; others go to the Realschule, a more practically-oriented school type, and children with low marks go to the Hauptschule, the lowest secondary school type with a very negative image. Because of their low school marks, most migrant children have only one choice, the Hauptschule. So, in the course of time, the Hauptschule of the district has become a school for migrant children, where 90% of the pupils have a migration background. Teachers adjusted to this situation by reduc-

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ing their educational standards with the consequence that it has become even more difficult for migrant children to succeed in schools outside the migrant district. One of the findings of our ethnographic research is that migrant children develop different socio-cultural orientations and communication practices depending on their school careers.4 Going to the Hauptschule for a tenyear-old child implies (since the Hauptschule is situated in the migrant district) that he/she will grow up in an environment and in peer groups where German–Turkish mixing or highly marked ethnolectal German varieties are the normal ‘codes of interaction’.5 When the adolescents complete the Hauptschule at the age of 15 with low marks or without a qualification,6 as 25–30% of the students do, they have almost no opportunity to obtain a professional qualification.7 These youths typically develop an antieducational and non-professional orientation. They align with other migrant peer groups, where members are proud to be a school failure, engage in sports or music, and wish to become a good football player, boxer, hip hopper, or break dancer. They typically marry partners from their parents’ home villages and live with them in the migrant district. Children of the district who, at the age of ten, have the chance to go to the Gymnasium or the Realschule (10–20% of an age-group) develop quite different social orientations. Since both types of schools are situated outside the district, the children have to enter German educational worlds where migrants are a small minority. For the first time in their lives, they experience the negative image of the Turkish migrants in terms of abuse such as scheiß ausländer (‘fucking foreigner’) and dreckiger (‘dirty’) or dummer Türke (‘stupid Turk’).8 In these schools, they have to cope with new educational, linguistic, and social standards for which they usually are not prepared. A typical reaction to these experiences is the organization of an ethnically defined peer group along with the dissociation from or the upgrading of ethnic features. There is a third educational career: with a good Hauptschule-diploma, adolescents have the option to attend various Fachschulen and obtain a qualification that enables them to go to Fachoberschule and later on perhaps even to a university. German teachers call this career der langsame Weg (‘the slow path’). They recommend it to those migrant children who, from their perspective, have an ‘ability to learn’ but do not yet have the necessary competence in German. Pupils with this school career live in the migrant district until the age of 15. After that, they, too, have to enter

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school worlds outside the migrant district, where they encounter similar experiences as the other children. The ‘Powergirls’ belong to the small portion of district children who were quite successful at school. Some of the girls went to the Realschule or Gymnasium at the age of 10; others took ‘the slow path’. So, in the course of their educational career, all of the girls had to leave the migrant district, some very early, the others later on at the age of 15. The formation of an ethnic group started not long after some of the girls attended the Gymnasium. Here, they experienced the Schock des Lebens (‘shock of their lives’) because they were not up to the new linguistic, educational, and social demands. Their parents could not help them, and, since they were too ashamed or too proud to ask for assistance from their German peers or teachers, they felt helpless, alone, and excluded. Trying to understand their situation, they soon arrived at an ethnic interpretation and considered their ‘Turkish-ness’ to be the reason for failing in school and for being excluded by their German peers. At the age of 12 or 13, they joined with other Turkish girls, formed an ethnic group, and called themselves ‘Turkish Powergirls’. On the one hand, they struggled against the German school world, where they felt marginalized and excluded, and, on the other hand, they revolted against their parents’ educational principles, especially against the traditional Turkish female role, since they had been exposed to other female models in their new surroundings. Gradually, the group developed into a wild, aggressive ethnic clique that even became criminal for a period. As the girls grew older, they started to visit one of the district’s youth centers where, at least, they found help with their school problems and new models for their further social, educational, and professional development. That was the time when I first met the ‘Powergirls’. I had the opportunity to observe them over a longer period of time and to document their gradual development.9 The main topics in the group’s discussions were the girls’ relationships to their families and the Turkish community and their experiences in schools outside the migrant district. In the course of these discussions, a new social identity emerged (see Keim 2002). The ‘Powergirls’, who up till then had defined themselves as a rebellious ‘Turkish’ group, gradually came to see themselves as something ‘new’, as ‘modern, German–Turkish’ young women who wanted to be socially and professionally successful and who were determined to fight against restrictions put on them by both the migrant community and German society.

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Social style and social identity: A dynamic relationship

Our concept of social style is influenced by cultural (Clarke 1979; Willis 1981), ethnographic (Heath 1983), and sociological (Strauss 1984) concepts in which style is related to a group’s culture and its social identity.10 In this tradition, cultural style is the product of the adjustment of human communities to their ecological, social, and economic conditions. Striving for social integration as well as for social differentiation is a part of these conditions. Cultural or social styles correspond to schematic knowledge of social behavior, and their relevant traits reflect distinctive features of the respective social and cultural paradigm. From this perspective, a sociocultural style is defined as the specific solution for existential needs and aspirations. The specifics of a socio-cultural style become obvious through a comparison across different social worlds. In the following section, I want to focus on some aspects of style formation that are relevant to the ‘Powergirls’’ stylistic development. (a) Style is a complex and holistic means of expression. It is signaled by co-occurring features on the prosodic, lexical, syntactic, and lexicosemantic level as well as by the realization of specific activity types or specific genres and conversational structures. Elements from all these levels are combined along the same line, in a homologous way, and form a unique ‘gestalt’. In this ‘gestalt’ formation, further dimensions of expression are included such as outward appearance (clothing, make-up, piercings), body movement, preference for specific music or sport trends, etc.11 (b) In sociological and ethnographic research, further aspects of style formation are discussed. Style is seen as an ‘aesthetic performance’ (Soeffner 1986), a unification of features in order to give a holistic self-presentation, high-lighting those features which contrast to other socio-stylistic paradigms. The issue of contrast is central in Irvine’s concept of style (2001) as “part of a system of distinction in which a style contrasts with other possible styles and the social meaning signified by the style contrasts to other social meanings” (22). From this perspective, style is a relational concept: it exists only for participants of a group or milieu who interpret it in relation to another group or milieu (see Hinnenkamp and Selting 1989; Auer 1989).

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(c) Social styles differ from one another. They are ascribed to social groups or milieus and have social meaning. Solidarity, affiliation, or identification with a social group or milieu is symbolized by using its style. In relation to other social groups or milieus, style functions as a means for differentiation and separation, as described especially in research on youth languages or youth cultures: cf. concepts such as ‘Kontrasprache’ (Bausinger 1972), ‘anti-language’ (Halliday 1976), ‘subculture’ (Hebdige 1979; Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995), or ‘counter-culture’ (Clarke et al. 1979; Willis 1982). Aspects of differentiation are also central in studies on ethnicity (see Barth 1969; Schwitalla and Streek 1989; Czyzewski et al. 1995) and on social categorization (see Sacks 1979; Hausendorf 2002). (d) Style is interactionally produced. Speakers as well as recipients participate in the formation of a style, its maintenance and its change. Styles are not determined: they are performed as socially and interactively meaningful productions and can be adjusted to situational and interactional requirements. By abrupt style switchings or gradual style shiftings, locally different contexts or footings (Goffman 1974) can be accomplished. These aspects are essential for the description of the ‘Powergirls’’ style whose formation can be related to two processes of differentiation: the girls’ emancipation from the traditional Turkish female role and their opposition to the German school world. In the course of these differentiation processes, the ‘Powergirls’ created a style that contrasted on all stylistic dimensions with the ‘traditional young Turkish woman’ as well as with the teachers’ expectations at the Gymnasium.12 Both contrasts made the girls fall back on features taken from the communicative behavior of Turkish male groups of the district, characterized by aggressiveness and coarse language. The teachers at the Gymnasium rejected the ‘Powergirl’ style rigorously because it contrasted sharply with the schools’ ideology of cultivated behavior. Two girls were even expelled from school because of their rudeness. These experiences and the insight that a higher school qualification was the only way to become professionally successful and financially independent of their families13 effected a gradual change of social orientations and a gradual transformation of style. Stylistic elements, which so far had been evaluated by the peer-group as ‘not belonging to us’, were tried out,

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and gradually accepted. Along with this constant reconstruction of the stylistic repertoire, the following questions arise: – How much stylistic continuity is possible since processes of repertoire reconstruction are not necessarily harmonious, and conflicting stylistic means may collide; – are there phases in the stylistic development where different styles coexist; – or is a unique style constructed with various stylistic facets? These questions will be discussed in the course of the following outline of the ‘Powergirls’’ development from a ‘ghetto’ clique to young university students. In the following sections, I want to focus on two sets of stylistic features: a) the use of different varieties, Turkish and German, and b) the choice of specific communicative practices such as rough and coarse provocations and insults as the stylistic means for the symbolization of being a ‘Powergirl’. The first set of features (4) will be outlined very roughly,14 but the second will be presented in more detail (5).

4.

The use of different varieties

I start with a rough outline of the group’s linguistic development regarding the use and evaluation of the three varieties: ‘Mannheim Turkish’, German–Turkish mixing, and monolingual German. When I first met the ‘Powergirls’, they were still closely linked to the social life of the migrant community; some had just finished the Hauptschule and attended a Realschule or Fachschule outside the district. For those girls, ‘Mannheim Turkish’ and especially German–Turkish mixing were the essential means of ingroup communication. Monolingual German was not important for them, and some girls had no routine of using it over longer interactional stretches. They told me mixing was the most comfortable code and, as I observed, the most important one in in-group communication. ‘Mannheim Turkish’ is the variety of Turkish spoken by second and third generation migrants, especially with their elders. The name is derived from a comparison between the Turkish spoken in the home villages of the parents and the varieties spoken in Mannheim. ‘Mannheim Turkish’ has some of the typical characteristics of the Turkish varieties in Germany such as deletion of the question-particle, use of personal pronouns in unfocused

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positions, avoidance of embedded gerund-constructions, etc.15 Some of these characteristics are caused by influences from German; others point to a loosening of grammatical norms or could be seen as the result of a dialect levelling. But most features of ‘Mannheim Turkish’ correspond to the Turkish dialects of the regions the families come from.16 In the case of the ‘Powergirls’, mixing was preferred in in-group communication, especially in everyday interactions such as narrations and arguments. In mixing, the girls use their bilingual competence for discursive and socio-symbolic functions.17 Until now, we could not find another migrant youth group that had developed such highly elaborate mixing practices; therefore, we assume that mixing as well as its discursive functions are part of the ‘Powergirls’ peer-group style. Those ‘Powergirls’ who had to leave the migrant district early in the course of their educational career had, when I met them, already acquired a high competence in monolingual German. But in in-group communication, mixing was their preferred code of interaction. The mixing of these girls differed slightly from that of the others in the higher proportion of German structures and elements. In some interactions (for example, discussions about their school affairs), German was their dominant language. This shows clearly that in the course of their educational career outside the migrant district, the girls’ linguistic competences and preferences had changed: in specific constellations together with specific topics, the relevance of mixing had decreased, and the relevance of German had increased. Two years later, when all girls attended schools outside the migrant district, they all had acquired a high competence in monolingual German. For the oldest girls, who had just started to attend a university, German had become the central means of expression in all professional domains. But in in-group communication, all girls still preferred mixing. At this time, it had become a means for symbolizing their affiliation with the category of the ‘German–Turk’ and their dissociation from the Turkish-speaking world as well as from the German-speaking majority. When I asked them about their ideal life-partner, they spontaneously answered that they would only marry a German–Turk, a man who could mix the languages. Thus, the formation of German–Turkish mixing as well as the use of monolingual German is closely related to the speakers’ processing of social experiences and to their construction of a genuine socio-cultural identity.

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Coarse language – a stylistic marker of the ‘Powergirls’

When I first met the ‘Powergirls’ (they were 15–19 years old), coarse language was a constitutive characteristic of their communicative style. Its use is closely related to their emancipation from the category of the ‘young traditional woman’. The defining features of this category can be characterized as the following: the young woman restricts her life to the house and the family, submits to the norms and values of the family, behaves in an unassuming way, and follows the orders of her elders. Chastity and modesty are highly evaluated virtues that are symbolized by clothing as well as behavior. A life outside the house and contact with boys is strictly forbidden. For a girl or young woman, it is obligatory to wait on other family members, to stay in the background in the presence of her elders, and to keep quiet in the presence of older men. To address older people in an outspoken manner or to contradict them would be offensive, at least in public. Many Turkish migrant families try to educate their girls according to this model in order to shield them from modern, western influences, as did the ‘Powergirls’’ parents. But the girls revolted against this model and strictly rejected it. One of the girls describes its features as follows: (1)18 01 AR:

die sind so furschbar unterwürfig * bedienen die älteren * ‘they are so terribly obsequious they wait on the older ones

02 AR

servieren tee↓ * und gehn wieder still in die ecke↓ serve them tea and then they go quietly into their corner

02 AR:

des find=isch einfach schre”cklisch↓ I think that is really terrible’

And another girl describes her experiences with a neighbor, whom she sees as a candidate for the category: (2) 01 DI:

weißt du jedesmal wenn ich bei denen warĹ ** hat sie immer ‘you know, every time I was in their house she acted always

02 DI:

schön brav äh die dienerin gespieltĹ * hat immer tee gebracht like a servant, very obediently she brought tea

03 DI:

und gebäck gebracht und und die leute bedientĹ and cookies all the time and she waited on people

04 DI:

saß immer brav zu hauseĹ * ähm hat immer des getan always stayed at home, like a good girl, and she always

und ähm m/ and she

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was die eltern gesagt haben did what her parents told her’

The ‘Powergirls’ developed an ‘anti-traditional’ self-conception: they disobeyed their parents’ orders, preferred stylish clothes, make-up and piercings, went out with boys, danced in discos, and experimented with drugs. They enjoyed undisciplined, rude, and coarse ways of speaking and behaved very generally in a wild and aggressive way. From the perspective of their Turkish elders, such behavior was unusual for young women but rather typical for young men living in ‘street gangs’. Undisciplined behavior was expressed, for example, by ignoring turn-taking rules, interrupting each other, and shouting each other down (see below, examples 8 and 9). For the expression of coarseness, the girls drew on rough ways of speaking that they had observed in Turkish male groups who practiced verbal duellings and ritual insults. 5.1. Coarseness in verbal duellings In the district under study, games such as tavla and billards are part of everyday life for Turkish men. Such games are played in Turkish coffee houses, exclusively visited by men. In these games, playful insults with drastic expressions, swear formulas, coarse sexual formulas, and verbal duellings are constitutive elements.19 The aim of these verbal activities is to distract the adversary with advice or insults, to make him feel insecure, and to provoke him. The provocative turn follows the action of the game. Traditional Turkish women do not play such games, at least not in public. But for the ‘Powergirls’, tavla and billards were favorite games and part of their leisure-time activities. In order to demonstrate the kind of coarseness the girls enjoyed along with these games, I will give a short example taken from a weekend excursion I had the chance to document at the beginning of my observation. Hatice and Teslime, 16 and 17 years old, are playing billards. Before the following transcript starts, Hatice has commented on her successful moves with statements in German such as das war gut (‘that was good’) or ich hab deinen ball getroffen (‘I hit your ball’). Teslime reacts neither to Hatice’s moves nor to her remarks. Her silence causes Hatice to provoke her: she poses provocatively in front of the billiard table, laughs as if she is confident of victory, switches into Turkish, and starts speaking in a sweet, seductive voice (Turkish segments are in bold type):

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(3) 01 HA: seksi oyun yapalım↓ *1,5* PLAYS, HITS ‘let’s play in a sexy way’ K SWEET VOICE 02 TE: →>oruspu<← ‘whore’ 03 HA: PLAYS, DOES NOT HIT >a÷zını * sikyim< ‘I fuck your mouth’ K: SHARP VOICE 04 TE: PLAYS, DOES NOT HIT →allah belamı vermesi:n↓← ‘Allah shall not curse me’ 05 HA: LAUGHS niye be↑ * ha: * ben an/ anladım niye versin↓ ‘why oh, I have got it why He should curse you’ 06 HA: PLAYS, DOES NOT HIT →>siktir<← ‘fuck you’ 07 TE: PLAYS, DOES NOT HIT a÷zına sikyim ‘I fuck into your mouth’ 08 TE: PLAYS AGAIN, HITS 09 HA: →des is do=normalerweise ein faul gell↑ * ‘this is a foul normally you know’ K

ANGRILY

10 HA: dass du meinen stein zuerschd triffschd← ‘that you hit my ball first’

Transitions into playful interaction have to be signalled by contextualisation cues and practices20 and have to be ratified by the co-participants. They imply a change of frame21 whose beginning and ending also have to be contextualized. Hatice frames her playful initiative explicitly with seksi oyun yapalım↓ (‘let’s play in a sexy way’, 01), hits the ball, and succeeds in provoking her partner. Teslime reacts with a drastic term of abuse oruspu (‘whore’, 02). The following interaction shows that this term functions as a contextualization cue for a playful competition: every strike is commented by an abusive formula. The timing of the commentaries is directly related to the moves of the game, and the abuses become increasingly drastic. Hatice does not comment on the abusive term oruspu; she plays the ball. Since she does not hit the target, she comments on her failure with the insult >a÷zını * sikyim< (‘I fuck your mouth’, 03). With this, she ratifies the playful competition in Turkish and continues it by topping the previous

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move.22 Teslime plays the next ball. She also does not hit and uses a religious formula as a kind of self-reproach (allah belamı vermesi:n ‘Allah shall not curse me’, 04). 23 Since the formula does not belong to the standard repertoire of formulaic abuses, Hatice does not understand its meaning at first and asks niye be (‘why’, 05). But as she begins to understand, she confirms Teslime’s bad play by using the positive version of the formula: ha: * ben an/ anladım niye versin (‘oh, I have got it why He should curse you’, 05). She then continues with the game. She plays the ball, and because she does not hit again, she comments on her failure with the abuse formula siktir (06), a shortened version of siktittir git (‘let yourself be fucked’). With this formula, she resumes the verbal duelling that was interrupted by the religious formula. When Teslime, too, does not hit the target, she uses a further version of the abusive formula that Hatice had used in line 03, which has a slightly more drastic quality: a÷zina sikyim (‘I fuck into your mouth’, 07).24 When Teslime hits the target with the next move (08), Hatice ends the playful competition: →des is do=normalerweise ein faul gell↑ dass du mein stein zuerschd triffschd← (‘that normally is a foul, you know, that you hit my ball first’, 09/10). She reproaches Teslime for foul play and changes the frame of interaction from ritual insults to an earnest reproach. The end of the playful interaction and the beginning of the new interaction modality are signalled on various linguistic levels: faster tempo, louder and angry voice, code-switching into German, and the meta-linguistic comment on the adversary’s move. The speaker opens another frame and speaks like a young German from Mannheim – using some colloquial elements25 – who reproaches her friend for unfairness in a game. 5.2. Coarse language in calls to order Calls to order using coarse language were used for playful criticism as well as for the expression of irritation and anger. It includes formulas such as halts maul langer (‘shut up, man’), verpiss dich (‘piss off’), and siktir lan26 (‘fuck you, man’), or terms of abuse such as orospu (‘whore’) and orospu çocu÷u (‘child of a whore’). But coarse language in calls to order is not treated as an insult: recipients accept or ignore them, and they often top them as in the following example:

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(4) 01 I: 02 TU:

>→hosch gekifft↑←< ‘did you smoke pot’

siktir lan ‘fuck you, man’ +halts:=maul=langer ‘shut up, man’

Since the consumption of hashish is prohibited in the youth center, Hilal’s (HI) question >→hosch gekifft↑←< (‘did you smoke pot’, 01), addressed to the girl sitting next to her, Tuna (TU), is delicate and risky even though it is spoken fast and in a low voice. The recipient treats the question as an infringement and rejects it with a coarse call to order: +halts:=maul=langer (‘shut up, man’, 02). She either thinks that the speaker has no right to ask her such a question or that the situation is too dangerous for the topic. But Hilal obviously interprets the situation differently and counters the call to order with a more drastic formula: siktir lan (‘fuck you, man’, 01).27 She tops Tuna’s call to order and emphasizes the opposition by code-switching into Turkish. Tuna does not react, and the dispute is settled. By performing the dispute with formulaic means, the critique and its rejection obtain a ritual character: both parties demonstrate a readiness to fight, and, at the same time, they settle the critical situation. 5.3. Situational restrictions for the use of coarse language Even though drastic expressions are characteristic, the ‘Powergirls’ know that outsiders, especially teachers, evaluate them extremely negatively, and there are situations where this knowledge becomes manifest. In the following example, two girls are involved in an argument in which a series of abuses occur such as öküz (‘ox’), sakat (‘nitwit’), and amcık beyin (‘brain of a cunt’). The girls do not realize that a teacher (who understands Turkish) overhears their verbal fight. When one of the girls becomes aware of the teacher, she reacts in the following way: (5) 01 TE:

>rezil oldukĻ< * si"ktir * oruspu çocu÷uĻ * ‘we disgraced ourselves completely, fuck you child of a whore, beat it’

The speaker finishes the argument with the self-reflexive comment >rezil oldukĻ< (‘we disgraced ourselves completely’) and expresses her shame for using vulgar expressions in the presence of an outsider and a person on whose evaluation she depends. With a final angrily spoken insult si“ktir

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oruspu çocu÷uĻ* (‘fuck you, child of a whore, beat it’), she turns away and leaves the room. The comment rezil olduk reveals a rule for vulgar expressions: they are specific to in-group communication, and the girls try to avoid them in the presence of outsiders on whose good opinion they depend because they know that they disapprove of them.28 But the speaker’s use of vulgar expressions even in the course of lamenting her coarse language reveals how stabilized and routinized these ways of speaking are in in-group communication. Coarse language together with the male address forms mann, lan, and langer are closely related to the group’s self-conception, contrasting maximally with the social category of the ‘traditional young Turkish woman’. As a consequence of the intensive revolt against the category of the ‘traditional young Turkish woman’, the girls’ rough and rude behavior was gradually used in other contexts, too. As long as they attended the district schools, they got on quite well. But in schools outside the district, especially the Gymnasium, the teachers did not tolerate their behavior. And here, they got into serious trouble. They interpreted the teachers’ criticism and rejection of their behavior in an ethnic frame: they felt negatively evaluated because they were Turks and because of the German teachers’ prejudices against Turks, and they reacted accordingly with an up-grading of their ethnicity. They rejected the teachers as ausländerfeindliche Deutsche (‘Germans hostile to foreigners’) and emphasized their Turkishness by enforcing their aggressive and coarse behavior. They enjoyed shocking everyone with the consequence of marginalizing themselves and being marginalized by their German schoolmates and teachers. Retrospectively, they characterize their behavior in this phase of their lives as unverschämt, frech und einfach asozial (‘insolent, rude, and truly anti-social’). For some of the girls, this attitude grew into a hostile relationship towards the teachers with very serious consequences. One of the girls who was no longer accepted as a student and had to leave school explains this in the following way: (6) 01 HI:

des haben die lehrer zu mir gesagt ‘the (German)teachers told me

02 HI:

dass isch ähm- * dass halt der tonĹ die musik machtĻ that I ehm * that I need to change my tune

03 HI:

dass isch misch halt falsch ausdrücken würdeĻ and that I express myself in a wrong way

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04 HI:

dass die misch missverstehnĻ (...) that they misunderstand me

05 HI:

isch weiß was die meinen halt dass isch- ** and I know what they mean that I

06 HI:

dass isch halt zu grob binĻ that I am too rude’

The speaker portrays the teacher-pupil conflict as based on differences of social style, and her failure in school is presented as a consequence of her stylistic shortcomings. On the basis of such experiences, the girls came to understand that the teachers, whom they treated as their enemies, were ‘gate-keepers’ to their future professional careers. Consequently, they became more and more sensitive to situational demands on their verbal and nonverbal behavior: they learned to distinguish between situations where it was possible to use rude ways of speaking from situations where they were better avoided, and they learned to come to terms with the social conventions and values of the social worlds in which they wanted to succeed. They learned to control their behavior and to adjust it to new contextual conditions. Along with a change in their self-conception from the ‘Turkish Powergirl’ to a socially and professionally successful ‘German–Turkish young woman’, they gradually oriented towards communicative practices associated with this new category. In this process, more formal and elaborate forms of communication were acquired, including ‘polite talk’ with conventional politeness formulas.

6.

Politeness in out-group communication

The youth centre that the ‘Powergirls’ began to visit regularly enforced this process. Here, they learned new communicative styles, especially in interaction with their favorite social worker, Naran, a young, modern German– Turkish academic. Since she grew up and finished her university career in Germany, she was well acquainted with life in the Turkish migrant community as well as with the social and educational demands in German institutions. The young women respected Naran as their abla (‘older sister’), and they followed her advice. Even though she tolerated the girls’ rude ways of speaking, she would never tolerate rudeness addressed to herself. If the girls disregarded rules of politeness towards her, they had to apologize using the relevant formulas, or they had to offer other compensatory actions.

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In some of these interactions, differences between the girls’ and the social worker’s communicative styles come into focus. These show that even though the girls knew how to be ‘polite’ they still dissociated themselves from that kind of behavior, signalling that it belonged to others and not (yet) to their peer group. This can be demonstrated by the following example. On a weekend trip (in the second year of my observation), when the social worker tried to explain some organizational details, she could not get the girls’ attention and did not succeed in getting the floor. The girls interrupted her, spoke all at once, or tried to shout each other down. When, at last, Naran got the floor, she reproached the girls for their undisciplined behavior, returned to the official agenda, and continued with the organisational information. With this, the transcript starts: (7) 01 NA:

für den fernsehraum ←krieg ich schlü“ssel↓→ * →das heisst ‘I get the keys for the television room that means

02 NA:

we=ma← a“bends noch was unternehmn↑ * wir ham selbst die if we do something in the evening we have the opportunity

03 NA:

möglichkeit a“bzuschließn↓ to shut the room by ourselves’

>isch möscht was fragen< ‘I would like to ask something’

04 TE:

05 TE:

** >bitte< ‘yes,please’

darf isch bitte am donnerstag * ‘may I watch TV please on Tuesday

entweder elf uhr morgens either at 11 o’clock in

06

TE: oder zehn uhr abends fernsehn kuckn↓→ the morning or at 10 o’clock in the evening’

07

HL:

08

TE: s=is sehr wichtig ‘it’s very important’

09

NA:

GIGGLES SOFTLY

>sehr wichtich↑ wir kuckn mal< ‘very important we’ll see’

Right after the information about the TV-room, the first point of Naran’s announcement, Teslime (TE), one of girls who had just been rebuked for rude behavior, intervenes and asks for the floor >sch möscht was fragen< (‘I would like to ask something’, 04) even though it is clear to all participants that Naran has not yet finished. Reluctantly (longer pause), Naran gives Teslime the floor, and she presents her request: ←darf isch bitte am

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donnerstag * entweder elf uhr morgens oder zehn uhr abends fernseh kuckn↓→ * (‘may I watch TV please on Tuesday either at 11 o’clock in the morning or at 10 o’clock in the evening’, 05/06). Explicitly asking for the floor and speaking in a soft way marks a clear contrast to Teslime’s former behavior. The request is formulated in a rather elaborate and ‘polite’ way of speaking using conventional politeness markers such as the modal verb dürfen and the bitte-formula and giving an account for the request s=is sehr wichtig (‘it is very important’, 08). With this, Teslime follows Naran’s call for a change in behavior and demonstrates that she is perfectly able to speak in a polite way. Naran does not reject Teslime’s request for the floor, but gives her the floor, and she even does not rule out that the request may be granted >sehr wichtichĹ wir kuckn mal< (‘very importantĹ we’ll see’, 09). This reaction indicates that she treats Teslime’s politely formulated request not as an intervention but as a kind of repair for her previous (bad) behavior; and she shows her that polite forms are effective in interaction. The reaction of another girl (HI) to Teslime’s polite request is interesting as well. Her soft giggling (07) signals that Teslime’s change in behavior is unexpected and has comical effects for her. The style Teslime uses with Naran does not correspond to the group’s normal way of speaking, and by emphasizing the stylistic difference, a certain social distance towards Naran is established. This interaction sequence makes evident that two different communication styles coexist in the stylistic repertoire of the girls at this developmental stage and that they differentiate very clearly between different social worlds by using different stylistic means together with markers of disaffiliation.

7.

Elaborate and polite ways of speaking in in-group communication

In the course of the older group members’ successful participation in the world outside the migrant community, new forms of communication were gradually incorporated into in-group communication. This process was reinforced when the group experienced for the first time that verbal means that had been effective so far no longer met with new requirements. A crucial situation occurred when, one and a half years after the conversational exchange discussed in the previous section (6), the girls had to manage a complex and demanding project without the help of their social worker. The girls were then 17 to 21 years old. They planned to produce a video

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film about themselves in order to take part in a supra-regional film contest. The film was of great importance to them, offering an opportunity to present themselves to the public and depicting a picture of modern migrant women, which was quite different from the stereotypical view of Turkish women dominant in German society.29 The group started with a meeting of all members in order to draw up the plot of the film and to plan its production. Right from the beginning, the girls experienced their inability to cope with a situation in which they had to organize a creative process over a longer period of time and to integrate members’ often contrasting views and proposals without excluding anyone. The meeting started chaotically. Trying to establish a working order, the group elected a moderator, who had to organize the discussions and decisions on the film project. This type of situation, where an elected moderator has to cope with a new role and new tasks, provided the context for introducing new stylistic means. In the course of this meeting, new and more elaborate ways of speaking were gradually brought in and tried out; some were rejected, and others were accepted and incorporated into the group’s stylistic repertoire. The elected moderator was Didem, one of the older girls, who had just begun to attend a university. The first opportunity for introducing new stylistic means arose when communication threatened to break down. This happened when the girls, talking about their film ideas, interrupted each other and all tried to speak at once until a wild confusion arose with reproaches, counter reproaches, and rude insults. The moderator tried to calm everybody down by calls to order like ruhe (‘be quiet’) and jetzt hört ma zu mensch * seid doch ruhig (‘now you listen and be quiet’), but nobody obeyed her orders. The noise became louder and louder until one of the young women complained: (8) 01 SU:

02 SU:

vollĻ meine o“hrenĹ isch schwö“rĻ> terribly, my ears I swear’ <ja“Ļ halt=s maulĻ> ‘ou yeah, shut up’

03 TU:

04 DI:

und die schrei"en and they are yelling

KNOCKS ON THE TABLE <wir haben hier gerade eine besprechung ‘we are having a meeting

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05 DI:

falls ihr das nischt mitbekommen ha"btĻ und wer nischt in case you did not notice and I ask those

06 DI:

dazu gehört> bitt isch raus zu gehnĻ du wolltest who are not participating to leave the room you wanted to genauĻ ‘exactly’

07 SU:

08 DI: 09 HA:

was sagenĹ jetz mach ma weiterĻ say something please continue’ yani i/ ‘well

isch zum beispiel I for instance’

Suna’s (SU) complaint about the noise is rejected by a rude call to order from Tuna (TU): <ja” halt=s maul>Ļ (‘oh yeah, shut up’, 03). The rude rejection of a discussant’s justified complaints could be the beginning of the meeting’s break down. The way the moderator intervenes suggests such an interpretation: she knocks on the table, gives an explicit definition of the situation as a besprechung (‘meeting’, 04), and asks participants who do not accept it to leave the room. In contrast to the previous turns of Suna and Tuna,30 the moderator switches into an elaborate way of speaking: <wir haben hier gerade eine besprechung (…) wer nischt dazu gehört >bitt isch raus zu gehen (‘we are having a meeting here (…) I ask those who are not participating to leave the room’, 04/06). This constitutes a marked contrast to the kind of language used in the previous turns. With this move, the moderator succeeds in putting an end to the interaction chaos. She obtains a positive response from one of the participants: genauĻ (‘exactly’, 07), and as soon as the others are silent, she gives the floor to the girl who was interrupted before: du wolltest was sagenĹ jetzt mach ma weiterĻ (‘you wanted to say something, please continue’, 06/08), and the girl continues with her statement (09). The conversational discipline only lasts for a short time; and it is not long before the participants talk all at once again and try to shout each other down. Thereupon, the moderator proposes a procedure that she became familiar with at the university and that she announces as her last attempt to establish order: she proposes that each speaker who has the floor takes a rod, symbolizing that it is her turn. As long as she holds the rod, no one should interrupt her. Only the moderator is allowed to take the rod from a speaker and to give it to another, who then gets the floor. This proposal is rejected, first by Tuna’s negative evaluation in Turkish ay ne gıcık (‘how stupid’) and then by Funda’s comment in German des is bei uns in der clique ganz schlecht (‘that is completely unsuited for our clique’). These

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comments highlight the social meaning of the proposed procedure: it is seen as belonging to the style of another social world to which the two younger girls do not (yet) belong and which is not (yet) accepted as part of their repertoire. By rejecting elements of a social world not (yet) their own, the two girls reveal a high stylistic sensitivity. But the moderator insists on the proposed procedure and explains that for her, it is the only effective way to accomplish some kind of interaction order: (9) 01 DI:

des is=n einziges cha"os hierĻ un=des is die einzige ‘here, we have only chaos and my proposal is the

02 DI:

möglischkeit o/ eusch mal irgendwie zum schweigen only way to silence you somehow

03 DI:

zu bringenĹ

04 HA:

und du willst jetzt grad was and you want to say something right ahĻ

05 DI:

sagenĹ GIVES THE ROD TO HA und alle anderen now and all the others

06 DI:

halten jetzt die klappeĻ keep their mouths shut now’

By explaining the reason for her insistence in introducing the new procedure, the moderator uses no peer group expressions but more elaborate formulations: des is=n einziges cha"os hierĻ un=des is die einzige möglischkeit o/ eusch mal irgendwie zum schweigen zu bringenĹ (‘here, we have only chaos, and my proposal is the only way to silence you somehow’, 01/03). She continues to speak in this way as she performs the new procedure, handing over the rod to the girl who wanted to speak and giving her the floor: du willst jetzt grad was sagen (‘you want to say something right now’, 03/05). After that, she addresses the other participants with a further call to order, thereby switching into more colloquial expressions: und alle anderen halten jetzt die klappe (‘and all the others keep their mouths shut now’, 05/06). With this move, Didem succeeds with the new procedure and re-establishes the interaction order. In her turn, Didem combines different stylistic means: along with the presentation and explanation of the new procedure, she uses more elaborate ways of speaking; but when she addresses the other girls, calling them to order (06), she switches into a typical peer group formula used when somebody is annoyed, without being as coarse as the other girls’ utterances.31

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Therefore, it can be assumed that Didem distinguishes between stylistic means of the peer group that agree with her role as moderator from others that disagree with it. By choosing only ‘moderate’ expressions and combining them with elaborate ones, she enacts her conception of a ‘moderator’ through her ways of speaking, and the other girls accept her performance. In the course of the meeting, the moderator introduces even conventional politeness forms that respect speakers’ negative face-wants; and the other girls accept them, too. As it happens, Didem herself interrupts another speaker, apologizes explicitly and re-establishes the speaker’s right in the following way: (10) 01 DI: 02 SU:

03 DI:

‘or or/ one moment, you could something o"hĻ K ANGRILY

entschuldigungĻ * du bist dran excuse me it is your turn’

In (01), Didem interrupts Suna’s (SU) previous turn (outside the transcript) and starts with a new suggestion for a film scene. Suna stops Didem with her angry cry o”hĻ (02), whereupon Didem explicitly apologizes for interrupting: entschuldigungĻ (03). Then she gives the floor to Suna with the formula: du bist dran (‘it is your turn’, 03), thereby re-establishing her speaking right. Taking into account another speaker’s right and apologizing explicitly for an interruption are new practices in in-group communication. Up to now, such procedures had only occurred in interactions with outsiders, for example, with Naran, other social workers, or teachers. Since the procedure was effective in the interaction between the moderator and Suna, another group member also tries it out. At the end of the meeting, one of the girls who had been extremely undisciplined, Facilet (FA), starts speaking in a polite way: (11) 01 DI:

jetzt ähm- ** folgendesĻ wenn wir mit diesem film anfangen ‘and now, what I want to say, when we start with the film

02 DI:

jaĹ ** äh also ihr solltet zuverlässig seinĻ zu jedem yes, you really should be reliable and you should

Socio-cultural identity, communicative style, and their change over time 03 DI: 04 FA:

177

|treffen auch kommenĻ | jaĻ come to every meeting yes’ das nächste mal (…) |darf isch noch was sagenĹ| bitteĹ ‘may I say something please the next time (...)’

Before the moderator finishes her last appeal (01/03), Facilet asks for the floor: darf isch noch was sagenĹ bitteĹ (‘may I say something, please’, 04), using conventional politeness forms such as the modal verb dürfen and the bitte-formula. The utterance is spoken in an earnest and eager way without any signs of ironic or playful modalization. The addressee grants the request, and the speaker presents her proposal. In this short interaction, a ‘polite’ way of speaking is realized in an unmarked and natural way without signs of dissociation. Even though it is practiced in interaction with the moderator, it was initiated by a discussant for the first time. With this, ‘polite’ speaking has entered in-group communication, and it is accepted and practiced by group members. But the incorporation of new stylistic means into a group’s stylistic repertoire is a dynamic process, and it does not advance in a linear way. Every new element is tried out and evaluated if it agrees with the group’s ideas about adequate behavior. This can be demonstrated by another example taken from the same meeting. Here, the recipients do not accept the new stylistic elements introduced by the moderator. As Didem closes the group meeting with a formula, she provokes distancing reactions: (12) 01 DI: 02 TU:

03 DI: 04 FA: K&

|danke | für eure- gute ‘thank you for coming thank you for your good |bitteĻ| ‘you’re welcome’

kooperationĻ cooperation’

auf wiedersehenĻ ‘good bye’ *1,5* END OF THE MEETING

(‘thank you for coming’, 01) is a formula for closing a formal meeting to which the chairperson has invited the participants. One of the girls, Tuna (TU), reacts with the bitteĻ- formula (‘you’re welcome’, 02) although no response is expected in the closing ritual. With this reaction, Tuna falls back on another formulaic ritual – thanks and acceptance – and produces the second part of that ritual (acceptance). Her reaction has a non-serious, playful quality indicating that she is making fun

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of the closing ritual produced by Didem. The reason behind Tuna’s reaction could be, on the one hand, that the formula does not correspond to Didem’s role in the situation: only the person who initiated the meeting could use it. On the other hand, the formula might be too formal and inconsistent with other stylistic features. Didem’s next closing formula danke für eure gute kooperation (‘thank you for your good cooperation’, 01/03) is also not accepted, made evident by Facilet’s (FA) surprised and amused exclamation (04). It is interesting that Facilet, who took over the moderator’s polite way of speaking a short time before (see example 12), now distances herself from her. These reactions make it evident that the girls, who accepted Didem’s performance as the moderator up till now and who even incorporated some of her ways of speaking into their own, reject stylistic means that do not agree with their idea of adequate behaviour in the present situation. They work together with Didem to construct the stylistic means of a group moderator, but they object to the (too formal) situational definition that Didem produces in her closing rituals.

8.

Conclusion

The formation of the ‘Powergirls’’ style was related to two social categories relevant to the girls’ self-definition. Their dissociation from the ‘traditional Turkish woman’ was expressed through the selection of maximally contrasting features, taken from ‘male worlds’ of the migrant ‘ghetto’, features which are ‘rough, coarse and aggressive’. These features were used in all situations in which the girls wanted to express their opposition to the traditional female category. In opposition to German teachers of the higher educational institutions, the girls highlighted their ‘Turkish-ness’ by the extensive use of elaborated Turkish–German mixings as well as behavior contradicting all teacher expectations. The ‘Turkish Powergirls’ realized that their rebellious and anti-social behavior excluded them from social and educational success. This led to the construction of a new self-conception and to integration into educational and professional German worlds, expressed on the stylistic level by the incorporation of elaborate and polite ways of speaking. The formation of a style is a dynamic process and in constant progress. There are phases in which various styles with conflicting means co-exist in

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a group’s repertoire and are separately used in order to adjust to or to create different contexts. Additionally, there are phases where the gradual incorporation of new means into peer group communication can be observed. When group members obtain more and more experience in the use of stylistic means characteristic of the outside world, they differentiate their stylistic repertoire according to situational and functional tasks, combining new forms with features of their former in-group style. As the young women’s further development shows (some of them became teachers or social workers, others are still university students), the acquisition of new stylistic means does not imply giving up in-group forms. All former group members still have a high competence in coarse language and ritual insults. But they have learned to switch in a virtuoso manner from one style to another according to different situational and contextual purposes: vulgar expressions in response to a ‘ghetto kid’ may be followed by conventional politeness forms in order to create a more elaborate or formal situation. The formation of a social style follows biographical processes and adjusts to new demands emerging from new social orientations and aspirations.

9.

Transcript conventions

The transcription uses the signs of the German alphabet in analogy to the rules of pronunciation in German for the representation of the phonological and phonetic features of the spoken language, including dialectal speech. In addition, we use the following notation: *, ** ↑, ↓, – ←, → <, > ” : = ich |hab das| gesehn |niemals | # #

short pause, longer pause rising, falling, and middle intonation slower, faster tempo louder, softer voice strong accent strong lengthening slurring manner of articulation, linking different words overlap extension of comments

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LAUGHS Ü

nonverbal expressions of a speaker translation line

Notes 1. This study is part of a research project on “German-Turkish variation and the construction of social styles of communication in young migrant groups in Mannheim, Germany.” This project was funded by the DFG (2000–2004) and carried out by Sema Aslan, Ibrahim Cindark, Werner Kallmeyer, and Inken Keim. The aims of the study were the description of the group members’ linguistic and communicative repertoires, their bilingual practices, and the reconstruction of their in-group style of communication in relation to their social experiences. We selected three groups of young migrants and documented their in-group and out-group communication over 2–3 years. One group was studied by I. Cindark (2005 and i. prep.), the other by S. Aslan (2005) and the third group, the ‘Turkish Powergirls’, by myself. For a presentation of the research project, see Kallmeyer and Keim (1999); for a short overview of the three groups and their style of communication, see Keim (2003); for project papers and publications, see: http://www.ids-mannheim.de/prag/sprachvariation/public.htm#tp-3. 2. According to statistics, in October 2004, 67,000 migrants from 177 nations were living in Mannheim, most of them in inner city districts; see Mannheimer Morgen, 26.10.04, Nr. 249, p. 20. 3. There are Turkish stores, banks, doctors, hairdressers, advocates, service stations, cafes, restaurants, etc. In the past years, numerous Turkish companies were founded where young migrants can find a job. 4. For a detailed description, see Keim (2007). 5. For a more detailed description, see Keim (2005). 6. At the end of Hauptschule, students have to pass a final examination in order to obtain the Hauptschule-diploma. Without this diploma and without good average marks, they do not have a chance to take an apprenticeship. 7. According to the newest statistics, only 16% of the adolescents leaving the Hauptschule in Mannheim get a professional training; see Mannheimer Morgen, 03.12.2004, Nr. 281, p. 20. 8. Many of my young informants, not only the ‘Powergirls’, spoke about such experiences. 9. When I met the girls at the youth center, they were 15–19 years old. After having offered them some help with their homework, I had access to the group. As soon as some of them got better marks at school, I was accepted at their group meetings and was allowed to (audio and video) record their group activi-

Socio-cultural identity, communicative style, and their change over time

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

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ties as well as other situations (family meetings, week-end excursions). I observed the group for 3 years, visited their meetings once or twice a week, and did biographical interviews in German with all group members. Sema Aslan did ethnographic interviews with the girls’ parents in Turkish. I was present at all the documented group interactions. After the end of the observation, I kept in touch with the girls, was invited to their weddings, and am still informed about their social and professional lives. The conversational material was transcribed and translated by Necmiye Ceylan and Emran Sirim, German-Turkish bilinguals, who grew up in the migrant community in Mannheim. This concept was developed in the course of various research projects on different social groups in an urban context; see Kallmeyer (ed.) (1994), Keim (1995), and Schwitalla (1995). For a further development of the concept, see Kallmeyer and Keim (1996 and 2003). See the papers in Hinnenkamp and Selting (eds.) (1989), in Selting and Sandig (eds.) (1997), and in Keim and Schütte (eds.) (2002). Other Turkish girls as well as German girls characterized the ‘Powergirl’-style and the ‘Powergirls’ behavior as asocial, non-feminine, and not what a (Turkish) girl should do. This insight was reinforced in the course of many discussions with the social worker of the youth center. For a detailed description see Kallmeyer, Keim, Aslan and Cindark: Variationsprofile. Zur Analyse der Variationspraxis bei den Powergirls. Online. http://www.ids-mannheim.de/prag/sprachvariation/fgvaria/Variationsprofile.pdf, 08.07.2004, and Keim (2007). For detailed description of ‘Mannheim Turkish’, see Cindark and Aslan (2004) and Sirim (2004). Cindark and Aslan’s study focuses on some features of ‘Mannheim Turkish’ such as the use of personal pronouns, the question particle, and the pluralmarker and compares them with the Turkish spoken in Turkey. They show that only in 1–7 % of the cases does ‘Mannheim Turkish’ differ from the Turkish spoken in Turkey. The authors conclude that speakers of the second and third generation have a high structural competence in Turkish (morphology and syntax), but on the lexical level, there are gaps, and expressions are used that are unusual in Turkey. For a detailed analysis of these functions, see Keim (2007); see also http://www.ids-mannheim.de/prag/sprachvariation/fgvaria/Variationsprofile.pdf, 08.07.2004. See Appendix for transcription conventions. Verbal duellings among young Turkish men that are not related to games are described by Dundees, Leach, and Özkök (1972); Labov (1972) analyzes ritual insults used by young blacks in the US. In his ethnography of a Turkish street gang in Frankfurt, Tertilt (1996) also describes verbal duellings.

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20. For the concept of contextualization, see Gumperz (1982) and Auer (1986). 21. For the concept of frame, see Goffman (1974). 22. Topping is constitutive for verbal duellings or ritual insults used in male youth groups, see Labov (1972); Dundes, Leach, and Özkök (1972); Schwitalla (1994), also for rap and hip-hop. Topping also occurs in female groups, see Keim (1995), Chap. 5. 23. Turkish parents use the formula allah belani vermesin (‘God shall not curse you’) with their children, for example, when they have done something very wrong. Here, Teslime uses the formula as a self-reproach for not hitting the ball. 24. According to my German-Turkish informants, the second version a÷zına sikyim with a÷zın in the dative/ directional position, marked by –a, is slightly more drastic than the first version a÷zını sikyim, where a÷zın is in the accusative, marked by -ı. 25. Regional colloquial elements are the palatalization of /s/ in the consonant cluster /st/ in zuerschd and triffschd as well as the shortening and raising of the vowel in des instead of das and the tag gell . 26. The German address form langer (‘man, old boy’) and the Turkish address form lan (‘man’), taken from male repertoires, are normal in the ‘Powergirls’ in-group style. 27. The girls know that TU occasionally smokes pot; therefore, HI’s question does not refer to a secret. HI rejecting TU’s critique implies that from her perspective the question is no great infringement on TU’s privacy. 28. The Turkish informants to whom I presented the conversational material confirmed the ‘Powergirls’’ impression that coarse expressions are negatively evaluated by outsiders. From an outside perspective, it is unusual for a young Turkish woman to use such language. 29. In connection with the video project, intensive discussions about the girls’ selfconception took place. In these discussions, the new model of a ‘self-assertive German-Turkish young woman’ emerged, who strives for social and professional success; see Keim (2007). 30. Suna’s utterance has markers of ‘youth language’ such as the use of the adjective voll as a modal adverb in die schreien voll and the intensifying formula isch schwör. Tuna’s call to order halt=s maul is a very rude colloquial expression. For the description of ‘youth language’, see, for example, Androutsopoulos 1998. 31. Throughout the meeting, Didem does not use the kind of coarseness that the other girls use in the same situation, for example, halt=s maul (‘shut up’) or siktir (‘fuck you’).

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References Androutsopoulos, Jannis 1998 Deutsche Jugendsprache. Untersuchungen zu ihren Strukturen und Funktionen. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe 1998 Identity as an Achievement and as a Tool. In: Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London/New Delhi: Sage, 1–14. Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.) 1998 Identities in Talk. London/New Delhi: Sage. Aslan, Sema 2005 Aspekte des kommunikativen Stils einer Gruppe weltläufiger Migranten türkischer Herkunft: Die ‘Europatürken’. Deutsche Sprache 4(4), 327–356. Auer, Peter 1986 Kontextualisierung. Studium Linguistik 19, 22–47. 1989 Natürlichkeit und Stil. In: Hinnenkamp, Volker and Margret Selting (eds.), Stil und Stilisierung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 27–60. Barth, Frederik 1969 Introduction. In: Barth, Frederik (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Bergen-Oslo/London: Univ. Forl., 9–38. Bausinger, Hermann 1972 Dialekte, Sprachbarrieren, Sondersprachen. Frankfurt: Fischer. Cindark, Ibrahim 2005 ‘Die Unmündigen’. Eine soziolinguistische Fallstudie der emanzipatorischen Migranten. Deutsche Sprache 4(4), 299–326. in prep. Die Unmündigen – der kommunikative soziale Stil der emanzipierten Migranten. Dissertationsprojekt, Universität Mannheim. Cindark, Ibrahim and Sema Aslan 2004 Deutschlandtürkisch? http://www.ids-mannheim.de/prag/soziostilistik/Deutschlandtuerkisch.pdf, 08.07.2004. Clarke, John et al. 1979 Jugendkultur als Widerstand. Milieus, Rituale, Provokationen. Frankfurt: Syndikat. Czyzewski, Marek, Martina Drescher, Elisabeth Gülich, and Heiko Hausendorf 1995 Nationale Selbst- und Fremdbilder im Gespräch. Kommunikative Prozesse nach der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands und dem Systemwandel in Ostmitteleuropa. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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Dundees, Alan, Jerry Leach, and Bora Özkök 1972 The strategy of Turkish boys’ verbal dueling rhymes. In: Gumperz, John and Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 130–160. Goffman, Erving 1974 Frame Analysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Gumperz, John 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. 1976 Anti-languages. American Anthropologist 78, 570–584. Heath, Shirley 1983 Ways with Words. Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hausendorf, Heiko 2000 Zugehörigkeit durch Sprache. Eine linguistische Studie am Beispiel der deutschen Wiedervereinigung (Reihe germanistische Linguistik 215). Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hebdige, Dick 1979 Subculture. The Meaning of Style. London/New York: Methuen. Henne, Helmut 1986 Jugend und ihre Sprache. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Hinnenkamp, Volker and Margret Selting (eds.) 1989 Stil und Stilisierung. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Irvine, Judith 2001 ‘Style’ as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In: Eckert, Penelope and John Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 21–43. Kallmeyer, Werner (ed.) 1994 Exemplarische Analysen des Sprachverhaltens in Mannheim (Kommunikation in der Stadt. Teil 1). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Kallmeyer, Werner and Inken Keim 1996 Divergent perspectives and social style in conflict talk. Folia Linguistica 30(3–4), Special issue, Interaktive Sozioliguistik, Helga Kotthoff (ed.), 271–298. 1999 Deutsch-Türkische Sprachvariation und die Herausbildung kommunikativer Stile in Migrantengruppen türkischer Herkunft. Manuscript, Mannheim.

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Eigenschaften von sozialen Stilen der Kommunikation: Am Beispiel einer türkischen Migrantinnengruppe. In: Erfurt, Jürgen (ed.), ‘Multisprech’: Hybridität, Variation, Identität (OBST 65). Osnabrück: Universität, 35–56.

Keim, Inken 1995 Kommunikative Stilistik einer sozialen Welt ‘kleiner Leute’ in der Mannheimer Innenstadt (Kommunikation in der Stadt. Teil 3). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. 2002 Sozial-kulturelle Selbstdefinition und sozialer Stil: Junge Deutschtürkinnen im Gespräch. In: Keim, Inken and Wilfried Schütte (eds.), Soziale Welten und kommunikative Stile. Tübingen: Narr, 233–259. 2003 Social style of communication and bilingual speech practices: Case study of three migrant youth groups of Turkish origin in Mannheim/Germany. Turkic Languages 6(2), 284–298. 2005 Kommunikative Praktiken in türkischstämmigen Kinder- und Jugendgruppen in Mannheim. Deutsche Sprache 3(4), 198–226. 2007 Die ‘türkischen Powergirls’. Lebenswelt und kommunikativer Stil einer Migrantinnengruppe in Mannheim. Tübingen: Narr. Labov, William 1972 Rules for ritual insults. In: Sudnow, David (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction. New York/London: The Free Press, 120–169. Sacks, Harvey 1979 Hotrodder: A revolutionary category. In: Psathas, George (ed), Everyday Language. Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington, 7–21. Sandig, Barbara and Margret Selting 1997 Einleitung. In: Selting, Margret and Barbara Sandig (eds.), Sprechund Gesprächsstile. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1–8. Schwitalla, Johannes 1994 Die Vergegenwärtigung einer Gegenwelt. Sprachliche Formen der sozialen Abgrenzung einer Jugendlichengruppe in Vogelstang. In: Kallmeyer, Werner (ed.), Exemplarische Analysen des Sprachverhaltens in Mannheim (Kommunikation in der Stadt. Teil 1). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 467–509. 1995 Kommunikative Stilistik zweier sozialer Welten in Mannheim-Vogelstang (Kommunikation in der Stadt. Teil 4). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Schwitalla, Johannes and Jürgen Streeck 1989 Subversive Interaktionen. Sprachliche Verfahren der sozialen Abgrenzung in einer Jugendlichengruppe. In: Hinnenkamp, Volker and Margret Selting (eds.), Stil und Stilisierung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 229–252.

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Selting, Margret and Volker Hinnenkamp 1989 Einleitung: Stil und Stilisierung in der interpretativen Soziolinguistik. In: Hinnenkamp, Volker and Margret Selting (eds.), Stil und Stilisierung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1–26. Selting, Margret and Barbara Sandig (eds.) 1997 Sprech- und Gesprächsstile. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Sirim, Emran 2004 Bilinguales Sprachverhalten bei jungen Deutschtürken. Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Mannheim. Soeffner, Hans-Georg 1986 Stil und Stilisierung. Punk oder die Überhöhung des Alltags. In: Gumprecht, Hans-Ulrich and Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.), Stil. Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselements. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 317–341. Strauss, Anselm 1984 Social worlds and their segmentation processes. In: Denzin, Norman (ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction 5. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 123–139. Tajfel, Henri 1978 Differentiation Between Social Groups. Studies in Social Psychology. London: Academic Press. Tertilt, Hermann 1996 Turkish Power Boys. Ethnographie einer Jugendbande. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Widdicombe, Sue 1998 Identity as an analysts’ and a participants’ resource. In: Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage,191–206. Widdicombe, Sue and Robin Wooffitt 1995 The Language of Youth Subcultures: Social Identity in Action. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Willis, Paul 1981 ‘Profane Culture’. Rocker, Hippies: Subversive Stile der Jugendkultur. Frankfurt: Syndikat. 1982 Spaß am Widerstand: Gegenkultur in der Arbeiterschule. Frankfurt: Syndikat

Chapter 7 Bystanders and the linguistic construction of identity in face-to-back communication* Kathryn A. Woolard 1.

Introduction

The notion that social identities are interactionally constituted and linguistically displayed is now quite well-established in linguistic anthropology, as well as in interactional sociolinguistics and sociology. Situated, contingent identities are constructed and enacted through the deployment of variable linguistic resources in interaction. Conversation analysts in particular have elaborated on this view of the contingent discursive achievement of identities. However, the linguist Robert LePage also influentially analyzed linguistic and stylistic choices as “acts of identity” on the part of individual speakers: “the individual creates the patterns for his verbal behavior so as to resemble those of the group or groups with which from time to time he wishes to be identified” (Le Page 1988: 31). Penny Eckert (2000) and colleagues have since developed the idea that speakers style unique social identities for themselves by cobbling together choices from an array of sociolinguistic variables. Whether from micro-sociological or sociolinguistic viewpoints, social identity is now generally seen as a form of discursive practice, and thus as fluid, multiple and negotiable. What has been less satisfactorily decided is what and where the limits of such speaker-centered, agentive interactional processes are. LePage included several caveats or “riders” to his model, to capture constraints on a speaker’s willful conjuring of an identity through linguistic practices. However, these were primarily cognitive and psycholinguistic constraints on a speaker’s ability to produce a target linguistic form. Questions about more social constraints on identity construction remain unexplored. How much freedom of range does identity-in-interaction have? How are the practices that produce ethnolinguistic identity distributed over space and time? What is the relevant social compass of the constitution and display of identity?

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In one attempt to delineate the relations between interactionallyestablished identities and the macro-social order, the sociologist Don Zimmerman distinguished three types of identities that have different “home territories”: discourse, situational, and “transportable identities” (Zimmerman 1998). Race and gender are “transportable” in Zimmerman’s schema. Zimmerman treats these as forms of identity that “tag along with individuals as they move through their daily routines” because they are usually “visible,” on the basis of physical or (material) cultural insignia (Zimmerman 1998: 91). This conceptualization has been refined by Auer and Mair (2001), who rightly underline that such identities may be transported in more ephemeral behavioral insignia, including speech. Ethnolinguistic identities, i.e. ethnic identity categories defined by language affiliation such as Catalan and Castilian in Barcelona, are thus transportable identities. In his introduction to this volume, Auer asks to what extent participants can mobilize heterogeneity within the linguistic systems of their repertoire in order to symbolically express their affiliation with or disaffiliation from a given social group. Interactional sociolinguistics has generally highlighted speaker agency, creativity and fluidity in such symbolic expressions, and has also emphasized production. In this article, I will focus on the facets that correspondingly have been underplayed in the interactionist consensus: constraint, imposition, and the (in)validating reception of a speaker’s linguistic production of identity claims in interaction.

2.

Gatherings, bystanders, and identity

The principal argument of this article is that social identities, even those established in and through interaction, are transportable and tag along not only or necessarily because they are embodied in visible or hearable characteristics, nor because they are irrepressibly given off (as for Erving Goffman) in linguistic variables “from below” consciousness (as for William Labov), nor because they are produced or mobilized afresh in each new encounter (as in some conversation-analytic accounts). Rather, linguistically-displayed identities can be exported beyond transitory encounters and reified as features of individuals through chains of participation in gatherings, in social networks and in institutional settings. I develop this suggestion on the basis of Erving Goffman’s (1981) wellknown argument that the common two-person speaker-hearer model is inadequate for the consideration of significant aspects of social interaction.

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There are not just two kinds, but various types of ratified and unratified parties to an encounter, Goffmann observed. He pointed out the significance of the “gathering”, which he defined as an aggregate of persons in visual and aural range of one another in a physical arena in which an encounter takes place (Goffman 1981: 136). “Routinely, it is relative to a gathering, not merely to an encounter, that the interactional facts will have to be considered,” Goffman wrote (1981: 136). Among the potentially consequential actors for any encounter is the “bystander”, a member of such a gathering who is an unratified, "adventitious participant" in the encounter by virtue of being within visual and aural range of its ratified participants (Goffman 1981: 132). Bystanders, Goffman pointed out, can catch the talk of an encounter in bits and pieces, and follow it partially and temporarily, becoming overhearers. Bystanders can even become “intended overhearers” (as distinct from addressees). Significantly for our purposes, Goffman suggests that even the most polite bystander will be able to glean information such as “the language spoken, and ‘who’ (in categorical or biographical terms) is in an encounter with whom” (1981: 132). The presence of bystanders, Goffman asserts, should be considered the rule rather than the exception. This rule, I suggest, has been observed mostly in the breach in research on ethnolinguistic identities-in-interaction. Certainly, analysis of the achievement and communication of identities-in-interaction has expanded beyond the two-person arrangement to multi-party encounters. Nonetheless, it has not strayed far from the imagery of engaged, participating speakers and addressees associated with the notion of “face-to-face” communication.1 However, identity is displayed not only to the active, immediate contributors to an interactional encounter, but also to non-participating (nonspeaking) witnesses or bystanders. Goffman’s fundamental insights allow us to consider one of the basic ways in which social identities can be simultaneously interactionallyestablished and yet transportable beyond a given interaction. That is, identities formulated or displayed in interactions are transported in part simply because these interactions occur not just in face-to-face encounters but in gatherings, where they are witnessed by bystanders. The bystander can function as a nexus for the portability of identity in several ways, among them the fact that the bystander to one encounter may play a significant active role in the next in many institutions and communities. In many gatherings, bystanders are not only future interactants but also future social arbiters or gate-keepers (Ehrlich 2002).

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However, because bystanders’ access is partial, coming in bits and pieces, the formulation of identity they carry out may sometimes be systematically different from that done by participants in an encounter, even when they are invoking the same interpretive rules. Bystanders don’t see the same sequence of unfolding events, and from the same standpoint, that participants do.2 Because of this, sequential analysis even of the seeming entirety of an encounter (the bounding of an encounter already being a thorny issue in itself) cannot fully capture its consequences for identity assignment. Nonetheless, such consequences still can be seen as interactionally-given when we broaden our understanding of the relevant interactional field from the encounter to the gathering. I want to suggest that “face-to-side” and “face-to-back” communication to bystanders in the gathering can be at least as important as, and possibly even more consequential than, face-to-face communication within the encounter for the creation and management of transportable social identities. Between the proximal and the distal, to use the terms applied to the issue of identity by Zimmerman, we might say there lies a medial arena of identity, where portability materializes. The exploits of the first self-created individual in Western literature illustrate well the paradoxical pitfalls of interactive identity construction in a social world. Don Quixote’s radical project of self-transformation has been characterized as the “invention of individualism”, yet even this revolutionary of identity eventually found himself trapped in the identities he himself had created (Mariscal 2003). In the second volume of Cervantes’s tale, published in 1615, Don Quixote encounters several characters who have read the first volume, published in 1605. Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza “see their freedom slowly slip away” as former bystanders – readers – become participating characters who insist on staging interactions that realize the expectations they formed about these two based on their reading of the first book (Mariscal 2003: 4). As George Mariscal puts it, “no longer free to re-create themselves, Don Quixote and Sancho are in effect trapped inside both the preconceived ideas of others and their own fame” (2003: 4). What was true for our first early modern European hero is also true, I argue, for speakers in the late modern world of allegedly fluid identities. In the next sections, I will illustrate this simple claim, and hope to establish that it is non-trivial, with some examples from earlier research in Barcelona. All illustrations are taken from interviews with or interactions among adolescents, and most come from a group of 36 classmates in one school in the late 1980’s. (For a fuller report on this study, see Woolard 1997.)

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3.

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Ethnographic background

The social world in Barcelona is traditionally divided into ‘Catalans’ and ‘Castilians.’ Both referentially in discourse and pragmatically in interaction, these identity categories are fitted onto actual individuals with more or less difficulty (see Woolard 1989). While many criteria enter into play in different contexts, language choice is the fundamental shibboleth. For example, young people routinely and systematically transformed my interview questions about Castilian speakers or Catalan speakers into responses about Castilians and Catalans, as seen in the boldfaced segments of the exchange below: (1) KW:

M:

Tu notes diferències entre castellanoparlants i catalanoparlants?3 ‘Do you notice any differences between Castilianspeakers and Catalanspeakers?’ Els catalans i els castellans estan picats. ‘Catalans and Castilians are at odds’

In the system M draws on in this exchange, people who speak Catalan – catalanoparlants – are Catalans; people who speak Castilian – castellanoparlants – are Castilians.4 However, even the reduction of identity to the single criterion of language does not allow a simple, straightforward diagnosis. Given long-established bilingualism among Catalans and growing competence in Catalan among Castilians in Barcelona, the translation of actual patterns of language use into this dichotomy is a complicated linguistic ideological process. It involves what Irvine and Gal call iconicization and erasure, highlighting some aspects of linguistic behavior and ignoring others (Irvine and Gal 2000). For instance, only linguistic choices made in some interactions are relevant to claims to Catalan or Castilian identity. Home language and habitual language in informal solidary relations with others known to be Catalan are traditionally among these. The significance of the language spoken at home in diagnosing identity gives rise to the convoluted characterization of one student by another in example (2): (2)

yo tinc una amiga que parla el castellà i és catalana, bueno a casa seva són catalans, però ella sap parlar català però parla castellà perquè li agrada més.

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Kathryn A. Woolard ‘I have a friend who speaks Castilian but she’s Catalan, well at her house they’re Catalans, but she knows how to speak Catalan but she speaks Castilian because she likes it better.’

The practice of assigning Catalan and Castilian identity on the basis of language use is also a particularly complex affair because linguistic choices can index the addressee’s identity as much as – or even more than – a speaker’s, as is well known. Overt acts of linguistic accommodation (Giles and Powesland 1975; Giles, Coupland and Coupland 1991) can index addressee-focused identity attributions rather than speaker-focused identity claims. A Catalan not only can but traditionally was expected to use Castilian even in informal domains to accommodate Castilians when directly addressing them. For this reason, speaking Castilian in interaction with a Castilian never has constituted a claim to Castilian identity for a Catalan speaker. Change in this traditional accommodation norm is in progress in autonomous Catalonia, but comes slowly. It still operated for many of the case study students, and for them language choice often indexed not speaker identity but addressee identity. For example, Frederic interacted with some classmates in Castilian, but they still classified him as Catalan because they understood him to be merely accommodating them. In turn, some students interacted with Sara or Tomàs in Catalan, and yet they categorized these two as Castilian (for reasons that will be discussed below). Young Catalans who routinely speak Catalan within their own ethnolinguistic group often volunteer that it is very difficult to use Catalan to someone who responds in Castilian, even when the response itself evidences full comprehension of Catalan. A passively bilingual conversation is felt by some speakers as a violation of some fundamental social norm, as seen in examples (3) and (4): (3)

És que és mania. Yo no li puc parlar a una persona que a mi em parla en castellà, yo, no em surt en català. ‘It’s an obsession. I can’t speak [Catalan] to a person who speaks to me in Castilian, me, it won’t come out in Catalan.’

(4)

És molt difícil parlar amb una persona que està parlant en castellà i tu li parles en català. Sembla que li parlin en xino, és molt difícil. ‘It’s very hard to speak to a person who’s speaking Castilian and you talk to them in Catalan. It’s like speaking to them in Chinese, it’s really hard.’

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Such accommodation presents a challenge to LePage’s speaker-focused “Acts of Identity” model. In accommodation, a speaker’s language choice projects and adapts to the linguistic preferences, abilities or identity of the addressee, but does not constitute a claim about speaker’s own identity, except perhaps as a polite person who puts others before self. Such accommodation might indeed be said to assert a claim about affiliation in the sense of liking and solidarity with the addressee as an individual (Giles and Powesland 1975). That is precisely what Castilians in Barcelona have sometimes said. During this fieldwork in the 1980s, one sometimes heard it said of a Catalan who breaks the accommodation norm and maintains Catalan when Castilian is returned, “he cares more about his language than about me.” But the expression of sympathy (or lack thereof) in this sense is not the same as a claim about speaker’s (transportable) social identity or category membership. Like Giles and Powesland's, LePage’s model is built in part on an implicit equation of these two kinds of solidarity (social alignment and social/linguistic similarity), but the validity of this equation of liking to likeness is a question that has long been begged in sociolinguistic studies (see, e.g., Woolard 1985). The question is underlined when we consider that traditionally – and still – some Catalans accommodate not just to an interlocutor’s active projection of identity, as seen in that interlocutor’s choice of vehicular language for the conversation. Rather, they may accommodate to what they understand to be the interlocutor’s ‘underlying’ transportable identity as diagnosed from other conversations witnessed, even if such accommodation violates the interlocutor’s own language choice in the present interaction. Castilian-speaking students who were trying to master Catalan often found that Catalan classmates responded to them in Castilian, even when addressed in Catalan. Frustrated learners understood these Catalan classmates’ language choices with them to be indexical of an unchanging classification of their ethnolinguistic identity and linguistic skills as “Castilian”, as these two comments from Josep illustrate: (5)

amb alguns de la classe potser yo els parlo català, no?, perquè el vull aprendre, però molts em contesten en castellà ( ) no sé, creuen que yo els entenc millor. ‘with some of the people in the class maybe I speak Catalan to them, you know? because I want to learn it, but many of them answer me in Castilian, ( ) I don’t know, they think I’ll understand them better.’

194 (6)

4.

Kathryn A. Woolard El que passa es que jo soc castellà, no? Em tenen com un castellà pero jo parlo perfectament el català i les fa com cosa de parlar en castellà, no? Es creuen que jo no entenc el català, no? ‘What happens is that I’m Castilian, no? They see me as Castilian but I speak Catalan perfectly and it’s like a thing with them to speak [to me] in Castilian, you know? They think I don’t understand Catalan, you know?’

Adolescent language choice, identity, and classroom bystanders

Despite the general importance of the home language to the establishment of ethnolinguistic identity and to ensuing language choices in Catalonia, adolescents in my case study routinely acknowledged that they couldn’t tell which language their classmates spoke at home. Knowledge or inferences (founded or unfounded) about home language didn’t usually underlie their categorizations of classmates and resultant language choices with them. Rather, aspects of language choice witnessed at school provided the basis for them to distinguish Catalans and Castilians among their classmates. Most (though not all) of the students in the classroom I studied could be heard speaking Catalan and Castilian at some time in the school setting. So what language choices did students attend to in diagnosing the identity of their peers? The language used in the classroom was sometimes relevant, but only sometimes, given the dominance of obligatory Catalan-medium instruction. Attention to classroom language use in discussing peer identities depended on the interactional activity in which identity assignment occurred. When I asked in interviews about typical differences between Catalans and Castilians, students considered the language used by fellow students in official classroom activities relevant to placing them in one category or the other. Many students responding to these interview questions used the term “Castilian” to mean functional monolinguals who did not learn and use Catalan, even at moments officially mandated or suggested in the classroom. In this sense, active social or home use of Castilian didn’t necessarily make a person Castilian; rather, the failure to become actively bilingual in Catalan did. “Castilian” in this use was a monolingual identity based on an absence rather than a presence. The focus of the Castilian identity category in this sense was in those who didn’t use Catalan even

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when it was officially required in classroom activities. To be Castilian was to refuse the use of Catalan. In talking about their actual friendship circles, however, and at the point of selecting a language to speak with individual classmates, use of Catalan in official classroom activities did not usually count as identity–relevant. Rather, it was taken as contextually mandated and therefore not a significant sign of identity that would affect interaction among peers and friends. This pattern suggests a paradoxical effect of a successful official language policy in relation to acts of identity. Thanks to Catalan-medium schooling, more people than in the past may be speaking Catalan – in school, casual interactions, and commercial exchanges – without this meaning that they either count themselves or are counted by others as Catalans. This is a parallel to the fact that under the former Castilianist sociolinguistic regime before Catalan autonomy, speaking Castilian in official domains didn’t signify a claim to Castilian identity or a loss of or challenge to Catalan identity. Within the frame of a new sociolinguistic policy, linguistic behavior once seen as identity-claiming can lose that meaning. Changes in patterns of linguistic choice do not then necessarily reflect or affect speakers’ personal sense of affiliation with social identity categories; i.e. they are no longer necessarily acts of identity. The language used in interaction with classmates in general also did not usually count in peers' identity assignments in the case study classroom. The language choice these students most often used as the key diagnostic of identity was that which an individual used with those peers recognized as his or her ‘friends’, in a more intimate and solidary relation than just “classmates”. Observed language choices in encounters in which the diagnostician was not a ratified participant were thus often central to decisions about identity. We can illustrate the effects of language choice with close friends on bystanders by looking at Sara and Eva, two girls in the case study classroom of 36 students. Nearly three-quarters of the girls in the class participated in homogeneous “best-friend” relationships or networks, in which all members not only used the same language, but came from the same linguistic background and shared the same ethnolinguistic identity. These networks were also relative closed and cliquish (see Woolard 1997).5 Sara and Eva were anomalous, and their presence accounted for almost all of the heterogeneous friendship networks among the girls in the class. Eva was from a Catalan-speaking home, and Sara was from a bilingual home, where she spoke Catalan with her father. Both girls used Catalan

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fluently with teachers and Catalan peers. But both were associated with cliques of girls from exclusively Castilian-speaking homes, and these associations were recognized and commented on by classmates. Sara and Eva each adapted to, or accommodated, the language habits of her circle of friends. Sara used only Castilian with her principal friends. Eva codeswitched between Catalan and Castilian, in the manner of her group – something that native Catalan speakers do not usually do but is more common among second-language speakers of Catalan whom I call “New Catalans”.6 So, while they often spoke Catalan outside these circles, both girls used Castilian, either exclusively or intermixed with Catalan in a nontraditional way, in their close friendships on display in the classroom. These associations and accompanying linguistic behaviors stamped the girls’ identity for many of their classmates. Their ability to speak Catalan was recognized, but at the same time as it was often taken to be non-native or secondary to their identity. So, in answer to my question, “who are good speakers of Catalan among those who don’t speak it at home?”, five classmates named Eva and six named Sara, and most used terms that showed that they equated my category “those who don’t speak Catalan at home” to “Castilians”. Several more initially categorized Sara or Eva this way, although they then repaired their classification: (7)

El Rafael, el Víctor, i després no sé si l’Eva és castellana o catalana, però l’Eva. ‘Rafael, Víctor, and then I don’t know if Eva is Castilian or Catalan, but Eva.’

(8)

Eva. Bueno, l’Eva parla de les dues maneres, pero més bé, el castellà. ‘Eva. Well, Eva speaks both ways, but more often, Castilian.’

(9)

Son castellanes, Rosario, Margarita, Elena, Adela, Sara. Sara parla molt el català. El que passa es que parla castellà perquè va amb aquestes. ‘They’re Castilians, Rosario, Margarita, Elena, Adela, Sara. Sara speaks Catalan a lot. What happens is that she speaks Castilian because she goes around with these girls.’

To some classroom bystanders, Sara and Eva were not just girls who had Castilian friends, but themselves became Castilian speakers (castellanoparlants) and “Castilians”. To be seen as a traditional Catalan when speaking Castilian, one must be known to be accommodating, that is, moving from a

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Catalan-speaking position to Castilian for the sake of an addressee. Because all their intimates were Castilian speakers, Sara and Eva could not routinely do this. Frederic describes exactly this pattern and its effect on his own response to Sara: (10)

El primer trimestre i aixins quan no ens coneixiem ningú, doncs, jo sentia parlar castellà amb les seves amigues, li parlava en castellà. Amb ella parlo en català, a vegades. ‘The first trimester and all when nobody knew each other, well, I heard [Sara] speak Castilian with her friends, so I spoke to to her in Castilian. [Now] I speak Catalan with her, sometimes.’

Despite the newer counter-evidence, however, the label stuck in Frederic’s social mapping of the classroom. Frederic still thought of Sara as “Castilian” and listed her as such in answer to my question. The social challenge in such a situation is the converse of the problem of “passing”. Those who attempt to “pass” performatively from one identity to another may avoid interaction with members of their group of origin, who might “out” or unmask them in interaction to bystanders. In cases like Sara’s and Eva’s, individuals unintentionally lose their legitimately claimable ascriptive identities of origin because they do not regularly interact closely with members of their group of origin, and they thus lose the chance to be observed and overheard using the “right” language. Although they are not attempting to pass as Castilian, this identity is imposed on them by bystanders as a result. In contrast to Sara and Eva, however, two Catalan-origin and Catalan self-identified boys, Emili and Frederic, were able to maintain close friendships with Castilians, accommodating them in Castilian, without losing their Catalan identities among their classmates. That was because, unlike Sara and Eva, these boys moved in a large bilingual circle of friends, which allowed them to display their Catalan ability in Catalan friendships. Frederic described himself as using both languages equally within his group, “because we’re a group of friends, half Catalan and the other half Castilian. So you have to speak mixing them”. As could be predicted from this quote, Frederic practiced the traditional Catalan accommodation norm of switching to the language he associated with the identity of his addressee; he rarely actually “mixed” the languages in a single utterance unless he was switching interlocutors. One of Frederic’s friends, Paco, was indeed just about as monolingual a Castilian speaker as could be found. But neither such a Castilian friendship, nor Frederic’s linguistic accommodation

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to it, created any confusion or weakening of his Catalan identity among his classmates. The same was true for Emili. I suggested in an earlier analysis that this difference was evidence of the differential power of association for girls and boys (Woolard 1997). That is, not only did I observe gender differences in the structure and composition of social networks, but I also posited that there was bias in the ideological template students applied in interpreting observed relations and behaviors, depending on which sex exhibited these behaviors. Peer association seemed to count more, to be more constraining, in determining girls’ social identity than boys. This fit with the argument developed by Eckert that ‘persona’ or a set of identities is the source of girls’ status, while action is the basis for boys’ status in a peer hierarchy (Eckert 1989). Now taking into consideration the dynamics of interaction from the bystander’s point of view, I would reframe that interpretation. Gender enters the equation at the formation and shaping of the friendship circles in the case study classroom, but not necessarily at the reading of them by bystanders. Thus, the bilingual, bi-ethnic makeup of Frederic and Emili’s circle allowed them to display clearly to bystanders that in speaking Castilian, they were accommodating to addressee’s identity rather than expressing their own (i.e. to disambiguate participant-related codeswitches and signal that addressee rather than speaker was the participant to whom the decision is keyed). Within friendship interactions, they observably used sometimes monolingual Catalan and sometimes monolingual Castilian, and this fit within traditional norms of Catalan identity. In contrast, the more homogeneous circles of Sara and Eva did not enable them to display a Catalan identity to observers outside those circles through their language choice with friends. Even though they might have been drawing on the same linguistic norm as Fredric did – that of matching their interlocutors’ language choice – these girls did not have the opportunity to affirm a Catalan identity for themselves, since none of the close friends whose linguistic behaviors they matched were Catalan. The conversational participants whom they addressed in Castilian might themselves interpret this choice as linguistic accommodation to them rather than as an identity claim on the part of these speaker (and there is indeed evidence from interviews that the friends understood Eva and Sara to be Catalans). Observing from outside, however, bystanders were given no evidence that these girls’ social selves, as founded in close friendships, were Catalan, and they might easily arrive at a different interpretation of the meaning of the linguistic behavior.

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The differentially confining character of friendships for these girls and boys can be accounted for by the fact that the composition of their friendship networks allowed different opportunities for display of identity to bystanders. There is probably a second point to be made here about focusing vs. diffusion, a concern that LePage associated with acts of identity. Certainly it is true that under norms of linguistic accommodation, the more the social network is focused in one ethnolinguistic group, then the more focusing the effect on the identity of the occasional anomalous member. Girls’ homogeneous networks are focused and focusing in this sense, in that there is significant matching of linguistic background, current linguistic habits, and identity assignment. But the opposite is not necessarily true. More heterogeneous networks that are not so highly focused in one ethnolinguistic group don’t necessarily lead to a diffusion of an individual’s linguistic habits or a breakdown of ethnolinguistic identity. In this classroom, ethnolinguistically diffuse networks and diffuse practices did not diffuse identity for the boys. Rather, they allowed members to keep strong but different identities. Mixed male friendship groups led to less identity crossing into an alternate identity than the girls did, not more. Nor did the mixed male groups seem to encourage a hybrid or mixed identity. Such a hybrid identity did exist in the bilingual “New Catalan” girls, but it did not derive from on-the-ground mixing between Catalans and Castilian girls as close friends (see Woolard 1997). For boys in this classroom whose friendship patterns were more similar to those of the girls – i.e. dyadic or homogeneous – the effects on their recognized identities were similar to those for girls. This occurred with Tomàs, a native Catalan speaker who routinely used Castilian with his single close friend, Jesús. Tomàs systematically accommodated Jesús in Castilian, and some of Tomàs’s classmates and even teachers mistakenly assumed he was himself “Castilian”, and not a habitual speaker of Catalan (though they could hear and admired his Catalan linguistic ability in the classroom). (11)

No em sé, no, perque no sé quina parl – si que parlen a casa seva. El Tomàs, creo que es castellano y habla muy bien el catalán. ‘I don’t know, because I don’t know who spea- if they speak at home. Tomàs, I think he’s Castilian and he speaks Catalan very well.’

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For another boy whose network was large but ethnolinguistically nearly homogeneous, the same kind of effect was achieved as for Sara and Eva, but in the reverse direction. Several classmates were taken by surprise to learn through a teacher’s classroom comment that Rafael, who moved in an exclusively Catalan-speaking circle, was of Castilian background: (12)

En Rafael diu que és castellanoparlant i yo no ho hauria dit mai, perquè és clar, per a mi sembla que sigui català. ‘Rafael says he’s a Castilian speaker, but I never would have guessed that, because, obviously, to me he appears Catalan.’

(13)

És que jo, vull dir, el Rafael, no m'ho pensava jo que parlava en castellà,...el Rafael, no m'ho pensava. I quan ho va dir, (laugh) em va sorprendre, no? ‘It’s just that I, I mean, Rafael, I never thought that he spoke Castilian... Rafael, I never would have thought it. And when he said so, (laugh) it surprised me, no?’

Rafael in fact had sought the Catalan identity that classmates like this one ascribed to him, and he had gone to some trouble to transform his identity when he entered this high school, as shown in example (14): (14)

Vaig (decidir) si jo m’ho proposo parlar català, parlaré en català desde principi…el primer dia de curs, no, vaig dir, bueno, aquí al [school name] parlo català I ja està. I parlo català. ‘I decided that if I wanted to speak Catalan, I would speak Catalan from the start…The first day of school, you know, I said, ok, here at [school name] I speak Catalan, and that’s it, I speak Catalan.’

When I asked what language he spoke with classmates, Rafael distanced himself from Castilian speakers among them: (15)

Als que parlen més en castellà, doncs en castellà, però normalment els meus amics casi tots son catalans, parlo en català sempre. ‘To those who speak more in Castilian, then in Castilian, but normally my friends are almost all Catalan, I always speak Catalan.’

Prompted to list Castilian speakers in class, Rafael again took pains to make clear that they were not his friends:

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(16)

5.

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Adela, Rosario, Sara..el José Luis, el José, algú més, no me’n recordo ara. Però aquests no son tant amics, jo vaig amb els altres, normalment. ‘Adela, Rosario, Sara, ..José Luis, José, some others, I don’t remember now. But these aren’t really friends, I go around with the others, normally.’

Exploiting bystanders, bystanders exploiting

As Rafael’s case suggests, any sociolinguistically indexical fact can be, and often is, creatively exploited and manipulated by speakers (Silverstein 1995). So, in language choice as in so many other interactional phenomena, we find speakers playing to the crowd. Singh refers to this as the theatrical and game-playing aspects of code identification, and views these as overlooked in the traditional analyses of codeswitching and ingroup identity (Singh 1983). Language choice can be intended to be overheard, and thus potentially mobilized for identity claiming. For example, one of the students who showed the most identity entrepreneurship was Laura, one of the ‘New Catalans’. She was one of Eva’s friends, Castilian-origin bilinguals and codeswitchers. On a science field trip, Laura became separated from her clique. Looking for them, she ran across a large field where most of the other kids were occupied in various ways. As she ran, Laura shouted loudly On sou? On sou? (‘Where are you?’) in Catalan. It is particularly noteworthy that Laura used a public call in Catalan to locate her intimates among a field of far more Catalanidentified potential addressees. All her classmates could thus “overhear” her using Catalan not just to address her ingroup of friends, but apparently to single them out. Such a language strategy seems more designed for public display to intended overhearers than for these particular intended addressees. Since these girls most often used Castilian or a mixed-language strategy among themselves, they in fact were not especially likely to recognize themselves as the intended addressees, out of all the young people present, of a Catalan-medium cry. If speakers such as Laura can manipulate their interactional displays of language choice to bystanders, bystanders can in turn define or redefine displays, whether intended or unintended to be overheard. (In fact, by orienting to overheard language choice publicly, bystanders can imply that the choice was intended to be overheard and throw doubt on its authenticity.)

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Josep, the boy who complained in example (6) that classmates ignored his use of Catalan and pegged him as Castilian, provides an example. As an incipient Catalan-speaker trying to restructure his identity in this Catalanoriented high school, he preferred to use the Catalan form of his name, Josep, rather than the Castilian form, José. In general, the linguistic form of one’s name was taken as a sign of the ethnolinguistic identity one claimed and was accorded (see also Bierbach and Birken-Silverman, this volume). Thus, teachers discussed this boy with me using the Castilian form of his name in otherwise monolingual Catalan discourse, signaling that they identified him as Castilian. His closest friend in the bi-ethnic boys’ network, Emili, was helping Josep by making occasional moves to address him in Catalan. This began with naming; Emili was among the first to use the Catalan form that Josep himself preferred, rather than the Castilian, which teachers used. On the science field trip, a female Catalan student who was not a ratified participant overheard Emili address this boy as “Josep”, the Catalan form. She laughingly and loudly commented in Catalan to her girlfriends, ‘Josep’, li diu ‘Josep’ (‘’Josep’, he calls him ‘Josep’’), ridiculing the language choice and orienting other bystanders to it as dispreferred. Such ridicule presumably not only was based on her perception of Josep as Castilian but also reinforced this perception among her classmates.

6.

Conclusion

We find that people’s ethnic identities are formulated and oriented-to in interaction not only by participants in encounters but also by bystanders. As members of recurring gatherings, bystanders are one of the constraints on the autonomy of the speaker in constructing identity, which I posed as an issue in the beginning of this article. Bystanders can do much to focus, transport and institutionalize the interactionally-inscribed social identities of others. Moreover, individuals in different social circles can find that their identities are differently ‘diagnosed’ and reinforced by bystanders not because they enact different language choice principles in interaction, but rather because of the structural particulars of the overheard interactions in which they frequently participate. We can say that ‘face-to-side’ and ‘faceto-back’ communication is as relevant to the establishment of social identity as is the ‘face-to-face’.

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Young people often are all too acutely aware of the effect of interactional displays to bystanders and the gathering on their social identities, not only ethnic identities as displayed in linguistic choices, but more generally. As seen in both the Catalan study and in Eckert’s (2000) work on high school identities in Detroit, transitions to large middle or high schools create just the kind of gatherings in which bystanders can quite rapidly and powerfully institutionalize individuals’ social identities on the basis of partially observed and overheard encounters. In recurring and institutionalized social gatherings such as the classroom and playground, bystanders’ categorizations of interactants’ identity create conditions that constrain further identity displays in future interactions. Like Don Quixote and his friend Sancho, schoolchildren often learn to their chagrin that they quickly get locked into identities they didn’t necessarily intend to claim, in the children’s case through the company they keep. In exchange, some find that the artful staging of displays to bystanders in peer interactions is a good route to successfully claiming new, sought-after identities.

Notes * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Colloquy on “Acts of Identity” organized by Peter Auer and Christian Mair, Freiburg, Germany, February 2002, and in the session, “What’s Left of Ethnolinguistic Identity?”, organized by Jan Blommaert and Robert Moore, at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, IL, November 2003. 1. For other topics there have been expansions beyond the face-to-face, most notably in the work of Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Goodwin. M. Goodwin’s (1990) analysis of “he-said-she-said” routines, for example, traces the way interactions ramify through relationships in a social network. Studies of gossip (e.g., Haviland 1977) also show such social ramification of communication. 2. By extension, analysts have the same limitations, and it would be useful to consider analysts as bystanders. Unfortunately, this is an issue beyond the scope of this article. 3. In all transcribed examples, italic script represents Catalan. Castilian speech is represented in underlined text. Text is rendered in boldface to make an analytic point. Poorly intelligible stretches are represented by ( ). 4. Readers will rightly ask whether young people categorized their peers ethnically or ethnolinguistically when not prompted to do so by an interviewer. Although this is an important question, I cannot explore the complexities here. Students in this study varied in how likely they were to introduce ethnic and

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ethnolinguistic labels spontaneously to discuss their social world. Classroom observations and evidence from naturally-occurring talk showed that the ethnolinguistic distinction was relevant in peer and friendly interactions, but in varying degrees for different students. For some evidence, see Woolard 1997. 5. Network data was collected through both interview and observation of interactions and classroom seating. 6. Classifying the linguistic habits of Eva’s friends, for example, one student from outside Laura’s network said: “Laura and those girls, they talk to each other in Castilian. But if you talk to them, they answer in Catalan. It depends on the moment you catch them.”

References Auer, Peter and Christian Mair 2001 Acts of identity. Unpublished manuscript. Eckert, Penelope 1989 The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation. Language Variation and Change 1, 245–267. 2000 Linguistic Variation as Social Practice; The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Ehrlich, Susan 2002 Legal institutions, nonspeaking recipiency and participants’ orientations. Discourse & Society 13(6), 731–747. Giles, Howard and Peter F. Powesland 1975 Speech Style and Social Evaluation. London: Academic Press. Giles, Howard, Justine Coupland, and Niklas Coupland (eds.) 1991 Contexts of Accommodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, Erving 1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodwin, Marjorie 1990 He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization Among Black Children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haviland, John B. 1977 Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge in Zincantan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal 2000 Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In: Kroskrity, P. V. (ed.), Regimes of Language. Santa Fe: School of American Research, 35–84.

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Le Page, Robert B. 1988 Some premises concerning the standardization of languages, with special reference to Caribbean Creole English. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 71, 25–36. Mariscal, George 2003 Tilt. Review of Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes, Edith Grossman (trans.). Union Tribune. San Diego, Books 1–4. Silverstein, Michael 1995 Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. In: Ide, R., R. Parker, and Y. Sunaoshi (eds.), Third Annual Symposium About Language and Society-Austin. Austin, TX: University of Texas, Dept. of Linguistics, 266–295. Singh, Rajendra 1983 We, they, and us: A note on code-switching and stratification in North India. Language in Society 12, 71–73. Woolard, K. A. 1985 Language variation and cultural hegemony: Towards an integration of sociolinguistic and social theory. American Ethnologist 12(4), 738–748. 1989 Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1997 Between friends: Gender, peer group structure, and bilingualism in urban Catalonia. Language in Society 26, 533–560. Zimmerman, Don H. 1998 Identity, context and interaction. In: Antaki, C. and S. Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, 87–106.

Part 2. Monolingual styles and social identities – From local to global

Introduction to Part 2 Peter Auer While Part 1 of this volume deals with variation and linguistic choices out of a multilingual repertoire and the way in which these choices, being part of certain social styles, may become relevant for participants’ identities, the core of sociolinguistic research on variation has been concerned with a different type of choices: those within a linguistic system, i.e. by a monolingual speaker. The chapters in this part of the book address questions of variability within a language on the level of the vocabulary, phonology or grammar of ‘a language’. However, these chapters are united with the papers in the first part in that the same methodologies are followed. In particular, linguistic choices are not investigated as single parameter variation (as is mostly done in ‘variation studies’), but are rather embedded into a network of features which is socially interpreted as a style. These styles can be seen as the basis of performances on a stage, be it a political stage or that of the World Wide Web. As the chapters in this section show, styles therefore include more than grammatical or phonological variation: some of their most salient properties are on the rhetorical level. The communities in which speakers act may be those of a traditional sociolinguistic study: a regional speech community into which the overarching standard variety is imported. However, they may also be part of global youth culture, or a migrant community in which old (established) and new (adapted from the receiving society) linguistic resources coexist and interact. In Ch. 8, Nikolas Coupland combines the investigation of speech styles, political rhetorics, and linguistic choices by looking at one political performer in Wales, Aneurin (‘Nye’) Bevan, the founder of the British National Health Service. Nye remains an icon of British socialism and was a politician of considerable stature in the British political arena in the 1940s and 1950s. He was also renowned, however, for setting his South Wales Valleys working class values against those of a dominant Conservative government based in Westminster. The data source is a newly discovered audio-recording of Nye speaking at a political rally in 1959, one year before his death. Of sociolinguistic interest is Nye’s shifting between phonological features redolent of the British middle-class establishment of the

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period and features that powerfully evoke a South Wales Valleys vernacular ideology. The rhetorical effect of the performance more accurately lies in the interplay between Nye’s selection from his dialect-style repertoire and the subject positions he establishes in the non-phonological dimensions of his discourse. Nye’s public political rhetoric has often been described as ‘sneering at the establishment’, but as Coupland points out, it can be better accounted for in terms of his vocal stylizing of Wales-Westminster political antagonisms. While the relevant identities in Coupland’s study are the personae of a ‘national politician’ and of a ‘spokesman of Wales’, both of which are activated by Nye in his speeches, Grit Liebscher and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain investigate a particular kind of ‘migrant identity’ in Ch. 9. The migrants here are people who lived in the Federal Republic of Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and moved to former East Germany at various times between 1990 and 1998; the relevant identity category is ‘West German’ (and, by co-activation in the membership categorization device, ‘East German’). These migrants share the personal experience of moving to the east at a time when East and West Germans were still coming to terms with their different pasts and negative stereotypes of each other. Due to their ‘in-between’ status, they have potential ties to both previous and new identities, places and experiences. In many interactions, they are challenged to position themselves in relation to these past and current affiliations. The paper aims at identifying features of a communicative style through which a ‘migrant identity’ emerges in such interactions. Four main features are identified: (i) an additional conversational effort, (ii) a delay in categorizing, (iii) a metalinguistic deconstruction of the categories ‘East’/’West‘ and (iv) the presentation of oneself as an animator rather than an author in relating factual matters of the new place. In the third paper in this section (Ch. 10), Jannis Androutsopoulos investigates the Web as a social space in which like-minded individuals use the resources of the medium (interactivity, multimodality, unlimited access to media production, etc.) for purposes of self-presentation and community formation. In constructing and negotiating their online identities through text and talk as well as other semiotic resources, participants may choose to reproduce an aspect of their offline social identity, or construct alternative versions of self. As Androutsopoulos shows, sociolinguistic style is a crucial part of identity formation in CMC. It is a boundary marker through which participants position themselves vis-à-vis other participants. Online styles are hybrid, however, drawing on resources of face-to-face discourse

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as well as specific CMC resources. As the social identities negotiated on the Web are often framed in global popular culture, sociolinguistic styles on the Web are immanently related to processes of cultural globalization. This particularly holds for hip-hop culture in Germany from which Androutsopoulos draws his examples. The hip-hop field of activities on the Web is structured along participation formats and discourse activities (e.g. discussion board member; homepage author; semi-professional website writer). Its concomitant style displays certain core features which occur across formats and activities and are recognized by members as typical for the field. Among them is an orientation to spoken language features (“conceptual orality”), technical terms and categorizations, distinctive routines and phrases, slang items of African-American English origin, codeswitching into English, spelling variants, naming patterns, and preferences in typography and visual imagery. Style differences along these features construct social, activity-related and ideological diversity in the field.

Chapter 8 Aneurin Bevan, class wars and the styling of political antagonism Nikolas Coupland 1.

Aneurin Bevan

Aneurin Bevan, affectionately known as ‘Nye’, is an iconic figure in the history of British politics.1 He is the icon of British democratic socialism in the twentieth century.2 His reputation conventionally centres on his role in founding the British National Health Service. The NHS, for all the politicking around it over successive decades, remains the greatest achievement of the 1945 Labour government and is without doubt the single most socially transformative institution introduced by any administration on the British political left. But even beyond this achievement, Bevan’s career symbolises successful working-class resistance, through mainstream political processes, to large-scale and destructive capitalist exploitation of working communities. Aneurin Bevan was a class warrior, a socialist hero of modernity. The roots of Bevan’s life and politics were in South Wales. Steel fabrication, but even more powerfully coal mining, defined the South Wales Valleys’ position as the hotbed of nineteenth and twentieth century industrialisation. Rapid deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and waves of extreme social deprivation from the 1920s through to the 1980s, whose legacy is far from eradicated today, decimated the Valleys communities. But it also further galvanised working-class consciousness and radical political action in South Wales, documented in the historical commentaries of Gwyn Alf Williams and Dai Smith (G. A. Williams 1985; Smith 1999). Industrial fervour and post-industrial turmoil have come to constitute one of, in Raymond Williams’ expression, the “two truths of Wales” (R. Williams 2003), the other in his view being the romanticised, Welsh-language based, Celtic and Cymric Wales. Aneurin Bevan epitomises this first truth, implementing the radical politics of the left as it developed in South Wales and impacted on Britain

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through the depression years of the 1920s and 1930s and between the wars. Born in 1897 in Tredegar, on the eastern extremity of the South Wales coal field, a colliery worker from age 13, Bevan quickly engaged with and moved up through local political groups, becoming a member of parliament for Ebbw Vale in 1929. He went on to become a cabinet minister with responsibilities for health and housing in the post 1945 Labour government, and deputy leader of his party. It is widely thought, nevertheless, that Bevan failed to fulfil his political potential at the very highest level. He is reputedly the greatest British politician never to have led his party or become prime minister. Current British prime minister Tony Blair writes that, since Bevan’s death, “his ideas and personality and rhetoric passed on from generation to generation … and the remaining soundtracks of his speeches give people born after he died the chance to hear the power of his oratory” (Blair 1997: 11). Bevan’s biographers, political inheritors and admirers represent him as a complex individual, in his political, personal and social dimensions.3 There is a debate about whether Bevan construed himself more as a rebellious agitator than as a mainstreamer, even though he was in fact highly influential in the political mainstream at Westminster. At the same time there is strong support for the view that he could be a pragmatist and a political accommodator, as well as being, overridingly, a socialist ideologue fervently committed to principles of social justice through public ownership and redistributive taxation, and enraged by capitalist exploitation. He was capable of utterly ruthless actions, decisions and verbal attacks, notwithstanding that he was generally companionable and sociable, and even tender and shy, in dealings with friends and non-political acquaintances. He was fiercely proud of his Welsh social origins in Tredegar and appealed passionately to his childhood experiences as a basis for his political philosophy: democratic socialism was the only means of redressing the social injustices he had experienced at first hand. All the same, he developed a wide social circle of friends, including the newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook. He read and often quoted poetry and philosophy. He had a reputation for sharp dressing and enjoying good food and drink. Kenneth O. Morgan calls him “an aristocrat in outlook and taste” (1989: 13). On this count, as Morgan explains, he was criticised as “a Bollinger Bolshevik, a ritzy Robespierre, a lounge-lizard Lenin”. A mythology around what is elsewhere called his “champagne socialism” was recycled by some who wanted to undermine his otherwise impeccable working-class credentials. His Welshness provided the foundation for his politics, yet he was a com-

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mitted internationalist and analysed ‘the Welsh problem’ essentially in terms of class conflict and repression, not nationalism. Dai Smith writes: The question of Wales, per se, was not one to which he gave much thought in isolation. It was what had taken place in Wales throughout its industrial history which concerned him and, by extension, how the people who had undergone that experience might make dynamic social capital out of their material exploitation (1997: 71).

The facet of Aneurin Bevan’s political career that is relevant to the present book’s concerns is his standing as a political speaker (mentioned in the Blair quote) and how he carried his social identity through his oratory. Michael Foot, a former leader of the Labour Party, places Bevan among the three most impressive and effective political speakers of the last century, but with Bevan far ahead of the other two, Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George (Foot 1997: 193). His rhetorical range in public speaking, at public political rallies and in the House of Commons, was considerable. His fulminating and corruscating attacks on the Conservative Party (the Tories, a term Bevan used almost as an insult), but sometimes also on members of his own party, were notorious. He famously once said in public that he considered the Tories to be “lower than vermin”, a remark that appears to have damaged him more than his opposition (Smith 1993: 254). But it is not an overstatement to talk of his hatred for the Tories, and we get a clear sense of this in some of the data extracts to be considered below. There is good support for the view that Bevan either would not or could not speak from prepared notes or a script, extemporising his speeches, though on the basis of extensive rehearsal.4 He often made capital from aggressive rejoinders to hecklers and spontaneous attacks on opponents who were present in the debating chamber. Prosodically and paralinguistically, Bevan’s voice was highly distinctive. It was generally high-pitched and thin, but he could infuse a gruffness and power that carried aggressive and furious affect. Foot calls it “sweet and strong at the same time” (1997: 202). He would often segment utterances into short, matched strings, punctuated by even-length pauses, in the grandiose manner of public political oratory, partly no doubt to allow his words to reach large and noisy audiences through the rudimentary public address systems of the day. He would manage speech rhythm and pausing, amplitude and intonation to produce swooping rhetorical sequences that often culminated in key political points. At other times his speeches would

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create a surprising intimacy and audiences would be drawn into quasidialogic debate with him, or even actual dialogue. Biographers talk of his ‘speech impediment’, though this seems to have amounted to a recurrent but relatively non-intrusive block rather than an iterative stammer. He commonly had uvular /r/ in all linguistic contexts (for example in Tories, every, result, sincere in), and although this feature has a marginal status as a selectively regional characteristic of South Wales speech, it might be part of the lay perception of an ‘impediment’. In recordings made late in his life, he seems to have had badly fitting dentures, blurring his sibilants. His phonological habitus was decidedly South Wales Valleys, which is a major sub-variety of Welsh English (Garrett, Coupland, and Williams 1999, 2003), but not without frequent and sometimes extreme variation between Valleys variants and RP-like variants of certain speech variables. His speech also included occasional idiosyncrasies of word stress which might be the result of bookish but extensive self-education rather than formally institutionalised education. These features were overlaid on a remarkably confident, inventive and powerful oratorical competence which was the cornerstone of his political success. What, then, can the sociolinguistics of style offer to an appreciation of Aneurin Bevan’s public speaking, and vice versa? I shall introduce the data after some brief overview comments about the history of style in sociolinguistics, to situate the approach I will take in the analysis.

2.

A sociolinguistics of style

Variationist sociolinguistics at first treated style as an interesting but relatively minor and potentially distracting dimension of language variation. It was minor in that it was considered theoretically or in explanatory terms secondary; it was distracting in that it pulled away from a commitment to finding structured regularities in speech communities, which was held to be the discipline’s main obligation. This is Jack Chambers’ view when he writes that, for his integrative theoretical overview of variationist sociolinguistics, “style is an important independent variable but it is never the focal point” (Chambers 2003: 6). Style has been rehabilitated to a large extent through Rickford and Eckert’s integrative (2001) volume. That book establishes a dialogue between (i) William Labov’s original conception of style (1972) as a contextual plane of language variation; (ii) later relationallyoriented models, most notably Allan Bell’s audience design framework

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(e.g. Bell 1984, 1999, 2001) and the communication accommodation framework of Howard Giles and others (e.g. Giles and Powesland 1975; Giles, Coupland and Coupland 1991), and my own studies of style as persona management (Coupland 1985, 2001a, 2001b); (iii) established perspectives on register (e.g. Biber and Finegan 1995); and (iv) a variety of other sociolinguistic perspectives, many of them originating in linguistic anthropology and organised around concepts of genre, performance and language ideology. Style research was also substantially revitalised from the late 1990s by Ben Rampton’s research on sociolinguistic crossing and stylistic creativity in relation to ethnicity and social class (e.g. Rampton 1995, 1999, 2001) and the steady flow of studies influenced by this important initiative, theoretically linked to the perspectives of Mikhail Bakhtin and Erving Goffman (Bakhtin 1981, 1986; Goffman 1981) – e.g. Bucholtz (1999), Cutler (1999), Schilling-Estes (2004). Although this is not the place for detailed discussion, there are at least the following arguments in favour of extending sociolinguistic engagement with style: – Style research builds bridges between variationist analysis of accent/ dialect and the many other distinct or partially distinct traditions of sociolinguistics, many of them grounded in ethnography and in the analysis of discourse (cf. Eckert 2000; Jaffe 1999; Johnstone 1996; Johnstone and Bean 1997); that is, it breaks out of autonomous variationism. – Style opens qualitative perspectives on social identity, for example by clarifying and extending the ‘acts of identity’ perspective (LePage and Tabouret-Keller 1985), seeing identities as interactionally negotiated and accomplished (Auer 1998). The language and social identity nexus is of course at the heart of all traditions of sociolinguistics. Styled identities are not (only) ‘who social actors are’ but how they can be represented to be, for specific purposes. – Style convincingly breaks the chain of assumptions that ensnares speakers as naive but perfect and authentic members of speech communities (Coupland 2003; Rampton 2000), and points up the limitations of treating speakers as social prototypes or as full owners of their speech. – Style leads us towards richer models of the social contextualisation of language (cf. Auer and Di Luzio 1991); indeed, it was the need for better accounts of language and social context that gave much of the original stimulus for sociolinguistics; style is the contextualising of social meaning.

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– Style invites sociolinguistics to engage with aesthetic qualities of talk and its metalinguistic design, requiring critical sensitivities in analysis. – Style challenges us to take a wider theoretical stance on the relationship between social structure or “systems of distinctiveness” (Irvine 2001) and social agency in situated linguistic performance, without trivialising either part of this relationship (cf. Coupland 2001c, 2007). Following from these points, a sociolinguistics of style generally aligns with a constructionist view of social life. In this view, social meanings, identities, relationships and language ideologies are both invoked and actively created and styled in the dynamics of social interaction (cf. Antaki and Widdicombe 1998). Meaning resources are not so much sociolinguistic ‘features’ available for ‘selection’, although these concepts have predominated in the analysis of style variation. Rather, semiotic resources are historically and culturally imbued potentials for making meaning (Hasan 1996) and for achieving material and symbolic outcomes (Bourdieu 1977, 1991). They are indexical relationships between linguistic/discursive forms and clusters of social values, practices, norms and assumptions, but not in a simple, one-to-one mapping arrangement. These resources are available for deployment (creative, strategic use and placement) by speakers in evolving discursive contexts which renew and potentially reshape their value loadings. Because semiotic resources are generalised associations between linguistic forms and social meanings as part of cultural ideologies, speakers must necessarily (in Bakhtin’s term) ‘reaccentuate’ them or revalorise them in their unique discursive contexts. To that extent, stylistic operations are distinctively innovative, and certainly agentive and contextualising. But they are only possible because of the socially structured indexicalities that link ways of speaking to social groups or situations, and to the ideological conditions that define these at particular times and places. Relative to this broad agenda for a sociolinguistics of style, it is interesting to note that the dominant traditions of style research so far have actually had rather specific qualities. William Labov’s seminal observation on style – we can think of it as the first wave of sociolinguistic research on style – was that speakers are not stylistically uniform, and that there are readable associations between social situations and stylistic arrays for social groups. Labov’s insight has mainly been developed, in a second wave of sociolinguistic style research, as the search for generalisable statistical patterns and transcontextual explanations for style shifting. It was the uniformity of the directional tendency for speakers to shift their pronunciation

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towards prestige variants during more formal or monitored speech activities during interviews that mattered to Labov’s account of sociolinguistic patterning. While Giles’ accommodation theory and Bell’s audience design models (frameworks in which my own early research on style was developed; see Coupland 1980, 1984) posit different and more resolutely social bases for regular style shifting (‘accommodating a listener’ and ‘designing one’s speech for an audience’), their priority is still to generalize about the conditions under which and the extent to which ‘speech convergence’, ‘speech divergence’ and so on will happen. Motivational and contextual accounts are more explicit in accommodation theory, while audience design is more sociolinguistically precise and entertains the idea of converging to non-present ‘audiences’ in ‘initiative’ style-shifting (Bell 1999). Style is treated mainly as a linear concept in both approaches (see Coupland 2001b for further discussion and critique). Both models give us a rather sparse account of the semiotic resources that are deployed – what their specific histories, values and affordances are – and very little detail on the social identification processes that inevitably mediate ‘audience effects’. But style points us above all to the local dynamics of sociolinguistic variation, and abstractions to ‘what many people stylistically do as general tendencies’ must necessarily sacrifice the detail of those dynamics. The mindset to establish generalisations about stylistic patterning in the service of predictive theory (if this is taken to mean establishing statistical regularities about different speakers’ style-shifting across different codable social situations) is an inheritance from survey research in sociolinguistics, where the essential claims have to be distributional and correlational. Generalisation in the domain of style is not necessarily, and arguably not naturally, of this order. It can aspire to more abstract and less predictive generalisations about the role of language variation in macro-micro sociological dimensions, processes in the articulation of social identities and relationships through discourse, and to interpretive frameworks within which myriad local acts of social construction operate. In this third wave approach to style, we need to be more ambitious in analysing stylistic constructions which do not reduce into consolidated general ‘strategies’ tied to linear sociolinguistic continua (such as increasing formality or reducing interpersonal differences and distance) and which do not fit neatly into simple theoretical/motivational architectures such as ‘a drive for social approval’ or ‘designing talk for listeners’. (For more on the three waves of style research, cf. Eckert and Mendoza-Denton 2002.)

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Another tacit assumption in the sociolinguistics of style has been that what we can grossly call ‘dialect’ (sociolinguistic variables, often phonological, which function semiotically in the demarcation of speech communities as well as in the demarcation of social groups within them on the basis of frequencies) provides the necessary linguistic focus for style research. This restriction to a rather autonomous stylistics of dialect variation has certainly produced valuable coherence across studies, but it has also implied that the role of stylistics is secondary to the role of ‘social’ (or intergroup) variation, where dialect does necessarily define the territory. In fact, in the domain of style, dialect semiosis needs to be seen as only a part of the complex of discursive constructions that style achieves. It is a productive part, and largely what I will be concerned with in the Aneurin Bevan data. But even so it is specifically in the interplay across semiotic dimensions that social meaning is created and interpreted. The implication is that a sociolinguistics of style needs to be a committedly holistic analysis, even though dialect stylistics or ‘dialect in use’ (Coupland 1988) might continue to be its principal empirical focus. Finally, we should recognise that the sociolinguistics of style, in both first and second waves, has been the study of style-shifting. Often it is our awareness of ‘shifted’ variants that draws attention to stylistic meaning, and the idea of studying linguistic deviation from some presumed norm has a long pedigree in general stylistics. But understanding ‘how style means’ in discursive operations need not be focused around patterned shifts, qualitative or quantitative, within speakers’ speech across contexts. The basis unit of analysis for a sociolinguistics of style is a single semiotic unit, and the analytic demand is to explain how its activation contributes to speakers’ negotiation of social meaning in a discourse. Abstraction to general tendencies may of course follow from this, but these tendencies need not be where style is recognised. When shifting is in question, there is also the risk of adopting mechanistic and realist criteria for ‘context’. As an alternative to this survey-type, contrastive orientation, a holistic and discursively richer approach will need to recognise differential framing of semiotic resources. In the Bevan data, with multiple dimensions of rhetorical control at his disposal, dialect resources are invoked in subtle ways; their impact is far more dependent on the discursive frame that is in place (and which might come to be in place through dialect constructions themselves) than on some putative disjunction between ‘how that speech variable is realised at other moments’. Contrast is a powerful sensitising factor, but style analysis need not be the documentation of contrast per se.

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The meaning potential of sociolinguistic style is realised in at least the two overlapping arenas of social identity and social relationships. Styling is part of the construction and deployment of a speaker’s and others’ social identities, which might be to invoke and to consolidate the values and attributes associated with a ‘speech community’ (for example interpreted as a social class and its associated political ideologies). On the other hand it might involve establishing a particular stance vis-à-vis those community norms, where ownership of voice becomes less or more clear – e.g. the voicing of a class position one wants to subvert. In turn, the styling and performance of social personas and stances achieves different relational orientations and effects, such as purporting to accredit an opponent’s ideological position or stealing/appropriating their own value system. The interplay between dialect styling and other dimensions of discursive construction can achieve highly nuanced meanings and effects, of the sort I hope to demonstrate in the analysis of Aneurin Bevan’s oratory. Behind this is the puzzle that Bevan is ideologically rooted on one side of the key discursive conflict of high modernity, class war, while we might think that his propensity to manipulate voice and social identification gives him impressive latemodern credentials. (I return briefly to this puzzle at the end of the chapter.)

3.

The Nye data

A small set of fragments of audio- and video-recordings of Aneurin Bevan’s speeches has been in circulation since his death, mainly embedded in political journalism features about Bevan on radio and television.5 The same sequences tend to recur in these recordings, and they have thereby become something of a standard repertoire (referred to by Tony Blair, above). Critical biographical commentaries on Bevan’s career often dwell on moments illustrated by these famous fragments, although, as far as I am aware, they have not been analysed stylistically before. Regrettably, contextual details of the speeches are limited, although it is possible to infer some general characteristics of the social settings of the recordings from the general acoustics and audience involvement. In one case, the historical context makes the precise setting obvious (see below). For reasons to do with developing recording technologies and practices, all the extracts available are from the later years of Bevan’s life. We know that one recording in the set was made in 1959, one year before Bevan’s death from cancer.6

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A performance space

The cultural distance between Aneurin Bevan’s Tredegar upbringing and the dominant mores of the House of Commons between 1929 and 1959 was inevitably stark, and was marked dialectally in varieties of English. Senior Labour Party politicians on the political Left as well as the Right, including Clement Atlee who was Labour Party leader between 1935 and 1955 (that is, for much of Bevan’s time in politics) presented a decidedly patrician, upper-class demeanour and speech style, which was clearly considered to be generally appropriate for figures in public life. Nye brought to Parliament a phonological habitus that was quite different from this conservative norm. Over time, and certainly by the time of the recordings available to this study, Nye had acquired the facility to deploy RP-like and ‘establishment sounding’ variants (and sometimes even conservative RP variants) of certain sociolinguistic variables, variables whose vernacular variants would have been (and still are) strongly diagnostic of Valleys English (or South Wales English generally, in many people’s perceptions). Table 1 lists the most salient sociolinguistic variables and variant forms that can carry this opposition. Lexical examples are taken from the data extracts. Table 1. Phonemic/phonetic variables distinguishing Valleys and RP speech Variable name

Valleys variant

RP variant

Conservative RP variant

Examples and comments

(ou)

o:

NT

?T

[o:] – [NT\ contrast is available in one lexical set, e.g. coal, although, so, over; [NT\ is normative in a second set, e.g. told, knows, ownership; Z?T\ is the conservative RP realisation for both sets

(ei)

e:

eH

Thiscontrast is available in one lexical set, e.g. educating, Ebbw Vale, misbehaving, nation; [eH\ is normative in a second set, e.g. train, day, neighbour

(au)

?T

`T

e.g. pounds, out, now

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(ai)

?H

`H

e.g. might, private, why

(a)

a

æ

This contrast is available in stressed ‘short a’ contexts, e.g. fact, national, established, including in words that have a short vowel in South Wales but a long vowel in RP, e.g. circumstance, where lengthening is another option

(a:)

a:

@9

(y)

i

H/Hd D?

These contrasts are available in orthographic final ‘y’ words and in ‘-ly’ adverbials, e.g. finally, city, integrity

(2:)

8:

59

e.g. heard, perfectly, years

(?(

?

U

This contrast is available in stressed syllables, e.g. dull, must, come

(iw)

Hw

ju

e.g. opportunity, constituency, you

(h)

Ø

h

Ø (zero) in word-initial orthographic ‘h’ contexts hands, e.g. house, and favoured in have, had, he, his, etc.

(ing )

n

M

[n] in verbal ‘-ing’ contexts and lexical compounds with ‘-thing’, e.g. educating, going, nothing

This contrast is available in ‘long a’ contexts, e.g. argue, laugh, tarnished

It is impossible to hear the extracts without being aware of how Bevan’s socio-phonology interfaces with his various other rhetorical designs and ploys to create social meanings and effects. Socio-phonetic forms and meanings constitute rich semiotic resources, in the sense I outlined earlier, for Nye’s performances. Above all, the social class resonances of specific variants are highly salient in his speeches, evocative of (in gross terms) ‘vernacular’, ‘working class’ and ‘Valleys’ meanings versus ‘establishment’ or ‘middle class’ meanings, but also in this context evoking political ideologies of public ownership versus capitalist profit. These meanings and

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the phonetic variants that they potentially index can be seen as opening up a performance space in which Bevan is free to operate discursively, to embed sociolinguistic values within his rhetorical designs. It would be wrong to ‘fix’ the meanings of phonological variants (as the column labels in Table 1 might appear to do) before we meet them in Nye’s discourse. A crucial point is that macro-level value systems can not be read directly or unambiguously from the phonetic shape of variants themselves. The crucial mediating consideration is Bevan’s styling of his own and others’ identities and relationships, how his speeches dynamically position culturally significant voices, and how Bevan builds implications about his own and his opponents’ orientations to these voices. We will see that Bevan appears to project some establishment speech characteristics, on some occasions, as qualities of his own preferred political persona. On other occasions he constructs them as objects of derision and hatred. This is why the ‘situational’ account of the data needs to be developed in terms of discursive frames and not in more materially or temporally realist ways. Discourse analyses of these meaning creations are necessarily post hoc and interpretive, open to alternative readings; this is the essence of a local stylistic analysis. All the same, valuable support for some lines of interpretation is available from the sequential organisation of the talk, particularly in the evidence of where and how Nye places certain segmental phonetic realisations in the rhetorical structure of his talk, and how they sometimes mesh or conflict with other social meanings. How audiences react by inferably reading humour or other affective qualities from elements of Nye’s performance is again revealing for its interpretation.

5.

Framing, footing, keying

A clear characteristic of Bevan’s public oratory is his propensity to engage different oratorical modes. He is most famous for his scathing wit and sneering derogation of political opponents. This often entails sarcastic humour, where his strategy is often to build fellow-feeling with an audience, designing his utterances dialogically, while ridiculing opponents and their arguments. We can take a discursive frame (Goffman 1974; Tannen 1993) to be a mutually achieved set of understandings of what goals and affordances are operative at any one moment of interaction. Bevan was recurrently able to establish a particular frame of expectations (let us call it the dialogic sneering frame) where Left-inclined audience members would

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expect to have Tory Party actions or characteristics paraded before them for ridicule. Audiences would be on an interactional footing where they were under a demand to be judgemental, and where their own derisive laughter or applause was expected as an audible element of the discourse at moments which Bevan would orchestrate. This is a mode of political speech-making sometimes loosely referred to as ‘knock-about’, entailing non-serious and often mock-serious key: playful but nevertheless damaging characterisations of opponents’ arguments and stances. A strongly contrasting frame in Bevan’s repertoire is what we can call the denunciation frame. In this frame an audience’s footing would be much less participative and there would be less of a demand to respond or indeed to anticipate Bevan’s lines of argument and punch-lines. The audience could expect to be engaged affectively in a serious key, on topics close to the ideological centre of Bevan’s politics, and to be invited to follow and echo Bevan’s outrage at the unfairness or incompetence of the Tories. Whereas Bevan’s humour, often cruel, was definitely entertaining, constructing opponents as ludicrous, his denunciation sequences tore into them, on-record, from a position of the moral high ground. Extract (1), a famous sequence, demonstrates these two particular frames. This speech is at an outdoor venue to a large crowd. Almost certainly this is Bevan’s speech at the ‘Law not War’ Labour Party rally in Trafalgar Square in London at the time of the Suez crisis, November 1956.7 Tory prime minister Sir Anthony Eden had called on Egypt and Israel to withdraw their forces ten miles from the Canal. When they did not comply, Britain and France attacked Egyptian airfields the very next day, in defiance of the United Nations’ Charter. (1)

Get out get out get out

1

Sir Anthony Eden has been pretending (2.0)

2

that he has he is now invading Egypt (.)

3

in order (.) to strengthen the United Nations

M

Ø h

Ø

e: M

ai

((3.0 laughter; audience: rubbish)) 4

er every every um (.)

ei

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5

every burglar of course (.) could say the same thing

8:

e:

((2.0 laughter)) Ø

6

a:

M

Ø

h ?T

he could argue that he was entering the house in order to <<step up>> train the police

((4.0 loud laughter)) o:

Ø

M

7

so if Mis- Sir Anthony Eden (.) is sincere in what he is saying (.)

8

and he may be

Ø

((2.0 laughter; audience: ah with low-fall intonation)) Ø

9

he <> may be

((1.0 slight laughter; ‘yeah’)) Ø

M

Ø

10

then (.) if he is sincere in what he is saying (.)

11

then he is <<step-up>> too stupid to be a Prime Minister

Hw

Ø

?i

[ ((wild laughter)) (There is a break in the recording here, and the extract may therefore not be continuous, although it appears to be.) a:

ae

12

we are in fact in the position today (1.0)

13

of having appealed to force in the case of a small nation (1.0)

14

where if it is appealed to against us (1.0)

15

it would result in the destruction (.) of Great Britain-

16

-not only as a nation

ha M

e:

ei

?

?

ou

?

ei

ei

Aneurin Bevan, class wars and the styling of political antagonism M

17

227

M

but as an island con/ taining living men and women

((2.0 audience: hear hear)) 18

<> therefore I say to Anthony Eden (1.0)

19

I say to the British / government (2.0)

20

there is no / count at all upon which they can be defended (2.0)

21

they have besmirched the name of Britain (3.0)

22

they have made us <> ashamed of the things (.) of which

?

?T

o:

8:

h

Ø

e:

e:

?

e:

?T

formerly we were proud ((4.0 loud cheers)) Ø

D?

ou

23

they have (.) offended against every principle of decency (2.0)

24

and there is only one way in which they can (.) even begin to restore their

ou

a:

?

u ei

<< harsh>>tarnished reputation ((audience: get out)) ?T?T?T

25

and that is to <> get out (.) get out get out

[ ((loud cheers))

In the first 11 lines Bevan represents Eden’s policy of military intervention in Egypt as motivated by a desire to strengthen the United Nations. This is a curious proposition, presumably reworking some specific comment by Eden that the policy of attacking Egypt would show the power of the United Nations. Bevan parallels the invasion with burglars breaking into a house, and ‘strengthening the United Nations’ with ‘training the police’ (lines 5 and 6). This of course imputes criminality to the attack and criminal behaviour to the Tories, as well as exposing the ludicrous nature of the

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supposed motivational reasoning. Then we have the mock-serious concession that Eden may be being sincere in his (ludicrous) beliefs (lines 7–9), before the abusive put-down that Eden’s being sincere would leave stupidity as the only available explanation. Bevan has invited the audience to reflect on the illogical motivation of to strengthen the United Nations up to line 3, and a supportive audience is already audibly ‘rubbishing’ this motive in the pause between lines at that point. Bevan’s apparent fumbling for a comment (the disfluencies in line 4 – and some commentators have suggested he sometimes feigned disfluency to increase the appearance of spontaneity – see note 4) sets up an anticipation of a derisory remark to come. He then tantalises his audience with his as-if accepting of Eden’s sincerity, presenting the opportunity for them to reach their own denial of this sincerity before he articulates it himself. Some audience members duly give him laughter and a prolonged lowfall ah after line 8 (to the effect, ‘ah, we don’t believe that’) and slight laughter and an ironic ‘yeah’ after line 9. But then, Bevan’s debunking of Eden in line 11 turns out not to be simply a refutation of sincerity, but the more damaging suggestion that Eden cannot be sincere without also being too stupid to be a prime minister. This is a true Bevanite discursive ploy – eliciting an audience evaluation then transcending or trumping that evaluation in his own punch-line comment. From line 12 Bevan drops out of the mock-moral evaluation of Eden’s sincerity and moves into the denunciation frame. He loads up his censure with direct and extreme morally evaluative expressions, especially over lines 20 to 24. He asserts his own authority in the highly formal metapragmatic design I say to Anthony Eden… (lines 18, 19). The frame is not participative in the way the earlier frame was. Bevan moves out of personal attack into attacking Tory policy, from sarcasm to direct evaluation, and from light-hearted play to heavy condemnation.

6.

Socio-phonetic imaging

How does dialect semiosis work as a resource in these framings in Extract (1) and elsewhere? Bevan’s delivery over lines 1–5 is slow and deliberate, with a small non-fluency in line 2 possibly resulting from his wanting to ‘correct’ an aitchless realisation of he.8 There is no consistent patterning of variants. There is variation between [e:] (the prototypically South Wales value) in invading (2) and same (5) and RP-like [ei] in Nations (3). (Nation

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in the political entity the United Nations as a lexeme is less amenable to phonetic vernacularisation than non-proper-noun items, although Bevan seems to favour RP-like [ei] in the word nation generally.) But when Bevan draws the ‘burglar’ parallel, the complete line (5) has a strong vernacular quality. This is partly because Bevan has lexically relegated the status of the grammatical subject from Sir Anthony Eden to every burglar (5), but the semiotic associations of vernacular [8:] in burglar add to the effect. Bevan constructs a second parallel contrast between Eden’s grandiose purpose (to strengthen the United Nations) and his feeling that anyone could say the same thing, with vernacular [e:] in same. We begin to see that, in an abstract sense but with some evidencing in phonetic substance, there might be two voices in Bevan’s account. The first is not Eden’s own voice, but it is a voice which superficially endorses Eden’s stances and claims. The second is a critical and sceptical voice, drawn from and evoking a vernacular culture of unreliable burglars. These phonetic images are fleeting and not fully consistent, although features in sentence-stress position, and probably vocalic more than consonantal features, have most salience. They cannot in isolation carry the values I am attributing to them (thankfully, because there is no suggestion that all South Walians are burglars), although I am sure we can say that they are part of the ideological contrasts that Bevan is constructing. The ‘sinceritystupidity’ sequence has something similar about it. The ideational/ pragmatic thrust of his talk at that point is to offer respect to Eden’s being sincere in what he is saying. But the too stupid to be a prime minister phrase (line 11) is the targeted punch-line, and is delivered on a markedly higher pitch, with increased amplitude, and with a resoundingly South Walian [Hw] in stupid. This is the critical voice returning, speaking abrasively and personally, but from a vernacular social base, willing to drop out of polite and respectful parliamentary protocols of ‘trusting the sincerity of opponents’. As a personal judgement, too stupid to be a prime minister is uncompromisingly disrespectful, direct and unhedged. Lexically, stupid sets up a self-consciously unsophisticated and perhaps even puerile basis for personal judgement; socio-phonetic imagery adds support, implying a specifically South Walian, ‘no nonsense’ intolerance. But the utterance is also voiced from a position of superiority – Bevan’s reputed intellectual elitism, added to the moral basis of his critique of invading Egypt. Intellectual and moral elitism with vernacular authority is very much Bevan’s distinctive political persona, and indeed it is a key part of the mythology of workingclass Welshness.

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There are contrasting socio-phonetic nuances in the powerful, censorious sequence in the second frame, down to and including line 24. Some keywords have resonant South Wales Valleys pronunciations: no count at all in line 20, ashamed in 22, tarnished in 24, and of course the final get out get out get out (where three flapped intervocalic [t] sounds support the Valley’s voice with marked informality and non-institutionality), where Bevan voices the communal rhythmic chant that the crowd itself might adopt. Yet there are also several RP-like realisations of (h), (ng) and (ei), and the phonetically striking line, they have offended against every principle of decency (23). Within this line we have the unusual, hypercorrect spellingpronunciation of (ou) (realised as /ou/) in the first syllable of offended, and the highly conservative RP realisation of ‘y’, [İԥ] + as the final syllable of decency. Bevan produces this feature on some other occasions too. To my ears it is evidence of him fleetingly accommodating Westminster’s patrician phonological mores, before, on this occasion, the sequence ends with a rousing return to vernacular values and class action, in get out get out get out. The moral high ground he is claiming in this sequence in some ways naturalises the conservative variant, reversing the polarity of vernacular authority in the earlier sequence. ‘Principles of decency’, Bevan is implying, ought to be values shared by all people in government. At the same time, [İԥ] undoubtedly also contributes to the impression of Bevan’s ‘champagne socialism’ that his left-wing critics disapproved of. We can look in less detail (for lack of space) at two other extracts. Extract (2) is from a speech at an unspecified indoor venue. The acoustic quality of the recording suggests the speech is made in a large and full hall, once again with a generally supportive audience. Bevan again establishes the dialogic frame to sneer at the Tory government. Either by chance or through some planned device, an audience member heckles him, and receives a verbal assault quite similar to the too stupid sequence. (2)

Dull going out

1

<<slow>> even the Tories themselves have been rather surprised at what’s

ha

h ae

been 2:

2

M

happening (2.0) ?i

?i ?i ai

it’s the first time in my lifetime (2.0)

@:

?i

Aneurin Bevan, class wars and the styling of political antagonism Ø

231

?d9

h ae

3

that we have had a Tory government in Great Britain (.)

4

without having had mass unemployment at the same time

h a M ha

a

?i

e:

((3.0 audience murmuring)) ae

5

Ø

?i

e:

ai

and this s- circumstance has taken even the Tories by surprise

((4.0 some laughter)) Hw

?

6

and you (can’t) wonder at it (2.0)

7

because they don’t know why it’s happened

?i

ou

Ø ae

((5.0 growing laughter and applause)) ?i

h ae

8

?u

and they want to have a general election before they find out

((7.0 bursts of loud laughter and strong applause)) ?h

9

59

D?

<<slow>> (now) I want to be perfectly fair to them

((4.0 growing laughter, probably responding to a non-verbal gesture from Bevan)) ou

10

?i

look (th)ere’s no reason why we shouldn’t because we can beat them that Ø?u

way anyhow ((4.0 laughter, an apparently hostile audience member calls out repeatedly))

[ ?u

11

?u

?u

now (.) now (.) <> listen now (1.0) this is a very serious

[ ((more calling out, above laughter)) Hw ou

12

Hw

?

o: M ?u

Hw

l-listen carefully because if you don’t you’ll be as dull going out as you ?

M

were coming in ((loud laughter and cheering))

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Bevan opens this sequence with controlled, measured prosody. In line 1 he preserves some aitches, has RP-like open back long [a] in rather and the ‘posh’ close variant, short [a] in happening is prominent. In line 2 he ‘corrects’ the final realization of the (ai) variable to an open-onset RP-type variant. The effect continues through RP-like had in line 3 and [h] and velar [M\ in having had in line 4, plus the close short [æ] in the very formal phrase this circumstance in the following line (even though a full RP realisation would be with long open [@9\). Bevan is imputing naivety to the Tories, who, he says, can’t account for why there isn’t mass unemployment while they are in office. It has often been said of Bevan’s rhetoric that he liked to attack the strong points more than the weak points in his opponents’ positions, and here he appears to be conceding that unemployment levels under a Tory government are not too high. But of course he undermines the Tories’ position by claiming that they are not in control of the employment situation: they don’t know why it’s happened (line 7). We have the incongruous pairing of aitchlessness and close short [æ] in the single word happened in the utterance that triggers the laughter, and the effect is of an insincere RP affectation, usefully creating a supercilious persona. The two voices we met in the earlier extract pull apart from each other rather more clearly in lines that follow, particularly in the socio-phonetic contrast between lines 9 and 10. 9 has RP-like [5:] and [İԥ] in perfectly fair, which is again a heavily stylised establishment voice. It is similar to the every principle of decency sequence in Extract (1), but this time metaparodic (parodying its own stance). Bevan is affecting an honourable, House of Commons-type demeanour of fairness (again similar to he may be sincere in what he is saying in Extract (1)), although the dialogic frame is obviously and successfully bringing in the audience’s judgements to the contrary (after lines 5, 7 and 8). The audience laugh at Bevan’s mock commitment (in this local instance) to fairness, and he reacts to their laughter with the disjunctive look (as if he needs to correct their cynicism), and a strongly vernacular line 10. Its vernacular quality is partly in the phonetics of some familiar phonological variables (especially the aitch-dropped and centralised onset to (au) of anyhow) and partly its lexical reference to ‘beating them’ (another studiedly unsophisticated way to represent political success). Another facet is the syllable-timed rhythm of this line (not marked in the transcript) which contrasts with Bevan’s more typical RP-type stresstiming. In line 10 Bevan acknowledges that his mission is of course to beat the Tories and not at all to be fair to them, retrospectively confirming the as-if design the earlier line, but also trumping the assumption that we need

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not be fair to the Tories, with the idea that ‘even if we are fair to them, we will still win’. It is Bevan’s attack on the heckler that elicits the strongest audience support (in the last two lines). Bevan rounds on the heckler, with the patronising fall-rise tone on the last syllable of listen now, and warns him that he will remain as dull going out as he was coming in if he does not listen. Just like stupid, dull is a personally offensive and self-assertive insult, though perhaps more directly so here because Bevan also constructs the implication that the heckler could have been illuminated by his (Bevan’s) truth, if only he had listened. Just as [Hw] in stupid contrasts with RP [ju]:, dull has the vernacular Valleys imprint of schwa rather than RP [U\, with dull perhaps being lexically one of those socially self-contextualising words that have different connotations and perhaps denotations in RP versus vernacular phonology. The final extract is an extended sequence from a 1959 recording, made a few months before the general election (which Labour were again to lose). Bevan is campaigning at a public meeting. (3)

Complete poppycock

1

<<slow>> at last we might have an opportunity of educating the British

?i

a:

h

ju

i

e: n

?u

people about the truth (3.0) ?u ai

o:

Hw

H

2

now I represent a (.) a steel and coal constituency (2.0)

3

we are still nationalised (3.0)

4

the Ebbw Vale er the (.) the R T B’s (.) Richard Thomas and / Baldwin’s (.)

ae

ai

e:

ei

still belong (.) / to the nation (.)

Ø

a

?i M

5

they haven’t succeeded i- in denationalising it <<step up>> yet (1.0)

6

al / though they’ve been at it for seven years

o:

a

8:

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Nikolas Coupland

((3.0 slight laugher)) U

H?

7

that is still public property (3.0)

8

and it’s a very prosperous concern (3.0)

9

in fact (.) it’s so prosperous and efficient (.) that even Mr Macmillan (.) told

2:

a

o:

h ?u

?

the House of Commons the other day (.) Hw

o: n

?u ?i

a

Hv

10

that the new strip mill that’s going to be established outside Newport is

n9m

?

2:

a

going to be entrusted to the national(ist) <<step up>> concern (4.0) ?u

11

Hw

Hw

Ø

now you would have thought wouldn’t you (.) that er er if Mr Macmillan U

really believed (.) that the public ownership of <<step up>> steel (1.0) was a

ei

Ø

h

?

Hw

er disadvantageous to the nation (.) then he ought to have entrusted the new ?i

2:

steelworks to (.) a <<step up>> private concern (2.0) ?i Ø a

Ø

12

well why hasn’t he? (3.0)

13

why is he so misbehaving himself?

?i

Ø

e: M h

o:

((3.0 laugher)) ?i

14

Ø

o:

a

why is he so neglectful of the national interest?

((2.0 laugher)) Ø ha

15

o:

2:

o: M

?u

that he hands over a concern that’s going to cost about sixty million ?u

?h

<<step up>>/ pounds before it’s finished (1.0) to a (.) a publicly

Aneurin Bevan, class wars and the styling of political antagonism

235

owned steelworks (4.0) ?

16

Ø

h

<< long high rise over the line>> doesn’t he believe his own æ

@9

propa<>ganda? ((3.0 strong laughter)) ?i Øm

17

why is he doing it? (2.0) Ø

18

M

Ø

a

he’s doing it of course because he knows (.) that the propaganda that they’re n ?u

putting out is complete <> poppycock ((2.0 slight laughter; audience: of course)) 19

com<<step up>>plete <>poppycock (3.0)

This is another mixed-frame sequence, although it is overall a more orderly speech event, with less audience participation and better acoustics, than the previous extracts. Bevan creates another opportunity to accuse the Tories and Harold Macmillan in particular of acting inconsistently and ‘not believing his own propaganda’ (lines 1–19). We see his typically mixed sociophonetic profile, with several RP-like variants early on (in opportunity [but not its final syllable], nationalised, nation, property, etc.). For most of the extract Bevan is speaking as a ‘serious Westminster politician’ and there is some sustained phonetic support from the RP-like features for this construction, bolstering the grand initial claim of educating the British people, the credentialising self-reference (line 2) and the generally expert formulations of the social policy topic. The sixth line, which elicits slight laughter, is heard by the audience as an aside or a quip, briefly breaking the established serious key, and its slight disfluency and three vernacular variants help to mark the momentary incursion into Bevanite mockery. The original frame is quickly reinstated in line 7 with its RP-like realisation of the phrase public property, which is a concept dignified by an establishment pronunciation of both words. At line 11 Bevan begins his querying of Macmillan’s integrity, on the evidence of his decision to make substantial new investment in a public steelworks. The frame becomes overtly dialogic. The question-tagged now

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Nikolas Coupland

you would have thought wouldn’t you (11), and the follow up, more insistent question well why hasn’t he? (12), and the sarcastic why is he so neglectful of the national interest? (14), all have uniformly vernacular variants; Bevan is now styling himself as agitator and critic. A further question is voiced in the same style: why is he doing it? (17), although it is preceded by a candidate explanation in line 16 that draws strong audience laughter: doesn’t he believe his own propaganda? This utterance begins with the same vernacular design, but the long rise in pitch across the whole utterance results in the extremely high-pitched final word propaganda. The third syllable of the word is a very close, RP-like variant of short [a] (unusual in Bevan’s repertoire) and the final syllable is another hyper-correct spelling-pronunciation, the stylised Z@9\. As the line develops Bevan voices first the vernacular critic, but then blends into an abstracted propagandaising Tory persona. The stylisation itself evokes the disjunction between truth and propaganda, which is after all precisely how Bevan thematises the speech at its outset. In the final two lines of the extract, Bevan consolidates his critique of Tory propaganda as complete poppycock, which some audience members have evidently already conceded (see of course after line 18). The critical vernacular voice is a requirement for this consolidating line and it is unsurprising that we find a string of vernacular variants (except for the velar nasal in doing) in line 18. Notice that this second, vernacular-voiced realisation of the word propaganda has regained its Valleys-like open ‘short a’ form [a] and lost its hyper-correct final syllable: [prPp?'gznd@9\ has been recast as [prPp?'gand?\- This socio-phonetic contrast across a few seconds of speech performance vividly symbolises the cultural and ideological divide at the heart of the policy dispute, and the two conflicting points of view: of propagandist (Macmillan) and critic (Bevan and, he intends, his audience).

7.

Discussion

Sociolinguistic theories of style have claimed to find unitary principles or ‘dimensions’ through which to model the variation they address. As a reaction against unitarianism, and hoping to open a door to a more complex and more closely contextualised reading of stylistic constructions of social meaning, I have previously suggested ‘the relational self’ as a two-headed theoretical formulation of what style potentially achieves (Coupland

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2001b). By this I mean to imply that the work of style is to construct personal and social personas or identity images, for self and others, but also that constructed personas are then positioned and framed by speakers to achieve a wide range of relational orientations and effects. Diffuse as it may be, this line of theoretical interpretation again seems to me to provide the best fit to the data I have been considering in this chapter. Aneurin Bevan marshals semiotic resources to construct compellingly diverse social personas in and through the different interactional frames that are characteristic of his public speech-making. This is not to say that his political identity is in some way deeply compromised – it could hardly be more resolute. But his enduring commitment to what he often called ‘his own people’ on the working-class Welsh side of the class war of 1950s Britain required him to fight and win political battles, and this called for complex tactical operations, not least in that primary domain of political confrontation, public debate. On the basis of the evidence available in the audio-recordings, many of Bevan’s debating successes hinged on establishing ludicrous or foolish or inconsistent personas for his Tory opponents, and in building identities and stances for himself in relation to them and working people which listeners could adopt as their own. Style could in this case be defined as the discursive work that achieves these identities and relationships, where images of competence/ incompetence, coherence/ incoherence, integrity/ profligacy and truth/ falsity are some of the qualities at stake. Bevan’s constructions were potentially transformative, which is why they merit attention. Socio-phonetic features and their cultural resonances are what I have chosen to focus on here, although they are just some of the discursive resources through which Bevan achieves these constructions. The battle-lines of a class war are evident enough in Bevan’s speeches, and that is how he intended it to appear. But the discursive class war, in the data, is not a simple antagonism of ‘us and them’, Labour and Tories, workers and owners, even though these are words that pepper the language of the debates. Bevan does more than simply recycle the social and sociolinguistic mores of Tredegar mining communities as his own persona, although he can and does appeal to these values repeatedly. His stylistic constructions allow him to make capital out of working-class semiosis when it is rhetorically most useful to do so. Personal derogation of the Tory establishment through words like stupid and dull, and moral outrage through words like ashamed and besmirched, are stances where the vernacular symbolism of a Tredegar mining community voice adds social depth and

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power. But Bevan was aware that power is multi-faceted and is located in different places. One key source of political authority was the House of Commons, and we should remember that Bevan believed wholeheartedly in constitutional rather than revolutionary routes to social change. It is not surprising, then, that he was prepared to adopt some of the semiotic trappings of parliamentary authority, despite the fact that this semiotic would potentially conflict with the Tredegar mining semiotic. This is the best explanation, I think, for Bevan’s sometimes perceived ‘champagne socialism’, at least as it is evident in his occasional and striking deployment of conservative RP features in his speech. His left-wing critics might have asked, ‘how can Bevan, the boy from the Tredegar colliery, collude with the enemy and talk posh?’, which is how pronouncing the word decency as ['dis?nsD?\ was probably heard. But it would be entirely consistent with Bevan’s politics to argue that the working classes should claim authority whenever they could, and not eschew the trappings of privilege. Fine wine and sharp suits, so why not the occasional syllablefinal [İԥ]? Conservative RP certainly defined the establishment in 1950s Britain, but it was also (one sort of) authority. When Bevan could claim that moral authority was on his side of the debate, why not occasionally cross into the voice of the Tory establishment and bring its weight to bear down upon itself? This was at least an alternative to voicing moral authority as resistance, style-marked as Tredegar voice. These resources, like others, needed to be carefully deployed in felicitous and politically useful contexts. Sometimes it was most useful to ‘leave traces of the artist’s brushstrokes’, to cue an audience to realise that this was parody not appropriation, a stylised, as-if voice rather than fully-owned voice. In those moments Bevan provides a nice case study of the discursive performance of authenticity, and of how tactics of self de-authentication as well as other de-authentication can work in the service of self-authentication at other levels (paradoxes I discuss in Coupland 2001). It is interesting to speculate on the significance of the Bevan data being about fifty years old, and how the data might or might not reflect ‘modern’ versus ‘late-modern’ tendencies (the puzzle I mentioned earlier). The contemporary trope is to claim that social class is recessive or less structurally dominating today (see Rampton 2003 for a critique), and if we agree, we might be tempted to see Bevan’s class wars discourse as an interesting cultural relic of high modernity. A contrary and I think more accurate line is that Bevan’s playful and not-so-playful styling of social class relations has a decidedly late-modern quality. In British political history his rhetoric was

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in fact a powerful force acting to destabilise the established class order. As Dai Smith writes: Public speech, as interpreted and practised by Bevan, was an indictment of the suffocating wisdom of established superiority in its settled forms… Bevan understood that it was language alone which allowed his listeners to comprehend reality as something which could be fashioned in its plasticity not just endured in its materiality. (Smith 1993: 184–185)

Bevan’s rhetoric was a force towards a more polyvocal modernity, undermining the foundations of rigid class structures in 1950s Britain. We have seen how Bevan could bring vernacular authority to bear on political elitism. Putting the Tredegar mining community’s voice on-stage in the institutional genres and settings of British political debate in the 1950s was itself a move towards a more open and plastic social reality. But plasticity is above all the quality of discourse achieved through multiple voicing, which is able to destabilise the voice of privilege from within. The overtly dialogic frame in which most of Bevan’s voice-play happened was a radical departure from British political norms. We can invoke Bakhtin’s distinction between “authoritative discourse” and “internally persuasive discourse” to describe the distinction. Authoritative discourse is essentially monologic; it is, in Bakhtin’s expression, “the word of the fathers” and it “demands that we make it our own” (1981: 342). It is not unreasonable to call on-record, politically consolidated discourses of both left and right – ‘authoritative’ in this sense. The discourse of the political establishment was certainly “the word of the fathers”, and one which also happened to be a Tory voice in the late 1950s, giving it a an even more unmoving quality of patronymy, with RP as its socio-phonetic image. But Valleys voice was another “word of the fathers” – different fathers, of course, iconically hooked into a history of class struggle and deprivation in the coalmines of South Wales. One of Bevan’s sociolinguistic achievements was to bring these two authoritative discourses into conflict with each other, symbolically as well as rhetorically confronting establishment authenticities with vernacular authenticities. Establishment authority was thereby challenged as a universal doxa. For Bakhtin, internally persuasive discourse is relativised and developmental, and repositions authoritative discourse “in a new situation in order to expose its weak sides” (1981: 348; see also Tsitsipis 2004). The spontaneity of Bevan’s speaking (see note 4) encouraged listeners to work through arguments – with him but

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for themselves – and to become critics of received Tory stances. It is in Bevan’s socio-phonetic stylisations that his ideological critique was most persuasive and where class strictures began to seem less inevitable. His styling was both locally diverting and ideologically destabilising.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Theo van Leeuwen, Justine Coupland, Ben Rampton, Peter Garrett, Adam Jaworski and the editor of this volume for very helpful comments on an earlier version. Deficiencies in the chapter are my own. I am also grateful to the BBC Archive in Llandaff, Cardiff and to Rachel Muntz for assistance in identifying and obtaining these sources. 2. Aneurin Bevan was recently voted top of a list of ‘100 Welsh Heroes’ (see http://www.100welshheroes.com/), although the results have proved controversial. A short, photo-illustrated biography of Aneurin Bevan is available at http://www.worldwidewales.tv/index2.php?mid=259. 3. Michael Foot’s is the definitive biography (Foot 1997a); see also Brome (1953), Cambell (1987), Morgan (1989), Smith (1993), and the collection of senior politicians and journalists who contributed to Geoffrey Goodman’s (1997b) edited volume on Bevan’s legacy. 4. “[The] quality of spontaneity and immediacy is the very kernel of effective speech. It induces in the audience a disposition to give themselves to the speaker because their surrender has not been obviously and carefully prepared beforehand” (Aneurin Bevan, quoted in Smith 1993: 183). 5. The broadcast sources I originally had access to are: Nye, BBC Radio 4, 21st June 1978; What Became of Nye, BBC Radio Wales, 6 parts, 7th November 1997 to 11th December 1997; and A Class Apart: Aneurin Bevan and the Labour Party, BBC television, 1998. All were presented by the political journalist Patrick Hannan. A further, unique source is: The Past Master, presenter Phil Carradice, BBC Radio Wales 25th May 2003. This programme was devoted to a then newly discovered complete recording of one of Aneurin Bevan’s speeches, with extensive extracts of the speech included in the broadcast. 6. Transcribed extracts, below, are segmented into intonational units (to which I have allocated ‘line’ numbers), usually but not inevitably bounded by pauses. A typical pattern in Bevan’s public speeches is a sequence of short units divided by short pauses, followed by more substantial pauses which may include audible audience response. Parts of some extracts show a less formal oratorical mode, with some longer intonation units and less predictable pause boundaries. I mark short, untimed pauses as (.) and Bevan’s occasional (stammering) blocks with /. Particularly heavy syllable emphasis is shown through underlining, but

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this is of course only a rudimentary convention for representing the rhythmical properties of the speeches. I do not give a formal representation of intonation either, but I note some salient pitch movements and some paralinguistic characteristics, as necessary to the analysis, in comments enclosed by << >> within the line of transcript. I give representations of salient socio-phonetic variants in small font, above the line of transcript. 7. See Foot 1997a: 519ff, 1997b: 202ff, for a personal account of this speech and more details of its historical context. 8. “Bevan’s natural gifts were perhaps unpromising for someone who wanted to persuade from a platform or the benches of the House of Commons. A rather high voice, a stammer, and a substantial dropper of aitches too. But none of it mattered, I think, because these characteristics were for his audience a kind of guarantee of authenticity. That and his skill at making ideas accessible” (Patrick Hannan, What Became of Nye, Programme 5).

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Johnstone, Barbara 1996 The Linguistic Individual: Self-Expression in Language and Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. Johnstone, Barbara and Judith M. Bean 1997 Self-expression and linguistic variation. Language in Society 26, 221–246. Labov, William 1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. LePage, Robert and Andrée Tabouret-Keller 1985 Acts of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, Kenneth O. 1989 The Red Dragon and the Red Flag: The Cases of James Griffiths and Aneurin Bevan. Aberystwyth: The National Library of Wales. Rampton, Ben 1995 Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. 2000 Speech community. In Verschueren, J., J.-O. Ostman, J. Blommaert, and C. Bulcaen (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1–34. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/education/ULL/wpull.html 2001 Language crossing, crosstalk and cross-disciplinarity in sociolinguistics. In Coupland, N., C. Candlin, and S. Sarangi (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Social Theory. London: Longman, 261–296. 2003 Hegemony, social class and stylisation. Pragmatics 13(1), 49–84. Rampton, Ben (ed.) 1999 Styling the other. Thematic issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4). Rickford, John and Penelope Eckert (eds.) 2001 Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schilling-Estes, Natalie 2004 Constructing ethnicity in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8, 163–195. Smith, David 1993 Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 1999 Wales: A Question for History. Bridgend: Seren. Tannen, Deborah (ed.) 1993 Framing in Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Tsitsipis, Lukas 2004 On Bakhtin and sociolinguistics: Linguistic ideology and the tension between authoritative discourse and minority language communities. Journal of Sociolinguistics. Williams, Gwyn A. 1985 When was Wales? London: Black Raven Books. Williams, Raymond 2003 Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity, D. Williams (ed.). Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Chapter 9 Identity and positioning in interactive knowledge displays* Grit Liebscher and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain 1.

Introduction and theoretical background

In his article on the asymmetries of knowledge in conversational interactions, Drew (1991) points out that “the kinds of ways in which asymmetries are manifest need to be more carefully specified in the details of talk” (1991: 22). These asymmetries concern the ways in which speakers claim authority to knowledge through the use of interactional and linguistic resources. These resources are, for example, mitigations by a patient in doctor-patient-interaction with the use of a medical term in order to “treat such terminology as normatively ‘belonging’ to the other” (1991: 39), in this case the doctor. Thus, Drew shows that “an asymmetry of knowledge is not equivalent to ‘not knowing’”(1991: 39). Furthermore, Drew argues for a link between identity and these knowledge asymmetries: Entitlements to knowledge are attached to, or belong to, categories – and not to persons.... This has the consequence that a speaker may possess some knowledge, but nevertheless have an asymmetrical position with respect to that knowledge. The connection between categories or speaker identities and normative entitlements to knowledge begins to separate the notion of asymmetry from actual states of knowledge and ignorance. The interactional consequences of this shows up in cases where speakers use some piece of knowledge, but simultaneously display their asymmetrical position of non-entitlement to – or of not being an authoritative source of – that knowledge. (1991: 37–38)

Identity, as conceived by Drew above, as well as by Antaki and Widdicombe (1998), is something that is co-constructed by participants in an interaction. In our interest in identity and positioning in interactive knowledge displays, we concern ourselves with emergent identities within the context of Eastern and Western Germany1 after the fall of the wall in 1989

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and German unification in 1990.2 We distinguish between three types of identity: personal, social, and discursive. Personal identity refers to the particular life history of each of our interactants, which results in a biographical accomplishment of an individual person (cf. Ricker 2000: 9). Part of this history is the accumulation of life experience, which then becomes first-hand knowledge. With it comes a psychological awareness of one’s own as well as others’ experiences, and this awareness is part of the contextual knowledge participants bring to an interaction, whether or not such knowledge is made relevant in the interaction. In the analysis for this paper, this knowledge is tied to social categories such as those of Eastern German and Western German. While identity is discursively constructed, the cultural context in which the conversational participants live makes them aware of such social categories, and this awareness allows them to use these categories as “construction materials” for social identities for themselves and others, by making such information relevant in the interaction (cf. McKinlay and Dunnett 1998: 46). In this sense, “Eastern German” and “Western German” as social identities are not pre-analytic concepts which determine the outcome of the interaction, but rather concepts which evolve in the interaction and present themselves through linguistic variability. Finally, discursive identity is that position which interactants momentarily take up at a particular point in the interaction. For example, a person may take up the position of the “speaker”, while another is the “recipient”. The interactants can then construct themselves and/or each other as the “knowing recipient” or the “non-knowing recipient.” The process by which interactants make these identities relevant is called positioning (Harré and van Langenhove 1991; van Langenhove and Harré 1993; Wolf 1999), which we define here as the ways in which interactants index their own and others’ relationships to roles and social categories by means of interactive resources. Positioning can be seen as “a dynamic alternative to the more static concept of role” (Harré and van Langenhove 1991: 393), and far from being permanent category memberships, these positionings are always highly context-dependent and often quite temporary. In our analysis, these have to do with respective identity assignment in the discursive co-construction of a particular personal story in which cultural knowlege plays a role. Positioning aids in “mak[ing] a person’s actions intelligible and relatively determinate as social acts” (van Langenhove and Harré 1993: 83) and is a natural and unavoidable process of conversation.

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By using this approach, this paper tries to make a contribution to the understanding of the link between identity, positioning and knowledge displays. While this research may be of interest to linguists investigating the relationship between epistemic phenomena and grammar in the tradition of Chafe and Nichols (1986), it also addresses questions which interactional researchers are increasingly interested in. Such questions are: Since knowledge may be acquired on the basis of experience (first-hand) or through hearsay (second-hand), how do interactants deal with these differences? Contrary to institutional settings where authority may be based on an understanding of roles (e.g. doctor vs. client), how is authority through knowledge displays negotiated in everyday conversation? How do epistemic stances contribute to the construction of social identities? Finally, is there a link between first- and second-hand knowledge and communicative styles in particular local contexts? Heritage and Raymond (2005: 16) address the connection between knowledge and style as “organized practices of speaking” when claiming that “the distribution of rights and responsibilities regarding what participants can accountably know, how they know it, whether they have rights to describe it, and in what terms is directly implicated in organized practices of speaking.” In their analysis of first and second assessments in everyday conversations, they describe the linguistic features that index “relative epistemic rights to evaluate states of affairs” (ibid.) and discuss the use of these features in relation to the management of face and identity in form of social categories such as “dog owner” and “grandmother”. In this discussion, they point out that this relationship is rather ambivalent at times in that, e.g. “[s]peakers may assert rights that are (or could be) contested; in some cases they may defer to a recipient with putatively subordinate rights” (Heritage and Raymond 2005: 31). In searching for reasons why speakers do that, we suggest to consider how personal knowledge links with social stereotyping and the social discourses about identities at large such as the discourses about Eastern and Western Germany after 1989. The conversations analyzed for this paper all involve people who have migrated from Western to Eastern Germany after German unification in 1990. We refer to these individuals as “migrants”3 due to the fact that they moved from one geographic area to another, each with a distinct recent cultural and political past. One outcome of these distinct pasts are the different experiences of people living in the East and in the West, resulting on the individual level in different biographies, i.e. different personal identities. Whether or not these differences are made salient in the interaction has

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an effect on the construction of different German social identities and on the construction of the identity of Germany as a whole. In our analysis, we focus on the varying ways in which the migrants construct these different kinds of culturally specific knowledge, and in particular, how they use specific linguistic resources to index one social group or the other in the context of this knowledge management. While we are interested in the ways in which speakers in our data use linguistic resources to “upgrade” and “downgrade” their claims to authority, building on Heritage and Raymond’s (2005) analysis of knowledge displays in first and second assessments, we are further interested in the use of these resources within a context in which claims to knowledge relate to ways in which contested or stigmatized Eastern and Western social identities are constructed. Communicative style plays a role to the extent that it can be considered an outcome of the interaction, in which local and social contexts are as important as who is participating in the interaction. Our understanding of style is that of a “strategic, proactive use of available linguistic resources to construct social meaning” (Milroy and Gordon 2003: 199). Kamio (1995, 1997) in his theory of the territory of information seems to link style to the management of knowledge, in particular the display of authority through the use of particular forms. Though Kamio’s theory is somewhat deterministic in that linguistic forms are linked to social meaning a-priori, we can also take his theory to inform our understanding about why certain forms are possibly used in particular local contexts and what such use implies in regard to the social identities of speakers. This theory distinguishes two basic types of sentential forms: the direct form and the non-direct form. The direct form consists of bare forms such as “That lady is your mother,” while non-direct forms contain “hedging” elements such as “I think”, “probably”, or rhetorical questions. These forms correspond, in turn, to the notion of locating the information inside or outside a particular territory, which is analogous to a physical space that can be claimed by a person or animal. The form of the utterance that is used indicates the interactant’s relationship to the information, as well as that of the other conversational participants; i.e., when a given piece of information falls into the speaker’s territory but not the hearer’s, the speaker will tend to use the direct form; when a given piece of information falls into the hearer’s territory but not the speaker’s, the speaker will tend to use an indirect form (Kamio 1997: 6). We do not, however, claim that there is a particular Eastern German or Western German style. Rather, as these social categories emerge as topic or through vocabulary, speakers use stylistic means such as hedging

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to create epistemic or affective stances to position themselves in relation to these categories. This notion comprises style shifts where an individual speaker “creatively uses language resources often from beyond the immediate speech community, such as distant dialects, or stretches those resources in novel directions,” which Bell (2001: 147) refers to as “referee design”. In that sense, a Western German may present Eastern German knowledge, including Eastern German-specific vocabulary. According to Kamio, however, in using a direct form when presenting this knowledge, the speaker would construct an Eastern German identity for himself. In contrast, by presenting Eastern German knowledge using a non-direct form, the speaker would construct a non-Eastern German identity for himself. Since Eastern German and Western German are complementary categories (in that indexing one category necessarily means simultaneously invoking the other category; Wolf 1999: 15), positioning as a non-Eastern German may evoke a Western German identity. In other words, “linguistic choices are interpreted as part of a larger set of strategies and practices whereby speakers not only associate themselves with particular social groups and index distinctiveness from others, but also construct by means of these practices social categories such as ‘whiteness,’ ‘masculinity,’ ‘jock,’ ‘burnout,’ and so forth” (Milroy and Gordon 2003: 199–200), or, we may add, ‘Eastern German’ and ‘Western German’.

2.

Data and methodology

The data on which this paper is based was collected by the two authors over three summers between 2000 and 2003 in Eastern Germany. The data are audiotaped and videotaped, mostly non-directed conversations which took place during cooking, while playing with children, while sitting together in the migrants’ homes, or during meals. The participants in these conversations are one or more migrants from Western to Eastern Germany and sometimes their partners and children, along with one or both of the researchers, who are also the authors of this paper. All of the migrants in this study moved from Western to Eastern Germany for personal or professional reasons after the unification of East and West Germany in 1990 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.4 Specific circumstances distinguish the migration from Western to Eastern Germany from other migrant situations. Eastern Germany and Western Germany are not politically neutral grounds, but places that each carry the

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associations of the formerly opposed political systems of the West vs. the East. These associations such as social evaluations, emotions and attitudes are tied not only to the respective places but also to the people, and to the social categories of Eastern German and Western German (cf. Wolf 1999: 15). Since the conversations take place in Eastern Germany, where the pejorative picture of the Western German as the “other” is strongly present, the Western German migrants may feel compelled to address this pejorative image. While they can do this through the ways in which they use linguistic resources to position themselves within the Eastern and Western German categories, the direction of the move itself may also be indicative of a favourable view on Eastern Germany.5 Simply by moving from Western to Eastern Germany during the time when important parts of the former East German infrastructure were still intact, the migrants already position themselves as favourable towards Eastern Germany. As in any situation of migration, however, they are, based on their personal histories, outsiders. As such, they may have an interest in integrating as soon as possible, i.e. in positioning themselves as Eastern Germans. Positioning, as one way to display integration discursively, is made more difficult through the sociopolitical contrast between Eastern German and Western German and the baggage these categories carry. The ways in which knowledge about Eastern Germany is presented becomes intrinsically linked to the evaluation of Eastern and Western German as social categories. The migrants in this study have acquired their knowledge of former East German and present-day Eastern German life through a combination of first-hand and second-hand experience. Those varying kinds of experience are relevant to whether they perceive a piece of information as falling inside or outside of their territories, and therefore with what degree of authority they speak about that information. As Sacks (1995: 468) points out: People in this world in any event are built to be the custodians of just about only their own experiences. And a lot of things that people are built to be the custodians of, i.e. that they can be made to care about keeping, taking care of, defending, and the like, are more or less whatever it is that the world has them conceive of as ‘their own’. Their experiences are but one class of such things.

Among the questions that we address involve how these migrants relate their knowledge, how this knowledge display is part of identity construction, and to what extent different styles can be said to be emerging through the use of different features that are instrinsically tied to particular social groups.

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For this paper, we collected excerpts from the data in which our migrants present their knowledge on Eastern and Western Germany. From these excerpts, we selected segments to be analyzed and presented in this paper. Our analysis is based on a combination of qualitative tools developed within interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis and the ethnography of speaking. While we discuss individual utterances within their conversational context and consider the sequential nature of each interaction, ethnographic information in form of the cultural and historical backgrounds of and the relationship between Eastern and Western Germany also become part of the analysis. This background includes the relationship between language and culture, e.g. through the ways in which lexical items carry certain social connotations.

3.

Analysis

The focus in the segments analyzed below is always on the presentation of knowledge about Eastern Germany, which necessitates choices for positioning, links the migrants’ selection of linguistic forms to social identities, and makes these links contestable. The segments are organized into different analytic sections in order to discuss different aspects of knowledge presentation. In section 3.1, we discuss the use of Eastern German-specific vocabulary as part of knowledge management. Our focus in section 3.2 is the variable use of direct and non-direct forms by the same speaker in one and the same interaction and its consequences for self- and other-positioning. Finally, in section 3.3, we examine the ways in which migrants’ presentation of knowledge is challenged and how the migrants strategically position themselves to address these challenges. 3.1. Variability and positioning involving Eastern German-specific vocabulary Presenting knowledge about Eastern Germany in an interaction often involves the use of lexical items which carry the connotations of and knowledge about Eastern German culture and society, and which we call Eastern German-specific vocabulary. Such vocabulary in itself can be considered a stylistic feature which calls upon Eastern German as a social category. For a migrant from Western Germany, using such vocabulary is no easy task

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because it implies knowledge about Eastern Germany and, perhaps, positioning as an Eastern German. In other words, its use implies knowledge that does not fall into the territory of information of a Western German who has lived all his life in Western Germany, especially if this vocabulary is tied to former East Germany rather than to present-day Eastern Germany. The use of Eastern German-specific vocabulary occurs in several segments discussed in this paper, but it takes a central role in the two segments discussed in this section. The following segment is from a breakfast table conversation which took place in a town in Eastern Germany in 2003. The interactants are the Western German migrants, Diana and Fred5, with their pre-school and primary school aged daughter and son who are present but do not talk during this excerpt, and the two researchers GL and JD. They migrated to Eastern Germany after Fred, who is in his fourties, was hired by a local government ministry. Segment (1)7 1

GL:

geht die tochter in den kindergarten eigentlich? ‘is your daughter in preschool?’

2

Fred:

ja ‘yes’

3

Diana: ja ‘yes’

4

(2.0)

5

GL:

hier in (.) wachau? ‘here in wachau?’

6

Fred:

ja ‘yes’

7

(1.0)

8

Fred:

9

GL:

in den volkssolidaritätskindergarten ‘at the volkssolidarität preschool’ ((laughs, looks up from the table at GL))

10 Fred:

ja? heißt der noch so ja? ‘yeah? is it still called that yeah?’ ja- na ja- der heißt kinderland ‘yeah well it's called child-land’

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[(0.1) aber wird von= [(0.1) but is run’= [(du deswegen ) [(‘hey therefore’ ) ((separate conversation involving JD))

11 Diana:

12 Fred:

=der volkssolidarität betrieben =‘by the volkssolidarität organization’

13 GL:

ach so? ‘oh?’

14 Fred:

aber ist nicht schlecht. die haben so ne montessori gruppe ‘but it's not bad. they have a montessori group’

15

und auch ne nette kinder [gärtnerin‘and also a really nice [preschool teacher’[ [hm=hm? [‘hm=hm?’

16 GL:

After GL’s initial question in line 1 about the daughter’s preschool and a follow-up question in line 5, Fred in line 8 volunteers more information about the preschool, namely specifying it as a Volkssolidarität preschool. Volkssolidarität is an Eastern German-specific term referring to a charitable organization that used to do work in former East Germany, where it still exists today, and has never done work in the West. When he uses this term, Fred starts to laugh, indicating that he finds this amusing, and looks up from the breakfast table to make eye contact with GL.8 By doing this without giving any additional information about the term, he positions GL as the knowing recipient, and moreover, indicates through the use of a direct form that knowledge about the Volkssolidarität organization falls within his territory of information. Through these linguistic and interactional resources, he calls upon their shared knowledge about the significance of the term as something to do with Eastern Germany, though also checking through eye-contact whether GL has knowledge about that term and/or anticipating her reaction to his use of the term. In using a direct form rather than a non-direct form, he presents this knowledge as first-hand knowledge, as part of his current experience in Eastern Germany rather than tied to former East Germany. In fact, GL in her question in line 9 also ties this term to present-day Eastern Germany in formulating a question with the

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underlying assumption that this term is still used today. This assumption may arise from the fact that Fred uses the direct form suggesting that this is first-hand knowledge from his experience living in present-day Eastern Germany. It is not clear whether Fred actually knows that the term originated in former East Germany, but through his laughter he indicates that he finds the use of the term amusing for some reason or another, i.e. takes an affective stance toward the term. In looking at GL in line 8, he positions her as somebody who may be able to share in the amusement value surrounding the term. Through her response in line 9, GL indicates that she is familiar with the term, i.e. shares that knowledge. She does not, however, join in the laughter with him, but seems to want to locate the reason for the amusement in asking whether this term is really still used in present-day Eastern Germany. The ‘noch’ (still) is used to index the relationship between the present (Eastern Germany) and the past (East Germany). Similarly to the use of ‘früher’ (in the past) in the first segment, the reference is given through GL’s personal life history as a former East German who may be interested in the changes between East Germany and present-day Eastern Germany. In other words, GL assumes that Fred’s laughter may result from the fact that the term is still used today as it was in former East Germany. While GL positions Fred as somebody who has more knowledge than herself about Eastern Germany, she is also building on shared knowledge about East Germany, i.e. she locates the information about the Volkssolidarität organization within both her territory of information and his. In Fred’s answer starting in line 10, the several restarts and perturbation makers are indicative of a dispreferred response (i.e. a ‘no’-answer rather than a ‘yes’-answer presupposed by GL’s question). Since the name of the kindergarden, as it turns out, is Kinderland, Fred adds an explanation why it is called Volkssolidaritätskindergarten (presumably as an alternate name): it is run by the Volkssolidarität organization. Since this is an Eastern German organization and since he therefore could possibly be seen as mocking things East German, the positive information about the preschool he gives in lines 14 and 15 can be seen as asserting his position as being positive about Eastern German things (at least as far as the kindergarten is concerned). This could indicate that he may have understood GL’s reaction as doubtful about his positive attitude towards Eastern Germany by her not joining in a joke. By displaying a positive attitude through current knowledge about something with ties to East Germany, Fred asserts his position as integrating into his place of migration in a positive way. While Fred did

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not succeed in displaying this positive attitude through the use of vocabulary, the Western German migrant in the following segment does. Segment (2) is similar to the previous segment in that it involves the use of Eastern German-specific vocabulary, a term that calls upon Eastern German as a category and by which the Western German migrant, in using this term, displays knowledge about former East Germany. What is different from segment (1), however, is how the interactants in the following segment (2) treat this use of such vocabulary, namely the term Westbesuch. This term was typically used by East Germans to refer to people from West Germany who visited relatives or friends in pre-unification East Germany. It had a pejorative meaning, especially when used by East German state officials, with a connotation of “making allies with the enemy”. The use of the term was commonly associated with an East German person, and would fall into the territory of information of someone with an East German identity. In a Bakhtinian sense, the person using it speaks with an East German “voice” (Bakhtin 1981). If a migrant from Western Germany uses this term, as in the segment below, it becomes marked and has multiple implications, as the discussion following the segment will show. The participants in segment (2) are the two migrants, Silke and Bernd, along with their 4-yearold daughter Sabine, as well as the researchers GL and JD. Silke and Bernd, both in their late thirties, came to Eastern Germany shortly after unification to start their own businesses. Segment (2) 1

JD:

2

so sabine meinte ihr hattet (.) gaanz lange beSU:CH ‘so sabine said that you guys had (.) visitors for a loong time’ (2.0)

3

Silke: wann (.) GEStern ‘when (.) YESterday’

4

JD:

5 6

weiß ich nicht ‘I don't know’ (1.0)

Bernd: von VORgestern abend bis gestern v- vormittag ‘from the day before YESterday until yesterday m- morning’

258 7

Grit Liebscher and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain Silke: ( ) und das- wenn dann auch (.) äh vieler besu:ch ist (.) ( ) ‘and therefore- if then (.) uh many of our visitors are’(.)

LA:Nge auch da ‘here for a LONG time such’

8

[also so (.) WESTbesuch [I mean like (.) WESTbe-

GL:

[mhm [‘mhm’

10 JD:

[mhm [‘mhm’

9

11 GL:

[((laughter))

12 JD:

[((laughter))

13

(1.0)

14 JD:

((laughter)) WESTbesuch

15

((laughter))

In this segment, the researcher JD initiates a topic about visitors at Silke and Bernd’s home, since their daughter had mentioned them. Silke, in her turn in lines 7 and 8, confirms their daughter’s description that the visitors stayed for a long time, and adds that their visitors are usually from Western Germany, using the term WESTbesuch. As the term displays an East German social identity, in using this term, Silke evokes a voice she is not typically associated with. By using the discourse marker also (I mean),9 she marks this term as a repair10 and as a reformulation of her description of the visitors. In doing so, she compares her own experience of receiving visitors in Eastern Germany with receiving Westbesuch in former East Germany. As part of the general nature of this comparison, Silke associates the Eastern and Western German territories with the former states of East and West Germany. While the term was outdated at the time of interaction because East and West Germany no longer existed as states, Silke, in using the term, recalls the East German experience through the territorial correspondence. In alluding to an East German identity, Silke displays her East German knowledge and “transports” that knowledge into the present day, invoking the connotations this term used to have, such as visitors who came from the wealthier part of Germany with West German goods (or hand-me-

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downs), possibly staying for a longer time after going through the trouble of registering as visitors in East Germany and of paying a fee to be able to visit. These associations are the reason why Silke’s use of the term triggers laughter, first by the two researchers and later, in line 15, by all interactants. Silke’s use of the term can thus be seen as a funny comment about her visitors. Secondly, and more importantly for our discussion, Silke’s use of the term is a comment about herself as a Western German who would have been the person visiting rather than receiving the visit in preunification East Germany. In using the term, she not only displays her East German knowledge but is able to shift identities from a Western German to an Eastern German. Nonetheless, because of her personal identity as a migrant, this shift is recognized by the present parties through the laughter. Silke gets credit for her knowledge about the East German term, drawing on the shared knowledge among all interactants, and the way in which her use of the term is a twist on her own identity. While the interactants seem to recognize this twist through the laughter, it is GL and JD who position Silke as a Western German by initiating the laughter, by which they express that Silke is somebody for whom the use of the term ‘Westbesuch’ is unusual. 3.2. The contrast between direct and non-direct forms in the presentation of knowledge There are also subtler ways than Eastern German-specific vocabulary by which the social categories Eastern and Western German emerge in the interaction, and in the course of which positioning plays a role. One of these ways is the focus of discussion in this section, where the speaker constructs a migrant identity for herself through the use of the direct and nondirect forms and simultaneously constructs the interlocutor’s identity. The first of two segments in this section, segment (3), is an excerpt from an interaction between the migrant Nina, who is in her mid-thirties and came to Eastern Germany in 1995 to pursue a doctoral degree, and the researcher GL. The conversation took place over dinner in a restaurant, and the main topic is the differences between Eastern German products before unification and at the time of conversation.

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Segment (3) 1

Nina:

[(2.0) angeboten [(2.0) ‘packaging’

2 3

bestimmte produkte werden wieder mit der originalverpackung ‘certain products are being offered again in their original’

GL:

4

[m=hm: [‘m=hm:’ (2.0)

5

GL:

zum beispiel? ‘for example?’

6

Nina:

die schlager süßtafel 11 ‘the schlager süßtafel’

7

GL:

ach so? ((laughter)) ‘oh really?’

8

Nina:

ich weiß nich ob wir da neulich schon drüber gesprochen ‘I don't know if we already talked about that last time?’

9

hatten? aber das is so KÖSTlich ‘but it's so GREAT’

10 GL:

hmm doch [schon ‘hmm yeah [I think we did’

11 Nina:

[die schmeckt ja nicht mehr sooo [‘it doesn't taste aaaas good as it used to’ [(1.0) sagn (1.0) die einheimischen [(1.0) ‘as (1.0) the locals say’

12 13 GL:

[hm:=m [‘hm:=m’

14

(3.0)

15 Nina:

nja: die ZETTi knusperflocken (1.0) die sehen wohl nich mehr ‘well: the ZETTi knusperflocken (1.0)I guess they don't’

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16

so aus wie früher (1.0) die sin nämlich jetz in so ner ‘look like they used to (1.0) now they're wrapped’

17

hochkants [(2.0) folie‘in a horizontal [(2.0) foil-

18 GL:

[ach soo [‘ohh

[verpackung [packaging’ [aha [I see’

Nina’s formulation at the beginning of Originalpackung (‘original packaging’) contains an implicit comparison between the state of affairs in former East Germany with that of current-day Eastern Germany, through which the categories of East German and West German are made relevant. Since Nina is using the direct form in this comparison, she claims to have knowledge about current-day Eastern Germany just as she does about former East Germany, without indicating that any of this is second-hand knowledge. Even though GL does not challenge her directly, she asks Nina in line 5 for the name, possibly in anticipation of recognizing the East German product herself, but may be perceived as probing into Nina’s more specific knowledge about things East German, which she presents again in a direct form in line 6. By using these direct forms, Nina locates this piece of knowledge within her territory of information and not GL’s. This has the effect of evoking GL’s own migrant status as someone not currently living in Eastern Germany, and positioning GL as someone for whom this knowledge is new information. The presentation of knowledge at the beginning of the segment and the positioning of both herself and GL contrast with the ways in which Nina formulates similar knowledge about past and present Eastern German products in lines 11 and 12. In line 11, she again uses the direct form when giving comparative information about such products. In line 12, however, she locates that information outside of her territory by using sagn die einheimischen (‘as...the locals say’), which identifies it as hearsay by making the form indirect and as outside her voice (in a Bakhtinian sense). Even though the term ‘locals’ could potentially refer to any group of people in the town or region in which Nina lives, in this context it indexes Eastern Germans as a category bound by the conversational context in which it appears, since the talk has been about Eastern German products. In talking about the locals in third-person reference, Nina positions herself as well as GL outside this group, i.e. she defines ‘locals’ as those that are different

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from both herself and GL. The difference between herself and this group is that she has just recently moved to this area, which allows her migrant status to appear. The difference she may perceive between GL and this group is that GL is not ‘local’ anymore, since she does not now live in Eastern Germany. In line with positioning herself as an outsider to the ‘locals’, i.e. the Eastern Germans, Nina now uses a non-direct form in line 15, where she employs the hedging particle wohl (Helbig 1988; see also Brausse 1992) when comparing former East Germany with current-day Eastern Germany. Nina makes this comparison by using früher (translated here as ‘as they used to’, literally ‘earlier’), a temporal deictic commonly used to index preunification East Germany in conversations about Eastern Germany (cf. Liebscher 1997; Auer and Kern 2001). Through the hedge which marks the knowledge as hearsay, she locates this knowledge as outside her territory of information by reporting on this knowledge as second-hand. The use of this hedge, however, does not necessarily locate this information outside GL’s territory of information, as was the case with the demonstrative pronoun die (‘they’). The information immediately following in line 16 ‘now they are wrapped...’, is presented in a direct form and therefore as new information to GL, without marking this information as shared knowledge. GL further confirms that this was new information through her backchannel cues of ach soo ‘oh’ and aha ‘I see’ in line 17. Interestingly, however, Nina, in this comparison between former East Germany and the current state of affairs in lines 15 through 17, only reports about present-day Eastern Germany but not on what used to be in East Germany, thus positioning GL as knowledgeable about pre-unification East Germany. For her own positioning, however, the hedge wohl is a strong indicator that she shares this knowledge neither with GL nor with the ‘locals’. In marking this past knowledge as outside her territory of information, i.e. positioning herself as a Western German, and marking current knowledge as inside this territory, her identity as a migrant (rather than e.g. a Western German nor an Eastern German) emerges. The temporal deictic früher plays an important part in this identity construction, as this time indexed through früher for her is linked to Western Germany rather than Eastern Germany (see also discussion of segment 4 below). The following segment, part of the same conversation as segment (3), provides evidence of how Nina presents herself as outside of the social category of Eastern German by means of pronoun use but without using a hedging device. This self-presentation coincides with her changing percep-

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tion of GL as an outsider to former East Germany. The conversation in this segment is still about East German products, here specifically about wine. Segment (4) 1

Nina: is ja letztendlich egal (.) da wird eh alles zusammengekippt ‘in the end it doesn't matter (.) it all gets mixed together anyway’

2

GL:

3 4

hmm=m ‘hmm=m’ (3.0)

Nina: un die hatten selbst in ddr zeiten schon auch französischen ‘and they even had French wine back in East Germany’

5

(1.0)

hmm=m ‘hmm=m’

6

GL:

7

Nina: also gegen [(..) TEUre devisen (..) einge [kauft ‘it was [(..) bought with (..) exPEN [sive hard currency’

8

GL:

9 10

[doch [‘yeah you're right (1.0)

GL:

11

un der MEIßner wein wurde dagegen (.) verKAUFT ‘and the wine from MEIßen12 was SOLD (.) going in the other direction’ (2.0)

12

Nina: als bückware ‘under the table’

13

GL:

14 15

[hja:. [yeah’

nja ‘yeah’ (1.0)

Nina: saale unstrut geNAUso ‘just like saale unstrut’

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16

GL:

hm (.) wo? hm (.) where?’

17

Nina: saale unstru:t ‘saale unstru:t

[(..) aber (..) der= [(..) but (..) the=’

18

GL:

[aha (.) so genau (.) [‘I see (.) right okay’ (.)

hm:=m hm:=m’ 19

Nina: =der [(...) weiß nich wie hieß des denn =‘the [(...) I don't know what did that’

20

GL:

[hm:=m. [‘hm:=m.’

19a Nina: FRÜher= ‘used to be called back THEN’= 21

Nina: =JETZT (.) sagt man ja sachsen anhaltinische =’NOW (.) you call it Saxony-Anhaltinish’

After a general comment in line 1 about the mixing of wines for sale and a relatively long pause, Nina in line 4 volunteers information on the subject of wine in former East Germany. Here, she uses the direct form but positions herself outside the group of people indexed by die (‘they’) through the use of the third person pronoun. Through the conversational context, and especially due to the use of the expression in DDR Zeiten (‘back in East Germany’ or ‘during East German times’), the referent of die can be located as the people in East Germany at the time. It makes sense, therefore, that Nina positions herself outside of this group. Interestingly, however, she presents knowledge about this group as direct knowledge, i.e. locating this information within her territory. This is noteworthy because, in doing so, she also positions GL as outside this group and as the non-knowing recipient, even though she knows about GL’s personal identity as a former East German. This construction of GL as an outsider just like her may be the reason why she may now, in contrast to segment (3), present information about East Germany as the knowledgeable author, using direct forms, rather than presenting the information as second-hand. In perceiving GL as an outsider rather than a former East German, there is no reason for Nina to engage in any additional effort to hedge any objection to her authority on

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East German knowledge. In fact, GLs doch (‘yes’) in line 8 confirms the information Nina gave in line 4 as correct. In the turns that follow, Nina and GL co-construct knowledge about former East Germany. In contrast to Nina’s positioning both of them as outsiders using die, GL, in line 10, resorts to the passive through wurde verkauft (‘was sold’), through which she avoids both her own and Nina’s positioning in relation to a particular German social identity, as she would have using a pronoun. In line 12, Nina presents a further piece of information about East Germany through the use of the term Bückware (‘products sold under the table’) which strongly evokes the East German cultural context. Nina’s use of früher (‘back then’), as in segment (3), indexes former East Germany, and again she positions herself as an Eastern German, tracking her past in a linear fashion from current times to pre-unification times in the same place, despite the fact that she used to live in a different place before unification. Through this direct line, and by asking the question in which früher is used in a direct rather than non-direct form, Nina does not mark the shift that has occurred in her personal identity from Western to Eastern German. 3.3. Challenging migrants’ presentation of knowledge in narrated knowledge displays The use of Eastern German-specific terms and the references to Eastern German products discussed in the previous two sections are one way of displaying knowledge about Eastern Germany. The segments in this section deal with narrated knowledge display of Eastern German cultural life. As already suggested in the discussion of earlier segments, this knowledge can be challenged or disputed by other conversational participants. This is what Harré and van Langenhove (1991: 396) call “second order positioning”, which is a re-positioning after a challenge to the “first-order positioning”, i.e. the initial positioning. Through such second order positionings interlocutors may call into question migrants’ rights to their expressed knowledge, and through their very self-positionings. These challenges have repercussions for the speaker’s territory of information, since, as we have previously stated, information is considered less close to an interactant if he or she is deemed not to have an adequate basis for asserting it (Kamio 1997: 17–20). In segment (5) below, we analyze a stretch of conversation where one of the other participants in the conversation challenges a piece of

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knowledge about East Germany as introduced by a migrant. In segment (6), we analyze a similar stretch of conversation in which the migrant reacts as though his knowledge is being challenged; however, the actual challenge is not to the validity of the knowledge expressed, but to the migrant’s right to claim that information as falling within his territory. Segment (5) is a part of a conversation between the migrant Erika, who is in her late thirties and came to to Eastern Germany in 1993 to take a staff position at a university, her Eastern German partner Lars, whom she met after her migration, and the two researchers, JD and GL. Directly preceding the segment shown here, they have been discussing possible reasons why the Saxon dialect is so unpopular, and Lars has presented the former East German politician Walter Ulbricht’s Saxon origin as part of the reason for this unpopularity, which stretched back to pre-unification East Germany. Segment (5) un das is ‘and that's

[wahrscheinlich MIT?= [probably PART?=’

1

Lars:

2

JD:

3

Lars:

=KÖNNT ich mir vorstellen als GRUND? ja? =‘I COULD imagine part of the REason? yeah?’

4

JD:

ja ‘of

5

GL:

6

JD:

wo kam der eigentlich her? ‘where was he from?’

7

Lars:

ach des ‘oh I

8

Erika:

9

JD:

10 ??:

[wo KAM der? [‘where did he COME?’

[klar. [course.’ [mh=m. [‘mh=m.’

[weiß ich nich. [don't know.’ [aus LEIPzig. [‘from LEIPzig.’

aus LEIPZIG? ‘from LEIPZIG?

[direkt LEIPZIG? NEE. [directly from LEIPZIG? no WAY.’ [ja ja. [‘oh yeah.’

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11 Lars:

jaa. ich glaube das is (.) des war n leipziger gewesen. ‘yeeah. I think he's (.) he was a Leipziger.’

12 JD:

WAAS? ‘WHAAT?’

13 Lars:

ja: ich glaube ja:. ‘yeah: I think so:.’

14 JD:

der sprach aber so KOmisch? ‘but he talked so FUNny?’

15 Lars:

jaa. der hat so die (.) die hohe? so ne ganz ‘yeeah. he had that (.) that high? such a really’

16

hohe stim [me hatte der gehabt? so das KLANG so=n ‘high voi [ce was what he had? and it SOUNDED like’ [hmm. [‘hmm.’

17 GL: 18 Lars:

[bisschen komisch. so jo=o=a? [‘a little bit weird. so 'jo=o=a?' ((imitating))

19 JD:

[ach soo. [‘ohhh.’

20 JD:

((laughter)) aber der KAM aus leipzig? also das HÄTT ich (laughter)) ‘but he was FROM leipzig? I mean I WOULDN'T have’

21

nich gedacht. [ich dachte irgendwie VOGTland ‘thought so. [I thought maybe the VOGT region’

22 Lars:

[(doch.) [(‘yeah he was’.)

23 JD:

[oder so? [‘or something like that?’

24 Lars:

[nein des is n LEIPziger glaub ich. [‘no he was a LEIPziger I think.’

25 Erika: ich GLAUbe jaa. ‘I THINK soo.’

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26 Lars:

m=hm. ‘m=hm.’

27 JD:

hmm. ‘hmm.’

28 Erika: =wurde mal gesacht. =‘or so I've been told.’ 29 GL:

hmm. ‘hmm.’

In lines 4 and 5, both JD and GL indicate their agreement with Lars’s assertion that part of the reason why Saxon German was so unpopular in preunification East Germany resulted from the unpopularity of East German politician Walter Ulbricht. In line 6, JD asks a question, presumably of Lars, as he is not only the interactant who introduced the subject of Ulbricht, but also an Eastern German who himself lived in East Germany prior to unification. Lars responds to this question of JD’s in line 7 by stating that he doesn’t know the answer, but in overlap with Lars’s response in line 8, the migrant Erika also answers, stating that Ulbricht was from Leipzig. This statement is phrased in a direct form, locating this East Germanspecific piece of information within her territory. The researcher JD, however, challenges Erika’s assertion in line 9, stating very strongly through both repetition and increased volume that she does not believe that Ulbricht was actually from Leipzig. Even after Lars supports Erika’s assertion in line 11, JD maintains her strong doubt in line 12, possibly in part because of Lars’s hedge through ich glaub ‘I think’, and Lars repeats his assertion of belief with the same hedge in line 13. After JD and Lars further describe the ways Ulbricht talked to support their argument in lines 14 through 23, and JD acknowledges through her ach so in line 19 that Erika and Lars may in fact be correct about Ulbricht’s origin, Lars asserts again in line 24 that he believes that Ulbricht is from Leipzig. It is only here, in line 25, that Erika enters the discussion again in support of her original assertion that Ulbricht was from Leipzig, but this time she uses the same hedge Lars has been using. This is a non-direct form that pushes her original direct assertion about Ulbricht outside of her own territory of information. Erika here downgrades her knowledge, possibly because of JD’s previous strong disagreement and in order not to challenge JD.

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This happens after JD and Lars have both presented this East Germanspecific knowledge, while Erika has been silent, letting her Eastern German partner Lars step in and make a case for an argument he originally said he had no knowledge about. Through this silence, Erika defers to Klaus’s authority on matters Eastern German, despite the fact that the information about Ulbricht’s origin was introduced into the conversation by Erika in the first place. She then provides unrequested evidence for her assertion in line 28, indicating that she acquired this knowledge from other people, and thereby treating JD’s questioning as doubting Erika’s own authority on Eastern German matters. Even though she uses the passive wurde mal gesacht (literally: it was said) and thus does not explicitly state the source of her knowledge, at this point in the discussion where she, as a migrant, is trying to find support for her assertion, this support can only have come from a source within Eastern Germany, i.e. she must have heard it from locals. In other words, given Erika’s status as a migrant, providing an Eastern German source strengthens the validity of her knowledge. Through having been told this information about Ulbricht by Eastern Germans, she may locate this knowledge within her territory of information. Through this series of conversational strategies, she positions herself as a migrant who has some right to this knowledge, though, in contrast to Lars, she has to support this right by locating the source of knowledge outside herself. Taken together, this is therefore neither an Eastern German nor a Western German positioning, but one of “migrant Westerner in the East”. In the next and final segment it now is the migrant’s degree of closeness to the information which is challenged, even though the migrant himself initially perceives it as a challenge to the validity of his personal experience. This segment is a part of a conversation in which the migrant Walter recounts the story of trying to get a telephone installed in his Dresden apartment after his migration in 1994. The participants in the conversation are Walter, who is in his forties and migrated to Eastern Germany to be part of a research team at an institute, his partner Claudia (an Eastern German whom he met after his migration), and the two researchers, GL and JD.

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Segment (6) 1

Walter: [nachdem ich ne dresdnerin kennengelernt hatte (.) die= [‘after I had met a woman from dresden (.) who had’=

2

GL:

3

Walter: =ganz gut- ganz gute beziehungen zur telekom hatte (..) =‘really good- really good connections to the phone company’ (..)

[mhm [‘mhm’

[und d[‘and th-’

4 5

JD:

[aha? [‘oh yeah?’

6

GL:

aha ‘I see’

7

Walter: und drei monate später hatten wir [telefon ‘and three months later we had a [telephone’

8

JD:

[da gings [‘you still

9

noch über beziehungen had to have connections’

10 GL:

ja ja ‘yeah yeah’

11 GL&JD:

((laughter))

[echt 12 Walter: das war wirklich so ‘it was really that way [really’ [aha [‘uh-huh’

13 GL: 14 GL&JD:

((laughter))

15 GL:

is ja13 wie im osten ‘just like in the East’

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16 Walter: das [war ja auch osten ‘it [was the East’ [ 17 JD: [ja wir sind ja im osten [‘well we are in the East’ 18 Walter: das war ja noch der kluge osten (..) zumindest [für mich= ‘it was still the wise old East (..) at lEast [for me’= 19 GL: 20

[vierund[‘ninety-’ [neunzig ja? [‘four yeah?’

21 Walter: = [als zuge- für mich- zumindest für mich als zugereister jaja = [‘as a m- for me- at least for me as a migrant14 oh yeah’

In lines 1, 3, and 7, Walter is relating his personal experiences. By using direct forms to convey these experiences, he locates that information within his own territory and outside the territories of the other conversation participants, indicating that only he himself has that knowledge. Walter’s use of the word Beziehungen (‘connections’) in line 3, however, evokes a context of secrecy and insider knowledge typical of former East Germany. Since both GL and JD had personal experience living in former East Germany that Walter did not have, what would otherwise be a simple case of someone relating his own personal experience becomes a matter of positioning them, since he calls upon shared knowledge here. They react to this display of East German knowledge through their aha’s in lines 5 and 6. The actual story of the telephone installation reaches a satisfactory conclusion in line 7. What follows in lines 8–21, however, is a series of subtle challenges to Walter’s closeness to the information he is relating. In lines 8 and 9, JD comments on the notion that connections were ‘still’ (noch) a part of Eastern German society even four years after unification. By doing this, she makes explicit Walter’s evoking of former East Germany through the use of the word Beziehungen. In line 10, GL aligns herself with JD by appealing to their shared knowledge arising from their mutual experiences in former East Germany, and they join together further through laughter in

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line 11. While Walter is the only custodian of his own personal experiences, he does not have the direct experience with former East Germany that both GL and JD have. Any information making reference to former East Germany therefore falls further inside GL’s and JD’s territories than Walter’s, since he can only have knowledge of that information through hearsay. Walter, in fact, does not join in GL’s and JD’s laughter, and through his reaffirmation of the truth of his experiences in line 12, seems to show that he interprets that laughter as casting doubt on the validity of his experiences. Without reaffirming the validity of Walter’s experience, GL comments in line 15 on his experience as typical of East Germany through the expression is ja wie im Osten15 (‘just (as you know) like in the East’). This seems to be an attempt to correct Walter’s assumption that the two researchers are challenging the validity of his experiences, but could also be interpreted as providing Walter with the reason for their laughter: Beziehungen reminds her of East Germany. She makes specific reference to shared knowledge through the use of the particle ja, which can be loosely translated as ‘as you know.’ Walter, in line 16, stresses that it is not ‘just like’ the East but that it ‘was’ the East, thus contradicting GL and making himself an authority on East German knowledge. In doing this, he not only employs a direct form, but also uses the particle ja. Through this particle, he indicates not only that his statement is valid, but that GL should in fact share in the knowledge of its validity, locating that validity within her territory of information as well as his. In line 18, Walter again presents himself as someone with knowledge of pre-unification East Germany by specifying directly that he views East Germany and Eastern Germany in 1994 as similar enough to be equated, again accompanied by the particle ja. However, he follows this direct form with a non-direct form modified by zumindest für mich als Zugereister (‘at least for me as a migrant’) in lines 18 and 21. By making specific reference to his migrant identity as part of this hedge, he is not calling into doubt the veracity of his own experiences, but he is casting doubt on the validity of his perception that Eastern Germany in 1994 still resembled former East Germany in certain important ways. By doing this, he moves the information he has about former East Germany to a point outside of his territory. This results in a re-positioning of himself as someone who does not have an adequate basis for asserting knowledge about former East Germany, at least as compared with two people who actually lived there before unification.

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As the discussion in this section has shown, when challenged about their presentation of knowledge related to Eastern Germany, the migrants in both cases look for conditions under which the challenged knowledge becomes valid, and they do this by appealing to their migrant identities as nonEastern Germans. In segment (5), the migrant appears as non-Eastern German only implicitly by locating the source of knowledge with Eastern Germans rather than herself. In segment (6), the migrant explicitly formulates his identity as ‘somebody who moved here’, i.e. somebody with no direct experience in East Germany. In both cases, the use of direct forms as resources indexing the social category of Eastern German preceded the challenge, and in both cases, the challenge was only resolved when the speakers strategically formulated their identities as different from that of the Eastern Germans.

4.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have shown several different ways in which knowledge display about Eastern Germany can occur in conversations involving migrants from Western to Eastern Germany. First, there are Eastern Germanspecific vocabulary items in which the vocabulary item itself is connected with the social category of Eastern German. Second, there are instances where the display of knowledge about Eastern Germany is part of a narrated event, and makes up part of the content of the conversation. In both cases, the knowledge display is tied to the social category of Eastern German, although as we have shown, this effect can be reduced in several ways, including through the use of non-direct forms. Direct and non-direct forms are not connected to the social categories of Western and Eastern German in a one-to-one correspondence, or to state this differently, it is not the case that Eastern Germans always use direct forms when discussing Eastern German topics and Western Germans always use non-direct ones. Instead, these forms emerge as connected to social categories only when the conversational context in which they are used is taken into account. When the talk is about Eastern German knowledge and the forms used to express that knowledge are direct, the person expressing that knowledge positions himself as someone with an Eastern German social identity. If, however, he uses a non-direct form to do so, he marks that knowledge as outside of his territory of information, thereby positioning himself as someone with a non-Eastern German identity. Mi-

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grants may be consistent about these self-positionings throughout a given conversation, but they may also vary them as a result of changes in the situational context or in response to their interactants. These kinds of shifts are not unique to these interactions, but in the case of our migrants, they indicate the complex nature of the migrants’ identities as Western Germans living in Eastern Germany for whom strategic positioning may become a means to address the relationship between Eastern Germany and Western Germany. We have also shown that migrants position not only themselves through their choices between direct and non-direct forms, but also their conversation partners. In turn, these conversation partners also position both themselves and the migrants. At any point, any conversation participant may either accept the first-order positionings offered or contest them by offering a second-order positioning. As shown in the analysis, interactants do this not only with reference to what has been said, but also with reference to their own and others’ biographies, their knowledge of the information in question, and their own positionings of themselves as Western German, Eastern German, or something else altogether. A second-order positioning, if accepted by the interactant being positioned, has the effect of relocating the piece of knowledge in question to a different place in that person’s territory, and thereby producing a different relationship between that person and the piece of information. Positioning is therefore not only relevant to the validity of the knowledge presented, but it can also be used strategically in response to a second-order positioning. Positioning involving the use of Eastern German-specific vocabulary is less open to challenge from the interlocutors than positionings involving the display of knowledge as part of a narrated event. These latter positionings are more easily challenged if former East Germans or others who experienced former East German culture are present. Our analysis has shown that migrants may use knowledge displays and variability in the form of vocabulary resources and direct and non-direct forms to validate their decisions to migrate. As such, they may transmit positive attitudes towards Eastern Germany, as well as present themselves as discursively integrating without conflicting with the territories of their interlocutors who may share different attitudes about in- and out-groups. These resources allow the migrants in our data to make connections between former East Germany and Eastern Germany without positioning themselves as former East German. The analysis presented here has also shown that implicit or explicit positioning can be strategically placed at a

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point in the interactional organization where the knowledge display has been challenged.

Notes *

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

We would like to thank Peter Auer, Werner Kallmeyer and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. In this paper, the terms ‘East Germany’ and ‘West Germany’ refer to the two separate countries prior to October 3, 1990. The terms ‘Eastern Germany’ and ‘Western Germany’ refer to the same geographic territory subsequent to unification. ‘Eastern German’ and ‘Western German’ are analytic categories for anything associated with one or the other territory. These terms are also used in reference to people who position themselves as Eastern or Western German. An additional distinction may be made between ‘(former) East German’ vs. ‘Eastern German’ and ‘(former) West German’ vs. ‘Western German’, whereby the first of each refers to the time before unification and the latter to the time after. This paper is a part of a larger project entitled ‘(Inter)acting identities in dialect and discourse: migrant western Germans in Eastern Germany’, carried out by the authors and funded in 2003 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (File number: 410-2003-0378). We are also grateful for funding from the University of Alberta and the University of Waterloo. We use the term ‘migrant’ throughout, but in each case we mean a migrant from Western to Eastern Germany rather than migrants to or from different places, or people who have relocated in general. While the migrants were still living in Eastern Germany in 2003, it is unknown to the authors whether they moved elsewhere since then or whether they stayed in Eastern Germany. While migration from Eastern to Western Germany was and continues to be quite common, there has been far less migration from Western to Eastern Germany, the direction in which the migrants in this paper moved. Names and some other pieces of information have been changed in order to protect participants’ identities. Transcription conventions are as follows: German utterances are in italics and English translations are directly beneath in normal type and single quotations. The transcript differs from usual orthographic spelling, e.g. capitalization in the transcript is used to mark loudness. Conversational overlap is indicated with square brackets. Pauses lasting a beat (.) or two (..) are indicated as shown; longer pauses are indicated in seconds. Laughter and parts deleted to

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8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

Grit Liebscher and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain save space are written in ((double brackets)), and =equals signs= are used to indicate a continuation between previous and following lines of talk. The reason for his eye contact with GL and not with Diana or JD may have to do with GL’s East German origin, but it may also have to do with the fact that it was GL who asked the initial question about the preschool. It is also possible it is due in part to a separate conversation developing between Diana and JD, as noted in the transcript in line 11. For a discussion of also as a discourse marker, see Dittmar (2002). ‘Repair’, a conversation analytic term, refers to a mechanism used to deal with trouble in speaking, hearing, and understanding (Schegloff et al. 1977). Schlager Süßtafel and Zetti Knusperflocken are types of Eastern German chocolate snacks. Meißen, Saale Unstrut, and Saxony-Anhalt are Eastern German place names. Ja is not translated in the transcript in GL’s turn here or in the turns that follow, but it is a particle serving as a marker of shared knowledge that can be glossed approximately as ‘as you know’. Zugereister means ‘migrant’ in the sense of someone who has moved from one place to another place, and is not specific to the western-to-Eastern German context. For a discussion of the way Osten (‘the East’) indexes different time periods as used by the different speakers in this conversation, please see Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain (2005).

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Brausse, Ursula 1992 Wohl – The lexical variation of adverbs. Deutsche Sprache 20, 219– 243. Chafe, Wallace and Johanna Nichols 1986 Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Dittmar, Norbert 2002 Lakmustest für funktionale Beschreibungen am Beispiel von auch (Fokuspartikel, FP), eigentlich (Modalpartikel, MP) und also (Diskursmarker, DM). In: Fabricius-Hansen, C., O. Leirbukt, and O. Letues (eds.), Modus, Modalverben, Modalpartikeln. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 142–177. Drew, Paul 1991 Asymmetries of knowledge in conversational interactions. In: Marková, I. and K. Foppa (eds.), Asymmetries in Dialogue. Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 21–48. Harré, Rom and Luk van Langenhove 1991 Varieties of positioning. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 21, 393–407. Helbig, Gerhard 1988 Lexikon deutscher Partikeln. Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie Leipzig. Heritage, John and Geoffrey Raymond 2005 The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly 68(1), 15–38. Kamio, Aki 1997 Territory of Information. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1995 Territory of information in English and Japanese and psychological utterances. Journal of Pragmatics 21, 67–100. Liebscher, Grit 1997 Unified Germany (?): Processes of identifying, redefining and negotiating in interactions between East and West Germans, In: Chy, A., A.-M. Guerra, and C. Tetreault (eds.), Salsa IV. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Symposium about Language and Society Austin. Texas Linguistic Forum 37. Austin: Dept. of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin, 78–87. Liebscher, Grit and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain 2005 West Germans moving East: Place, political space, and positioning in conversational narratives. In: Baynham, M. and A. De Fina (eds.), Dislocations/Relocations: Narrative of Displacement. Manchester: St. Jerome, 61–85.

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McKinlay, Andrew and Anne Dunnett 1998 How gun-owners accomplish being deadly average. In: Antaki, C. and S. Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, 34–51. Milroy, Lesley and Matthew Gordon 2003 Sociolinguistics. Method and Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell. Ricker, Kirsten 2000 Migration, Sprache, und Identität: Eine biographieanalytische Studie zu Migrationsprozessen von Französinnen in Deutschland. Bremen: Donat Verlag. Sacks, Harvey 1995 Lectures on Conversation, vol. 1, Gail Jefferson (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Schegloff, Emanuel A., Gail Jefferson, and Harvey Sacks 1977 The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53(2), 361–382. van Langenhove, Luk and Rom Harré 1993 Positioning and autobiography: Telling your life. In: Coupland, N. and J. F. Nussbaum (eds), Discourse and Lifespan Identity. London: Sage, 81–99. Wolf, Ricarda 1999 Soziale Positionierung im Gespräch. Deutsche Sprache 1, 69–94.

Chapter 10 Style online: Doing hip-hop on the German-speaking Web Jannis Androutsopoulos 1.

Introduction

Drawing on sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and research on computermediated communication, this chapter develops a sociolinguistic approach to language style on the Web. Based on findings of a study on Germanspeaking hip-hop websites and discussion boards, it aims at demonstrating how the notion of sociolinguistic style could deal with the complexities of linguistic variability in computer-mediated communication (CMC). In particular, this chapter proposes a framework of style analysis which attempts to bridge the gap between the social contexts of CMC and micro-linguistic processes in online text and talk, thereby using genre as a crucial mediating factor between the social and the linguistic. I start by contextualizing my approach in a brief discussion of style, computer-mediated communication, and the discourse arena of interest here, i.e. hip-hop. The notion of style adopted here is inspired by recent “speaker design approaches” (Schilling-Estes 2002: 388–394) as well as by the framework of the “social style of communication” by Kallmeyer and Keim (e.g. 2003). Notwithstanding their particular differences, these fairly new developments are influenced by interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication, and react to previous notions of style in sociolinguistics, in particular those by Labov and Bell (cf. Schilling Estes 2002; Bell 2001). In these latter frameworks, style is discussed in terms of stylistic variation along a one-dimensional axis between standard and non-standard/vernacular speech. By contrast, the approaches of interest here view style as a holistic pattern, in which linguistic structures on several levels work together with non-linguistic resources to index social positioning (cf. Bucholtz 1998, 2004; Coupland 2001; Eckert 2002; Eckert and Rickford (eds.) 2001; Keim and Schütte (eds.) 2002). Rather than understanding style as a reaction to formality or addressee, the active and constructivist nature of style is now

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foregrounded. In speaker design approaches, style is viewed “as a resource in the active creation, presentation, and re-creation of speaker identity” (Schilling Estes 2002: 388). Likewise, in the “social style of communication” framework, style is organically related “to a group’s culture and its social identity” (Kallmeyer and Keim 2003: 29). Moreover, rather than focusing on a single linguistic variable, a whole range of linguistic features is now examined, to the extent they are shown to be situatively relevant, even if they do not lend themselves to quantification. Researchers of social style thus aim at understanding how clusters of linguistic (and non-verbal, semiotic) resources gain local meaning as indices of particular social orientations. However, style in these approaches is mainly investigated in settings of face to face interaction. While Bell’s language style framework (Bell 1999, 2001) has repeatedly been applied to media discourse, new approaches to sociolinguistic style have hardly been taken out of the realm of the interpersonal and unmediated (but see Coupland 2001; Holly 2002). In this chapter, I argue that the sociolinguistic style approach outlined above can also provide a framework for addressing the complexities of language use in CMC. Computer-mediated communication has been an increasingly popular topic in empirical and applied linguistics in the last years, but relatively few studies have examined it from a sociolinguistic point of view. Much linguistic research on CMC has focused on media-related determinants of language use, and on the linguistic innovations that emerge as a response to media constraints. While this research has made significant contributions to our understanding of language use in online communication, it tends to downplay the social diversity of language use on the Web. A case in point is Crystal’s popular notion of “netspeak”, which is defined as “a type of language displaying features that are unique to the Internet, […] arising out of its character as a medium which is electronic, global, and interactive” (Crystal 2001: 18). Crystal conceives of “netspeak” as a language variety which is subdivided in the “language of e-mails” and the “language of chatgroups”. However, it is empirically questionable whether anything like a “language of e-mails” exists, simply because the vast diversity of users, settings and purposes of e-mail communication outweigh any common linguistic features. Similarly, while emoticons – e.g. :-) – and acronyms – e.g. lol ‘laughing out loud’ – are characteristic features of e-chat in general, it is the particular type of chat and the social profile of its users that are decisive in whether and to what extent these resources are used. Crystal

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(2001: 155) does note the “variety of group practices” in CMC, without accounting for it in a systematic way. By contrast, this paper is situated within a growing body of research inspired by sociolinguistics and discourse analysis which aims at exploring the social and contextual diversity of language use in CMC (cf. collections by Androutsopoulos (ed.) 2006 and Danet and Herring (eds.) 2003; research overviews by Georgakopoulou 2003 and Herring 2003; as well as papers by e.g. Paolillo 2001, Sebba 2003b and this volume, Androutsopoulos and Ziegler 2004). Common denominators of these studies are the shift of focus from medium to user related patterns of language use, and the increasing emphasis on the varying instantiations of online genres in their particular social contexts. Georgakopoulou (2003: 2) points out the need for “contextual and particularistic analyses that shed light on how different contextual parameters shape and are evoked in the discourse of various types of CMC”. She identifies four main agendas of linguistic studies of CMC with a discourse-pragmatic focus: language use between writing and speaking, play and performance, self-presentation and identity, and the formation of online communities. In the following section, I draw on these agendas in sketching the framework of this paper. Hip-hop culture offers an ideal setting for the study of sociolinguistic style in computer-mediated communication. Over the last 20 years, hip-hop has developed from an African-American street culture into a globally acknowledged form of youth-cultural expression. A growing number of studies theorize the global spread of hip-hop as a process of cultural appropriation, in which forms of cultural expression – rapping, graffiti, dancing, djing – acquire local features and invite local interpretations that no longer rely exclusively on their African-American origins (cf. collections by Mitchell (ed.) 2001 and Androutsopoulos (ed.) 2003). However, ‘local’ hiphop does not completely separate from, but emerges in a constant dialogue with its ‘mother culture’. In Germany, for instance, hip-hop culture develops its own discourse around ‘local’ events and productions, all by drawing on U.S. American hip-hop as a source for new trends and a frame for the interpretation of local productions. Local hip-hop identities are immanently framed as part of globally distributed popular culture. The constant dialogue between the global and the local is manifested both in discourse and in language style. This is particularly salient in the language of German hip-hop fans with its vast amount of English, which extends beyond technical jargon and slang to communicative routines and emblematic codeswitching (cf. Androutsopoulos 2004).

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From the point of view of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, hiphop foregrounds issues of linguistic creativity, performance, the relation between globalization and language (Pennycook 2003), and the reflex of language variation in popular culture (Morgan 2001). Rap has been repeatedly celebrated as a creative form of expression, in which all linguistic resources of a speech community are poetically intermingled. Several studies have documented how this credo translates in local appropriations of rap (cf. Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2002; Berns and Schlobinski 2003, as well as papers in Mitchell (ed.) 2001 and Androutsopoulos (ed.) 2003). As Streeck (2002) argues, rap artists engage in (lay) sociolinguistics as they draw on a multitude of linguistic varieties and styles in order to stage various, often conflicting social voices in their lyrics. Much the same could be said of the adolescents and young adults who use the Web “as a means of representing, critiquing and contradicting the images and issues of hip-hop culture” (Richardson and Lewis 2000: 251).

2.

Locating style on the Web: fields, communities, and genres

My sociolinguistic outlook on computer-mediated communication views the Web as a social space in which like-minded individuals use the resources of the medium, such as interactivity, multimodality, and easy access to media production, to construct identity and community (cf. Baym 2000; Döring 2003). However, these familiar notions must be understood in terms of the new communicative potentials that are provided by the New Media. With respect to identity, I follow here Mendoza-Denton’s definition of social identity as the active negotiation of an individual’s relationship with larger social constructs, in so far as this negotiation is signaled through language and other semiotic means. Identity, then, is neither attribute nor possession, but an individual and collective-level process of semiosis (Mendoza-Denton 2001: 475).

Identities on the Web may, then, be conceived of as processes in which individual relationships to larger social constructs are constructed and negotiated through text and talk. Internet users do not necessarily reproduce offline (or real-life) identities in their Web literacy practices, but may choose to foreground alternative aspects of self. They do so by drawing on

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symbolic resources that are both restricted and extended, i.e. through image, animation, and sound, vis-à-vis direct interaction (cf. Chandler 1998; Hine 2000; Hawisher and Selfe (eds.) 2000; Snyder (ed.) 2002). Just as in ‘real life’, identities on the Web are formed in a continuous dialogue with larger social formations, which are usually termed ‘online’ or ‘virtual communities’ in CMC research. Following Castells, A virtual community ... is generally understood as a self-defined electronic network of interactive communication organized around a shared interest or purpose, although sometimes communication becomes the goal in itself. Such communities may be relatively formalized ... or be spontaneously formed by social networks which keep logging into the network to send and receive messages in a chosen time pattern (either delayed or in real time) (Castells 2000: 386).

Online communities are thus networks of interconnected individuals who engage in regular communication in a virtual space, such as a chat channel, a discussion board or a mailing list. Their members share a common interest or purpose; they develop social relationships and a set of shared interactional and linguistic norms. Virtual communities, as Castells points out, “are communities, but not physical ones, and they do not follow the same patterns of communication and interaction as physical communities do. But they are not ‘unreal’, they work in a different plane of reality” (2000: 389). The notion of virtual community links linguistic research on CMC with sociolinguistic theory, in which community – originally in the sense of speech community, more recently as a community of practice – has always played a crucial role (Paolillo 2001). However, in addition to the virtual community, a broader concept is needed. If we conceive of, say, the regulars on the discussion board of a football club as an online community, we also need a notion for the “meta-community” formed by several footballrelated discussion boards and websites, be it in a particular country or on a transnational scale. In other words, we need to acknowledge that online communities are embedded in larger patterns of online discourse and literacy practice. For these larger patterns, I propose the notion of ‘computer-mediated discourse field’. It is based on the concept of field originally developed by Bourdieu (1991) and extended by Fairclough (1995), i.e. as a structured space of positions for the articulation of a social discourse. In my working definition, a computer-mediated discourse field is a set of discursively and

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hypertextually interconnected websites, which represent a social discourse on the Web. While the notion of online community foregrounds networks of users, the notion of discourse field foregrounds semiotic artefacts, i.e. websites, rather than the individuals behind them. These websites and their users (authors and readers) share a common discourse, including, as will become clear in this paper, a set of common symbolic resources for the display of affiliation; however, member categories, production formats (Goffman 1981) and individual patterns of engagement within a discourse field on the Web may vary considerably. Online communities and discourse fields draw on a multitude of genres or text-types.1 The choice of genre is part of the situated management of identities that emerges from online activity. Some genres of CMC extend traditions of media discourse in a more or less straightforward way, e.g. editorials, reviews, reports or newsletters. However, genre blending and the emergence of hybrid genres are particularly salient in CMC, as is the case with personal homepages that draw on the private diary and the photo album (Chandler 1998; Karlsson 2002a, 2002b). The most important innovations of CMC are interactive multi-user formats such as chats, boards and newsgroups. Provided that they are regularly used by an online community, these sites of online talk host sequences that share at least some features of verbal interaction, i.e. dialogicity, sequentiality, and indexicality (cf. Herring 1999; Storrer 2000). Although sites of one-way communication (e.g. homepages) and sites of online interaction (e.g. discussion boards) are densely interrelated in practice, they need to be analytically separated in the study of online style. In personal homepages and other website genres, language style is designed in advance, in a process of composition and editing, and then displayed to an audience. The style of websites typically evokes issues of multimodality, as it involves an interrelation of verbal and visual resources. Within the verbal mode, it involves the linguistic design of names and categories (e.g. navigation bars) as well as issues of text layout (e.g. text blocks as opposed to lists; cf. Karlsson 2002b; Kress 2003). Within the visual mode, style involves the selection and composition of resources in typography, image, and color. In genres of online talk, on the other hand, communicative resources are essentially restricted to the verbal mode. In e-chats, newsgroups or discussion boards, each participant’s linguistic style is subject to immediate negotiation in the online community. The positions articulated and the linguistic forms used by individual members may be ratified or challenged, aligned to or contrasted by other participants.

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All genres of online text and talk can be sites of performance, in the sense of “a display of communicative virtuosity” for an audience (Bauman 2004: 9). However, they differ with regard to, among other things, the available semiotic resources and in the immediacy of audience reaction. It is in genres of online interaction that “performance particularly flourishes” (Danet 2001: 100). This coexistence of communicative modes makes clear the need for complementary methodologies in the sociolinguistic study of CMC, in particular variation, genre and conversation analysis. How does the notion of style tie in with computer-mediated discourse fields, virtual communities, and genres? Social style emphasizes individual agency and the social embeddedness of online language use, as well as the interrelation of language with other signifying systems in constructions of social identity on the Web. It provides an interface between linguistic selections, interactional processes, communicative goals, and their larger social contexts. Typical dimensions of linguistic variability in CMC – e.g. between spoken and written language, standard and dialect, monolingual and multilingual speech – are resources for the construction of sociolinguistic style, their capital value depending on the ideologies and genre conventions of each particular community and field. Individual styles of online writing draw on these resources to varying degrees, depending on community norms, genre traditions, and individual goals. A task of the sociolinguistic style analysis proposed in this chapter is to disentangle style features related to a computer-mediated discourse field as a whole from those related to a particular genre or to individual users. Fields are constituted by a variety of genres, and any particular realization of a genre will carry the traces of its social context (Kress 2003: 100). Text and talk within a field can therefore be expected to contain ‘global’ style markers that occur across user networks and genres within the same field. On the other hand, genres rely on relatively stable patterns and conventions that operate across social contexts. We can therefore expect that genres within a field will be clearly distinguishable from one another, with indicators of genre differences operating on one or several linguistic levels. However, there is a considerable degree of freedom in the individual realization of (at least some) online genres. Users may shape and transform genres in order to construct individuality and originality or to express a particular stance vis-à-vis other users. Therefore, genre is the level on which style in a collective and individual sense is manifest. Different users have various degrees of exposure to and experience with CMC, and they may represent different orientations within a virtual community. We can

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expect these orientations to be indexed through linguistic choices, which, in turn, reflect the social-symbolic value of language styles in a particular community or field. The distribution of linguistic and interactional resources across genres and individual participants within a field of computer-mediated discourse is a central issue in the approach to online style outlined in this chapter.

3.

Research context and aims of this paper

The findings reported in this paper are drawn from a research project on ‘youth-cultural media styles’ which examined the language and discourse of German websites related to hip-hop culture.2 In consonance with other studies of media discourse (Fairclough 1995; Scollon 1998), the project’s aim was to explore connections between media texts and the practices of their production and consumption, as well as participants’ awareness of language style and variation in media discourse. For this purpose, a combination of linguistic analysis and online ethnography was developed. Ethnography is a meeting point of sociolinguistics and CMC studies. For sociolinguistics, it is an essential resource for understanding the social categories of a community and the meaning of sociolinguistic variation from the members’ point of view (cf. Eckert 1997; Kallmeyer and Keim 2003). CMC studies, on the other hand, draw on ethnography as a point of access to the formation of online communities, the patterning of online literacy practices, and the dynamic unfolding of online activities in relation to offline events (cf. Danet 2001; Döring 2003; Hine 2000; papers in Hawisher and Selfe (eds.) 2000; Snyder (ed.) 2002). Data collection included systematic observation of online activities as well as participant interviews. The reconstruction of the hip-hop field (cf. 4.1) was based on systematic observation, which started off from key nodes (portals, link directories), and browsed its way through to smaller sites. Several websites and discussion boards were repeatedly visited in order to develop a ‘feel’ for topics, trends and emblems in hip-hop discourse. A second set of ethnographic data consists of approximately 25 interviews with webmasters, homepage authors and community members. These interview partners were selected in a non-random manner, taking into account both the ‘richness’ of individual cases and practical issues such as regional location. The initial contact was established with an informal e-mail, followed by a semi-structured, face-to-face or email interview. The interviews

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covered a broad range of topics, including the website’s aims and target group, production practices, semiotic resources, aspects of language use, personal opinion on hip-hop on the Web, and the relationship between online and offline cultural engagement. I confronted members with sample texts from their own website in order to elicit their awareness of style features and their evaluation of language variation. For purposes of linguistic analysis, samples from various genres were collected partly through systematic sampling on a particular website, and partly on the basis of specific topical triggers. In a strategy familiar from Kallmeyer and Keim’s framework (2003), board discussions were repeatedly scanned for controversial issues, based on the assumption that conflict interactions prompt condensations of social style and thus reveal constructions of identity in a particularly salient way. In hip-hop discourse, such issues include the representation of hip-hop in mass media, controversial artists and their new releases, the tension between regional hip-hop scenes (e.g. Berlin vs. Hamburg), and issues of sell-out and cultural authenticity. Four dimensions of linguistic variability were examined in the project: (a) variation on the continuum of typically spoken vs. written mode,3 (b) the use of non-standard language, especially regional varieties’ (c) spelling variation without a correspondence to phonetic features, and (d) language contact between German and English as well as between German and migrant languages. The analysis draws on both qualitative and quantitative methods, thereby joining approaches that were separately used in previous linguistic research on CMC. As suggested by Bell (1999), the multi-level structure of language style entails that some of its features will be relevant in their relative frequency and distribution over large data sets, while other features will have a highly contextual significance. In CMC research, a quantitative approach has been proposed by Paolillo (2001: 181), who focuses on relations of “micro-linguistic variation to the social mechanisms by which virtual communities are structured and maintained”. This approach demonstrates correlations of linguistic variables with social roles within an online community. An example for the interactional approach is Georgakopoulou (1997), who examines code- and style-shifting as contextualization cues in e-mail exchange, showing how participants draw on various linguistic resources in accomplishing interactional tasks. It seems to me that a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies is an advantage given the complexity of online language use (cf. also Siebenhaar 2006).

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The remainder of this chapter will discuss hip-hop on the Germanspeaking Web as a field of discourse that consists of various types of websites, genres, and participation formats (cf. 4.1). Style features that are typical for the field as a whole will be shown to exist in various lexical and discourse-pragmatic categories as well as on the nonverbal level (cf. 4.2). Based on findings of a case study, I then focus on language style in different genres of a particular website (cf. 5). I will provide evidence for the relationship between online genres and the orientation to a spoken or written language style, and present an interactional analysis of a board discussion to illustrate how participants’ strategic style choices reflect the socialsymbolic value of linguistic resources within the German hip-hop community.

4.

Hip-hop on the German-speaking web

Hip-hop’s popularity in Germany is reflected in the amount of computermediated activity of its fans who use the Internet as one additional means of articulating cultural affiliation and involvement. Reading online magazines dedicated to hip-hop, posting on dedicated discussion boards, chatting with other fans or making a personal homepage are practices of ‘vernacular literacy’ (Barton and Hamilton 1998) that enrich individual cultural experience without the aim of replacing real-life engagement. The amount of hip-hop websites on the German-speaking Web cannot be stated in a precise and definite way, because new websites appear and disappear every day. Judging from large link directories on web portals, several hundred German-speaking websites claimed to represent hip-hop on the Web in 2003.4 In this section, I first sketch a tripartite classification into (a) magazines/portals, (b) homepages, and (c) sites of online interaction, indicating relevant subdivisions where appropriate. In a second step, I outline a number of linguistic and non-verbal features shared by all websites in the field (cf. 4.2). 4.1

Outline of the field

Following Döring (2003: 520–548), I assume that the structure of a computer-mediated discourse field can be grasped in terms of a core-periphery scheme, a website's core position in the field being indicated by the amount

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of page impressions and by the awareness of that website among users. At the time of my research, the core of the German hip-hop field on the Web consisted of no more than 12–15 online magazines, web portals and discussion boards that are widely known throughout Germany, including rap.de, hiphop.de, mzee.com, rapz.de, and webbeatz.de. Hip-hop magazines and portals5 operate in many respects like niche media (Thornton 1995). They address a comparatively wide audience, some receiving more than a million page impressions per month;6 they provide a wide variety of genres and constantly update their content, thus making maintenance a resource-demanding enterprise. Large hip-hop portals such as rap.de and hiphop.de depend on the music industry for the constant flow of new information, and place advertisements on their website. Their managers are in their late twenties; they are socialized in the hip-hop scene, and are in the process of turning their hobby into a profession. Young freelance writers contribute most of the site’s content, which is post-edited by the managers. While magazines and portals are the equivalents of traditional media institutions, homepages represent individual actors. Commercial homepages are run by established artists or music labels; personal homepages, on which I focus here, are run by fans, activists and amateur artists. Chandler (1998) suggests that the main purpose of making a personal homepage is to construct identity through text and other semiotic resources. In the hip-hop field, main communicative aims of homepages are self-presentation as an active member, promotion of individual productions, and making connections with like-minded activists (cf. Androutsopoulos 2003). Personal homepages presume a clear notion of authorship. Authors may not reveal their real name, but nevertheless work on establishing individuality and continuity. Being visited by a far smaller audience than magazines, personal homepages usually feature no advertisement, and they contain a limited range of genres. The typical hip-hop homepage consists of an artist bio and photos, samples of the author’s work, links to other homepages and/or to core websites, and a guest book. Discussion boards and chat channels offer platforms for the formation of online communities, and thereby constitute the field’s public sphere. Most large German-speaking hip-hop boards are hosted by portals (e.g. rap.de, hiphop.de), but independent boards exist as well (e.g. mzee.com). According to webmaster information, hip-hop board members are between 14 and 29 years of age, mostly males, with varying educational background. The six discussion boards I observed in more detail (rap.de, hiphop.de,

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mzee.com, rapz.de, webbeatz.de, and epoxweb.de) had a sum of more than 65,000 registered users in the summer of 2003. This number certainly includes a significant amount of occasional posters; others, however, stick to a board and develop social bonds, thus becoming community members over a period of time. My observations and members’ judgements suggest that these large boards differ in terms of regulars, their music taste, favorite topics as well as in aspects of language use. In contrast to magazines and homepages, anonymity and reduced responsibility of authorship turn boards into liminal spaces (cf. Sebba 2003b). In liminal contexts, speakers cross certain borders of social behavior and performance; they experiment with social identities and language styles in ways that are clearly outside their normal, everyday repertoire (Rampton 1995). In the German hip-hop context, acts of language crossing involve, expectedly, the ‘gangsta’ stereotype and other aspects of the imagery of African American hip-hop (cf. Androutsopoulos 2004). Multi-generic literacy practices are characteristic for online activists, i.e. participants with a strong commitment and engagement. In addition to board or e-chat membership and the authoring of a personal homepage, activists typically assume various responsibilities in the field’s public domain, e.g. as administrators of a discussion board or freelance writers for an online magazine. These activities involve different language styles, resulting in style-shifting as members turn from e.g. news writing to board contributions. A clear distinction between the language style of magazines and boards is borne out by the findings discussed in the next section (cf. 5.1). 4.2. ‘Global’ markers of hip-hop style To what extend is style a useful notion with respect to the hip-hop field as a whole? To rephrase this in empirical terms, what style features do all these hip-hop websites and discussion boards have in common? The answer first points outside the verbal domain. Visual cues that are highly typical for the field include logos and navigation bars in graffiti type, visual metonyms or synecdoche for hip-hop’s four elements (i.e. sneakers for breakdance, a turntable for dj-ing, a microphone for rapping, and a spray can for graffiti), as well as certain features of photographic representation (cf. 5.3). The answer then points to the naming patterns participants draw on in designing their personal nicknames and the names of their websites. For example, names such as BeatSkill Crew and Bad Grade Click are unmistakably

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marked as hip-hop by means of specific lexical items, name formation patterns and intertextual references (cf. Androutsopoulos 2001; Bierbach and Birken-Silverman, this volume). The main linguistic realm of hip-hop style in the German-speaking Web is vocabulary and formulaic speech of English origin, including both major wordclass items (with various degrees of morphological integration into German) and instances of (emblematic) code-switching into (stylized African-American) English. This vocabulary includes a lengthy list of culturally significant key words that cut across hip-hop’s forms of expression, among them battle, bite, diss, flow, freestyle, props, represent, and respect.7 Other parts of hip-hop vocabulary are more practically described in terms of lexical fields, e.g. terms for song structure and music production. This is more or less a technical jargon, which partially overlaps with lexis more widely used in pop music discourse. It is supplemented by slang items, notably evaluators (whack, dope, fresh, burner) and categorizations (bitch) as well as by an extensive set of formulas and conversational routines: openers and farewells such as peace and one love, exclamations such as aight, formulas for giving props or respect to other community members. Obviously, a large part of these items are not ‘school English’ but originate from exclusive hip-hop sources, and have a strong indexical function. The same holds true for a set of stereotypical spelling variants applied mostly to English items, in particular as noun plural marker (as in beatz, cutz, trackz, and stylez), instead of as in phat and phunky, and instead of on lexical items such as kool and kru (‘crew’). Though systematic research was restricted to German data, glimpses at hip-hop discourse in other European speech communities (notably in Italy, France, Greece, and Norway) suggest that these items and variants are indeed globally spread. What is characteristic for the German hip-hop field, then, seems at the same time a good example for emergent global English “from below” (cf. Pennycook 2003; Preisler 1999). To support these observations, a 35,000-word sample of record reviews, personal homepages and board discussions from webbeatz.de, the website discussed in more detail in the next section, was subjected to a concordance analysis. All items with five or more tokens (N=983) were examined in semantic-functional terms. In particular, almost all nouns with 10 or more tokens in this sample8 refer to hip-hop and rap (e.g. hip-hop, rap, flow, style, battle, mcs) or to pop music in general (e.g. beat, album, track, text, band). This list also includes items with stereotypical spelling variants (beatz, cutz, trackz, stylez), slang evaluators (fett, dope, fresh, wack), and

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conversational routines such as peace and props. This suggests that discourse on webbeatz.de is quite homogeneous in terms of culture- and topicrelated lexical choices. Most lexical items in this cross-genre sample are highly specific to hip-hop discourse. A writing style considered highly typical for hip-hop websites was termed “hip-hop slang” by some participants. Discussion of examples in the interviews suggested two main features of this member category, i.e. hiphop related English (as outlined above) and markers of oral style. Hip-hop slang partly reflects face-to-face discourse; partly it is specific to computermediated communication, as some of its features are contingent to genres of online talk. Two examples will be used to illustrate these points: (1) Board discussion Um ehrlich zu sein, das Album finde ich echt dope. Afrob ist für mich sowieso eina der echt guten Texter. Sehr gute Lyricz und gute Beatz. Zwa jetzt keine Überbombe aba bessa alz andere Sachen die es zur zeit gibt, natürlich nicht so dope wie Azad aba es lohnt sich auf jeden fall mal reinzuhören. ‘To be honest, I think the album is really dope. Afrob is in my view one of the best text writers anyway. Very good lyrics and good beats. It's not the bomb, but still better than other things going on at the moment. Of course not so dope as Azad but it's worth it listening to it.’ (2) Board discussion @dable: hab gesehen, dass du mit civilrings nach berlin kommst. vielleicht können wa connecten, wie im Sommer 2001 (gloob isch). ‘@dable: [I] saw that you're coming to Berlin with the civilrings, perhaps we could connect like in the summer of 2001 (I believe).’

Example (1) displays a wealth of features which, as a webmaster suggested, are “judged as ‘underground’ affiliation” by members. There is a systematic substitution of –er endings by –a (einer > eina ‘one’, besser > bessa ‘better’, aber > aba ‘but’), and of –s by –z (Lyricz, Beatz, alz ‘than’). The –a variant is familiar from AAVE (cf. gangsta) and at the same time a phonetic spelling with respect to German. The –z variant is a major global stereotype for hip-hop slang. Originally a phonetic spelling (cf. boyz), it is often used as a purely visual marker (cf. lyricz). The author of (1) idiosyncratically extends the distribution of –z to a German lexical item, alz (‘than’). This is an illustrative example of what Sebba (2003a) terms “spelling rebellion”,

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i.e. a deliberate transformation of orthography in an unregulated literacy field which uses the distance from orthographic norm to contextualize attitudes or to index cultural affiliations. However, a dense patterning of phonetic and homophone spellings as in (1) is not the rule in my data. An instance of vernacular writing without any of these features is (2). This is heavily marked as spoken in syntax (subject pronoun deletion) and spelling (habe > hab 'I have', wir > wa 'we'). In addition, it includes a style shift to an approximation of Upper Saxon vernacular (gloob isch instead of glaub ich ‘I believe’), the morphologically integrated English verb connecten and the @ sign, which is widely used as an addressing particle in online talk. These examples suggest that both German and English vernacular forms are valued resources in the German-speaking hip-hop field on the Web. However, assuming that hip-hop slang carries along uncontested symbolic capital would overlook the field's complexity in terms of genres and participation formats. The findings presented below suggest that hip-hop slang and the representation of typical spoken features are more densely patterned in online talk, but less so on personal homepages and even less in genres of edited content such as record reviews. Interviews with portal managers reveal a clear awareness of the appropriate language style for edited content. When it comes to the selection of freelance writers, gutes schriftdeutsch, i.e. a solid competence in written German is preferred to the vernacular style prevailing in boards and chats. My interviews also suggest that a writing style such as in extract (1) may seem prestigious to teenage board members, but is rejected as ‘kiddie stuff’ by older members with more experience who strive for a professional image.

5.

A case study: language style, genre, and member identities on webbeatz.de

Against this backdrop, we now focus on language style on a particular website, i.e. webbeatz.de. This is a well known website in the German speaking hip-hop field, with approximately 3,000 registered members and 100,000 page impressions per month during research. According to the webmaster, a young adult who works in the ICT sector, webbeatz.de is a non-commercial “one and a half man project”, which relies on volunteers for edited content and maintenance of discussion boards. While advert banners appeared on the site later on, membership and music downloads were still free of charge (as of mid-2004). Like other large hip-hop sites, webbeatz.de

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features both edited content (e.g. reviews, interviews, reports) and a large discussion board. Its particularity is the kostenlose HipHop Promotion Plattform, i.e. a free of charge service which provides amateur artists with a free homepage to present themselves and their music. At the time of research, webbeatz.de hosted more than 300 artist homepages, each composed of a short self-presentation text, a photo, a link to downloadable songs, and a link to a Kritikforum, i.e. a dedicated critique board. In a typical reception structure, the visitor will select an artist from the overview, read the self-presentation, listen to the songs, then proceed to the critique board, comment on the songs, and sometimes interact with other fans or the artists themselves who occasionally visit their board to read and respond to comments. Many critique boards feature dozens of entries, with discussions extending over weeks or even months. This is an ideal setting for a genre comparison as well as for tracing the construction of individual style. 5.1. Genre and spelling variation A random representative sample of the three main genres on webbeatz.de, i.e. artist homepages, critique boards and record reviews,9 was subjected to a quantitative analysis of spelling variation focusing on ‘colloquial spellings’, i.e. orthographic representations of phonetic-phonological features of colloquial spoken German (cf. Androutsopoulos 2000). Before discussing the results, I briefly introduce the three genres and discuss one example for each. Board discussions can be expected to display features of conversational style due to their situational features, i.e. immediacy of online interaction, spontaneous production, reduced responsibility of authorship, and affective interactional modality. By contrast, record reviews are modelled on a traditional written genre and are subject to post-editing by the website manager. Artist homepages on webbeatz.de require careful planning as far as their communicative purpose, i.e. self-presentation, is concerned. However, they do not follow a unique generic model. Some authors draw on the personal diary or the short bio note in designing their texts, others opt for a conversational style, and still others imitate professional press releases (see examples 6 and 7 below). Examples (3)–(5) illustrate some aspects of the three genres’ content and speech style.

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(3) Board discussion Ich weiß nicht… reality HipHop und dann „Players" im Namen? Der Beat hört sich für mich zu poppig an und die raps zu sehr nach fantastischen vier… also irgendwie kann ich mich damit nicht identifizieren, die hook ist auch ein wenig langweilig, also is nich grade mein fall ‘I don’t know... reality hip-hop and then naming yourself ‘players’? The beat sounds too poppy to me, and the raps are too much like fantastischen vier... [German rap band, J.A.] well I somehow can’t identify with it, the hookline is a bit boring too, well it’s not really my thing.’ (4) Artist homepage Eigentlich sind wir keine richtige crew, eher mehr so'n Soundsystem. Das alles begann mal Anfang des Jahres 2000 und flachte seitdem wieder ab! Zur zeit mache ich selbst nur noch Beatz und Smartie ging mehr in djing über, schade. Die ersten Sachen der Zeit werde ich in nächster Zeit euch mal zuschicken. ‘We’re not a real crew actually, more like a sound system. It all began at the beginning of 2000 but levelled ever since! I’m doing only beatz at the moment, and Smartie has turned to DJ-ing, it’s a pity. I’ll send you some early stuff from this period in a while.’ (5) Record review Nach „Break Ya Neck“, wohl einem der meistgespieltesten Club-Tracks dieses Jahr, gibts jetzt die nächste Auskopplung aus Busta Rhymes „Genesis“-Album. „Pass the Courvoisier, Part II“, das P. Diddy and Pharrell featured, knüpft genau da wieder an, denn der stark nach vorne gehende Neptunes-Beat ist definitiv Clubtauglich. ‘After “Break Ya Neck”, one of this year’s most played club tracks, the next release from Busta Rhymes’s “Genesis” album now follows. “Pass the Courvoisier, Part II” featuring P. Diddy and Pharrell ties in with that, because the massively forward-pressing Neptunes beat is definitely club compatible.’

The author of (3) questions the artist’s stated mission (reality HipHop) visà-vis their name, Players, which evokes ‘gangsta rap’, and then comments on the song’s beat, rap style and hookline. His orientation to spoken syntax is indicated by simple clauses, paratactic structure, discourse markers such as ich weiß nicht and also. The last clause, also is nich grade mein fall (‘well it’s not really my thing’) is heavily marked as spoken through subject pronoun deletion, the discourse marker also (‘well’), final consonant

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deletion (ist > is, nicht > nich), and interconsonantal vowel deletion (gerade > grade). The author of (4) presents himself and his band in a narrative mode, and directly addresses his readers in the last clause. Simple clauses and clitization (so ein > so'n) indicate an overall informal style. The review excerpt (5) is written from an impersonal perspective. It includes comparatively longer, subordinate clauses, and complex noun phrases (einem der meistgespieltesten Club-Tracks ‘one of the most played club tracks’, der stark nach vorne gehende Neptunes-Beat ‘the massively forward-pressing Neptunes beat’). The variables selected for analysis are typical features of spoken German (cf. Schwitalla 1997) and are repeatedly mentioned in German CMC literature as frequent features of informal online writing. They occur in quantifiable amounts in my sample, ranging from 51 to 1,440 tokens.10 (a) deletion of word-final /t/ in consonant clusters, e.g. nicht > nich (‘not’) (b) reduction of the indefinite article in all genders and cases, e.g. eine > ne (‘a’ sing.fem.nom. or acc.) (c) negative adverb nichts (Standard German [nICts] ‘nothing’) written nix (corresponding to the colloquial pronunciation [nIks]); (d) clitization of post-verbal es (object or dummy pronoun) after four different verbs (finden ‘find’, geben ‘give’, gehen ‘go’, haben ‘have’) in the 1st and 3rd person singular, e.g. habe es > habs, gibt es > gibts; (e) deletion of verb-final /e/ in the 1st and 3rd person singular of 16 different verbs (including high frequency verbs such as brauchen ‘need’, haben ‘have’, kommen ‘come’, sagen ‘say’), e.g. habe > hab. All five features have a ‘written’ variant, i.e. the standard orthographic representation, and a ‘spoken’ one, corresponding to the colloquial reduced or cliticized form. Based on all tokens of each variable, the frequency of spoken variants was counted for all three genres in the usual variationist way, i.e. all factual over potential occurrences of the variant, excluding categorically invariant cases. The findings (Table 1) suggest a clear distinction between the boards and the two other genres, and a more subtle distinction between artist homepages and reviews.11 Board discussions have a much higher amount of spoken variants throughout, ranging from more than 60% for features (d) and (e), to slightly over half for (c), 38% for (b) and 22% for (a). Homepages score higher than reviews for four features, (d) being the exception. This is largely due to the cliticized form of the construction gibt es > gibt's

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or gibts (‘there is’), which is frequently used in the reviews. A look at each variable reveals different distribution patterns. Features (a) and (b) have lower than average scores for all genres, with extremely low amounts of colloquial spellings in reviews and artist homepages. Feature (e) scores higher than average in all genres, and particularly high in the artist homepages, in which a personal style is more frequent. The distribution of (c) is similar to the average. Table 1. Frequency of five colloquial spellings in three genres

Reviews N % Final -t deletion Indefinite article reduction nix (instead of nichts) Clitization of post-verbal es Deletion of verb-final -e Total Average %

Artist homepages N %

Boards N %

Total N %

2

0,5

9

3

169

22

180

12,5

6

2

14

5

105

38

125

15

1

7

2

22

28

52

31

42

10

43

2

20

11

61

23

45

4 23 / 753

21

42 69 / 680

49

15

20

178 62 224 491 / 1390 583 / 2823 47

57 34

In sum, these findings suggest that writing style in the hip-hop field is partly determined by genre. This pattern was repeatedly found in the data: boards capitalize on written representations of spoken/colloquial features to a far greater extent than other genres. As a full description of these genres is beyond the scope of this paper, suffice it to say that reviews feature comparatively more of the technical jargon of hip-hop, while board discussions are the principal site for slang items, conversational routines, and stylized African-American English. Personal homepages have a less clear position in this respect.

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5.2. Genre and individual styling While these three genres are overall distinct in terms of their orientation towards the spoken or written mode, the language style of individual members sometimes follows and sometimes diverges from that pattern. Genres differ in the creative freedom they grant their users. While record reviews are quite homogeneously patterned in the webbeatz.de data, homepages display a striking range of individual variation. This is not surprising, taking into account that the main purpose of the artist homepage is precisely to communicate individual style. Some artists construe themselves in a more professional manner, while others aim at a style that is closer to street culture. Consequently, some homepage texts are stylistically closer to discussion boards, while others strive for a standard oriented writing style. This difference is evident in the two examples presented below. (Sentence numbering in square brackets is added for reference; italics in the glosses indicate English items in the original text; bold type in example 7 indicates reflexes of colloquial and regional speech.) (6) Artist homepage text [1] Einer der erfolgversprechendsten Gruppen der Flensburger HipHop-Szene ist die BeatSkill Crew. [2] Durch Zusammenarbeit mir Künstlern von Flensburg bis Salzburg, diverse von ihnen geplante Events und vor allem durch ihre Auftritte haben sich Mafuba und Dragon bereits einen Namen gemacht. [3] Während Mafuba durch ihren einzigartigen, teils mit Gesangspassagen gemischten Reimstil Eindruck macht, sorgt Dragon für die passenden, teils asiatisch und teils funkinspirierten Beats. [4] Zur Zeit in Arbeit sind das neue Album, das diesen Sommer fertig sein wird, sowie ein Beitrag für die Querschnitt-Compilation, die im März mit einer Erstauflage von 1.000 Stück erscheinen wird. [5] Live sind die beiden als nächstes am 16.03. in Flensburg mit Justus & Fumanschu (M.O.R.) zu sehen, danach sind erstmal wieder Studio-Sessions angesagt. ‘[1] One of the most promising bands from the Flensburg hiphop scene is the BeatSkill Crew. [2] Mafuba and Dragon have already made a name through the cooperation with artists from Flensburg to Salzburg [= end points of the Germanspeaking area, J.A.], through the planning of various events and especially through their gigs. [3] While Mafuba impresses through her unique rhyming style, which is partly interspersed with singing parts, Deragon takes care of the appropriate, partly Asian and partly funk inspired beats. [4] They are currently working on their new album, which will be ready this summer, and on a contribution to the Qerschnitt compilation, which will be out in March, starting with 1,000 copies. [5] Their next

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live appearance is 3/16 in Flensburg, together with Justus & Fumanschu (M.O.R.), after that some more studio sessions will follow.’ (7) Artist homepage text [1] Straight Up Hip Hop - Straight aus München. [2] Akuma: „Wir wolln halt, dass ma München ned ausschließlich mit Sound wie Blumentopf oder David P verbindet. [3] Wo is der dreckige, abgefuckte Scheiß hier? [4] Ich kann mir nimmer diesen ‚Was geht ab digga’ Sound anhören, so isses ned. [5] Das Leben is ned nur aus Party und feiern und cool rappen, oider!“ [6] Aufgenommen wird der Sound im jahrelang selber erweiterten BRA.CHI.AL Studio a bisserl außerhalb Münchens. [7] Die Beats bestehen zu 100% aus samples, sonst nix! [8] Gemastert wird das ganze vom S in Darmstadt. [9] Grüße an Ka, So, Kr, Ha, LC, Gr. ‘[1] Straight up hip hop - straight >from Munich [2] Akuma: “What we want is that Munich not be exclusively associated with a sound like Blumentopf or David P. [3] Where's that dirty, fucked-up shit here? [4] I can't hear this ‘What's up digga’ sound no more, that's not how it is. [5] Life is not just partying and having fun and cool rapping, mate!” [6] The sound is recorded in the BRA.CHI.AL studio, which we have been extending for years, a bit outside Munich. [7] The beats consist of 100% samples, nothing else! [8] The whole thing is mastered by S. in Darmstadt. [9] Greets to Ka, So, Kr, Ha, LC, Gr.’

The first text (6) is strongly reminiscent of promotional discourse by the music industry. It is syntactically quite complex (see sentences 2, 3, 4), including two heavily modified noun phrases in sentence 3. Standard orthography is used throughout, indicated by noun capitalization, which is required in standard German, and the absence of colloquial spellings. These artists frame their self-presentation by their success potential (cf. erfolgsversprechend ‘promising’ in sentence 1) and foreground their current production activities. By contrast, the writers of the second text (7) foreground issues of style in their local hip-hop community, i.e. Munich; they challenge established artists (cf. sentence 2), and stress their contacts to the local scene (cf. sentence 9). This self-presentation consists of a headline, a quotation by a band member, and a description of the band’s sound. The quotation (sentences 2–5) is heavily marked as spoken (see items in bold type). Some of these spellings reflect general features of colloquial German including the ones discussed above (e.g. ist > is, wollen > wolln, nichts > nix); others are more

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specific to Southern German varieties (man > ma ‘one’, nicht > ned ‘not’, nimmer ‘no more’, a bisserl ‘a bit’, alter > oider ‘mate (lit. ‘old man’)). The author draws on these features in stressing the band’s outlook on hiphop in Munich, i.e. what they like and what they reject. The quotation also includes bits and pieces of hip-hop slang, e.g. the use of Scheiß probably modelled after AAVE shit, and the phrase ‘Was geht ab digga’ Sound (digga is a German hip-hop slang term of address). The last part of this text, a greeting to the writer’s crew, is reminiscent of online discussion boards and guest books. Despite these differences, both texts are immediately recognizable as belonging to the field of hip-hop discourse. From a member’s point of view, as reconstructed in online ethnography, none of these texts is more ‘authentic’ or ‘fake’ than the other. These are rather two different ways of designing a young artist identity through language, which co-operate with other dimensions of mediated identity design, including photos, band logo, and the music itself. They demonstrate the importance of transgressing the seemingly homogeneous genre to include individual profiles in online style analysis. 5.3. Debating style in online talk: The case of Hecklah & Coch Moving from homepage texts to online talk, this section will focus on a discussion that took place on the critique board of a band called Hecklah & Coch. These two young Berlin artists represent ‘Berlin rap’, a recently popular rap style that draws on the tradition of U.S. American ‘gangsta’ rap. Their identity design on their homepage clearly appropriates aspects of ‘gangsta’ rap. This holds true for their name, which refers to the German gun manufacturer Heckler & Koch. Its respelling to Hecklah & Coch draws on the -er/-ah spelling alternation (as in gangstah, sistah), which is quite common in hip-hop discourse, and has a straightforward model in the name of the well-known U.S.formation Smif & Wessun, which in turn appropriates the name of the U.S. gun manufacturers Smith & Wesson. Besides alluding to this U.S. predecessor, the respelling presumably protects the band from copyright trouble. Moreover, the homepage photo depicts the two band members holding guns and looking down to the viewer. This is a visual resource for positioning the represented person as powerful (Kress and van Leuuwen 1996: 146), and quite a popular pose in ‘gangsta’ rap, the imagery of which often capitalizes on aggressive domination (cf. Haugen 2003).

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At the time of sampling, the Hecklah & Coch board included 90 contributions, posted in 19 days, with a sum of 4,056 words and an average length of 45 words.12 I will focus here on the first 29 entries, which were posted by 16 persons in 43 hours. In terms of sequential structure, this is a series of reactive posts that comment on the band, interspersed by short interactive sequences, which start at entry 10 and occur until 26. Eight participants contribute one posting each, six contribute two, and three participants contribute three postings each. I will quote three lengthy parts from this thread, i.e. entries 2–8, 19–21, and 22–29.13 (8) Board discussion (original numbering) 1. webmaster – 13.18 Hier ist Platz für deine Meinung zu Hecklah & Coch. 2. Dan – 14.00 beat geht so...raps auch...alles standard.nichts besonderes..euer foto find ich krass lächerlich... aber wer weiss ..vielleicht lauft ihr ja in berlin wirklich so hart rum...dann is ok... dieses „geld macht sex..geld macht fame..macht hass..“..hört sich krass scheisse an.. peace. 3. Dan – 14.01 aber vielleicht hate ich auch einfach nur... auch möglich...dann erschießt mich halt. 4. P-A – 14.20 wer ist Dan? track ist fett. auch dicker beat 5. Rolex –14.40 Ich find das Cover auch nich gut.....aber eigentlich isses mir Wayne! Beat is cool, Raps sind auch in Ordnung! 6. QM – 15.50 Hehe, dicker Track! [2nd and 3rd clause omitted] 7. Jim – 16.23 berliner style =) yes, ich hab paar tracks von euch am start und fand euch eigentlich schon recht fresh. also macht weiter jungs. Peace 8. Deep P – 16.35 Der beat geht nach vorn - ist aber trotzdem nichts besonderes.Zum text sag ich nur „hunde die bellen beissen nicht“ - mehr als peinlich jungs... Das photo ist echt der Hammer-fehlen nur noch zwei bitchez, ihr seid soooo lächerlich...

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‘1. webmaster – 13.18 Express your opinion on Hecklah & Coch here. 2. Dan – 14.00 beat is okay... raps too ... standard stuff. nothing special. your photo I find totally ridiculous... but who knows.. maybe you do run around as hard as that in berlin... in this case it’s ok... this “money makes sex..money makes fame..makes hate..” [= quotes song lyrics, J.A. ].. sounds totally crap. peace 3. Dan – 14.01 But maybe I'm just hating... could also be true... well then just shoot me. 4. P-A – 14.20 Who’s Dan? the track is fat. fat beat too. 5. Rolex –14.40 I don’t like the cover either, but it’s really the same to me! the beat is cool, the raps are also ok! 6. QM – 15.50 Hehe, fat track! [2nd and 3rd clause omitted] 7. Jim – 16.23 Berlin style =) yes, I’ve got some tracks from you guys and always thought you’re quite fresh. Well keep it up guys. peace 8. Deep P – 16.35 The beat moves forward, but is nothing special. About the text I can only say “barking dogs don’t bite” - more than just embarrassing, guys... The photo is just about the limit - only thing missing is two bitchez, you’re soooo ridiculous...’

The thread starts with a series of comments on the band’s music and selfpresentation, written in a usual board style. The contributions are quite short and syntactically simple; they feature non-standard orthography (lack of noun capitalization) and hip-hop slang (fresh, bitchez). The abundance of music-related terms (track, beat) and evaluators (cool, fett, fresh, ok) reflects the board’s communicative purpose, i.e. discussing the artist’s music. What is exceptional here is the attention paid to the band’s picture (cf. entries 2, 3, 8 as well as 19, 21, 22 later on). In post 2, Dan points out that the picture probably does not reflect lived experience; in 3, he ironically challenges the band to prove their authenticity, i.e. use their guns. In post 8, Deep P suggests a missing element, i.e. two bitchez, to complete the visual cliché. Both call the photo lächerlich (‘ridiculous’), emphasizing its lack of

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authenticity. Significantly, the posts that are positive towards the music, partly identifying its local style (cf. 7), hardly refer to the photo, with the exception of Rolex (5) who downplays its importance. As the thread unfolds, other posters defend the band’s style and react to the critique. Some of these responses display two techniques of derogation that are reminiscent of ‘dissing’, i.e. the genre of (aggressive) verbal challenge in hip-hop culture. These techniques are the derogatory reference to the opponent’s origin and music taste. For example, in post 11 (not included here), Jimmy challenges Dan (author of posts 2 and 3) to shut up or keep on listening to beginner (original wording: halt einfach dein maul oder hör weiter beginner!) The reference to beginner, a commercially successful German rap band, indexes a different music taste within Germanspeaking rap, which Jimmy presumably rejects as being too soft when compared to Berlin rap. (9) Board discussion (continued) 19. Ryke – 14.25 (day after) [1st para discussing song omitted] euer foto.. naja, der eine ist aufm internat, der andere war fürn jahr im ausland, ob ihr gerade die richtigen seid um „das getto zu representen“ weiss ich jetzt auch net. versteh das nicht als dis gegen eure skills, da geht schon was, vor allem wenn ihr schon jams klargemacht habt und so... peace ryke 20. TOC – 14.54 tach... @deep p wo kommst du her? Pinneberg? keine angst die tun dir nichts. @ryke sylvestah war '98 ein jahr in england sonst sind alle in schöneberg geboren und keiner war lange im ausland (ausser letztes jahr auf hawaiiiii) ... und wer das mit dem cover immer noch nicht geplant hat, tut mir leid. 21. Ryke – 15.09 okay, ich weiss was du meinst, ihr wiss was ich mein - ich finde guns ja auch ganz flashig und so.. aber besonders innovativ oder selbstironisch ist das halt nicht, gerade für berlin. peace

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‘19. Ryke – 14.25 (day after) [1st para discussing song omitted] Your photo.. well, one is in a boarding school, the other one was abroad for a year, whether you guys are the right ones to “represent the ghetto”, I’m not sure. Don’t read this as a diss against your skills, which you do have, especially since you’ve already played on jams and all.. peace ryke 20. TOC – 14.54 hi… @deep p where do you come from? Pinneberg? Don’t worry, they’ll do you no harm. @ryke sylvestah was one year in england in '98 but apart from that they’re all born in schöneberg and no one was abroad for a longer time (except last year in hawaiiiii) ... and if you still don’t dig the cover, I’m sorry for you. 21. Ryke – 15.09 Okay, I know what you mean, you know what I mean. - I also find guns quite flashy and all... but it’s not especially innovative or self-ironic, especially as far as berlin is concerned. peace ’

Another instance of verbal aggression towards the critics is post 20. Here, TOC’s reply to Deep P (post 8) can be read as implying that Deep P, living in the provincial town of Pinneberg, is not familiar with the sight of guns the way Berlin youngsters are. In the second part of his post, TOC responds to Ryke (post 19), who is positive towards the band’s music, but doubts their legitimacy to represent criminal ghetto life. However, Ryke mitigates his critique by acknowledging the band’s skills and by closing with a signal of community solidarity, i.e. peace. In the last clause of 20, TOC seems to imply that the band’s photo should not be taken at face value, an argument he takes up in post 24. Ryke partly aligns with this in post 21. His statement (original wording: ich finde guns ja auch ganz flashig und so) seems to position guns as part of an impressive staging, a visual decoration without any correspondence to lived experience.

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(10) Board discussion (continued) 22. Frank – 15.56 In gewisser Weise ist es clever jede Art von Kritik mit dem Vorwurf des „Ihr Hated Nur“ [Titel des Hecklah & Coch-Songs, J.A.] abzutun. Sehr einfaches, beneidenswert unkompliziertes Weltbild. Nur beschränkt man sich dadurch letztendlich selbst. Aber das fühlen Hecklah & Coch wohl nicht. Ein Quentchen übertriebener und es wäre beinahe hunmorvoll. So bleibt es, in meinen Augen, ein vergeblicher Profilierungsversuch der unterhalb der Mittelmäßigkeit rangiert. Der Beat fügt sich gut in diese Szenerie. 23. P-A – 16.08 blub blub blub. 24. TOC – 17.28 blub blub und abgesoffen! das man in alles immer so viel interpretieren kann. der track definiert sich ganz einfach. tighter beat, strophen geschrieben, aufgenommen. is doch nur RAP man, RAP !!!!!! kritik is cool. aber Deeuutschläänd (Mr.Banjo said so) hört auf mit pseudo intellektuellen phrasen irgendwelche tracks zu analysieren. feier doch einfach den track. (@frisbee) @ryke HAALLLOOOO H.E.C.K.L.A.H. & C.O.C.H - 99% Treffsicherheit - deutsche parade waffe - FlexRap -------------GUNZ auf dem Cover!!!! 25. TOC – 17.39 [21-word post offering web links omitted] 26. Frank – 17.43 Was gibts da zu feiern TOC ? Ich finde diesen Track langweilig. Wenn Du Dich über unreflektierten Konsum freuen kannst, dann wünsche ich Dir viel Vergnügen. Ich kanns nicht. Hilfe. Ich bin Student. 27. DownTown – 22.36 [11-word post praising the band’s style omitted] 28. Willy – 22.56 [38-word post praising band’s music and criticizing its photo omitted]

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29. Mark – 08.31 Frank schrieb am (DATUM): [ fullquote of (22) ] geh nach hause und höhr fanta4 ‘22. Frank – 15.56 In a certain way it is clever to block any form of critique with the reproach of “You’re just Hating” [title of a Hecklah & Coch song J.A.]. A quite simple, enviably uncomplicated worldview. But at the end of the day this amounts to a selfrestriction, though Hecklah & Coch do not seem to feel this. A bit more exaggerated, and it would be almost humorous. But this way it remains, in my view, an unavailing attempt to gain profile that ranges below average. The beat fits in well in this scenery. 23. P-A – 16.08 blah blah blah 24. TOC – 17.28 blah blah and down it goes! people can interpret so much in everything. the track defines itself quite simply. tight beat, write the stanzas, and record it. It’s just RAP man, RAP !!!!!! critique is cool. but Deeuutschläänd (Mr.Banjo said so) just stop analyzing these tracks with pseudo intellectual phrases. just celebrate the track (@frisbee) @ryke HEELLLOOOO H.E.C.K.L.A.H. & C.O.C.H – 99% marksmanship – German parade gun – FlexRap -------------GUNZ on the cover!!!! 25. TOC – 17.39 [21-word post offering web links omitted] 26. Frank – 17.43 What’s there to celebrate TOC? I find this track boring. If you can enjoy unreflected consumption, then please enjoy yourself. I can’t. Help. I’m a student. 27. DownTown – 22.36 [11-word post praising the band’s style omitted] 28. Willy – 22.56 [38-word post praising band’s music and criticizing its photo omitted]

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29. Mark – 08.31 Frank wrote at DATE: [ fullquote of (22) ] go home and listen to fanta4’

Post 22 introduces a markedly different style. Frank goes beyond the critique expressed so far, and provides an analysis of the artists’ ideology. He attributes to H&C a simplistic worldview and judges their style as not exaggerated enough to be humorous. With seven clauses and 66 words, this post is considerably longer than the thread’s average. It is also syntactically more complex and follows standard German orthography, including noun capitalization. Its most striking features are the absence of hip-hop slang and the abundance of formal vocabulary and collocations such as rangiert unterhalb der Mittelmäßigkeit (‘ranges below average’), vergeblicher Profilierungsversuch (‘unavailing attempt to gain profile’), beneidenswert unkompliziertes (‘enviably uncomplicated’), beinahe humorvoll (‘almost humorous’). This post is written in the third person (except for a subjectivity marker, in my eyes), while most other contributions choose the first and/or second person. Other than previous critics, Frank does not round off his contribution with peace, which contextualizes his lack of orientation to the community. Two immediate responses to Frank come from Berlin residents who are already active in this debate (place of residence is part of the member profile that is displayed together with each post). In the first of them (post 23), P-A disparages Frank’s statement with a condensed evaluation, i.e. blub blub blub (equivalent to ‘blah blah blah’) About one and a half hours later, TOC’s reply follows (post 24). His opener is a repetition and variation of the preceding evaluation,14 thereby demonstrating alignment with P-A. He rejects Frank’s criticism, which he labels pseudo intellectual phrases, and draws attention to what he perceives to be the essence of rap. According to TOC, the (formal) quality of rap sound and lyrics should leave no need for further interpretations. He underscores his stance through a reference to a rap artist he identifies with.15 In the second part of post 24, TOC elaborates his alternative reading of the photo. He seems to suggest that guns can be understood as a visual metaphor, which transfers positive qualities of the German gun brand Heckler & Koch, such as 99% treffsicherheit (‘99% marksmanship’), to the band. He also seems to imply that the gun metaphor is legitimate in the frame of FlexRap (battle rap), a rap genre that focuses on aggressive verbal competition.16

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Just a few minutes later, Frank’s reaction (26) keeps in line with his initial stance and style. He rejects TOC’s suggestion to ‘celebrate the track’ and accuses him of ‘unreflected consumption’. He retains the verb final –e twice, the deletion of which is quite common on these boards, as demonstrated above. Frank rounds off his post with a self-labelling as Student (‘university student’). In current German slang, Student is a negative categorization among high school students; it stands for an intellectual outlook without real experience. Frank’s self-labelling evokes this stereotype, perhaps in order to ironically confirm inferences by fellow posters and readers. Entries 27 and 28 (not reproduced here) come in the default board style and re-iterate the controversy discussed above. The author of (27) praises the band’s local style, whereas the author of (28) is positive towards the song but rejects the band’s photo as peinlich (‘embarassing’) and calls the band möchtegern gangsta (‘wannabe gangstas’). Yet another reply to Frank follows in entry 29. Mark, who also comes from Berlin and praised the band earlier in this thread (post 13), quotes Frank’s critique in full, and challenges him to go home and listen to fanta 4, i.e. a highly successful German rap band of the 1990s, which is judged by many as too commercial and soft. As in post 11, the indexical power of this statement draws on the position of the referent within the discursive system of hip-hop. The brevity of this post and the misspelling of hör as höhr (imperative sing. of ‘listen to’) provide a formal contrast to Frank’s critique as well. Overall, the participants’ positions with respect to the band’s photo reveal a dichotomy between ‘critics’, most clearly represented by Dan and Frank, and ‘defenders’, most clearly represented by TOC. The defenders are residents of Berlin and present themselves as fans of Berlin rap, while the critics come from other parts of the country. The critics read the band’s photo as a mere imitation of African-American imagery, which is not rooted in the artists’ local context, i.e. Berlin. To them, the band’s visual style lacks authenticity because it deviates from a widespread maxim of rap discourse, i.e. that rap reflects lived experience. By contrast, the defenders, and in particular TOC, embrace a metaphorical reading of the picture, which is rooted in an equally widespread conceptual metaphor of rap discourse, i.e. RAP IS A WEAPON (cf. Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2002). While many posters from both sides equally draw on resources that are typical for hip-hop board discussions in making their point, in Frank’s contribution this clash of cultural values is articulated with a clash of language styles. Frank draws on a markedly more formal style in producing a more ‘elaborate’ critique, which fans of Berlin rap in turn reject as ‘intellectual babbling’.

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However, Frank’s writing style is not exclusive to a critical perspective on ‘gangsta rap’, just as the defenders’ style is not exclusive to Berlin or to ‘gangsta’ rap fans. Moreover, a look at other postings by the protagonists of this debate suggest that they all style-shift to some extent. What we witness in this thread is how the capital value of linguistic resources in hip-hop discourse is reproduced, and contested, in a situated online interaction. The articulation of stance and style that is most salient in entries 22–26 is rooted in the fundamental ambivalence of spoken and written style in the field (cf. 4.2). Spoken and non-standard writing is a clear, often quite conscious divergence from school norms and mainstream media discourse, which all participants are familiar with. It is a resource for constructing nonmainstream and ‘down to earth’ attitudes; what this involves in every single case depends on local context and the topics at hand (cf. Eckert 2002). By contrast, more professional activities in the field, such as authoring and editing copy text for a large website, capitalize on a language style that is inevitably closer to institutional and mainstream media norms. However, sites of online interaction provide a space in which a writing style traditionally vested with symbolic authority can be devalued and made fun of. The emerging picture is certainly not unknown to sociolinguists, as it basically illustrates how the structural relation of standard and non-standard, as well as the covert prestige of vernacular speech, is reproduced in a new setting.

6.

Conclusion

The aim of this chapter was to demonstrate how the notion of sociolinguistic style can deal with the complexities of language use in CMC. A framework for online style analysis was sketched out, and its tripartite distinction between individual participants, genres, and computer-mediated discourse field was used to describe and interpret linguistic variability on a particular hip-hop website. The findings suggest that sociolinguistic style must be addressed at the intersection of these three levels, which frame and contextualize each other in online interaction. In sum, on the level of the field as a whole, participants are ‘doing hiphop’ by drawing on a small but highly typical list of items across various categories (vocabulary, discourse markers, spelling variation). They capitalize on vernacular English, and additionally draw on visual cues of affiliation. Hip-hop slang, a members’ resource, operates on this global level as

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well. Clearly, the prototypical instantiation of hip-hop slang is tied up with genres of online interaction. But hip-hop’s field of online discourse includes numerous other genres beside online talk, some quite close to offline traditions, and others genuinely specific to CMC. Hip-hop on the Web is constituted through non-institutional literacy practices, but these practices are not oblivious to genre differences. Depending on genre, users will follow established conventions, creatively transform them, or draw on different generic models to solve the communicative task at hand. The comparison of artist homepages suggests that the choice of a generic model is part and parcel of online identity design, as it contextualizes individual ambitions and alignments. Discarding a ‘default’ genre style and adopting a different generic model has stylistic significance and is clearly acknowledged as such by participants. Therefore, genre is the level on which online style in a collective and an individual sense is manifested. Finally, the analysis of the online talk suggests that the discussion board provides members with a discursive space to debate the artists’ visual and verbal style, and to construct their own style as community members. Although this approach was developed on data from an arena of youth (sub)culture, its usefulness is not restricted to such an arena. As researchers have repeatedly pointed out, youth and youth culture are particularly suited contexts for gaining sociolinguistic insights that reach beyond youth itself. Developing and negotiating social style plays a crucial role in adolescent identity constructions (cf. Bucholtz 2004; Eckert 2000; and papers in Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou (eds.) 2003); but the relevance of style in social life is obviously not restricted to youth. Given that the analytical distinctions developed in this paper are not exclusive to youth-cultural settings on the Web, this framework is capable of being applied to other fields of computer-mediated discourse as well. In conclusion, this chapter has argued for a sociolinguistic perspective on computer-mediated communication. With the social spread of the internet, new forms of community are emerging between real-life social networks and imagined communities. Informal written language is gaining new domains, and variation in written language, in particular spelling, is increasing (cf. Sebba, this volume). Sociolinguistics must address these issues and developments, modifying its tools and concepts to meet new social realities. It seems that the theoretical and analytic notions of sociolinguistics can account for the complexity of language use and variation on the Web, provided we adjust them to the new conditions of communication and community in what Castells (2000) has termed the ‘network society’.

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Notes 1. On genre in the study of sociolinguistic style cf. Irvine (2001); Bauman (2001); on genre and online ethnography cf. Danet (2001). 2. The project “Jugendkulturelle mediale Stile” was carried out from 2000–2004 as part of the research group “Sprachvariation als kommunikative Praxis”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG); director Werner Kallmeyer, principal investigator Jannis Androutsopoulos, research assistants Daniel Kraft, Nina Nikolic, Ben Schneider. 3. I draw on Koch and Oesterreicher’s (1985) model of conceptually spoken/written style here, which separates the (phonic or graphic) materialization of discourse from its (spoken or written) conception. This model relates linguistic features to communicative situations by means of two ‘continua’. The communicative situation is modelled on a continuum between nearness and distance, based on criteria such as level of formality, level of spontaneity, monologue/dialogue, synchronous/asynchronous mode, etc. The conception of discourse is modelled on a continuum between spoken and written style, based on features of discourse structure, syntax, lexicon, and phonology/orthography (cf. Androutsopoulos 2000 for an earlier application to media discourse). 4. One of the fullest directories in the field, the mzee.com link project, featured 480 German-speaking websites in spring 2002. This figure rose to 831 sites some 15 months later. The link directory on webbeatz.de listed 263 and 458 German hip-hop sites, respectively. 5. The terms ‘online magazine’ and ‘web portal’ are used interchangeably in the following, as the boundary between them is fuzzy from the participants’ perspective. 6. According to webmaster information, hiphop.de reached 3.5 millions of page impressions per month in the beginning of 2004. 7. Cf. Morgan (2001), contributions in Mitchell (ed.) (2001) and Rap Dictionary (www.rapdict.org). 8. These are 99 types, excluding proper names, but including a few ambiguous forms such as word class membership and language, e.g. sample (verb or noun) and mag (Ger. verb mag or Eng. noun magazine). 9. The sample consists of a total of 54,550 words, divided into 73 reviews (17,400 words), 116 artist homepages (18,650) and 24 board discussions (18,500). It is representative with respect to the total amount of texts in these genres on webbeatz.de at the time of research. 10. Feature (c) has the most tokens (1,440), mainly due to the copula verb ist, followed by (a) (854), (b) (391), (e) (73) and (d) (51). Features occuring less frequently in the sample, and therefore excluded from analysis, are the clitization of es after a personal pronoun (e.g. du es > du’s) and of definite article after preposition (e.g. mit dem > mit’m). Analysis of features (d) and (e) includes

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11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

Jannis Androutsopoulos only verbs which show variation in the sample. Linguistic constraints were not examined. Although they presumably affect the distribution of the variants to some extent, genre differences are clear enough for the purposes of this paper. The difference between the three genres is statistically significant, χ²: 121.2 (df: 8), p 0.001. This sum excludes member profiles and system-generated data, but includes quotes from other posts. This is a simplified version of the screen display. Additional content such as member information and signatures as well as all features of online layout have been omitted. The time of posting has been retained, as swiftness of response is an important indicator for online interaction. Names of contributors are anonymized throughout. English items in the original are in italics in the glosses. In the German original, TOC’s opener (blub blub und abgesoffen!) is a word play on German blub, i.e. the stem of blubbern (‘to blabber’), which also has the colloquial meaning ‘confused talk’. TOC refers to a song called “Deutschland” by Olli Banjo, and devises the spelling Deeuutschläänd in order to imitate the song’s prosody. Rap Dictionary (www.rapdict.org) defines the hip-hop usage of flex as follows: “To show one’s mettle, flexing one’s muscles, showing one’s arsenal and readiness to put it to use, letting one’s pugilistic prowess be known. To strike someone or to get up in someone’s face for intimidation.” In my data, Flexrap is used as a synonym with Battlerap.

References Androutsopoulos, Jannis 2000 Non-standard spellings in media texts: The case of German fanzines. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(4), 514–533. 2001 What names reveal about the music style: A study of naming patterns in popular music. In: Németh, Enikö (ed.), Pragmatics in 2000, vol. 2. Antwerp: IPrA, 16–29. 2003 Musikszenen im Netz: Felder, Nutzer, Codes. In: Merkens, Hans and Jürgen Zinnecker (eds.), Jahrbuch Jugendforschung 3. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 57–82. 2004 Non-native English and sub-cultural identities in media discourse. In: Sandøy, Helge et al. (eds.), Den fleirspråklege utfordringa [The multilingual challenge]. Oslo: Novus, 83–98. Androutsopoulos, Jannis (ed.) 2003 HipHop: Globale Kultur – lokale Praktiken. Bielefeld: Transcript.

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Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication. Special Issue, Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4). Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Arno Scholz 2002 On the recontextualization of hip-hop in European speech communities: A contrastive analysis of rap lyrics. PhiN – Philologie im Netz 19, 1–42. URL: http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin19/p19t1.htm (accessed 2006-10-20). Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.) 2003 Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Evelyn Ziegler 2004 Exploring language variation on the Internet: Regional speech in a chat community. In: Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise et al. (eds.), Language Variation in Europe. Papers from ICLaVE 2. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 99–111. Barton, David and Mary Hamilton 1998 Local Literacies. Reading and Writing in One Community. London/New York: Routledge. Bauman, Richard 2001 The ethnography of genre in a Mexican market: Form, function, variation. In: Eckert, Penelope and John Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Oxford: Blackwell, 57–77. 2004 A World of Others’ Voices. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Baym, Nancy K. 2000 Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and On-Line Community. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Bell, Allan 1999 Styling the other to define the self: A study in New Zealand identity making. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4), 523–541. 2001 Back in style: Reworking audience design. In: Eckert, Penelope and John J. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Oxford: Blackwell, 139–169. Berns, Jan and Peter Schlobinski 2003 Constructions of identity in German hiphop culture. In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 197–219. Bourdieu, Pierre 1991 Language and Symbolic Power. Oxford: Polity Press.

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Bucholtz, Mary 1999 ‘Why be normal?’ Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society 28, 203–223. 2004 Styles and stereotypes: The linguistic negotiation of identity among Laotian American youth. Pragmatics 14(2/3), 127–147. Castells, Manuel 2000 The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Chandler, Daniel 1998 Personal home pages and the construction of identities on the Web. URL: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/webident.html (accessed 2006-10-20). Coupland, Nikolas 2001 Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30, 345–375. Crystal, David 2001 Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Danet, Brenda 2001 Cyberpl@y. Communicating Online. Oxford/New York: Berg. Danet, Brenda and Susan Herring (eds.) 2003 The multilingual Internet. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 9(1). URL: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue1/ (accessed 2006-10-20). Döring, Nicola 2003 Sozialpsychologie des Internet, 2nd ed. Göttingen: Hogrefe. Eckert, Penelope 1997 Why ethnography? In: Kotsinas, Ulla-Britt et al. (eds.), Ungdomsspråk i Norden. Stockholm: MINS 43, 52–62. 2000 Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Oxford: Blackwell. 2002 Constructing meaning in sociolinguistic variation. Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, November 2002. URL: www.stanford.edu/~eckert/AAA02.pdf (accessed 2006-10-20). Eckert, Penelope and John Rickford (eds.) 2001 Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Oxford: Blackwell. Fairclough, Norman 1995 Media Discourse. London: Arnold. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 1997 Self-presentation and interactional alignments in e-mail discourse: The style- and code switches of Greek messages. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 7(2), 141–164.

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Computer-mediated communication. In: Verschueren, Jef et al. (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1– 20. Goffman, Ervin 1981 Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Haugen, Jason D. 2003 ‘Unladylike divas’: Language, gender, and female gangsta rappers. Popular Music and Society 26(4), 429–444. Hawisher, Gail E. and C. L. Selfe (eds.) 2000 Global Literacies and the World Wide Web. London/New York: Routledge. Herring, Susan 1999 Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 4(4). URL: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.htm (accessed 2006-1020). 2003 Gender and power in online communication. In: Holmes, Janet and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), The Handbook of Language and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell, 202–228. Herring, Susan (ed.) 1996 Computer-Mediated Communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Hine, Christine 2000 Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage. Holly, Werner 2002 Klare und normale Sprache als sozialer Stil. Zu Elke Heidenreichs ‘Brigitte’-Kolumnen. In: Keim, Inken and Wilfried Schütte (eds.), Soziale Welten und kommunikative Stile. Tübingen: Narr, 363–378. Irvine, Judith 2001 ‘Style’ as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In: Eckert, Penelope and John Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Oxford: Blackwell, 21–43. Kallmeyer, Werner and Inken Keim 2003 Linguistic variation and the construction of social identity in a German-Turkish setting. In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 29–46. Karlsson, Anna-Malin 2002a Skriftbruk I föröndring. En semiotisk studie av den personliga hemsidan. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

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To write a page and colour a text. Concepts and practices of homepage use. In: Coppock, P. (ed.), The Semiotics of Writing. Turnhout: Brepols, 295–310. Keim, Inken and Wilfried Schütte (eds.) 2002 Soziale Welten und kommunikative Stile. Tübingen: Narr. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher 1985 Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36, 15–43. Kress, Gunther 1998 Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically mediated communication: The potential of new forms of text. In: Snyder, Ilana (ed.), From Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. London/New York: Routledge, 53–79. 2003 Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen 1996 Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Mendoza-Denton, Norma 2001 Language and identity. In: Chambers, Jack K., Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden: Blackwell, 475–499. Mitchell, Tony (ed.) 2001 Global Noise. Rap and Hip-Hop outside the USA. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Morgan, Marcyliena 2001 ‘Nuthin’ but a G thang’: Grammar and language ideology in hip hop identity. In: Lanehart, Sonja (ed.), Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 187–210. Paolillo, John 2001 Language variation on Internet Relay Chat: A social network approach. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(2), 180–213. Pennycook, Alistair 2003 Global Englishes, Rip Slyme, and performativity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4), 513–533. Preisler, Bent 1999 Functions and forms of English in an European EFL country. In: Bex, Tony and Richard J. Watts (eds.), Standard English. The Widening Debate. London, NY: Routledge, 239–267.

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Rampton, Ben 1995 Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Richardson, Elaine and Sean Lewis 2000 ‘Flippin’ the Script’ / ‘Blowin’ up the Spot’: puttin' hip-hop online in (African) America and South Africa. In: Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe (eds.), Global Literacies and the World Wide Web. London/New York: Routledge, 251–276. Schilling-Estes, Natalie 2002 Investigating stylistic variation. In: Chambers, Jack K. et al. (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 375–401. Schwitalla, Johannes 1997 Gesprochenes Deutsch: Eine Einführung. Berlin: Schmidt. Scollon, Ron 1998 Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction: An Ethnographic Study of News Discourse. London: Longman. Sebba, Mark 2003 Spelling rebellion. In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 151–172. 2003b ‘Will the real impersonator please stand up?’ Language and identity in the Ali G websites. Arbeiten aus Anglistik and Amerikanistik 28(2), 279–304. Siebenhaar, Beat 2006 Code choice and code-switching in Swiss-German Internet Relay Chat rooms. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4), 481–506. Snyder, Ilana (ed.) 2002 Silicon Literacies. Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age. London/New York: Routledge. Storrer, Angelika 2001 Getippte Gespräche oder dialogische Texte? Zur kommunikationstheoretischen Einordnung der Chat-Kommunikation. In: Lehr, Andrea et al. (eds.), Sprache im Alltag. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 439– 465. Streeck, Jürgen 2002 Hip-Hop-Identität. In: Keim, Inken and Wilfried Schütte (eds.), Soziale Welten und kommunikative Stile. Tübingen: Narr, 537–557. Thornton, Sarah 1995 Club Cultures. Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Part 3. Identity-work through styling and stylization

Introduction to Part 3 Peter Auer In many papers of the preceding two parts of this book it has been argued that variable grammatical, phonological and discursive features combine into styles, which in turn are socially meaningful, i.e. their use can index a certain social category. Through being linked to membership categories, social styles become relevant for the construction of social identities. However, the social interpretation of styles is not a trivial issue. How can we know which styles are indexes of which social categories? The more discrepancies there are between the relevant social categories of a community and those of the researcher and his or her academic readership, the greater the methodological problem for sociolinguistic research on social styles and identity work in interaction. It requires a detailed ethnography of the relevant field in which the actors display identities through certain linguistic practices. There is, however, another way to demonstrate that a constellation of stylistic features receives a certain social interpretation in a community; it is possible to look at the way speakers themselves stylize each other or third parties in order to portray the stylized person as a member of a certain group, i.e. to categorize him or her. Since the social category which is applied to the stylized person is usually easy to reconstruct from the interactional context in which the stylization takes place, stylizations provide evidence that for the speaker, certain stylistic features are linked to certain social personae. This ‘proof procedure’ is applied in the papers of this third part of our volume. It should be noted, however, that it has obvious limitations. First of all, stylizations by definition involve misrepresentations: the portrayed person is rendered in a streamlined and exaggerated way. Also, the stylistic features used in stylizations are usually only a subset of the features that make up a social style: those that are salient and easily recognized by outsiders, and easy to reproduce. Finally, stylizations rely on stereotypes; these stereotypes may diverge more or less radically from actual identity work. But despite these restrictions, which mandate some kind of caution in the use of stylized material in order to reconstruct identity work, “playing with the voice of the other” (to quote Deppermann’s title)

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provides an excellent resource for the investigation of the social meaning of linguistic variation. In Ch. 11, Arnulf Deppermann applies this approach to stylized renderings of young immigrants in conversations among monolingual German adolescents. These are done in a kind of exaggerated ethnolect (sometimes called Kanaksprak in Germany, after a book title of the Turkish-born German writer Feridun Zaimoglu, cf. Zaimoglu 1995) which is ascribed to 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant youth, particularly from Turkey and other Southern European as well as Arabic countries. Obviously, we are dealing with a case of ‘crossing’ here, which is common in Western multi-cultural societies. Deppermann investigates the linguistic features, the sequential organization and the interactional functions of stylized Kanaksprak with a special emphasis on how identities of self and other are projected. He finds three practices in which stylized Kanaksprak is frequent: personal quotations, category-animations and playful assessments. Kanaksprak is meaningful because it is linked to the stereotype of the aggressive and dumb immigrant. However, it is mainly used as a fun-code which sets the ‘key’ of an interaction and is a resource for poetic performances marked by playful competition. It also is a display of youth cultural capital acquired from the media in which stylized Kanaksprak also plays an important role. Mark Sebba’s chapter (Ch. 12) directly links up with this interplay between media representations of ethnolectal styles and their everyday use in youth culture. He examines how identities are constructed through language in an online community devoted to discussing the British comedy character ‘Ali G’, created by the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in 1999. The ‘Ali G’ act consists of impersonating a gang leader (of ambiguous ethnicity but based on a black stereotype) complete with stereotypical dress, mannerisms and language. Soon after his advent on television, ‘Ali G’ became the subject of a number of websites frequented mainly by adolescents and devoted to the playful mock-adulation of ‘Ali G’ and the discussion of the show. While ostensibly focussed on ‘Ali G’, these websites are also places of identity construction and contestation for the contributors. In particular, race and ethnic identity emerge as topics in certain discussions. An important part of the fantasy world of these sites is their special language, modelled on that of ‘Ali G’ himself. This language is a mixture of Southern British English and Patois (creole), a linguistic stereotype recognizable to most urban British adolescents. In these computer-mediated texts, it is constructed, mainly by white adolescents with little first-hand

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knowledge of creole, through means of grammatical and orthographic deviation from Standard English. As Sebba shows, three distinct phases can be identified in the history of the ‘Ali G’ websites. The first one is involved in creating a specifically ‘Black British’ form of creole, and predates the show itself. The second is the act of identity (performed by ‘Ali G’), whereby this variety is taken up by people from outside the Caribbean community. The third act of identity is the one performed by the contributors to the ‘Ali G’ websites, who take the ‘Ali G’ language and use it together with English as an ingroup marker in their own on-line ‘community’. Since all identities are constructed through computer-mediated texts in this virtual meeting place, participants may leave their everyday identities behind them. Language becomes the essential part of identity-construction and ascription. While Deppermann and Sebba are concerned with ethnic stylizations, Alexandra Georgakopoulou looks at gender stylizations in Ch. 13, i.e. talk about men that was found to resonate in the conversations of four Greek adolescent female ‘best friends’. Georgakopoulou investigates the interactional resources that participants draw upon to refer to, identify, categorize, and, more generally, ‘represent’ men, the local meanings that such modes of reference and identification have, and their consequentiality for gender identity projections (both masculinities and femininities). The portrayal of men’s personae makes use of sets of co-occurring and patterned resources (i.e. nicknames, character assessments, stylizations, category bound knowledge) that have developed over time through the participants’ interactional history. As such, they bear meanings more indexically than referentially, evoking a host of associations that have to do with participants’ lived experiences and a social typology of localities (‘practiced place’). They are recycled and recontextualized. The styles that are more routinely invoked in this context mark men as either babyish (‘soft’, ‘feminine’) or ‘tough’/’hard’. Both are conjured on the basis of indexical linguistic choices and stylings of sterotyped sociolects, including shifts into the local dialect (for the ‘tough’ men). In addition, parody, critical distancing, and performative play are central to the enactment of both social styles. The last two chapters of this part of the book address questions of styling in the performance of narratives, and more particularly in reported dialogues. In Susanne Günthner’s contribution (Ch. 14), it is shown how in transmitting the speech of others, story-tellers animate and stylize others’ characters and thereby cast them into categories (social types) with associ-

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ated characteristics, such as foreigners, innocent children, snobs, machos, choleric persons, petty bourgeois, etc. By typifying their animated characters, and by affiliating with or disaffiliating from them, tellers implicitly also construe their own identities. Identity management is shown to essentially rely on the portrayal of ‘otherness’, i.e. identity relies on alterity. Along the same lines, Helga Kotthoff in Ch. 15 investigates mocking stylizations of Germans as old-fashioned and conservative by tellers who thereby display their own identity as that of a liberal and modern person. The data are evening meals among friends in Germany and Switzerland, with academics between 30 and 40 as participants who identify in a broad sense with egalitarian gender politics. Kotthoff looks at how these academics make their liberal stance ‘accountable’ in a humorous way, by overdoing the distinction between themselves and those who adhere to traditional gender roles, through mocking and parody. The stylization of the ‘conservatives’ also includes South German dialects, while the ‘liberal’ tellers present their own words in (colloquial) Standard German.

Reference Zaimoglu, Feridun 1995 Kanak Sprak. 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft. Berlin: Rotbuch-Verl.

Chapter 11 Playing with the voice of the other: Stylized Kanaksprak in conversations among German adolescents* Arnulf Deppermann 1.

Introduction

Compared to other Western industrial nations, it is only quite recently that Germany has become multi-cultural. It neither has a substantial colonial history, such as France and England, nor was it founded as an immigrant society, such as the USA or Canada. Until the 1960s, Germany essentially was a monolingual society with only regional, that is dialectal, but no ethnically-based linguistic variation. This picture has successively changed since the late 1950s, when the first so-called ‘guest-workers’ came to Germany. Today, in the large cities of Germany, such as Berlin, Frankfurt or Cologne, but also in small towns, immigrants and their descendants of the 2nd and 3rd generation make up more than 20 percent of the population. Apart from cultivating their own native languages, these immigrants have created new varieties of German, starting with the first generation’s so-called Gastarbeiterdeutsch (‘guest-workers’ German’; see Dittmar and Rieck 1977; Hinnenkamp 1982). The linguistic features of this variety were caused by insufficient knowledge of the German language and by interferences from the native tongue. In the first half of the 1990s, however, a new ethnolectal variety of German evolved (see Dirim and Auer 2004: Chapter 1). It is spoken by 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants, mainly young males who have grown up in Germany, but who are oriented towards a ‘ghetto’ identity. They strongly oppose integration into German society and culture, which they consider discriminating and hostile, lacking traditional male values and clearly defined gender-roles. But they refuse to continue their parents’ way of life as well. These speakers have developed a code that has come to be known as Türkendeutsch (Androutsopoulos 2001), Türkenslang (Auer 2003) or Kanaksprak (Zaimo÷lu 1995). Although it includes some Turkish features, it is a variety of German, since German is the main lexi-

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fier language. I will henceforth use the term Kanaksprak, because the group of people who are considered to be the ‘owners’ of this code are not only Turks, but also Romani, Maroccans, Egyptians, etc. Kanaksprak is derived from the social designator Kanacke. In Germany, this is widely used as an abusive term to refer to people who look like foreigners of southern origin. It has, however, been appropriated by so-called Kanacken themselves as a self-categorization which at least partly inverts its negative evaluation (comparable to the ‘black is beautiful’-movement in the U.S.; see Zaimo÷lu 1995). Kanacke strictly is neither an ethnic nor a national category-term. It is predicated upon perceptual features which are taken to index people’s national and ethnic membership, and thus is applied to people with very different ethnic origins and national identites. Moreover, its use is restricted to refer to male adolescents and male young adults. Despite its potentially abusive connotation,1 I will use Kanaksprak as an emic term for analytical concerns. This practice should not be mistaken to mean that I subscribe to its evaluative meaning. Starting in 1995, Kanaksprak increasingly has become an object of stylization in the media, mainly in various comedy-formats (see Androutsopoulos 2001). Consequently, it has become popular among German youngsters to insert fragments of stylized Kanaksprak into their conversations.2 To date, there are some studies of Kanaksprak (Auer 2003; Dirim and Auer 2004; Eksner and Orellana 2005; Füglein 2000; Kallmeyer and Keim 2003b; Keim 2003a and 2007; Tertilt 1996 and 1997) and its representation in the media (Auer 2003; Androutsopoulos 2001; Kotthoff 2004). Auer and Androutsopoulos have gathered interview data on German youngsters’ attitudes towards Kanaksprak and self-reports concerning their use. But to my knowledge, no studies exist that inquire into how Kanaksprak is used by German adolescents.3 This will be the focus of my paper. My study is concerned with a secondary ethnolect, a stylization of the ‘other tongue’ (cf. Coupland 2001; Rampton 1999). It is adequate to speak of ‘stylization’, because the German speakers do not use this code as a substantive enrichment of their basic repertoire (in contrast, e.g., to the use of Turkish as described in Auer and Dirim 2003 and Dirim and Auer 2004). They treat stylized Kanaksprak as a fun-code that is used for very restricted conversational and identity-related concerns. Since in many cases this stylization of Kanaksprak does not rest on direct experience with its speakers, but is modelled upon media representations (which are already stylizations), the code under study can in many cases aptly be called a ‘tertiary ethnolect’ (cf. Auer 2003). While it is often

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impossible to tell exactly how media stylization and direct experience relate to one another, there are some hints in my data to answer this question at least partially (see below). The use of stylized Kanaksprak is a case of language crossing as defined by Rampton (1995, 1998): A group of people uses a code that ‘belongs’ to a different ethnic (or cultural) group. Moreover, stylized Kanaksprak is an appropriation of a minority code by a majority. This is a kind of codeswitching which is in some ways atypical (but see Androutsopoulos 2003, the papers in Rampton 1999 and Keim 2002). The primary aim of my paper is to analyze the use of stylized Kanaksprak in conversations among German adolescents. My approach will mainly be conversation analytic as it focuses on the sequential analysis of the conversational organization and functioning of Kanaksprak. However, it is supported and supplemented by ethnographic data and by recovering intertextual references to media models, which are vital for gaining a fuller understanding of the identity-dimensions of Kanaksprak in German youngsters’ conversations. Section 2 will sketch how Kanaksprak is represented in the media. Section 3 will summarize how the German youngsters under study talk about speakers of Kanaksprak. The main body of analyses will then be devoted to conversational sequences in which the German youngsters use stylized Kanaksprak. I take the conversation analytic view which holds that people’s social identities and the features associated with them are neither invariably fixed nor relevant for just any interaction. Rather, they are locally invoked and flexibly shaped by ways of speaking (see Antaki and Widdicombe 1998). Social identities are associated with co-occurring ways of speaking, nonverbal behaviour, preferences for dressing, status symbols, etc. In sum, these co-occurrences amount to a social style, that is, a holistic configuration which is perceived as belonging together and which represents a common socio-symbolic meaning (see Kallmeyer and Keim 2003a), in our case, the image of the stereotypical speaker of Kanaksprak (see section 3). Like most other practices of crossing, stylized Kanaksprak is a kind of stylization (cf. Coupland 2001) of the other tongue which locally invokes and assesses social identities. Stylized Kanaksprak bears as well on the identity of the speaker as on the identities of the addressee and of the stylized other. So, using stylized Kanaksprak accomplishes various acts of selfand other-positioning at once (see section 4). My data come from a research project that aimed at inquiring into the range of interactional practices by which male adolescents organize their

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peer-group interactions.4 We observed a peer-group of about 20 boys aged 14 to 17 who live in a small town near Frankfurt/Main (Germany). Naturally occurring verbal interactions were tape-recorded in various settings, such as in the local youth center, on bus tours, in restaurants, and on the local skating-ground. Extensive fieldwork included regular participant observation for more than two years. Additionally, we conducted in-depth interviews with the members of the peer-group and with youth workers, the mayor, parents, and further significant others. The central members of the peer-group we studied were of German origin, but it also included an Italian, a Moroccan and a Turkish boy as peripheral members. The boys’ social background was mostly upper working and middle class. In the small town where the study was conducted, only a small percentage of the inhabitants is of immigrant origin (ca. 10% of the inhabitants). In nearby Frankfurt, where the boys went to school rsp. to work, the percentage of immigrants is more than 50%. It was at school and in work settings, but also at local events, such as disco nights and in the youth center, that members of the peer group regularly got into direct contact with youngsters of Turkish, Arabian and Slavic origin. Situations of contact are mostly avoided by both sides. Direct verbal conflicts and physical fights were rare, but happened now and then. While the members of the peer-group sometimes referred to these specific ethnic and national identities, they mostly used the abusive cover-categorizations Kanacken or Hawacks (see above). Individual immigrant members of the peer-group were also sometimes addressed by these terms. This, however, only happened in a playful, but competitive frame, especially in ritual insulting sequences called dissen (from: to disrespect, see Deppermann and Schmidt 2001b).

2.

Stylized Kanaksprak in the media: A fun-code

Stylized Kanaksprak and related varieties have been en vogue in German media since the late 1990s. Comedians such as Kaya Yanar (who is of Turkish-Arabian origin) and Stefan und Erkan have made stylized Kanaksprak popular among German adolescents. I will concentrate on the comedy-duo Mundstuhl, because the dialogues between their characters Dragan and Alder serve as the main media model for the adolescents under study. Mundstuhl are Germans who originate from the same region as the adolescents, i.e. the south of Hessia. The youngsters know the Mundstuhl produc-

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tions, which are available on CD and can also be heard on radio and seen on TV, very well and can even cite some passages by heart. Typical linguistic features of the Mundstuhl-dialogues are (see also Androutsopoulos 2001; Auer 2003; Kotthoff 2004): – phonetics: sometimes an epenthetic vowel is inserted into word-initial clusters of consonants (Schäpäruch instead of Spruch ‘slogan’); lack of umlaut (grunst statt grünst ‘gets green’); reduction of /st/ to /s/ (weiß=u? instead of weißt du? ‘do you know?’); coronalization of /ch/ to /sch/ (isch for ich ‘I’ – this feature is probably borrowed from the Hessian dialect) – prosody: syllable-timed instead of stress-timed prosody – syntax: omission of prepositions and articles; inversion of word order: VS instead of SV as in hab isch gekauft neue BMW (instead of ich habe einen neuen BMW gekauft ‘I bought a new BMW’) – lexis: extremely frequent use of some adjectives and adverbs such as krass (‘gross’), korrekt (‘correct’), konkret (‘concrete’). Their semantics deviates from standard German; they are all used as (positive and negative) evaluative markers; in contrast to primary ethnolectal speakers, there are no non-German lexical items e.g. of Turkish origin – semantics: these adjectives (krass etc.) and other lexical items are almost desemanticized, retaining only a ritual function as code- and identity-markers. Moreover, stylized Kanaksprak is marked by hyperbolic and vulgar expressions used for intensification. Many of them are taken from German youth slang (such as the adverbials voll ‘full’, echt ‘real’, the prefixes scheiß- ‘shit’, arsch- ‘ass’, ober- ‘over’; cf. Androutsopoulos 1998) – phraseology: incorrect, contaminated idiomatic expressions like nicht mehr alle Tassen im Kopf which is a blend of nicht mehr alle Tassen im Schrank (idiomatic like ‘one stick short of a bundle’; literally: ‘no longer all cups in the cupboard’) and nicht richtig im Kopf (literally: ‘not right in the head’) – turn-design: Alder expands most of his turns by the tag weiß=du (‘you know?’); Dragan uses in almost all of his turns the address-term alder (‘oldster’) as a turn-exit device – sequence-organization: ritualized openings/greetings was geht – was geht (‘what’s up?’); highly ritualized, symmetrically paired actions (mainly positive evaluations: konkret – konkret (‘concrete’) sometimes repeated over several turns) and a stereotypical closing du bist krass al-

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der – ich weiß (‘you are gross oldster – I know’); often there is a competition between the two characters about who can tell the more newsworthy and the more extreme story; this results in a competition of bragging and showing off – topics: mobile phones, tuning cars, personal achievement (sports, business) or talk about newly learnt words, songs. Mundstuhl ridicule the purportedly prototypical Kanaksprak-speaker who lives in Germany’s immigrant ‘ghettos’. Indeed, a lot of these linguistic features can also be identified in authentic speech of immigrant adolescents with a ‘ghetto’-background (see Auer 2003; Auer and Dirim 2004).5 However, their frequency and intensity is exaggerated in the comedies, and the linguistic repertoire of the stylized characters is much more restricted. The majority of these features (apart from coronalization, phraseological blends, use of tags and topical choice) are specific to (stylized) Kanaksprak and do not appear in domestic varieties of German. Kanaksprak-speaking comedycharacters are ridiculous because of the contrast between their high aspirations and claims on the one hand and their poor actual performances; one can laugh at them because of gross verbal and reasoning mistakes, absurd and stupid ideas and the repetitiveness of their conversations that are framed as being most important but that carry only minimal meaning. All of these comedy-formats are popular predominantly among youngsters, while adults take less notice of them. Among immigrants, their evaluation is not unanimous. Some of them take them to be offensive, some of them identify themselves with the comedy-characters as role-models, while the majority seems to regard the comedies as inoffensive gags. Public debates on the media also focus on whether such comedies are merely fun, blatant racism or rather a sign of an advanced public reaction to experiences of immigration which are no more subject to taboo or domination by a moral agenda.6

3.

Images of the other: German adolescents’ constructions of the identity of the Kanaksprak speakers

Talk about Kanacken was very common among the peer-group of German youngsters we studied. They repeatedly told jokes and stories about experiences with Kanacken and they assessed locations (such as clubs, restaurants or a foreign town), clothing or music styles with respect to them. Places

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where Kanacken go were avoided or devaluated. ‘You look/talk like a Kanack(e)’ was a severe criticism that could be used to threaten the status of a peer-group member or any other German youngster. Kanacken were generally despised and sometimes feared. But this rejection did not apply to every male adolescent of Arabian or Turkish origin. Some of them were respected and accepted as peers, and the boys also told stories about positive experiences with them. Positive individual ascriptions, however, were not generalized to the generic categories Kanacke/Hawack. The identity-attributes that the German adolescents ascribed to Kanacken are quite similar to those which are peculiar to the speakers of stylized Kanaksprak in media comedies (see Androutsopoulos 2001): – Kanacken use mobile phones, although they do not need them, just in order to show how important and popular they are. – They wear distinctive clothes from specific brands, such as Buffalo shoes and Helly Hanson jackets. – They are aggressive and violent; we recorded several accounts of brawls which were said to have been provoked by Kanacken. They were portrayed as looking for trouble without a cause. The German adolescents were afraid of them and conceded that they had no physical means against the Kanacken. – They perform dismally at school. Intellectual, educational deficits and disadvantages that go along with them, such as bad marks in school, having to repeat classes or difficulties in finding estimated jobs, were welcomed by the Germans boys as compensation and revenge for their own physical inferiority. – Kanacken were often associated with drug-dealing and petty crimes. – They were portrayed as bragging and claiming abilities and moral characteristics they do not live up to, thus as being ridiculous and untrustworthy. The last ascription touches on the role of Kanaksprak for defining the identity of the Kanacken. Their language is judged to be indicative of their character, since its pragmatics, but also its semantic and phonological features attest to identity-attributes that are quite distinctive and subject to devaluation and ridicule.

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German adolescents’ use of stylized Kanaksprak

My observations rest on 23 sequences of stylized Kanaksprak which I could find in my corpus of about 30 hours of audio-recordings of adolescents’ conversations. The following typology covers all instances in my corpus. One use of stylized Kanaksprak in conversation consisted in quoting Kanaksprak speakers. We can discern two different kinds of animating them in conversation: Personal quotations (4.1) and a practice which I will call ‘category-animation’ (4.2). The overwhelming quantity of conversational uses of Kanaksprak in my data, however, consisted in playful assessments (4.3). I will discuss the three practices taking into account the following aspects: – In which conversational contexts is stylized Kanaksprak used? – What are the linguistic properties of stylized Kanaksprak (including turn design)? – How is code-alternation between the conversational base-code and stylized Kanaksprak managed? – How are sequences of stylized Kanaksprak organized internally? – What are the semantic and interactional functions of stylized Kanaksprak? – What are the local identities of self and Kanaksprak-speakers that are constructed in these sequences? 4.1. Quotations By a quotation, I mean an instance of stylized Kanaksprak that is framed as the rendering of the speech of a specific person. Here is an example. The German adolescents talk about Turkish boys who live in their region. Denis refers to Hawacks who are supposed to be in Knut’s class, but Knut does not manage to understand whom Denis refers to (lines 03, 05). Denis now uses a quotation of a Hawack, in order to provide identification (lines 08–09). (1) der spast (Juk 17) 01 Denis: du hast ja auch < vOll die kO:mischen hAwacks ‘you really have tOtally strAnge 'hAwacks'’ bei dir in de gruppe ey,> (-) 02 ‘with you in your group ay, (-)’

Playing with the voice of the other 03 Knut: 04 Denis: 05 Knut: 06 07 Bernd: 08 Denis:

09

10 11 Frank: 12 Knut:

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ja wer bei mIr? ‘well who with mE?’ =äh also in de kl:- (.) in de klAsse, (-) ‘=ah I mean in the cl:- (.) in the clAss, (.)’ isch hab kein: hAwack‘I have no: 'hAwack-'’ (1,0) [höhö-] [‘haha-’] [kenns]te der eine spAst der immer so <komisch labert,> ‘[dya k]now the crAnk who always speaks so strange’ < HÖY Aldär höy OAldär öy krĻAss öy,> ‘HOY MAte hoy MAte oy grĻOss oy,’ hh. he. (-) < is=hald ĹUldra den kerle wEIß=u,> (-) ‘is real ĹUldra the guy y=knOw. (-)’ wEn meinst=en dU? (1,0) ‘whO d=you mEAn? (1,0)’

Up to line 08 the youngsters use their preferred we-code. This is a more or less dialectal variety of colloquial German interspersed with youth slang. It is the code that is mostly used in informal leisure-time conversations among the adolescents when adults are not present. In line 09, Denis quotes a Hawack that allegedly attends Knut’s class: HÖY Aldär höy AOldär öy krĻAss öy. The quotation is most prominently set off from previous talk: Denis not only frames the quotation metapragmatically (see line 08), it is also the dramatic change of his voice that marks the switch. Denis speaks in a choked and rasping voice, which gets increasingly lower until it reaches almost the lower extreme of Denis’ intonational range. The articulation sounds imprecise: the vowels are realized by a backward move of the tongue (velar [Ĵ] instead of [a]; [є] instead of [ȳ]); there is a lenisation of the fortis-plosive [t] to [d], and the /r/ is pronounced [Ӱ]. The lexis consists of items that are ‘code-markers’ for Kanaksprak: the words krass and alder, together with a few others (such as korrekt, konkret, see the next examples), form a repertoire of lexical items speakers of Kanaksprak are assumed to use in nearly every turn. The quotation has no syntactic structure; it consists of the attention-getter or intensifier ey, the tag alder and the

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evaluative adjective krass. The extreme assessment contrasts with almost complete lack of propositional content – there is no recognizable referent (for a summary of features of stylized Kanaksprak in my data see Table 1). Table 1. Linguistic features defining stylized Kanaksprak in German youngsters’ conversations Phonetics/Pronunciation

Phonology/Voice quality

Grammar Syntax and turn-design

Lexis

Semantics

Phraseology

apical [r]; reduction of /ts/ Æ /s/; coronalisation of [%] Æ [5]; lenisation of fortis-stops ([t] Æ [d]; [k] Æ [I]); vowels pronounced with a backward move of the tongue: closed Æ open vowels; (imprecise articulation) frequent elongation of vowels; (choked voice), (rasping voice), (rumbling, scanning rhythm), ((slow and sluggish)) overgeneralized use of den as pronoun/article; wrong agreement excessive use of tags; inversion of the word order of main clauses: VS instead of SV, violation of the German Verbklammer; often lack of syntactic structure (one-word sentences) excessive use of stereotypical code-markers krass, korrekt, konkret, alder; Turkish lexis, such as lan, tam, tschai, tschi, tschucki semantic widening of evaluative adjectives; use of upgrading prefixes such as ultra as evaluative adjectives abusive slogans/ritual sayings (threats, insults)

Features that are only typical of quotations and category-animations are represented in brackets; double brackets indicate idiosyncratic variants.

Frank aligns with Denis’ code-switch (line 11). He also uses stylized Kanaksprak (see next section for the analysis), but changes the perspective: He assumes the voice of an anonymous Kanacke who admires the character that Denis has quoted. Frank thus agrees with the upshot (cf. Heritage and Watson 1979) of Denis’ quotation which is designed to characterize the quoted speaker’s identity. In this sequence, we can see how stylized Kanaksprak is used in order to ascribe identities to self and other by a layering of voices (cf. Günthner

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1999, 2002; see also Bakhtin 1981; Rampton 1995, 1998). In order to describe the different identities that are involved, I will use the ‘positioning’theory (Bamberg 1997; Harré and van Langenhove 1999; Korobov 2001; Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann 2002) which in my view is most suited to capture the different levels and referents of local identity-constructions in discourse (see Table 2). Table 2. Layers of positioning 1st layer

other-positioning

representation of the self-positioning of the Kanacken

2nd layer

attitude toward other-positioning

attitude toward the 1st layer

3rd layer

representational self-positioning

versus represented other (= Kanacken)

4th layer

interactional self-positioning of * I: as individual * we: as peer-group as Germans as media-experts

versus co-interactant

In line 11, Frank shows his agreement with Denis’ other-positioning of the Kanacke in Knut’s form by ironically formulating the social identity that the quoted speaker is said to claim (cf. Kotthoff 2002): It is the identity of a strong and very macho male who demands attention and issues apodictic statements. But this other-positioning is only a first layer. A second layer is the attitude that the speaker assumes towards the other. The social identity that the fictitious Kanacke claims for himself is contested and ridiculed. This already becomes apparent by the metapragmatic framing of the quotation, where the quoted speaker is called a spast (line 08).7 Spast is an abusive youth slang-term derived from Spastiker (denoting ‘disabled persons suffering from spastic paralysis’). Spast is used in order to attribute intellectual deficits and social incompetence. The spast’s way of speaking is characterized as komisch labern (‘speaking strange’), which is a derogatory

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verbum dicendi. This attribution is further elaborated on by the quotation itself: The quoted speaker is despised as a braggart, who in reality is extremely stupid and incompetent. Especially Denis’ imprecise pronunciation contextualizes his contempt against the spast’s lack of civilization and selfcontrol (see above). In this sequence, Kanaksprak is judged as a low prestige variety that attests to a lack of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1983). Paralleling Bourdieu’s argument concerning the lacking prestige of dialects, it seems to be mainly the phonological features of stylized Kanaksprak that are linked to an uncivilized habitus (Bourdieu 1982). Language is not just one contingent feature among others that belongs to a Kanacke – the linguistic and pragmatic properties of Kanaksprak are regarded as features that have intrinsic sociosymbolic values and that are central in order to define the speakers’ identities (cf. Kallmeyer and Keim 1994; Kallmeyer 1995). They express ‘cultural rich points’ (Coupland 1996; here: central dimensions of identity) and can be used to identify speakers. A third layer of self-positioning can now be seen as being implicitly contextualized by the other-positioning and the attitude towards it: The speakers claim higher status for themselves. Their language contrastively is framed as attesting to more intelligence, a higher degree of civilization and verbal skill. In Rampton’s terminology (Rampton 1995: 300 and 1998), the boys switch to stylized Kanaksprak ironically, performing a ‘vari-directional double-voicing’, in which the (allegedly) original intention of the Kanaksprak-character is subverted, ironicized and mockingly held against him.8 4.2. Category-animations Frank’s turn is=hald ĹUldra den kerle wEIß=u, (line 11) is spoken in a footing (Goffman 1981) that is not his own. It is not a personal quotation, but an instance of a practice I will call ‘category-animation’ (sensu Goffman 1981: 143; see also Levinson 1988). By this I understand cases in which an utterance is framed as indexing some category of persons. The speaker does not claim to report something that has really been said (cf. Hartung 2002: 99). Sometimes the speaker does not even pretend that he refers to a specific person at all. Instead, category animations represent ways of speaking that are regarded as most typical and at times even constitutive of the category Kanacke itself.9 This indexicality concerns the (linguistic) form of the utterance as well as its content and its pragmatics (speech acts, claims to identity).10 I use the term ‘category-indexical’ in-

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stead of the well-known ‘category-bound’ (see Sacks 1972; Jayyusi 1984) in order to stress that the ways of speaking in question are not only framed as being typical of Kanaksprak; rather, they are used as devices to identify the animated character unambiguously as a Kanacke.11 Frank’s turn: is=hald ĹUldra den kerle wEIß=u is a clear case of a category-animation as he assumes the voice of an anonymous speaker of Kanaksprak. Frank partly uses the same linguistic properties as Denis in line 10 (e.g. lenisation, inarticulate speech, an extreme, but propositionally empty assessment (uldra), tag – here: weiss=u), and some additional features which are assumed to be typical of Kanaksprak: he reduces the consonant cluster /st/ to /s/ (weiß=u instead of weißt du), he talks slowly and sluggishly, he inverts the order of subject and verb (VS instead of SV: is uldra den kerle instead of der kerl ist ultra), the standard German pronoun der is replaced by den, and he uses the prefix uldra as an adjective. In this case the category had already been established in the previous turn. In the next example the category-animation serves to construct a theyidentity. Bernd and Wuddi are passing a house where Romani people live. They do not know these people, but they know that it is the home of Kanacken. Pointing to the house, Bernd sings: (2) isch fig disch (Juk 9) 01 Bernd: <<sings> lümm> (-) kanagge [näd da:? ] ((singing tone)) (-) ‘'kanak' [not the:re?]’ 02 Wuddi: [<I:sc]h fI:g dI:sch lA:n; (.) ‘[I: ] fU:ck yOU: mA:n; (.)’ 03 Wuddi: I:sch> < gib dir> korRE:KT- (.) ‘I: give you corRE:CT- (.)’ 04 Wuddi: trEt dir in die frEsse; [(.) LAN; ] ‘kIck you in the fAce; [(.) MAN; ]’ 05 Bernd: [aha ha HA-] ‘[uhu hu HU-]’

In the beginning, Bernd makes a non-lexical, singing noise12 which establishes an imitation-frame: [y]-sounds are considered as code-markers for Turkish among German youngsters. Bernd’s question about the whereabouts of the Kanacken (line 01) is some kind of stylized Gastarbeiterdeutsch rather than stylized Kanaksprak: Not only the article, but also the verb is missing. Wuddi answers with a category-animation (lines 02–04). In his first turn-constructional unit (line 02: I:sch fI:g dI:sch lA:n;), he pro-

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duces a scanning rhythm. It represents the rumbling sound that Germans often attribute to Kanaksprak. Wuddi uses also lenisation and speaks very slowly with elongated vowels ([ʪ] instead of [k], [fi‫ڴ‬ʪ] instead of [fik]). As a tag, he twice uses the Turkish word lan, meaning ‘young man’.13 Probably, this is the most widely known Turkish word among German youngsters, and it is regularly used as a social categorization for Kanaksprak-speakers. The phraseologism I:sch gib dir korre:kt (line 03) does not only contain the code-marker korrekt with its characteristic apical pronunciation. It is a ritualized saying, meaning that the speaker announces that he will defeat, and maybe do harm to, the addressee.14 The three turn-constructional units have very similar structures: they are about the same length and share a common rhythm, each of them contains a sentence, and they all perform a ritualized threat. This repetitive structuring evidences the speaker’s stylistic orientation to a poetic performance (cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990; Hymes 1996). The poetic features themselves reflexively index locally relevant identities. In contrast to the first example, this category-animation is semantically dense – it is not only a vignette of a communicative habitus, but it also denotes values and action preferences of the fictitious, animated speaker. All three phrases are ritualized threats that position their author as someone who is physically strong and dangerous. Since there is no justifying context, this practice is contextualized as violent, obscene and looking for trouble without a cause. Especially the threat to ‘fuck’ the opponent is well known from Turkish verbal duelling: the attacker announces that he will make his opponent a victim of sadistic homosexual practices, thus depriving him of his sexual reputation as a male.15 While the positioning of the other in this case is quite easy to see, self-positioning is not so clear: Does the animator position himself as being afraid of becoming a potential victim? Does he discredit the threatening behaviour as a ridiculous bluff and see himself as superior? Does he symbolically take revenge for defeats and a perceived disadvantage by exposing Kanacken to mockery? As in the previous example, there are again implicit claims to a more civilized status and higher verbal and intellectual competence. Wuddi’s self-positioning towards the addressee Bernd, however, is easy to be seen: He displays the rhetorical skills of a spontaneous artful verbal performance. Bernd’s laughter acclaims this and makes it an interactional success. Quotations and category-animations are primary ways to characterize Kanacken. This does not only highlight the fact that Kanaksprak itself and the actions performed with it are defining characteristics of Kanacken. Quoting and mimicry can also be seen as a rhetorical resource that is de-

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signed to convey identity-ascriptions in an implicit, but nevertheless effective way which is much better protected from criticism than any explicit propositional statement about Kanacken would be (cf. Günthner 2002). While the latter could be challenged, the inferences drawn from mimicry can be rejected as not intended. The same rhetorical advantage applies to the claims to the speaker’s own identity, such as being more civilized, more verbally competent and intellectually superior to the Kanacken. 4.3. Playful assessments The overwhelming number of stylized uses of Kanaksprak in my corpus are instances of a practice I call ‘playful assessments’. Playful assessments are evaluations that are contextualized as being unserious, jocular remarks. Stylized Kanaksprak is thus mostly used as a fun-code that defines the key of the ongoing interaction: it is framed as entertainment. This will become apparent in the next sequence. The boys are standing at a ski-lift and are talking about girls they have just seen. Frank and Denis disagree on which girl is most attractive (lines 01–08). In line 11, Denis switches into stylized Kanaksprak, and Bernd and Frank align with the code-switch: (3) blond ultrakrass (Juk 17) 01 Frank: hey die blond knut, (.) ‘ay the blond one knut, (.)’ des war en traum oder? (.) 02 ‘wasn't she a dream? (.)’ 03 Denis: < die ANdere, > (.) ‘the other, (.)’ die- (-) ziemisch 04 ‘the- (.) quite’ 05 < BRĹAUNE,(.) die war GEIL ey.> ‘BRĹOWN ONE, (.) she was FUCKin A ey.’ 06 Frank: och komm- (.) ‘now come on- (.)’ die blond war- (-) 07 ‘the blond was- (.)’ ä BRETT war des e [geRÄ::T (.) 08 ‘a HIT was this a [thI:ng (.)’ 09 [((incomprehensible)) (---)

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10 Bernd: ja, (.) ‘yes, (.)’ schieb ma=n a:rsch wieder hoch, (---) 11 ‘move your a:ss up again, (.)’ 12 Denis: < aldär- (.) KONkret, ‘mate concrete,’ (.) ober- (.) KRASS.> (.) 13 ‘(.) supergross. (.)’ 14 Bernd: is ultraKRASS. (.) ‘is ultragross. (.)’ 15 Frank: < den is < u:ltragEIl,> (.) ‘them is u:ltra fucking A, (.)’ aldär, (.) 16 ‘mate, (.)’ den hab isch schon gesä:hn LETZte 17 ‘them have I already seen LAST’ 18 [ja::hr, (.) hey aldär.> (.)] ‘[year, (.) ay mate.> (.)]’ ey::, ] total TA::M. (.) 19 Denis: [TA::M ‘[ri::ght ay::, ] totally RI::GHT. (.)’ (ha:h.)] 20 [ta::m ‘[ri::ght (hu:h.)]’ TSCHU ]cki aldär. (.) <

tschU:cki;> 21 Frank: [ta:m ‘[ri:ght FINE] mate. (.) fi:ne;’ 22 Wuddi: mayer- (-) mein bein mal- (-) an deinem- (.) ‘mayer- (-) my leg just- (-) past your- (.) fuß da vorbei dass isch (nacken) könnte. 23 foot that I could ( ).’ 24 ((door of the car is closed)) 25 Bernd: vierzsch mack kost=es. (-) ‘forty marks is this. (.)’ altär.> 26 Frank: tschucki, (.) < TA:M- (.) ‘fine, (.) RI:GHT- (.) mate.’ 27 (1.2) alex? (.) schmeißt mal mei cassett an=em? 28 ‘alex? (.) will you turn on my cassett=ah?’

Lines 12–16 contain the most prototypical occurrences of Kanaksprak in my corpus: they exclusively consist of the (in Labov’s 1972 sense) stereotypical items konkret, krass, ultra and aldär, delivered with code-marking phonetics (apical [r] and backward pronunciation of the vowels, partially

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with choked voice) and used as one-word comments. They are not embedded into a syntactic frame. This feature, as well as their semantics and their sequential placement, provides them with an interjection-like grammatical status. By using these features, the code-switch is clearly marked, although there is no metapragmatic announcement or thematic environment that makes it expectable. There is no intra-sentential or intra-turn codeswitching: Speakers who use stylized Kanaksprak take care to separate it clearly from their unmarked we-code by packaging it in distinct segments. In Frank’s turn (lines 15–18), we find some additional features of stylized Kanaksprak: sluggish delivery with prolonged vowels, the pronoun den instead of die, incorrect agreement between adjective and noun (letzte jahr, lines 17–18), numerous tags (aldär in lines 12, 16, 18, 21, 26) and alteration of word order (violation of the German S-Aux-O-V-order, line 17). In lines 19–21 and 26 words occur that are of Turkish origin: tam (an abbreviation of tamam ‘exactly’, ‘that’s right’) and tschucki which is derived from çok iyi (‘tremendous’, ‘fine’). In this sequence, speakers switch into stylized Kanaksprak in order to continue a disagreement about girls. From the beginning, it is at least partially a playful competition, because it is prosodically contextualized as fun (mainly by Denis who starts it laughingly in line 03ff.), and it probably will not have any consequences. As Denis switches into stylized Kanaksprak (line 12), the competition is at risk of losing its entertaining value, since it starts to move in circles. In this context, code-switching can be seen as a poetic variation. It introduces a new aesthetic resource which is in line with the playful and mainly rhetorical character which the competition has had from the outset. If we take a closer look at the succession of codes, the poetic character of the competition becomes evident: Frank starts in colloquial German (en traum, 01–02), Denis uses an old, already conventionalized item of youth-slang (geil, 05), Frank opposes him with new items of youth slang (brett, gerät, 06–08), Denis initiates a sequence in stylized Kanaksprak (12–18), this is finally topped by intended Turkish items (tam, tschucki, 19–21).16 After this, the competition is over. The sequence is realized by competing assessments which increasingly deviate from Standard German (see Figure 1). It is not by chance that stylized Kanaksprak is mostly used for making assessments: Assessing terms are one of the most productive lexical fields in German youth slang (Androutsopoulos 1998: 434). New terms are

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rapidly popularized as in-group markers and youth cultural capital. With their diffusion, however, they lose their distinctive prestige and therefore are in need of constant renewal. Stylized Kanaksprak is one current source for a prestigious enhancement of speakers’ expressive repertoires. colloquial German (lines 01–04)

↓ conventionalized German youth slang (line 05)

↓ new German youth slang (line 06–08)

↓ stylized Kanaksprak (lines 12–18)

↓ stylized Turkish (lines 19–21; 26) Figure 1. Code-competition

Starting with line 12, the sequence is no longer marked as disagreement (by negation, adversative connectives, etc.) and the turns lack referential specification (apart from Frank in lines 15–18).17 As these assessments are semantically roughly equivalent, it is only the choice of the code that serves to outdo the opponent by rhetorical means. Stylized Kanaksprak is used as a device to win in a poetic competition. Since this competition is driven by a deployment of increasingly specialized youth cultural knowledge, the performance of stylized Kanaksprak can be seen as a display of youth cultural capital: the winner of the competition is the one who manages to perform the code which is linguistically most distinct from Standard German and which is sociosymbolically most specific. At the same time, the use of stylized Kanaksprak definitely turns the competition into collaborative play (cf. also Eckert 1993). Next speakers regularly repeat items produced by the previous speaker and amend them (see Table 3). This combination of

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repetition (or ‘format tying’; see Sacks 1992: 716; Goodwin 1990) and variation makes visible the fusion of collaboration and competition that is distinctive for this interative practice. It produces an emergent poetic structure which matches with Jakobson’s (1960) basic definition of poetics as a meta-linguistic, self-reflexive construction built upon patterns of repetition and variation.18 Table 3. The sequential emergence of a pattern of repetition and variation Turn

New items

Denis lines 12–13

aldär konkret ober krass ultra krass geil den hab isch ultra aldär schon gesä:hn letzte jahr tam ey total tschucki tam aldär (tschucki)

Bernd line 14 Frank lines 16–18

Denis lines 19–20 Frank line 21

Repeated from previous turn(s)

In this segment, it becomes clear that stylized Kanaksprak is a youth cultural capital that can be used as a resource for self-positioning by an individual member of the in-group: it is a means to position oneself as a poetically and mimetically skilled entertainer. It enables the individual to successfully participate in peer-group routines of playful and entertaining competitions. As interpersonal competition and the production of funny moments in interaction are most highly valued among male adolescents (see Deppermann and Schmidt 2001a), the capacity to switch into stylized Kanaksprak at appropriate moments will contribute to enhance the individual’s status as a peer-group member. In the following excerpt, the boys ride in a car which is steered by the participant observer. They are heading for the Austrian valley “Stubaital”. As Denis sees a road sign “Stubaital”, he reads aloud: Stubai (line 05). Frank, who is smoking, repeats this turn and recontextualizes it as stylized Kanaksprak:

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(4) Stubai (Juk 17) 01 ((technosounds from the car stereo)) 02 Frank: OA::h des is so ein BRETT das LIED‘WO::w that is such a HIT that SONG-’ 03 (4.0) 04 Denis: < stUbai-> 05 Frank: < stu:bai Alder.> (-) ‘stu:bai Oldster. (-)’ hm?> 06 Denis: <<decr> Alder, (.) ‘Oldster, (.) hm?’ 07 (4.0) 08 Frank: ((exhales smoke and points to the microphone)) 09 <des find isch vOll KRA:SS ‘this is mOst GRO::SS [dass isch den hab] [‘that I got that’] 10 Denis: [hahaHA:'<haha>] 11 Frank: komm isch mir vor wie den <ULTRAkrassen repOrter> ‘feel like I am them ULTRAgro::ss reporter weiß=du?’ 12 y=know?’ 13 Denis: <> kann ich mal < ultrakrass> noch mal was sehn?> ‘can I just ultragross see somethin once again?’ 14 Alex: < kannst=e mal halten bitte?> ‘can ya just hold please?’ 15 Frank: <<smiling voice> jetzt lenkt die < AnnA:-> ‘now Anna: steers-’19 16 (1.5) 17 <<slightly laughing, h> macht ma kein schEIß-> ‘don't you make shIt-’ 18 (5.0) 19 < war der to:t?> ‘was he dea:d? ’ 20 (2.0) 21 der TĻY::P; (.) ‘the GĻU::Y; (.)’

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konKRE::T-> (-) ‘conCRE::TE- (-)’ 23 Frank: ich hätt jetzt mal lust auf ne <<English> BLUE 20;> ‘I just would like to have a BLUE now;’ 22 Denis: <

The use of stylized Kanaksprak here is triggered by the word stubai (line 04). The combination of the vowels /u/ and /ai/ is rather uncommon for German; this strangeness is highlighted, because Denis leaves out the wellknown part of the composite word, the German -tal (‘valley’), and because of his scanning delivery with the first syllable shortened and a slightly backward articulation of the vowels. It cannot be verified if Denis uses these features to contextualize a strange language or if he even alludes to Kanaksprak21 – maybe he just wants to point to the fact that the boys will reach their destination soon. However, Frank shows a sensitivity to the peculiar word and its rendering by repeating and recontextualizing it audibly as Kanaksprak (line 05). Apart from a slightly altered phonetics, this is done by adding the tag alder with its characteristic lenization of [t] to [d]. Denis now confirms this hearing by repeating the tag alder (line 06). After four seconds, Frank adds a topically unrelated, playful assessment that refers to the microphone he is equipped with (lines 09/11). The only coherence in this sequence lies in the fact that Frank stays with stylized Kanaksprak: the code of the interaction (and not its content) has become the focus, and thus it is perfectly adequate to produce a turn that can be heard as category-indicative of a prototypical Kanaksprak-speaker (bragging by making an extreme assessment). We already noticed in the discussion of extract (3) that when switching into stylized Kanaksprak occurs, next speakers repeat (parts of) previous speakers’ turns which were produced in stylized Kanaksprak. This is also found in extract (4): In line 05 Frank repeats stubai from Denis’ preceding turn, Denis in turn repeats Frank’s alder (lines 05–06), Frank’s ultrakrass (line 11) is taken up by Denis in line 13. In my data, there are several sequences that are organized by such paired repeats: Next speaker repeats a Kanaksprak-item that the previous speaker produced, often adding a new item which in turn is repeated by the speaker who follows. Here is another example. The boys wait in a car and watch passers-by. Denis draws their attention to a girl (muck, line 01). Bernd suggests that this girl was the one who another member of the group, Wuddi,

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had already admired at a night club (pinguins) they went to the evening before (lines 04/07). In lines 10, 11 and 15, Denis and Bernd produce assessments in Kanaksprak which are built as paired (partial) repeats: (5) Muck (Juk 16) 01 Denis: OA::r Oh ne MUCK- (---) ‘wO::w Oh a CHICK- (---)’ 02 Bernd: hhss::. (---) 03 Frank: wOĹuh‘whĹEre-’ 04 Bernd: < pinguins-> ‘penguins-’ 05 Frank: =mein gott. ‘=my god.’ 06 Denis: < ähä> < was was?> ‘aha what what?’ 07 Bernd: < die hat de wuddi vorm pinguins angeguckt.> ‘wuddi looked at her in front of penguins.’ 08 Wuddi: < h::m' hm' hm'> (.) 09 Bernd: ( ) de wuddi ( maske;) (-) ((incomprehensible)) 10 Denis: ((coughs and sneezes)) krass alder; ‘gross oldster;’ ((sneezes)) 11 Bernd: krass alder; (--) korrekt ey; ‘gross oldster; (--) correct ay;’ 12 (2.0) 13 Frank: ach dem mayer sein rucksack geht mir auf=n sAck EY‘hey mayers bagpack really sUcks AY- (.)’ 14 fällt mir dauernd auf de [knie. ‘always falls on my [knees.’ 15 Denis: [korrekte session. ‘[correct session.’ 16 Bernd: [=ähähä] ‘[=ahaha]’ 17 Frank: [am liebsten] [würd=ich=n schmEIßen-] ‘[I would like] [to throw it-’ 18 Alex: [kannste doch bei uns] ‘[you can put it in ] in de kofferraum tun. our baggage boot.’

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In other cases there is no exact lexical repetition by the next speaker, but he aligns with the code-switch and performs an action of the same type as the previous speaker did (see e.g. extract (1)) – mostly an assessment. How can we account for this sequential organization? In the group under study, the use of Kanaksprak for assessments is highly ritualized in several respects: – It is clearly set off from surrounding talk (by inter-turn code-switching or metapragmatic framing as citation or category animation); – it is restricted to a very small range of code-marking lexical resources (and few syntactic structures, if any); – it is limited to the performance of only one type of action, that is, of playful assessments; – it is sequentially organized by paired repeats and competitive alterations by next speakers. The interactive practice of paired repeats is also very pervasive in the dialogues of the comedy-duo Mundstuhl (see section 2 and Androutsopoulos 2001). Paired repeats thus seem to act as a recognition display (cf. Schegloff 1979) in several ways: conversationally, next speaker displays that he has recognized the social style (Kanaksprak) into which the first speaker has switched by repeating his words (or at least by aligning with the codeswitch and by repeating the type of action). By doing so, the next speaker also demonstrates that he recognizes, is willing to go along with and is also able to produce stylized Kanaksprak. Additionally, the speakers show shared knowledge of the media models, that is, their possession of youth cultural capital. In sum, paired repeats imply a highly ritualized reciprocity which accomplishes a sense of sharedness, belonging and the reciprocal confirmation of insider knowledge. Stylized Kanaksprak in assessments thus serves to confirm and reproduce the unity of the group by using the voice of the out-group for interactive routines that outsiders would not be able to participate in. But what does this practice reveal about identity-conceptions associated with Kanaksprak? Playful assessments draw on category-indexical actions that portray the stereotypical speaker of Kanaksprak: He is someone who makes extreme assessments in a repetitive, highly ritualized and restricted way – someone who is ridiculous and a bit stupid. Although it is clearly not other-positioning of Kanacken that is interactionally relevant, the potential for other-positioning is perfectly in line with the results we gained for quo-

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tations and category-animations. Additionally, however, it shows that stylized Kanaksprak is a youth cultural capital that can be used as a resource for self-positioning as an individual member of the in-group: It is a means to enhance status by positioning oneself as a poetically and mimetically skilled entertainer. Since competition and the production of funny moments in interaction are highly valued among male adolescents (see Deppermann and Schmidt 2001a), stylized Kanaksprak enables the individual to successfully take part in peer-group routines of playful and entertaining competitions. While quotations and category-animations are used to portray the outgroup’s identity, in the overwhelming majority of instances in my corpus stylized Kanaksprak is used to maintain the group’s own sense of belonging by shared routines and shared knowledge of cherished media models. Simultaneously, the individual member of the group positions himself by taking part in sequences of collaborative competition. The use of stylized Kanaksprak is a display of youth cultural capital that is used for self-positioning and as a mood-marker. In these sequences, the stereotypical Kanaksprakcharacter is only faintly present as a constitutive backdrop, but he is not topicalized. Stylized Kanaksprak as a humorous device thus is marked by the kind of ‘double indexicality’ which Jane Hill (1995) attributes to Mock Spanish: While it overtly indexes funny mood, the speaker’s humour, and his knowledge of media and culture, it tacitly indexes a potentially racist and prejudiced out-group identity that is confirmed and reproduced by the humorous practice. The issue of racism, however, is very difficult and well beyond the scope of this paper. Methodologically, it would require observational knowledge to which degree speakers’ stylizations of Kanaksprak are based on direct linguistic experiences with ethnolectal speakers and which individual interactional experiences the adolescents under study had. In order to judge the possibly racist effects of stylization, its non-displayed situated interpretation, its consequences for direct interactions with ethnolectal speakers, their moral categorization and their chances for future social participation need to be verified. Since these questions, however, can not be answered on the basis of the conversational and ethnographic data of my study, the issue of racism cannot be settled compellingly.

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Conclusion

In Auer’s (1988) terms, sequences of stylized Kanaksprak are ‘codetransfers’: they are insulated, mostly short sequences which are inserted into a stream of conversation in the speakers’ unmarked colloquial variety. In this paper, I have identified three conversational practices involving such code-transfers: quotations, category-animations and playful assessments. Stylized Kanaksprak is used restrictively. It consists of a repertoire of lexical and grammatical elements, its use is strictly limited to few conversational environments and functions, and it is mostly organized in highly ritualized sequences. The question of whether stylized Kanaksprak as found in my data is a secondary ethnolect, that rests on direct experience with ethnolectal speakers, or a tertiary ethnolect, derived from media sources (cf. Auer 2003), cannot be answered unambiguously. Stylized Kanaksprak in the media and in everyday conversations have quite a lot of linguistic and discursive features in common (compare Table 1 and Androutsopoulos 2001). The practice of ‘paired repeats’, phraseologisms such as korrekte session (see extract (5), line 12) and the universal article/pronoun den are borrowed from the media (namely Mundstuhl). As the adolescents claim when asked, other forms, however, are acquired by direct experience with ethnolectal speakers (e.g. isch gib dir korrekt, Turkish items, such as tam and tschi tschucki tschai used as a formula (literally: ‘nothing good girls’)). The most frequent use of stylized Kanaksprak is discourse-related codeswitching (Auer 1995a and 1998: 4): If it is not used for characterizing Kanacken, it is used as a mood-marker which contextualizes the ongoing interaction as funny and non-serious. This becomes especially evident when potentially conflictual matters are transformed into a collaborative playful competition by switching into stylized Kanaksprak. Stylized Kanaksprak goes nicely with general features of informal conversations among adolescents during leisure-time: they orient to creating entertaining and competitive sequences of interaction, which often are realized by collectively portraying out-group-members in a funny and derogatory way (Deppermann in press). The use of stylized Kanaksprak for playful assessments is not only the most frequent usage in my corpus, but seems to be the most popularized one in Germany in general. It needs only very few stereotypical items and does neither presuppose profound specific cultural nor linguistic knowledge, but provides for a prestigious enhancement of expressive means. These are applicable to almost any matter because of their semantic open-

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ness.22 A next step would be the integration of features of stylized Kanaksprak into the we-code.23 The combination of ethnographic and conversational analyses reveals that stylized Kanaksprak has a somewhat paradoxical status, which is similar to Mock Spanish in the U.S. (see Hill 1995): it has low prestige as a they-code, but it is also a high-prestigious cultural capital for the German boys. Stylized Kanaksprak has low prestige as code of a stigmatized outgroup, and it is seen to be indexical of negative characteristics, such as showing off, violence, lack of civilization, intelligence and verbal competence. By ridiculing Kanaksprak, German speakers may symbolically take revenge and cope with feelings of inferiority or helplessness. The low prestige of Kanaksprak is mirrored by the fact that the German adolescents never used stylized Kanaksprak in a serious mood, never for performing conditionally relevant actions, never to perform first actions, to tell a story or to give an account. If stylized Kanaksprak were used seriously, the German adolescents could be heard to identify with the out-group which would entail the self-ascription of negative properties. German adolecents do not use stylized Kanaksprak in contact with the ‘legitimate owners’ of the code, that is, with male adolescents of Turkish, Arabic or similar origin, especially if they are unfamiliar (cf. Eksner 2001). This restriction most clearly points to the stereotyping potential that any use of stylized Kanaksprak might be seen to have for any recipient. Stylized Kanaksprak, however, gains high prestige and counts as cultural capital, if it is used in a funny mood. The voice of the out-group is part of the artful display of poetic competencies and of youth cultural capital, that is of knowledge of widely appreciated media models. It is used for creating cohesion of the peer-group by shared routines, and for enhancing the status of the individual member of the in-group in playful competition. As Sebba and Wootton (1998) and Li Wei (1998) have noted, identityrelated functions of code-switching often cannot be easily discerned in the sequential organization of conversation, and it would certainly be an unjustified petitio principii to claim that code-switching is always identityimplicative. However, identity-concerns can be seen as being operative in the conversational background24 and can be recovered by ethnographic research, which provides for a deeper understanding of specific features of interactional sequences at hand (cf. Auer 1995b). If we compare the three conversational practices of personal quotation, category-animation and playful assessments, other-positioning is either in the interactional focus (personal quotation and category-animation) or in the background (playful

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assessments). Although a basic negative assessment of the Kanaksprakspeakers’ identity always seems to be at play, this ascription still remains ambiguous. By switching to stylized Kanaksprak, the German boys are able to do and say things they would never say in their own voice (e.g. obscene threats as isch fig disch, or showing off). Playing with the voice of the other is a carnivalesque practice (see Bachtin 1990) that allows the speaker to assume a cool and violent attitude. Protected by a fool’s cap, he may practice stigmatized ways of acting, without having to assume responsibility for his words that are framed as mere entertainment. In order to achieve this carnivalesque time-out, it is most important to unambiguously keep stylized Kanaksprak apart from serious contributions to the interaction. This is probably why we find no intra-turn code-switching to stylized Kanaksprak and why it is made up of few code-markers and is performed in an exaggerated phonology that makes sure from the very first syllable that the mood in operation now must be play. In sum, the study shows how linguistic stereotypes which are distributed by the media are adopted by conversationalists and integrated with their everyday experience. Media sources provide speakers with linguistic blueprints they can use for interactional work on social categorization, stereotyping and coping with real-world experiences as well as a resource for interactional self-positioning, display of fandom and self-entertainment as the business of conversation. These multi-faceted symbolic layers are always at least potentially available as interpretive background to any instance of the use of stylized Kanaksprak. This complexity, the unserious mood and the mostly non-propositional nature of this practice make it a disputable and always deniable issue if it is merely fun or if a hidden racist stance is implicitly expressed.

Appendix: Transcription conventions (GAT, Selting et al. 1998) [ ] = (.) (-) (--) (1.0) : strEssed

segments of talk spoken in overlap latching, contraction of syllables tiny gap between utterances (< 0.25 seconds) pause 0.25–0.5 seconds pause 0.5–0.9 seconds pause measured in seconds prolongation of a sound stressed vowel/syllable

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. ; , ? (unclear) < > <

> < > < > < > < > ((sleeps))

deep-falling intonation falling intonation level intonation rising intonation high-rising intonation dubious hearing forte, loud piano, soft voice allegro, faster than surrounding segments of speech lento, slower than surrounding segments of speech crescendo, getting increasingly louder comment on the way a segment is spoken description of activities

bold face

stylized Kanaksprak

Notes *

1. 2. 3. 4.

Acknowledgements: The participants of the colloquy ‘Acts of identity’, organized by Peter Auer and Christian Mair at the Sonderforschungsbereich 541 located at the University of Freiburg in February 2002, provided valuable comments to a first version of this paper. I thank Jannis Androutsopoulos, Alexander Brock and Axel Schmidt for intense discussions on the paper and related topics. Peter Auer and an anonymous reviewer have helped to clarify my arguments by suggestions from very close reading of the text. Kanaksprak would never be used by immigrants themselves for their own code. See Spitulnik (1996) for some general reflections on the appropriation of mass mediated linguistic forms by their recipients. Keim (2003b) reports on Turkish youngsters in Germany who use stylized Kanaksprak modelled upon German media sources. ‘Jugend, Kommunikation, Medien: eine ethnographische Längsschnittuntersuchung der Kommunikationskultur in Jugendgruppen’ (‘Youth, communication, media: an ethnographic long-term-study of the culture of communication in adolescent peer-groups’), directed by Klaus Neumann-Braun at Frankfurt/ Main University and funded by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (NE 527/1 and 2). Members of the research team were Klaus NeumannBraun, Axel Schmidt, Jana Binder and myself. Recordings were made in 1996–1998.

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5. Some features of media stylizations are not found in authentic ethnolects, (epenthetic vowels, lack of umlaut and phraseological blends). 6. As to my knowledge, there are, however, no representative surveys concerning this topic. 7. Already at the beginning of the sequence, Denis used the categorization komische hawacks (line 01) which is clearly devaluating. It is still valid as an interpretative frame, when Denis starts his quotation. 8. Double-voicing phenomena were first described by Bakhtin (1981) with respect to literary novels, interestingly also in their function as humourous ironicizations. 9. Admittedly, there will be a continuum between quotations and categoryanimations. Quotations are not mere repetitions, but rhetorically designed constructions that are often rather fictitious (see Tannen 1989; Neisser 1981). Irrespective of questions of objective truth, there are varying degrees of speakers’ claims to the accuracy of a quotation (Deppermann 1997; Günthner 1997): when something was said, if exact wording and intonation or just a gloss are reproduced, may be specified very precisely or left open. Sometimes it remains unclear whether the rendition of some definite speaker is intended, and thus in some cases it will be impossible to tell a quotation from a category-animation. 10. Not an individual speaker, but the group of the Kanacken as a whole counts as the author and the principal of category-animations (cf. Goffman 1981: 144). 11. Category-animations are most common in adolescents’ interactions. Schwitalla (1986, 1994) shows how adolescents animate fictitious, category-indexical voices in order to characterize different out-groups, such as lower working class people (asos), social workers or parents. 12. Schwitalla (1986, 1994) also notes that male adolescents often use specific non-lexical sounds to mark codes and ways of speaking that they consider to be typical of the members of specific social categories. 13. Lan is an abbreviation of the full Turkish lexical form o÷lan. 14. This phrase is often used by Kanaksprak speakers in our data, while playing bar-football. However, we do not find the mistaken congruence ich gib in these data. 15. Tertilt (1996: 198–206) presents a cultural-psychological analysis of this specific kind of ritual insulting among Turkish youngsters in Germany. 16. It is not clear if the boys consider the Turkish items as being part of Kanaksprak or as belonging to a distinct code. Put differently, we do not know if there is a code-switch from stylized Kanaksprak to intended Turkish, if we define codes from a members’ perspective. In either case, however, it is obvious, that the Turkish items are much more alien to the German language, since they differ from German also lexically.

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17. What is more, the agreement-token tam (lines 19–21) semantically contradicts the activity of opposing to one another. It is not clear, however, which meaning the boys attribute to this item. 18. In other cases there is no exact lexical repetition by the next speaker, but he aligns with the code-switch and performs an action of the same type as the previous speaker did (see extract 1) – mostly an assessment. 19. Anna is the female participant observer who sits next to the driver Alex. 20. Blue refers to a brand of cigarettes. 21. Stubai maybe heard as an assonance to the better known Dubai (name of one of the seven Arab Emirates), which undoubtedly belongs to the cultural domain associated with Kanaksprak. 22. Spitulnik (1996) discusses the conditions that favor the recontextualizing appropriation of linguistic materials. 23. Stylized Kanaksprak has already provoked processes of linguistic change in other non-standard varieties of German, especially in German youth slang. For instance, the high frequency of krass, its semantic despecification and the widening of its combinatory potential seem to be adopted from stylized Kanaksprak. Its phonetics (apical [r]), however, is not adopted – this feature marks a code-switch. The omission of local and directive prepositions also has increased among German adolescents. Compare Androutsopoulos (1999) for processes of grammaticalization in youth slang. 24. For foregrounded and backgrounded concerns with social identity and category-membership see Hausendorf (2000).

References Androutsopoulos, Jannis 1998 Deutsche Jugendsprache. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. 1999 Grammaticalization in young people’s language: The case of German. In: Belemans, Rob and Reinhild Vandekerckhove (eds.), Variation in (Sub)standard Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 155–176. 2001 From the streets to the screens and back again: On the mediated diffusion of variation patterns in contemporary German. University Papers L.A.U.D., Duisburg. 2003 Jetzt speak something about italiano. Sprachliche Kreuzungen im Alltagsleben. OBST 65, 79–109. Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.) 1998 Identities in Talk. London: Sage.

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A conversation-analytic approach to code-switching and transfer. In: Heller, Monica (ed.), Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 187–213. 1995a The pragmatics of code-switching: A sequential approach. In: Milroy, Leslie and Pieter Muysken (eds.), One Speaker, Two Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 115–135. 1995b Ethnographic methods in the analysis of oral communication. Some suggestions for linguists. In: Quasthoff, Uta M. (ed.), Aspects of Oral Communication. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 419–440. 1998 Introduction: Bilingual conversation revisited. In: Auer, Peter (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge, 1–27. 2003 ‘Türkenslang’. Ein jugendsprachlicher Ethnolekt des Deutschen und seine Transformationen. In: Häcki-Buhofer, Anne (ed.), Spracherwerb und Lebensalter. Tübingen: Francke, 255–264. Auer, Peter and ønci Dirim 2003 Socio-cultural orientations, urban youth styles and the spontaneous acquisition of Turkish by non-Turkish adolescents in Germany. In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 223–246. Bachtin, Michail M. 1990 Literatur und Karneval. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 Discourse in the novel. In: Bakhtin, Mikhail M.: The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, Michael Holquist (ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 259–422. Bamberg, Michael 1997 Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7, 335–342. Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs 1990 Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19, 59–88. Bourdieu, Pierre 1982 Ce que parler veut dire. Paris: Fayard. 1983 Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital. In: Kreckel, Richard (ed.), Soziale Ungleichheit (Soziale Welt Sonderband 2). Göttingen: Schwarz, 183–198.

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Coupland, Nikolas 1996 Pronunciation and the rich points of culture. In: Windsor Lewis, Jack (ed.), Studies in General and English Phonetics. London: Routledge, 310–319. 2001 Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30, 345–375. Deppermann, Arnulf 1997 Glaubwürdigkeit im Konflikt. Rhetorische Techniken in Auseinandersetzungsprozessen. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. in press Using the other for oneself – Conversational practices of representing out-group-members among adolescents. In: De Fina, Anna, Michael Bamberg, and Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), Talk and Identity in Narrative and Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Deppermann, Arnulf and Axel Schmidt 2001a Hauptsache Spaß – Zur Eigenart der Gesprächskultur Jugendlicher. Der Deutschunterricht 6, 27–37. 2001b Disrespecting: A conversational practice for the negotiation of status in juvenile peer-groups. In: Németh, Enikö (ed.), Pragmatics in 2000: Selected Papers from the 7th International Pragmatics Conference, vol. 2. Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association, 156– 164. Dirim, ønci and Peter Auer 2004 Türkisch sprechen nicht nur die Türken. Über die Unschärfebeziehung zwischen Sprache und Ethnie in Deutschland. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Dittmar, Norbert and Olaf Rieck 1977 Datenerhebung und Datenauswertung im Heidelberger Forschungsprojekt ‘Pidgin-Deutsch spanischer und italienischer Arbeiter’. In: Bielefeld, Hans-Ulrich et al. (eds.), Soziolinguistik und Empirie. Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 59–71. Eckert, Penelope 1993 Cooperative competition in adolescent ‘girl talk’. In: Tannen, Deborah (ed.), Gender and Conversational Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press, 32–61. Eksner, Julia and Majorie F. Orellana 2005 Liminality as linguistic process. In: Knoerre, J. (ed.), Childhood and Migration. Bielefeld: transcript, 175–206 Füglein, Rosemarie 2000 Kanak Sprak. Eine ethnolinguistische Untersuchung eines Sprachphänomens des Deutschen. Unpublished thesis, Bamberg. Goffman, Erving 1981 Footing. In: Goffman, Erving, Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell, 124–159.

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Goodwin, Marjorie Harness 1990 He-Said-She-Said. Talk as Social Organisation among Black Children. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press. Günthner, Susanne 1997 Direkte und indirekte Rede in Alltagsgesprächen – zur Interaktion von Syntax und Prosodie in der Redewiedergabe. In: Schlobinski, Peter (ed.), Syntax des gesprochenen Deutsch. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 227–262. 1999 Polyphony and the ‘layering of voices’ in reported dialogues: An analysis of the use of prosodic devices in everyday reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics 31, 685–708. 2002 Stimmenvielfalt im Diskurs: Formen der Stilisierung und der Ästhetisierung in der Redewiedergabe. Gesprächsforschung 3, 59–80. http://www.gespraechsforschung-ozs.de/heft2002/ga-guenthner.pdf [Date of access: 30-8-2006]. Harré, Rom and Luk van Langenhove 1999 Positioning Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Hartung, Martin 2002 Ironie in der Alltagssprache. Radolfzell: Verlag für Gesprächsforschung. http://www.verlag-gespraechsforschung.de/2002/mhartung.htm [Date of access: 1-5-2007]. Hausendorf, Heiko 2000 Zugehörigkeit durch Sprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Heritage, John and David R. Watson 1979 Formulations as conversational objects. In: Psathas, George (ed.), Everyday Language. New York: Irvington, 123–162. Hill, Jane H. 1995 Mock Spanish: A site for the indexical reproduction of Racism in American English. http://www.language-culture.org/colloquia/symposia/hill-jane/ [Date of access: 10-2-2004]. Hinnenkamp, Volker 1982 ǥForeigner Talk’ und ǥTarzanisch’. Eine vergleichende Studie über die Sprechweise gegenüber Ausländern am Beispiel des Deutschen und des Türkischen. Hamburg: Buske. Hymes, Dell 1996 Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality. Toward an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor & Francis. Jakobson, Roman 1960 Concluding statement: Linguistic and poetics. In: Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.), Style and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 350–377.

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Jayyusi, Lena 1984 Categorization and the Moral Order. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kallmeyer, Werner 1995 Zur Darstellung von kommunikativem sozialem Stil in soziolinguistischen Gruppenportraits. In: Keim, Inken (ed.), Kommunikative Stilistik einer sozialen Welt ‘kleiner’ Leute. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1–25. Kallmeyer, Werner and Inken Keim 1994 Phonologische Variation als Mittel der Symbolisierung sozialer Identität in der Filsbachwelt. In: Kallmeyer, Werner (ed.), Exemplarische Analysen des Sprachverhaltens in Mannheim. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 141–249. 2003a Eigenschaften von sozialen Stilen der Kommunikation. Am Beispiel einer türkischen Migrantinnengruppe. OBST 65, 35–56. 2003b Linguistic variation and the construction of social identity in a German–Turkish setting. A case study of an immigrant youth-group in Mannheim/Germany. In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 29–46. Keim, Inken 2002 Bedeutungskonstitution und Sprachvariation. Funktionen des ‘Gastarbeiterdeutsch’ in Gesprächen jugendlicher Migrantinnen. In: Deppermann, Arnulf and Thomas Spranz-Fogasy (eds.), Be-deuten. Wie Bedeutung im Gespräch entsteht. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 134–157. 2003a Social style of communication and bilingual speech practices: Case study of three migrant youth groups of Turkish origin in Mannheim/Germany. Turkic Languages 6(2), 284–300. 2003b Die Verwendung medialer Stilisierungen von Kanaksprak durch Migrantenjugendliche. Kodikas/Code 26(1–2), 97–111. 2007 Die ‘türkischen Powergirls’. Lebenswelt und kommunikativer Stil einer Migrantinnengruppe in Mannheim. Tübingen: Narr. Korobov, Neill 2001 Reconciling theory with method: From conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis to positioning analysis. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Research 2(3). http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/3-01/3-01Korobov-e.htm [Date of access:1-5-2007].

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Kotthoff, Helga 2002 Irony, quotation and other forms of staged intertextuality: Double or contrastive perspectivation in conversation. In: Graumann, Carl F. and Werner Kallmeyer (eds.), Perspective and Perspectivation in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 201–233. 2004 Overdoing culture? Sketch-Komik, Typenstilisierung und Identitätsbildung bei Kaya Yanar. In: Hörnig, Karl H. and Julia Reuter (eds.), Doing Culture. Bielefeld: transcript, 184–201. Labov, William 1972 On the mechanism of linguistic change. In: Gumperz, John J. and Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 512–538. Levinson, Stephen C. 1988 Putting linguistics on a proper footing: Explorations in Goffman’s concepts of participation. In: Drew, Paul and Anthony Wootton (eds.), Erving Goffman – Exploring the Interaction Order. Oxford: Polity, 161–227. Li Wei 1998 The ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions in the analysis of conversational code-switching. In: Auer, Peter (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge, 156– 176. Lucius-Hoene, Gabriele and Arnulf Deppermann 2002 Rekonstruktion narrativer Identität. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Neisser, Ulrich 1981 John Dean’s memory: A case study. Cognition 9, 1–22. Rampton, Ben 1995 Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. 1998 Language crossing and the redefinition of reality. In: Auer, Peter (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation. London: Routledge, 290– 317. Rampton, Ben (ed.) 1999 Styling the Other. Special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4). Sacks, Harvey 1972 On the analyzability of stories by children. In: Gumperz, John and Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Speaking. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 325–345. 1992 Lectures on Conversation, vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Schegloff, Emmanuel A. 1979 Identification and recognition in telephone conversation openings. In: Psathas, George (ed.), Everyday Language. New York: Irvington, 23–78. Schwitalla, Johannes 1986 Jugendliche ‘hetzen’ gegen Passanten – Drei Thesen zur ethnographischen Gesprächsanalyse. In: Hartung, Wolfdietrich (ed.), Untersuchungen zur Kommunikation. Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 248–261. 1994 Die Vergegenwärtigung einer Gegenwelt – Sprachliche Formen der sozialen Abgrenzung einer Jugendlichengruppe in Vogelstang. In: Kallmeyer, Werner (ed.), Kommunikation in der Stadt, vol. 1. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 467–509. Sebba, Mark and Tony Wootton 1998 We, they and identity: Sequential versus identity-related explanation in code-switching. In: Auer, Peter (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge, 262– 286. Selting, Margret et al. 1998 Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem (GAT). Linguistische Berichte 173, 91–122. Spitulnik, Debra 1996 The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6(2), 161–187. Tannen, Deborah 1989 Talking Voices. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Tertilt, Hermann 1996 Turkish Power Boys. Ethnographie einer Jugendbande. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Zaimo÷lu, Feridun 1995 Kanaksprak. Hamburg: Rotbuch.

Chapter 12 Identity and language construction in an online community: The case of ‘Ali G’ Mark Sebba* 1.

Introduction

Ethnicity, whether for analysts or for the general public, is a difficult topic. In Britain, many years of high-profile media coverage and political debate about issues to do with ‘ethnic minorities’ ensure that the subject, at least in public, is a sensitive one, surrounded by taboos, laws and a public concern for ‘political correctness’.1 For a period in the 1970s, ‘race’ was considered completely out of bounds as a joking matter in public, especially in the newspapers and broadcast media. Later, during the 1980s and 1990s, a number of comedians and actors who themselves were from ethnic minority backgrounds created successful television series which highlighted ethnicity and made it the subject of humour.2 For most ‘white’ comics, the subject remained too controversial for the broadcast media. The kinds of cosmopolitan, liberal audiences who might appreciate jokes relating to ethnicity were also those most sensitive to any hint of ‘racism’. The media remained extremely cautious in what they would permit. In 1999, the character ‘Ali G’ made his first appearance hosting interviews on a late-night comedy program. ‘Ali G’ styles himself a ‘hip hop journalist’ and presents himself as a youthful gang leader – of ambiguous ethnicity but based on an apparently black stereotype – complete with stereotypical mannerisms, language and dress in a hip hop style. In his guise as a young ‘ethnic’ chat show host with an unusual background, ‘Ali G’ was successful in persuading various high-ranking politicians, media celebrities and pillars of the community to be interviewed – and held up to ridicule through trial by double-entendre, typically by playing on words with apparently innocent meaning which have subcultural meanings to do with sex, drugs or gang warfare. Later, as the joke became more widely known, unsuspecting public figures became hard to find in Britain and ‘Ali G’ had

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to cast his net abroad, or look for laughs in cooperation with guests who were in on the act. ‘Ali G’s’ dress, mannerisms and speech have a ring of authenticity to them – at least to those who have little personal experience of harsh innercity life in the London area. To those who know something about the human geography of the area, some oddities would soon be noticeable: for example, Staines, where ‘Ali G’ claims to be leader of the ‘West Side Massive (Gang)’, is an unremarkable suburban area very unlike the dangerous ‘ghetto’ he describes it as (“Of course I is armed, man. It ain’t safe without a piece [gun] in Staines” (LOADED 1999)). Fairly soon it became known that ‘Ali G’ was actually the creation of a young man, Sacha Baron Cohen, not only white, but Jewish (a fact frequently mentioned in media descriptions)3 and with a degree from the University of Cambridge. Far from settling the issue of ‘Ali G’s’ ethnicity, this led to considerable discussion and confusion, both among the media and ‘Ali G’s’ own fans. As ‘Ali G’ became popular, websites, nearly all unofficial, were set up by his fans to discuss his shows, distribute the audio of his interviews, and generally to allow his admirers and occasional detractors to participate in the ‘Ali G’ fantasy. In the ‘Ali G’ websites – in particular, message boards where ‘Ali G’ fans interact with one another – language is the main medium for sustaining the ‘Ali G’ fantasy and creating a sense of community. ‘Ali G’s’ comic vision of a ‘ghetto’ on the leafy fringes of London is transformed into a ‘virtual ghetto’ inhabited by ‘massives’ (locally-based gangs) devoted to ‘Ali G’ and using a language strongly influenced by ‘Black British’ language varieties as their vernacular. However, it is certain that some of the inhabitants of the ‘virtual ghetto’ have very un-ghetto-like lifestyles, as their ‘massives’ turn out to be in such places as the rural north of England, Norway and New Zealand.4 Language is central to the ‘Ali G’ phenomenon. ‘Ali G’s’ language is a blend of non-standard Southern British English with grammatical, phonological and lexical features derived from Jamaican Creole. It enables him to construct himself as a Southern British urban adolescent through an easily recognized stereotype. It also has a key role in producing his ambiguous ethnic identity, because it is associated with language varieties of Caribbean origin used by black people, but not exclusively by black people. On the internet, ‘Ali G’s’ language has become the vernacular of the ‘virtual ghetto’. The fans have taken up his language variety in a playful way – though many of them will never have met anyone who actually speaks like that – and are using it as a medium for computer-mediated

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communication.5 Using this in-group language is part of creating a community of fans, who signal their group membership through the use, sometimes very tokenistic, of words and grammar characteristic of ‘Ali G’s’ speech. In this paper, I treat the language of ‘Ali G’ and his fans as the product of a series of “acts of identity” (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) which have resulted in language varieties or styles increasingly distant, both in location and in form, from the Caribbean Creole which is the original model. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller hypothesized that individuals model their linguistic behavior on that of the groups they wished to be identified with – subject to certain constraints (see Section 2 below). A collective act of identity may result in the formation of what is perceived as a new language variety. In my account of the language of Ali G, the first of these acts of identity was one which took place in the 1970s, and led to the formation of a new, British variety of Caribbean creole, ‘London Jamaican’, which served as a marker of identity for young British-born Caribbeans. The second act of identity took place slightly later, as non-Caribbean individuals appropriated salient elements of London Jamaican to signal their affiliation to what were originally ‘black’ cultural styles and identities. In the most recent of these acts of identity, a version of London speech heavily influenced by London Jamaican emerges in a new medium and a new locality – in written messages on the internet. The paper is structured as follows: in section 2, I will discuss how ‘Ali G’ is able to construct and maintain an ambiguous ethnic identity, even though it is well known that the performer is a white person. I will then go on to look at the origins of the language used by ‘Ali G’ and his fans, in terms of the three linguistic acts of identity mentioned above. In section 3, I will look in more detail at the language of the ‘Ali G’ websites, and consider how identity work is done in the messages posted there. Section 4 is the conclusion.

2.

Styling ambiguity

Part of the fascination of ‘Ali G’, both for his audience and for researchers, is how he succeeds in constructing an ethnically ambiguous, but culturally ‘non-white’ persona, without the need for ‘blacking up’ – the use of makeup, wigs etc. which was in the past associated with minstrel shows and would nowadays be widely seen as racist. Rather, his evocation of a

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character of uncertain ethnic origin relies on a combination of language, clothing style, and interests and activities stereotypically associated with young black people from the ‘underclass’. Early on, the character’s intended ethnicity was a source of controversy among reviewers in the press and elsewhere.6 Raekha Prasad wrote in The Guardian (31/3/2000): Our interest in him has largely been stimulated by his ability to elude any definitive identity. Is the character an imitation of a black man? Or is the spoof more complicated? Is ‘Ali G’ a ‘wigger’– a white man wanting to be black or as some viewers understand it, an Asian man trying to be black? (Prasad 2000).

Andrew Billen wrote in the New Statesman (10/4/2000): Most of us have got it now, although I was amused to see that Polly Toynbee in last week’s Radio Times still hadn’t. ‘He is not essentially making fun of black rappers,’ she wrote patiently, ‘but of the pathetic white kids who mimic them these days.’ Actually, ‘Ali G’ – the clue’s in the name, Polly – is a pathetic Asian kid who pretends he is black and misses (Billen 2000). 7

Although Billen’s view seems to be widely held, it is easy to dispute his claim that “the clue’s in the name,” since the name ‘Ali’ is obviously intended to be the one assumed by the character (a ‘street name’) rather than his original name.8 ‘Ali G’s’ “ability to elude any definitive identity” is based on a number of developments which have loosened the formerly strong links between ethnicity, language, naming practices and physical appearance in urban Britain, at the same time allowing adolescents to choose from a range of non-ethnically distinctive styles in clothing, hairstyle, bodily adornment and language. In terms of physical appearance, ‘black’ is often used in Britain to refer to Africans, African-Caribbeans and South Asians (though not South-East Asians) and anyone who is of mixed racial descent involving one of those categories. Since the definition of ‘black’ is so broadranging and reflects cultural affiliation at least as much as genetic heritage, it is possible to characterize someone as ‘black’ even if they have light colored skin. Hence, it is not necessary for ‘Ali G’ to ‘blacken up’ to be seen as potentially ‘black’.

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The uncertain link between ethnicity and language style is a crucial part of ‘Ali G’s’ successful portrayal of a character who associates himself with stereotypical ‘black’ underclass pursuits (drugs, sex, gang warfare, rap and hip-hop) while keeping his audience guessing about what his ethnicity is ‘really’ meant to be. ‘Ali G’s’ Creole-influenced British English is not therefore a definitive marker of ‘black’ ethnicity, but marks him out as someone who identifies with black cultural styles. He could be, but does not have to be, ‘black’ to talk the way he talks. In the rest of this section I will look in more detail at the historical and social origins of ‘Ali G’s’ language variety and the variety used by his fans on the internet. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s theory of acts of identity (1985) provides a useful framework for understanding the origins of ‘Ali G’s’ own language style as well as the style used by his fans. Central to the ‘Acts of Identity’ framework developed by Le Page and Tabouret-Keller is the so called Le Pagean Hypothesis. The following version is from Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985: 181–182) slightly adapted (by MS): The individual creates for himself the patterns of his linguistic behavior so as to resemble those of the group or groups with which from time to time he wishes to be identified, or so as to be unlike those from whom he wishes to be distinguished to the extent that (i) he can identify the groups (ii) he has both adequate access to the groups and ability to analyze their behavioral patterns (iii) the motivation to join the groups is sufficiently powerful, and is either reinforced or reversed by feedback from the groups (iv) he has the ability to modify his behavior. Within this framework, speakers are seen as modelling their language on that of groups with which they wish to be identified, but subject to certain constraints. Over time, as speakers focus on a particular set of norms, an identifiable variety may develop. I shall argue that the ‘Ali G’ language is ultimately the product of three acts of identity which have led to the development of new language varieties based on Jamaican Creole.

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2.1. ‘Black British’ and ‘London Jamaican’ The emergence of a ‘Black British’ identity with its linguistic hallmark, the ability to code-switch between Creole (‘Patwa’) and a local nonstandard form of English, is discussed by Paul Gilroy (1987). The loss of formerly separate local identities and their blending in a new ‘Black British’ identity results, he says, from the shared experiences of ‘race’ and social class, which the first generation underwent. In Britain, Caribbeans’ territorial origins and their previous social status became irrelevant: they were seen as ‘West Indian’ and working class. The consciousness of this in the second generation gave rise to the new identity, self-consciously both British and black, lacking the strong links with specific Caribbean places which the first generation had felt. In London, this process had its linguistic outcome in ‘London Jamaican,’ first noticed during the 1970s. As Le Page and Tabouret-Keller put it: … the evolution and use of this argot is the outcome of many ‘acts of identity’ by young people growing up in a multidimensional linguistic and cultural environment to which their parents, their teachers, their peer group and ‘the establishment’ all contribute. The precise linguistic outcome, as the analysis seems to show, is not that of any single external model but the result of focussing around a repertoire of forms in relation to meaningpotentials … London Jamaican is a language close to the ‘deepest’ form of Jamaican Creole, and is identified as such by all those features above the level of awareness which distinguish Jamaican Creole from Standard English … . In practice, most speakers cannot achieve the ideal. (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985: 178–180)

The act of identity leading to the creation of London Jamaican is constrained in particular by Le Page’s riders (ii) (the individual must have both adequate access to the groups and ability to analyze their behavioral patterns) and (iv) (s/he must have the ability to modify his behavior). Only features lying above the level of awareness of the hearer (i.e. where the individual has the potential to analyze the behavioral patterns) are readily available for inclusion in the repertoire; and speakers may differ in their level of mastery even of these (i.e. they may lack the ability to copy the model exactly). In Sebba (1993) I argued that for the majority of London-born Caribbeans, London English is a first (and dominant) language. The other lan-

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guage variety which they use, commonly called ‘Patois’ or ‘Patwa’ (‘Creole’ and ‘London Jamaican’ are terms mainly used by linguists) seems to consist of a larger or smaller number of adaptations of LE in the direction of JC. Strongly stereotypical Creole features should be salient and positively valued as a symbol of identity, so we would expect these particular features of Creole to be accommodated to by everyone who attempts to engage in ‘chattin’ Patois’. However, all speakers will be constrained by limits on what is learnable in their given situation (Sebba 1993: 52).

‘London Jamaican’, then, is a language variety which is characterized by some of the most saliently un-English features of Jamaican Creole; those “above the level of awareness” which mark it out as different from the local majority vernacular, London English, and from Standard English.9 This characteristic of focusing on the most ‘Creole’ features, at the same time marks it as distinct from most varieties of Jamaican Creole, which tend to show a greater degree of convergence to Standard English. The use of Creole by African-Caribbean adolescents functions strongly as an identity marker. According to Hewitt (1982: 226), “the use of creole by black adolescents is arguably the strongest single marker of black youth culture and it is consistently present throughout the different forms assumed by that culture.” In spite of this, second and third-generation African-Caribbeans in London can be characterized as users of London English and a local variety of Jamaican Creole, with the possibility of using both together in certain contexts. With respect to this Creole, they may well have a passive understanding comparable with that of a first-language speaker from the Caribbean, but the variety they produce is likely to show substantial influences from London English (Sebba 2000). This section has discussed how an act of identity has led to the development of a language variety specific to Caribbeans in Britain through focusing on a relatively small set of salient features which acquire symbolic value: this variety marks them as not Caribbean, not ‘anglo’ British, but Black British (and Londoners). We now go on to look at a second ‘act of identity’ which has led to that language spreading outside the ethnicallydefined community in which it originated.

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2.2. Creole beyond the black community A number of researchers (Hewitt 1986; Sebba 1993; Rampton 1995) have attested to the use of Creole by adolescents (in particular) of ethnicity other than African-Caribbean. In fact the use of Creole by the wider community takes a number of forms. Hewitt (1986: 129) found “some thirty distinctly creole lexical items” in the speech of white adolescents in an area of high Caribbean population; it is safe to say that two decades later, a similar survey would find many more Creole words used and recognized. While such Creole influences may have been more evident … in the speech of black youngsters, they were by no means restricted to black speakers but were to varying degrees evident also in the speech of white and ethnic minority youth other than Afro-Caribbean from the same localities. (Hewitt 1989: 139)

Both Hewitt (1982, 1986) and Sebba (1993) describe white adolescents in London who use Creole with some degree of fluency in conversation with black friends; such speakers do not simply use Creole lexis but also incorporate salient features of Jamaican Creole grammar and phonology into their speech. In this respect they are similar to many African-Caribbeans, whose Creole also is produced by ‘adapting’ London English in the direction of a target, with varying degrees of effort and success. The act of ‘chattin’ Patois’ may involve no more than inserting some Creole discourse markers or lexical items with high symbolic value in a stream of words which is otherwise ‘pure’ London English, or it may involve a more elaborate performance, drawing on salient points of difference between the two varieties. For example, in the following fragment of conversation between two adolescent boys, recorded by the author in London in 1982, both boys make use of Creole (uninflected) past tense forms (happen, see for Standard happened, saw) and subject pronouns (‘im… come, me.. see, ‘im… get for Standard he came, I saw, he got) while pronouncing but and get with final glottal stops, a characteristic of London but not of Jamaican Creole. M. uses one London English past tense form suspended (but arguably, so does E., since come is potentially past tense in London English anyway). In (03) E. uses the Creole strategy for negation, while in (05), M uses the Creole strategy for yes/no question formation (no verb-auxiliary inversion).

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(1) 01 M wha' happen to B 02 (1.0) 03 E me no know (1.0) 'im just come back today same time as you bu/ me no see 'im 04 (0.6) 05 M uh 'im ge/ s (.) ge/ suspended 06 E yeh man 07 M Jesus Christ

Of these boys, E is of Caribbean heritage while M is white with no family connection with the Caribbean. In this short performance, there is little difference between E’s and M’s ‘Creole’.10 Given the fact that there are non-Caribbean as well as Caribbean, white as well as black Creole users, what exactly is the connection between Creole and the ‘black community’? In fact the relationship is a very complex one, which was examined in detail by Hewitt in the 1980s. Hewitt distinguishes two varieties of language, overlapping in form but differing sharply in their symbolic value. Firstly, what he calls the ‘multiracial vernacular’: There has developed in many inner city areas a form of ‘community English’ or multiracial vernacular which, while containing Creole forms and idioms, is not regarded as charged with any symbolic meanings related to race and ethnicity and is in no way related to boundary maintaining practices. Rather, it is, if anything, a site within which ethnicity is deconstructed, dismantled and reassembled into a new, ethnically mixed, Community English. The degree of Creole influence on the specific local vernacular is often higher in the case of young black speakers but the situation is highly fluid and open to much local variation (Hewitt 1990: 139; cited in Rampton l995: 125–126).

Hewitt stresses that the ‘multiracial vernacular’ does not have symbolic value as a group marker. The other variety he identifies, by contrast, does: The use of creole by black adolescents is arguably the strongest single marker of black youth culture and it is consistently present throughout the different forms assumed by that culture. As such its use by whites is a potentially sensitive practice. (Hewitt 1982: 226)

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Thus in London in the 1980s, ‘Creole’ was a symbol of black youth culture, but the creole-influenced ‘multiracial vernacular’ was not. Yet the boundary between these was very fuzzy: What is regarded by one group of black and white friends as unmarked with regard to ethnicity may, in another group in the same locality, be regarded as marked, and therefore possibly as the subject of special negotiations in interracial usage. … The existence of a vernacular which already contains a number of creole-derived features provides a useful alibi, a kind of smokescreen through which words may be smuggled into white speech (Hewitt 1986: 151).

Does Hewitt’s description fit the situation two decades later? Unfortunately we have no recent study to match that of Hewitt. However, Mühleisen’s view, based on fieldwork in the mid-90s, echoes much of what Hewitt said: What is referred to as Creole or Patois in London is not a homogeneous and stable variety, but rather allows for a diffusing of norms and is characterized by high internal and external variability. Respondents may have very diverse ideas of what is meant by using Creole or Patois, ranging from a fullfledged Jamaican Creole … up to the odd insertion of a lexical item, or the occasional phonological shift to a Jamaican pronunciation (Mühleisen 2002: 145).

One likely difference between now and the 1980s is that the variety which Hewitt calls the ‘multiracial vernacular’ is recognized over a much wider geographical area. Although the heartland of this variety is no doubt still London, the popularity of youth cultural styles and art forms which draw on it, and regular media exposure, mean that it is now known much more widely around the country, and not just in urban areas. The extent to which it, or a similar local variety, is used outside London remains to be researched. The diffusion of a variety of Creole into the surrounding community can be viewed as a the result of second ‘act of identity’ in which individuals have appropriated salient elements of London Jamaican (the product of the first ‘act of identity’), to a greater or lesser extent, to signal their affiliation to what were originally ‘black’ cultural styles and identities. These features have come to be symbolic of the contrasts between ‘English’ and ‘Patois’, ‘White’ and ‘Black’, ‘Caribbean’ and ‘English’. In the terms of Irvine and Gal, we could describe them as iconized, through a process which

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“involves a transformation of the sign relationship between linguistic features (or varieties) and the social images with which they are linked. Linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group’s inherent nature or essence” (2000: 37).

This description fits the case of the Creole-influenced vernacular very well, as the apparent flouting of the rules of Standard English (for example, through non-standard verb agreements, using ‘object’ pronoun forms for subjects, and double negatives) connects perfectly with a stereotype of African-Caribbean adolescents as oppositional, undisciplined and ready to flout the law. In the next section, we turn to look at the language of ‘Ali G’ himself, and how it relates to these Creole-influenced vernacular varieties. 2.3. The language of ‘Ali G’ ‘Ali G’s’ speech shows features very similar to those typical of white Creole users from London. But these are also the features which typify second and third-generation black users of Creole. In particular, he draws on a repertoire of “features above the level of awareness which distinguish Jamaican Creole from Standard English” (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985: 180). At the same time he uses stereotypical and stigmatised features of Southern British English varieties from London and its surrounding areas. Below is a short extract from an interview of ‘Ali G’ by Danny Plunkett published in LOADED magazine, issue 61, May 1999 (spelling as in source): Loaded G

What school did you go to? Staines Comprehensive. Me was bored ‘cos me had to do 11 the same year for four years; they did’nt know me was dyslexical, and lots of people have told me that me have got the brain of a brain scientist if me only been to school and not fallen behind so. Also, me did’nt get on with me teachers after Mr Rogers slapped me in the art room. I’m not saying him was a battyman, but him left hand on me face a bit too long if you know what I is saying.

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If we look at the language of ‘Ali G’ in some detail, we find that it draws on a small repertoire of ‘points of difference’ from Standard English very similar to the ones which characterise the language of the two boys in Example 1. The most important of these are summarized below. Grammatical: use of Jamaican Creole pronoun forms, especially me and him as subject and possessive pronouns. Nonstandard verb agreement, e.g. me was, I is, typical of some varieties of Jamaican Creole. Double negatives (found in both Jamaican Creole and Southern British English.) Lexical: taboo lexis of Caribbean origin, e.g. battyman ‘homosexual,’ punani ‘vagina’. Frequent use of expressions of apparently Caribbean origin such as booyakasha, and non-standard discourse markers of British English origin, e.g. innit. Phonological: (a) Forms associated with Caribbean Creole, e.g. stopping of /D/: dis, dat etc. (b) Nonstandard, typically stigmatised forms associated with Southern British English, e.g. TH-fronting (fing, fank, wiv < thing, thank, with). T-glottaling ([lE?@] < letter) is so widespread in younger people in England that it no longer counts as very distinctive but it adds to the overall impression of nonstandardness. So how does ‘Ali G’s’ language relate to varieties of language spoken ‘out there’ by real people? Firstly, we should note that his own fans recognise his language as a speech style which is actually encountered in real life (in London at least), as these postings from message boards12 show: (2)

… You must have lived in Hackney13 at some point, cos how else did you learn the lingo? You certainly don't hear many Cambridge students14 saying booyaka, wicked and do you wanna spliff up? Keep it real Ali …

(3)

… ave all of you people ever been to London? if you have you will notice that prob about 90% of white kids under 15 speak like Ali G.

(4)

Towkin' lak a gangsta innit? There are far too many white people in my college who try to talk like they're Asian or whatever - Here's how they talk 'Yo, woss goin' daan laak, a is lookin' foor a bi of ackshun innit? wossappnin' on saaaday wiv daaa Garage portyy, saaaands wickid dannnnit!' These people just sound ridiculous and wonder why people ask them if they have relations in Lancashire. BIG UP ALI G!!

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Thus in spite of a degree of inconsistency and a reliance on a small number of stereotypical features, Ali G’s language variety is immediately recognisable and is ratified as ‘authentic’ by at least some of his audience. What exactly is this variety then, and more to the point, who are its users? This is where issues of language and ethnicity become central, and potentially delicate. If ‘Ali G’ is using Creole (‘London Jamaican’), he could be said to be portraying himself as a black person using his own ethnic language variety. On the other hand, if he is using some version of the ‘multiracial vernacular’ which Hewitt describes he could be a person of any ethnicity. Thus the ambiguous ethnic identity of ‘Ali G’ plays on the fuzzy boundaries between the two varieties which Hewitt identified. Is ‘Ali G’s’ language symbolic of a ‘black’ identity, or is it “a site within which ethnicity is deconstructed, dismantled and reassembled” (Hewitt 1990: 139)? The ‘diverse ideas’ about what constitutes Creole (Mühleisen 2002: 145), and the “highly fluid situation” (Hewitt 1990: 139) concerning what constitutes the multiracial vernacular mean it is impossible to say with certainty which variety we are dealing with. ‘Ali G’ can keep us guessing. 2.4. The language of the ‘Ali G’ websites On message boards and in guestbooks which are part of the ‘virtual ghetto’, the majority of messages posted by fans are at least partly in ‘Ali G language’.15 Commonly, the whole message is produced in a language variety which is oriented towards forms typical of ‘Ali G’ himself, as in this example from a message board: (5)

You is not knowing what you is on about my man Easy Now Dave, me is feeling what you is saying, aye? But you is tick, and me an' me crew is gonna come round and lash you up one time.

This example includes some of the commonest grammatical and phonological/orthographic variations from Standard English which characterize the written form of the ‘Ali G language’, for example: (a) spellings which are designed to reflect non-standard pronunciations, e.g. for RP /T/ (tick for thick). for RP /D/ such as dem for them is common. for RP /T/ (fink for think) reflects non-standard London pronunciation and is also common in some words.

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(b) Nonstandard verb forms, e.g. lacking agreement with the subject: I is, me is, you is. (c) Nonstandard pronoun forms, especially me as subject and possessive (me is, me crew); also him and dem (them) as subject/possessive pronouns. These are typical of Jamaican Creole. At a discourse level, we find (d) Frequent use of agonistic terms and insults and threats (lash you up) towards other contributors (this might be a common practice on websites of this kind which are mainly used by teenagers, but is also in the spirit of ‘Ali G’, who frequently uses insulting language.) Also typical of messages on ‘Ali G’ websites, though not found in this example, are: (e) Use of lexis associated with ‘Ali G’, especially the taboo terms punani (‘female genitalia’) batty(man) (‘homosexual’) and bitch (for ‘woman’), with taboo words and obscenities from the general lexicon, and with discourse markers and hard-to-categorize buzzwords like innit (‘isn’t it’), aaight (‘all right’), respect (‘respect’, a greeting) and booyakasha (a greeting, said by some to be an imitation the sound of a gun being fired and also claimed by some to mean ‘death to white people)16 – all of which have iconic status as ‘Ali G words’ though they predate Ali G. (f) Use of non-standard spellings. These include spellings which have become conventional in e-mail communication and text messages, e.g. u for you, 8 for ate (e.g. m8 = ‘mate’), 2 for to etc. (these of course are not specific to internet sites related to ‘Ali G’), but also include unconventional respellings of other words, as in the example below. The target language for these texts is the mix of Creole and Southern British English forms (especially stigmatized ones), which typifies the language of ‘Ali G’. Sometimes, what we find seems to be a focus away from the Standard, but not toward any particular form. Non-standard spellings also have a role in constructing the text as ‘other than Standard English’. For example the contributor of the message below has used some of the grammatical features characteristic of ‘Ali G’ (me is, you (not your) hairy batty) but has otherwise relied on a strategy of mass respelling of words to produce the desired effect of non-standardness.

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me iz frum da yookay but me iz in da states an me wonna woch sum ali g. Me gotsa problum mefinks.17 Bring yoo hairy batty over to dis side ov de worter.

(‘I am from the UK but I am in the States and I want to watch some ‘Ali G’. I have a problem methinks. Bring your hairy butt over to this side of the water.’)

As in the language of ‘Ali G’ himself, we find a focus on the same small repertoire of features with high symbolic value, the “features above the level of awareness” which characterize both Creole and London English. Even where contributors probably lack any personal experience of Creole, as apparently in the case of this contributor to the ‘Ali G Dreambook’ who gives his ‘massive’ as ‘Sweden’, some gesture in that direction, or at least towards nonstandardness, is typically included: (7)

i love your dhoe aihgt and if you cold tell a joke about me ! it really eold be better enouge said //robbo18

The ‘Ali G language’ results from a third act of identity in which its users, the website participants or inhabitants of the ‘virtual ghetto’ of ‘Ali G’, have styled their language to approximate that of ‘Ali G’ himself. But with exactly which “group or groups”, in Le Page’s terms, do these individuals “wish to be identified”? Young black people? Young London speakers of the ‘multiracial vernacular’ ? ‘Ali G’ himself? Or the fans of ‘Ali G’ – the dwellers in the virtual ghetto – others like themselves? Here we have no clear answer. What is clear is that the vernacular of the message boards is a performance, in the sense that the great majority of the participants do not speak that way, and probably none of them write that way, in their everyday lives outside the ‘virtual ghetto’. As an act of identity it is a transient one, one which is strongly linked to their identities within the ‘virtual ghetto’ and probably has little to do with their identities outside it. This act of identity is also highly constrained, by lack of contact with the original model (rider (ii)). Access to ‘Ali G’ is limited to his broadcast shows and films, while access to the ‘real’ speakers of ‘Ali G’s’ language variety will be available to some, but relatively few, of the fans (see note 6). A second constraint on this act of identity comes in the need for speakers to distance themselves from any hint that they might be mocking or mis-using Creole, which could result in a backlash from Creole users (Le Page’s rider (iii)). The possibility of ‘Ali G language’ being identified with

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a symbolically potent ‘Creole’ known to be the linguistic property of Black British youth poses a possible problem for ‘Ali G’s’ white fans, as their use of the ‘Ali G language’ could be taken as misappropriating Creole. Hewitt noted that the most commonly expressed attitude of black youngsters to the idea of white creole speakers is one of hostility … two major themes are readily discernible: one in which creole use by whites is taken as a derisive parody … the other in which it is interpreted as a further white appropriation of one the sources of power – ‘it seems they are stealing our language’ (Hewitt 1982: 226).

Though crossing, as described and discussed by Rampton (1995, 1998) is a liminal activity which allows using an ethnically marked language variety “across quite sharply felt social or ethnic boundaries” (Rampton 1998: 291), and the ‘Ali G’ websites might reasonably be described as a space where “the constraints of ordinary social order were relaxed and normal social relations couldn’t be taken for granted” (Rampton 1998: 291), nevertheless there is a need for fans to be cautious. Using the ‘Ali G language’ carries the risk of being seen as a racist, of engaging in practices of parody and mockery similar to parodies of African-American speech (Ronkin and Karn 1999) or to ‘Mock Spanish’ (Hill 1995) – allegations made against ‘Ali G’ himself (see note 7) by his critics. This consideration acts as a brake on ‘doing Creole’ too authentically, and also motivates some mixing of it with Standard English. In the next section, we continue with the theme of identity to see how ethnic identities are constructed in the ‘Ali G’ message boards.

3.

Styles, identities and ethnicity in the ‘Ali G’ message boards

Identity, as Le Page and others have shown, may be performed through using variant forms within a language or choices of language from a repertoire; but of course this is not the only way of ‘doing identity’ through language, whether for Caribbeans (in spite of their access to multiple language varieties) or for others. For example, in an analysis of a fragment of conversation, Sebba and Tate (2002: 85) show that at one point one of the participants manifests three distinct identities:

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Lu’s mixed language discourse simultaneously asserts his Dominican-ness through his claims of insider knowledge [of practices on the island of Dominica], his Caribbean-ness through his appeal to the fact that you can find inbreeding ‘in any one of the islands’ [of the Caribbean] and his Black Britishness through the use of English and Creole together.

They conclude from this that “identifications are accomplished in talk in interaction through both the discourse content and the manipulation of linguistic styles which [in this case] are more, or less, distinctively marked as ‘Creole’ or ‘English’” (2002: 85). In the ‘virtual ghetto’ of the ‘Ali G’ message boards, we can also identify two styles or codes. I have already discussed the distinguishing features of what I have called the ‘vernacular’, a language style based on that of ‘Ali G’ himself. In addition, we find a much more standard variety of written English – perhaps best described as ‘standard-like’, since it contains relatively few deviations from the written norm and does not appear to exploit these deviations to establish symbolic difference from the written norm.19 The two linguistic styles may be juxtaposed to contextualize the author’s message. ‘Ali G language’ is used largely to contextualize contributions that are intended to be playful, inconsequential, ‘unreal’. The use of Standard(-like) English adds gravitas and sincerity, making it more appropriate for serious messages, or serious parts of messages. While switching between styles is an optional way of contextualizing parts of the message, identity work is an essential part of every message posted to the boards. One aspect of the identity work which needs to be done in every message is to signal participation in the ‘Ali G’ fantasy, membership of the ‘virtual massive’. This can be done by using the ‘Ali G language’ itself, at least once in the message. This might be in the subject line only, or in the body of the message only, or (frequently) in both.20 ‘Proof of membership’ can thus be accomplished stylistically, through using language of the appropriate form. A second type of identity work involves the on-record claiming of an identity. This may or may not take place in a particular message: it will take place only if occasioned (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998: 3). In this paper, I want to focus on claims of ethnic identity. Declarations of one’s own ethnicity may be occasioned fairly rarely in face-to-face talk because visual clues make bald statements like ‘I am white’ redundant, or at least seldom necessary. On message boards, where the visual information is absent, such statements may become relevant especially where issues of ethnicity come

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under discussion. On the ‘Ali G’ message boards, we can take it that ethnicity has a high profile much of the time, given that ‘Ali G’ himself makes much of playing with this concept. Furthermore, some of the message boards have threads of messages specifically dealing with such topics: for example, ‘Is it cos I is black? Is Ali a bit racialist? You decide.’ (http://pub5.ezboard.com/faligsrealaudioghettoisitcosiis black) or ‘White People Are Scum..well the majority are!!!!!’ (http://pub3.ezboard.com/ fbooyakaaliggraffiti board). In one of relatively few existing scholarly discussions of race in internet communication21, Byron Burkhalter observes: “the connection between the body and racial identity is strong … establishing racial identity in face-toface interaction relies heavily on physical cues provided by the body. Physical characteristics like skin color and vocal patterns are pivotal clues to racial identity that can eliminate the need for an explicit claim to racial membership” (2003: 60–61). Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985: 208) would agree at least in part with this claim. In a discussion of “definitions of ethnicity as ideal”, they say: … we have to recognize among our data the fact that people do believe themselves to live in a world of discrete or distinct ethnic or racial groups – these among other social groups they also believe in. That belief is grounded in the use of terms of identity, words that are used in discourse which illuminates the concept each user attaches to each term … Such terms function as symbols ready at hand for identities to hang on, providing the links between individuals and groups, the instruments therefore of identification.

In their investigation, terms relating to physical features were the most frequently used for ascribing ethnicity to others, followed by provenance, language and genetic descent, though the frequency and relative ranking of these terms differed according to the origins of the person using them, for example British respondents used physical criteria more than non-British (1985: 209). In computer-mediated communication, certain information about interlocutors which might form the basis for ascribing identities to individuals is self-evidently lacking. Interactants have no direct visual information about physical aspects of their interlocutors such as skin and hair colour, age and sex. In face-to-face interaction, we might make a number of (possibly challengeable) assumptions on the basis of these characteristics. If physical

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appearance is important for establishing ethnicity, how do interactants construct ethnic identities for themselves and others, where communication is computer-mediated? Burkhalter (2003: 62), perhaps surprisingly, claims that racial identity is no more ambiguous online than offline. The resources of the medium are sufficient for participants’ determinations of racial identity. Offline, of course, people do not present themselves with their lineage documentation or DNA analysis attached. Certainty of racial identity offline or online is always contingent – absolute proof is not available and rarely necessary.

So how would ethnic identities emerge in the online interaction itself? Actually, it seems that online interaction is not necessarily so different from face-to-face talk. According to Antaki, Condor and Levine (1996: 473) identities in talk never just appear, they are always used; they only make sense as part of an interactional structure (like a story or argument), and ... they are highly flexible. The participants use their identities as warrants or authority for a variety of claims they make and challenge, and the identities they invoke change as they are deployed to meet changing conversational demands. (emphasis in original)

This turns out to be true of identities online as well. Let us now look at some examples of how claims of ethnicity are constructed in postings to ‘Ali G’ message boards. Example (8), is first of a thread of messages on the topic ‘White People Are Scum..well the majority are!!!!!’ begun by ‘Mrs Ali G’22 on the ‘Ali G Graffiti Board’ (http://pub3.ezboard.com/fbooyakaaliggraffitiboard). It is itself a reply to a series of messages in another thread (‘pakis stink’) from MiZ LiVeLy P, whose postings have offended ‘Mrs Ali G’. (8)

White People Are Scum..well the majority are!!!!! First and foremost i would just like to say Ali is the Don Dapper. Secondly, all them peoples who is sayin that pakis is mingin, especially the Bradda Batty massif, is complete scum! Without the asian population in this country the majority of white racist scum would be nothing...if u want to know

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Mark Sebba the reason why go and read an accurate history book which will give the answer. Thirdly, why is u on the ALI G website if pakis is mingin?....and by the way to the white scum 'Pakis' is all the asians in general. Ali is an Islamic name, so if pakis smell why visit a website whose main topic is on a guy with a 'Paki' name. So me is sayin to all the batty's if u is wantin to mess with us pakis then me is jus gonna get me F.B. Aye boyz..Aye

(MRS ALI G, Local user, 4/8/00 10:38:30 pm)

‘Mrs Ali G’s’ posting is a mixture of standard-like English (plain text) and ‘Ali G language’ (italicized) marked by a moderate use of Creole-derived forms. We find a few of these (non-standard verb agreements) near the beginning, and again near the end. In the middle, there are several lines entirely in Standard English: Without the asian population […] an accurate history book which will give the answer. The strongest gesture towards ‘Ali G language’ is in fact in the last sentence, which has non-standard pronouns, verb agreements and ‘Ali G’-related lexis.23 This is also the line which contains, in passing, a declaration of ethnicity: “with us pakis”. ‘Mrs Ali G’s’ claim to ethnic identity is made indirectly, by means of a self-ascriptive adjective rather than an assertion (‘I am a Paki’) – as though readers might be expected to know already that she is Asian. Moreover this is done in a line of text which is strongly styled as ‘Ali G’ language. Example (9) provides an interesting comparison. It is the 18th of 48 messages in this thread, most of which respond to ‘Mrs Ali G’s’ view that ‘white people are scum’. (9)

bout time you took a look at reality, remember try What is it dat ya want to make the most simple fing into a race issue. Be proud of what or who you are. It dont matter if you is black white male female straight or a batty man, if you watch Da Ali G show and fink it is funny the reason for it is cas "we are all da same" if you dont fink its funny then your head is fucked up an nobody really gives a fuck what you fink, its you who different not cos of your colour or your religion but cos of your attitude. People who will class an entire group of people as scum just because they are white, need to look at the problems of stereo typing, cos thats just what they are doing, yet

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at the same time what they dislike the whites for doing. Just incase you hadnt guessed I'm white. Like the man said we all come from the same place The punani.

(Mossy, Unregistered User, 5/18/00 7:42:08 pm)

The first part of the message (italicized here – not in the original) is strongly marked as ‘Ali G’ language. Even in the first line we find DHstopping ( for that) – a Creole feature, and TH-fronting ( for thing) – a London feature. In the first eight lines we also find non-standard verb agreements (It dont matter, if you is black…) and Creole lexis (batty man) and non-standard spellings which reflect casual pronunciation (ya, cos). The second part of the message is consistently in Standard English, apart from one use of cos (but note because occurs as well) and the ‘Ali G’ ‘buzzword’ punani (female genitalia) right at the end. The effect of this style change is to mark this second part of the message as more serious in tone than the first, and also perhaps to mark it as the author’s own voice rather than the stylised voice of ‘Ali G’. Then just 13 words before the end of the message, we have the self-revelation ‘incase you hadnt guessed I’m white’ – a bald on-record statement of ethnicity, but organized in such a way as to suggest that perhaps it was unnecessary because the poster’s ethnicity was already deducible (‘Just in case you hadn’t guessed’) from the views he had expressed. My final example is from the same message thread. This is the sixth message and is 740 words long, so it is abridged here. (The same poster’s later message is 963 words long!) (10)

Aits24 Stop all this racist nonsense NOW !!! You is all fools, the man Pugwash25 has a point. You is all fitting tings round what you want them to be without any basis of fact and using the man Ali G as a weapon for your small narrow minded pre concieved ideas. England is a very tolerant country cos if you was running on like this in some other countries you would be minus some limbs by now. The very fact that you are able to express your nasty racist views is proof that Britain is the most tolerant country on this earth. […] Please remember not ONLY White people can be Racist, just take a look at the posts on this site to proove otherwise. […]

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Mark Sebba Accept you are not a Pakistani or a Jamaican if you are born in this country and have never lived in these lands, give it up!!!. You may be British/Jamaican etc but you LIVE HERE, do not forget your forbearers traditions and ways but to achieve here you MUST do so. Play the Game and reap the rewards then do whatever you fucking please because you will then be in a position where you are able to!!! By the way yes I am a White man, but I have travelled the world and probably seen more of the West indies etcc than a lot of you that talk the talk and walk the walk and it is nice to see a Blackman in charge of a Blackmans land but that is not Britain and like it or not you must earn respect by achievement rise above the racist poison and be proud of what and where you are now accept the present and dont keep looking back. Forget yesterday and go forwards!!! Anyway what the fuck was me saying Ali G has had the guts to observe something that to many is just funny a parody a charictature whatever its someone you can laugh at cos sometimes he is cool and other times a fool but he is a very clever observant and most of all funny man please dont hold it against him because he is (probably) white you can see he knows where his humour is coming from and he is no Jim Davidson. 26 ...Re-spec

(JO, Unregistered User, 4/13/00 9:12:59 pm http://pub3.ezboard.com/fbooyakaaliggraffitiboard)

Jo’s posting contains much more Standard English and much less of the stylised ‘Ali G’ language than the other two we have looked at, but it shows some similarities in structure with example (9). Like (9), it begins with a fairly heavy concentration of Creole-derived lexis, phonological and grammatical forms: the salutation Aits, you is, tings. However, the very first line, Stop all this racist nonsense NOW !!! is pure Standard English: this serves to contextualize it as a serious call to other posters to stop being racist. In fact the concentration of ‘Ali G’ language is confined to the first few lines; the poster then carries on mainly in Standard English, with a few nonstandard spellings and colloquialisms, for nearly 700 words. Right at the end there are two more gestures towards the ‘Ali G’ language: at the beginning of the last paragraph what the fuck was me saying and at the very end: Re-spec (another greeting).

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In Jo’s posting, his declaration of ethnic identity comes once again close to the end: 171 words before the end of the 740-word message. As in the case of (9), it is constructed to make it seem that the poster thinks it may be unnecessary: By the way implies ‘this is not really all that important’; yes implies ‘I agree with your already stated proposition,’ in other words ‘as you already know’; I am a White man. While there are some important differences, there are also interesting similarities in these three messages. In each of the postings, the message is structured so as to contain some ‘Ali G language’ at the beginning and at the end. The use of ‘Ali G’ language in these positions ensures that the postings will be taken as part of the ‘Ali G’ fantasy, that their posters are part of the ‘community’ of the ‘virtual ghetto’. Thus it is part of constructing the poster’s identity as a fan of ‘Ali G’. Elsewhere in the message boards, Standard English acts as a contextualisation cue, with the implication that the parts of the message in Standard English should be interpreted as serious, as being outside the fantasy. In all three examples, Ali G language is used for more evaluative (and combative) comments: all them peoples […] is complete scum! (8), if you dont fink its funny then your head is fucked up (9), You is all fools (10). However, these themes are elaborated mainly in Standard English. In each of our three examples, the declaration of ethnicity comes late in the posting (10 words before the end of a 146-word message in the case of (8); 13 words before the end of a 165-word message for (9); 171 words before the end of a 740-word message for (10)). We can see in each case that the statement of ethnic identity is linked to what Antaki et al. (1996) call the ‘interactional structure’ by providing a warrant for something else which the poster is saying or doing. In (8) it provides an account for why ‘Mrs Ali G’ will take it on herself to send in the hit-men; in (9) it is by way of declaring an interest – as a white person, the poster might be expected to feel unhappy with being stereotyped as ‘white scum’. He immediately constructs his ethnicity as irrelevant, however, by saying we all come from the same place. The punani.27 In (10), the statement I am a White man is again a declaration of an interest (the poster has pointed out that people who are not white can be racist, and has spent some time telling black people how they should behave in Britain). In this case, however, lest it weaken the poster’s argument, he immediately follows it up with but I have travelled the world and probably seen more of the West indies etcc than a lot of you, implying that his whiteness does not disqualify him from taking a black, or at least non-Eurocentric viewpoint.

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How typical are examples (8)–(10) of postings involving self-revelation of ethnicity? At this stage it is not possible to say. It would be premature to declare that these examples are prototypical, irrespective of the theme of the discussion and the claimed ethnic identity of the poster28. However, there are structural reasons why self-revelations might tend to come late. Arguably, self-revelations of ethnicity become relevant enough to be occasioned only once the line of argument has developed sufficiently. Eventually, readers may reach a point where they feel that to be able to contextualize the poster’s viewpoint, they need to have definite knowledge of his/her ethnic identity, and the poster will be aware of this. The need for selfdisclosure may thus become greater as the argument develops, as the poster lays him/herself open to accusations of withholding important information. The choice of language/style for on-record statements of the poster’s ethnicity is another relevant issue. Why are the self-revelations in (9) and (10) done in Standard English rather than ‘Ali G’ language? There are three possible reasons for this. Firstly, as mentioned above, Standard English acts as a contextualization cue which removes the relevant parts of the message from the playful ‘Ali G’ world, and places them outside the fantasy. Thus, they must be treated as serious rather than jocular. Secondly, making these statements in Standard English avoids a paradox whereby an ethnically marked variety would be used to declare oneself to be of a different ethnicity: me is a white man might well seem insincere or unlikely. Thirdly, ‘Ali G’ fans who are not themselves racist must take pains to avoid being seen as using the ‘Ali G’ language as a mocking parody of black people’s language. The risk is greatest when ethnicity itself is in focus. When questions about ethnicity or race arise, therefore, the inhabitants of the ‘virtual ghetto’ must take care to construct themselves as anti-racist while at the same time associating themselves symbolically with the ‘Ali G’ fantasy, which requires the use of the ‘Ali G language’. This dynamic could be the source of the mixing of codes which characterises (9) and (10).

4.

Conclusion

In the wake of the ‘Ali G’ phenomenon, websites have come into being where adolescents adopt ‘black’ language styles using a small range of iconized linguistic features which distinguish ‘Creole’ from ‘Standard English’. Using this vernacular, which very few of the participants would speak (and no one at all would write) in everyday life, signals participation in the

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fantasy. Despite the fact that their vernacular hardly exists in the outside world, we find that the message boards show some typical features of real language communities; for example, meaningful switching between styles. Paul Gilroy has written: That modernist process of montage – mixing – created pleasures from … acts of piracy. It built an (anti)aesthetic around the practice of mutation and recombination. Its pleasures increased in proportion to the distance that had formerly separated the bits and pieces that were now dislocated into new meanings. Distance itself was subdued by this creative process (Gilroy 1993).

Although this was written about hip hop, an originally ‘black’ cultural form which has long since transcended ethnicity and geographical location, it could well be applied to the language of ‘Ali G’ – the self-styled ‘hip hop journalist’ – and the websites associated with him. In this chapter, I have argued that a series of ‘acts of identity’ have led what was once, in Britain, an ethnically marked vernacular spoken by immigrants – Jamaican Creole – to be transformed both in form and in meaning. Over three decades, it first became a distinctive marker of British-born Caribbean youth irrespective of their parents’ place of origin. Through a second ‘act of identity’ it became a key element of an ethnically nonspecific, but localized and age-graded, language style popular among, and increasingly stereotypical of, urban adolescents in Britain. By appropriating this variety as part of his persona, ‘Ali G’ has been able to construct himself both as ethnically ambiguous and as an example of contemporary British ‘urban youth’. In the most recent of the acts of identity, this Creole-influenced language style has been transformed again, through a change of modality, from spoken to written and computer-mediated. Notwithstanding its selfevident fabricated nature and its reliance on a small set of salient features, inconsistently represented through makeshift orthographic devices, the written version of ‘Ali G’’s language style functions both as a group identity marker for his fans on the internet, and as a contextualization cue within their communications. Communicative style is thus central to establishing membership and to creating meaning in the ‘virtual ghetto’. In this new space where geographical location is irrelevant, it can truly be said that the ‘bits and pieces’ (in Gilroy’s words) reassembled by ‘Ali G’ and his admirers have taken on ‘new meanings’.

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Appendix. Example of a series of postings to the ‘Ali G graffiti board’ (http://pub84.ezboard.com/fbooyakaaliggraffitiboard.showMessage?topicI D=18.topic accessed 15th June 2004) Mossy Unregistered User (11/10/99 6:19 pm) Reply

Da Widnes massive Big up da Widnes massive, da Huddersfield massive is rank. Respect

ossie Unregistered User (11/10/99 6:31 pm) Reply

da widnes massive

JIMMY D Unregistered User (11/16/99 9:43 am) Reply

DA WIDNES MASSIVE

Mossy Unregistered User (12/23/99 6:33 pm) Reply

DA WIDNES MASSIVE

Mossy Unregistered User (12/23/99 6:35 pm) Reply

Da Widnes Massive

For real, the widnes massive is wicked, we 'ave increased our turf to include from the public toilets up to halfway to the drinks machine.

ME IS HEARD THAT WIDNES IS CRAP

SHUT IT JIMMY D, YOU IS A BATTY BOY.WIDNES IS WICKED AND WE AS DA BEST MASSIVE. RECOGNIZE.

Me is feelin it Mr Osssie, me is feelin it.

Translation of messages (main content only): (Widnes is a town in Lancashire and Huddersfield a town in Yorkshire, both in the north of England.) 1.Cheers for the Widnes massive [gang], the Huddersfield massive stinks. Respect. 2.For real, the widnes massive is great, we have increased our turf [area of control] to include from the public toilets up to halfway to the drinks machine.

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3. I HAVE HEARD THAT WIDNES IS CRAP 4. SHUT UP JIMMY D, YOU ARE A QUEER. WIDNES IS GREAT AND WE HAVE THE BEST MASSIVE. RECOGNIZE. 5. I appreciate what you say, Mr Osssie, I appreciate it.

Notes *

1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

I am most grateful to Peter Auer, and to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, for comments and insights. For more on this notion see, e.g. Suhr and Johnson (2003) and other contributions to the same volume. These programs, for example Desmonds and Goodness Gracious Me, undoubtedly had very wide appeal, well beyond the ‘ethnic communities’ they portrayed. This is open to various interpretations, e.g. it could be taken as justifying his adopting the persona of a person from an ethnic minority, or as evidence of the irony in his act since the name ‘Ali G’ is apparently Islamic. For example, people leaving messages in the ‘Ali G Dreambook’ listed the following places as home to their ‘massives’ between February and July 2001: Australia, dOwn uNDeR, brisbane Australia, Essex, Auckland New Zealand (also spelt Orkland, Noo Zeeland), Norway, Bermuda, sweden, Greece, yorkshire, london, Darlington , Dublin, leicester , Sydney, Milan, downtown smestad ghetto, chesham, Tooting South London, Canada, Maidenhead in Berkshire, melbourne oz, Wrexham, Nottingham, Melbourne Australia, Stainds, Christchurch NZ, Sheffield, newcastle, Brighton, Stroud, The Universe, Herts, berkshire, leeds, germany, WARRINGTON, SE LONDON, barnsley skidz, suffolk. There is no way of checking the authenticity of any of these, of course. See appendix 1 for a sample of postings to an Ali G. message board. The problematization of ‘Ali G’’s ethnicity was partly the result of a need to decide whether or not his act was ‘racist’. A number of black comedians and writers complained that it was; others said it wasn’t. A conclusion that ‘Ali G’ was a portrayal of a ‘black’ person could lead to the inference that the act was a racist parody. A conclusion that he was a white adolescent unsuccessfully trying to buy into black culture would not lead to such an inference. See Sebba (2003) for a more detailed discussion. Such a character was by then already familiar in television comedy. The popular comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, featuring British Asian actors had a regular feature of two teenage Asian boys (‘the bhangramuffins’) who unsuccessfully mimicked ‘black’ language and fashions.

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8. This topic has also been discussed on some of the ‘Ali G’ message boards, for example: (i) White People Are Scum..well the majority are!!!!! […] Thirdly, why is u on the ALI G website if pakis is mingin?....and by the way to the white scum 'Pakis' is all the asians in general. Ali is an Islamic name, so if pakis smell why visit a website whose main topic is on a guy with a 'Paki' name. […] (ii) Mrs Ali G you stupid BITCH!!!!!!! If you actually bothered to find out anything about the history of Ali G, you will find that the name Ali is short for ALISTAIR. The whole fucking point of the show is that he is a white middle class boy acting like a black person. THAT IS WHERE THE NAME ALI COMES FROM HE IS NOT TRYING TO BE AN INDIAN HE HAS SHORTENED HIS CHARACTER NAME. DICKHEAD!!!!!!!!!! (iii) U dumb Mutha fuker You idiot u say that ALi is short for something else fair enougth but its not a indian name u dick! it a Islamic Universal Name EH EH eh mongy!

9. London English and Standard English grammar are fairly similar on most points, the phonology less so. Where they do differ, e.g. in the pronunciation of /T/, the London variant is often the subject of strong overt stigma. Lexically their differences are small and may be more due to register rather than ‘variety’. London Jamaican is similar to London English on some points of grammar and similar to Standard on others, but overall it is sharply divergent from both, in grammar and phonology. 10. Where there is likely to be a difference between ‘white’ speakers and those whose family heritage is African-Caribbean is at the level of comprehension. We can assume that most Creole users who come from African-Caribbean homes have fairly good understanding of Creole as it is used in the Caribbean, even if they cannot produce it. This is much less likely in the case of Creole users from non-Caribbean backgrounds, whose comprehension is likely to be limited to the more tokenistic London variety of Creole. 11. The incorrect placement of the apostrophe is in the original. 12. The appendix shows an example of a series of postings to a message board, the ‘Ali G graffiti board’. 13. A part of London with a mainly white working-class and ethnic minority population.

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14. A reference to the fact that Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of ‘Ali G’, is a Cambridge graduate. 15. Occasionally this is confined to the poster’s username or the subject line of the message. See Appendix for further examples of a series of postings to a message board. 16. Some more examples of the multiple interpretations of ‘Ali G’ come from the Urban Dictionary website entries for the term booyakasha (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Booyakasha, accessed 14/08/2006): ‘booyakasha does infact mean kill the white man, but ali g contrary to common belief does not use the word Booyakasha to mean this. ali g uses booyakasha, as a term for his home county BERKSHIRE.’ ‘Actually, since Ali G is Jewish and comes from Israel [sic] it means something totally different. In Hebrew there's a world called BEVAKASHA - which means ‘Here you go’ basically. So he made it into BOOYAKASHA.’ 17. The use of the archaic form methinks is quite unusual in itself and probably must be taken ironically. 18. “I love your ?show all(r)ight and if you could tell a joke about me! It would really be better, enough said” The main ‘Ali G’-related feature is the interjection aight which in origin is probably a lengthened, lax pronunciation of all right but probably has distinct discourse functions and has become iconic of the ‘Ali G’ style. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this chapter for pointing out that aight originated in hip hop language through the African-American English phonological process of liquid vocalization. 19. These deviations from standard are not specific to the ‘Ali G’ sites. They are probably typical of the informal writing style of monolingual English-speaking adolescents (in Britain at least) and include representations of spoken usage, e.g. cos, ain’t, wanna and the use of abbreviated forms which are now familiar in computer-mediated communication and/or SMS text messaging, e.g. for you, <8> for /EIt/, e.g. <m8> for mate, <2> for to and <4> for for. A few forms are also found in adolescent graffiti, e.g. for any as in anyone. 20. Postings are structured by the layout provided by the message board itself (see also Appendix for an example); in the case of many of the ‘Ali G’ related websites, they are laid out as below: Author Username (date/time) Reply [hyperlink]

Comment Subject line Comment

21. But see the collection edited by Kolko et al. (2000).

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22. There is of course no ‘real’ Mrs Ali G. and there is no certainty that the user of this name is really Asian, as she claims, even female or even a single individual. The anonymity of the username means that anything is possible; ‘Mrs Ali G.’could even be the username of a collective of middle-aged male linguistic researchers, and we would never know. 23. “F.B. Aye boyz..”: Aye is a play on F.B.I. and the discourse marker aye (variously spelt) used by ‘Ali G’. 24. A greeting associated particularly with Rastafarians. 25. Reference to an earlier poster with username ‘pugwall’. Getting people’s names slightly wrong is one of ‘Ali G’s’ running jokes. 26. A well known, but very mainstream and ‘safe’ comedian. 27. Another running joke in the ‘Ali G’ show is for ‘Ali’ to end with some visionary ‘words of wisdom’ which rely on a double meaning for humour. 28. The evidence for late disclosure of ethnic identity is not confined to sites devoted to ‘Ali G’, however. For example, an analysis of a series of postings to a message board which is unconnected with ‘Ali G’ shows a similar late disclosure of ‘whiteness’ (four days after the start of the discussion) by one of the most vocal posters.

References Antaki, Charles, Susan Condor, and M. Levine 1996 Social identities in talk: Speakers’ own orientations. British Journal of Social Psychology 35, 473–492. Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe 1998 Identity as an achievement and as a tool. In: Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, 1–14. Bechar-Israeli, Haya 1995 From (Bonehead) to (cLoNehEAd): Nicknames, play and identity on Internet relay chat. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1(2). http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol1/issue2/bechar.html Billen, Andrew 2000 ‘The smiling exile’. New Statesman, 10 April, 51–52. Burkhalter, Byron 2003 Reading race online: Discovering racial identity in Usenet discussions. In: Smith, Marc A. and Peter Kollock (eds.), Communities in Cyberspace. New York: Taylor & Francis, 60–74. Gilroy, Paul 1987 ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’. London: Hutchinson.

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Between Afro-centrism and Euro-centrism: Youth culture and the problem of hybridity. YOUNG 1(2), 1–12.

Hewitt, Roger 1982 White adolescent Creole users and the politics of friendship. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 3(3), 217–232. 1986 White Talk Black Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989 Creole in the Classroom: Political grammars and educational vocabularies. In: Grillo, R. (ed.), Social Anthropology and the Politics of Language. London: Routledge. 1990 A sociolinguistic view of urban adolescent relations. In: Røgilds, Flemming (ed.), Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining. (Studies in Cultural Sociology 28). Copenhagen: Institute of Cultural Sociology, University of Copenhagen, 136–146. Hill, Jane H. 1995 Mock Spanish: The indexical reproduction of racism in American English. http://language-culture.binghamton.edu/symposia/2/part1/index.html Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal 2000 Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In: Kroskrity, P. V. (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities. Oxford: James Currey, 35–83. Kolko, Beth E., Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman (eds) 2000 Race in Cyberspace. New York/London : Routledge. Le Page, Robert B. and Andrée Tabouret-Keller 1985 Acts of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LOADED 1999 Interview of ‘Ali G’ by Danny Plunkett published in LOADED magazine, issue 61, May. Mühleisen, Susanne 2002 Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Prasad, Raekha 2000 ‘Wandering Ali G may not hit the spot’ The Guardian, Friday March 31. Rampton, Ben 1995 Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman 1998 Language crossing and the redefinition of reality. In: Auer, P. (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation. London: Routledge.

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Ronkin, Maggie and Helen E. Karn 1999 Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics on the Internet. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(3), 360–380. Sebba, Mark 1993 London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction. London: Longman. 2000 What is ‘mother tongue’? Some problems posed by London Jamaican. In: Acton, T. and M. Dalphinis (eds.), Language Blacks and Gypsies, Languages Without a Written Tradition and their Role in Education. London: Whiting & Birch, 109–121. 2003 ‘Will the real impersonator please stand up? Language and identity in the Ali G websites’. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28(2), 279–304. Sebba, Mark and Shirley Tate 2002 ‘Global’ and ‘local’ identities in the discourses of British born Caribbeans. International Journal of Bilingualism 6(1), 75–89. Suhr, Stephanie and Sally Johnson 2003 Re-visiting ‘PC’: Introduction to special issue on Political Correctness. Discourse & Society 14(1), 5–16.

Chapter 13 Positioning in style: Men in women’s jointly produced stories Alexandra Georgakopoulou 1.

Introduction

1.1. Style, positioning and discourse approaches to identity Recent research on style within sociolinguistics has been characterized by dynamic, highly contextualized and multidimensional approaches to style, which have drawn attention to its semiotic potential for self-presentation as well as for social meaning-making (e.g. Eckert and Rickford 2001). A key idea in this strand of research is that style can be creatively and strategically drawn upon by speakers to signal a wide range of social identities and roles. By the same token, the notoriously tricky matter of defining style is moving away from distributional criteria towards embracing the following ideas as its constituents: (sociocultural) distinctiveness in the sense of systematic contrasts between different styles in terms of language choices and the social meanings that they signal (Irvine 2001); actively motivated symbolic processes of identification or disaffiliation with social groups; and semiosis which captures the participation of an array of both verbal and non-verbal resources in the constitution of a style (Coupland 2001a: 196). Even so, the business of establishing links between stylistic choices and identities is no more straightforward than any connections between text and context can be, particularly since there is a striking convergence on the fact that such links cannot be seen as one-to-one mappings but as complex, indirect, and mediated couplings. In the search for analytical ways of establishing those – however tenuous − links, a number of related concepts are time and again invoked as mediators, as providing the necessary mid-level between the micro and the macro. To mention just few, such concepts include footing, frame, stance, evaluation, involvement, and last but not least positioning. When talking about stance as one of concepts “with unclear and overlapping reference”, Coupland and Coupland make an argument

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that could be easily extended to all of them, namely that their value is to “direct us to orders of discourse in the mid-range of social contextualization, somewhere between identities and the roles associated with the management of turns or particular communication genres” (2004: 29). In that respect, they can be seen as “a useful corrective to analytic approaches which assume that identities can be read off from the surface forms of talk” (Coupland and Coupland 2004: 29). In an attempt to advance our understanding of linking individual language choices with social identities, this chapter will employ the concept of positioning as a point of entry into processes of identity construction through certain stylistic choices in the conversations of a group of female adolescents. Although potentially applicable to all types of discourse, it is fair to say that positioning has largely informed research on narrative and identity constructions. Within narrative analysis, a volume of relevant studies have directly departed from Davies and Harré’s (1990) seminal paper, in which positioning is defined as referring to “the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines” (48) – the latter part of this definition alluded to in the title of this chapter. This definition firmly locates the construction of selves and identities in interactional sites (conversations) and in this way subscribes to a discourse-based approach to identity; in other words, an anti-essentialist, anti-realist approach that emphasizes the emergence of identities in discourse: instead of being, identities come into being through interactions. In addition, the inclusion of observably highlights the fact that all constructions of ‘self’ are manifest in social (inter-)action, in the participants’ exploitation of conversational structures (cf. Widdicombe 1998: 203; Zimmerman 1998). The definition also forces attention to processes of joint construction or co-drafting (jointly produced). More specifically, the idea that selves are located in interactions as “subjectively coherent participants” can be linked with the ethnomethodological concept of the “architecture of intersubjectivity” (Heritage 1997: 162–163): this refers to the processes through which, in the sequentiality of conversations, participants demonstrate mutual understandings of the local actions performed. In its history, the concept of positioning, in a similar vein to the related concepts outlined above, has exemplified a tension between micro- and macro-analytic projects: as a result, it seems to partake in the technicalia of interactions (e.g. interactional ways of positioning) and in extra-situational resources and processes (e.g. larger social roles and identities pertaining

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beyond the here-and-now of an interaction). Positioning in particular has been frequently associated with pre-existing structures (also variably called master narratives, dominant discourses, cultural texts) or culturally available subject positions (in the Foucaultian tradition) that are postulated a priori of specific interactions: the emphasis here tends to be on how such positions shape and are invoked in speakers’ interactional choices. This kind of work does not seem to be tuned into the emergence of positioning processes through details intrinsic to an interaction and has shied away from an exploration of the fleetingness and contingency of positionings in local contexts (for a critique see Bamberg 1997: 335–342; Georgakopoulou 2000; Widdicombe 1998: 198ff; Wortham 2000: 164–166). That said, an interactionally based and dynamic view of positioning seems to be increasingly gaining ground. Departing from a relational and performative view of self, recent studies have explored positioning as comprising resources or strategies by means of which the speakers’ selves are interactionally drafted, (re)fashioned, and ultimately situated in language practices (Bamberg 2004; Georgakopoulou 2003a; Wilkinson 2003). The assumption here is that, rather than being positioned in a deterministic way by out-there structures, speakers actively and agentively select, resist and revisit positions. These processes are more or less indirectly marked or cued in discourse by specific devices which can be subsequently used as an analytical platform for the exploration of speakers’ identities (for examples, see Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann 2000; Wortham 2000). In addition to providing a useful analytical framework for establishing links between style and identities, in this study positioning is used as a point of entry into interactional constructions of selves and others, mainly for three reasons: a)

b)

Its strong association with story lines affords us with an apparatus for identity work that is keyed to narrative activities. As will be shown, positioning is inextricably bound up in the data with the construction of stories. The concept evokes a powerful metaphor of constructing selves and others as a process of locating them or drawing up spaces for them. At the same time, it suggests that identities locate us, “hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses” (Hall 1996: 5). As will be shown, this process of locating is very important in the data at hand for social categorization.

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Finally, the flexibility (and even ambiguity) inherent in the conceptualization of positioning as “doing” and “being done”, “self” and “other”, opens up possibilities for an exploration not only of how speakers take up positions (and in turn are being positioned) but also of how what they say positions somebody else, be their interlocutors or other participants.

1.2. Positioning of the ‘other’ Interactional accounts of positioning advocate a dialectical relationship between taking up positions and being positioned: both are joint draftings, subject to revision and negotiation. However, positioning also entails the third possibility of current speakers positioning “other” – absent – speakers. This tends to be looked into at the level of a teller’s “representations” of characters in the taleworld. As Bamberg has shown (1997, 2004), an indispensable level of positioning in storytelling involves the representation of characters (e.g. descriptions, evaluations) and event sequences and the ways in which these relate to social categories and their action potential (see Günthner, this volume). From there on, Bamberg argues, we move into positioning level 2, where the referential and representational aspects of story constructions are put to interactional uses, and rhetorically function to convey how speakers signal their relationships with their audience (2004: 6). In working from these two levels of positioning, the analyst is better situated to make assumptions about the ideological orientation within which the speakers are establishing a sense of self. What is important as an insight in this model of positioning is that through constructions of the other, speakers ultimately engage in self-identity work. Put it otherwise, positionings of self implicate positionings of other. Nonetheless, there is still ample scope for looking into the ways in which such constructions or positionings of others take place and how they link up with self-identity work. This paper sets out to address this question, as its data concern the incessant positioning of others, i.e. talked about, absent parties, in the conversational stories of a group of female adolescents. The positioned characters are men that the women are romantically interested in or courted by. The first issue to address is what linguistic resources the participants mobilize for positioning men. It will be shown that the participants have a style at their disposal that comprises more or less implicit ways of talking

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about men and in doing so imbuing social meanings and roles to them. This is intimately linked with their storytelling practices and by extension with their group history. Then, the discussion will turn to the consequentiality of this resonant phenomenon of positioning men in the discourse practices of the group for identity work. The question in this respect will be: How can we connect positioning others and more generally, discourses of alterity with making sense of self? It will be argued that the key to this is to be found in the social practices that members are engaged in and are (re)constituting through their discourse practices: in this case, other-positionings implicate self-identities of femininity and sexuality, since they are integrally linked with the all-important – at this point in the participants’ lives – practices of female friendship on one hand and heterosexual relationships (e.g. courting, dating) on the other hand.

2.

Data

The data for this study come from the conversations of a group of three Greek women (a fourth female person joins in occasionally but is not seen as a “core” member) that describe their relation as “best friends”. This is a small, close-knit clique rather than a large grouping (cf. Hey 1997: 45). The ethnographic study of this group was conducted in various stages between 1998 and 2000 and the data collection involved: a) 20 hours of audio-taped data that two of the participants, Vivi and Tonia, recorded wearing audiomicrophones; b) 60 pages of personal field-notes in the form of a diary; c) interviews before, during and after the period of audio-recordings. Some of these interviews elicited retrospective comments by the participants on what was being said and done in parts of the recorded data. When the recordings started, the participants were 17 years old and living in a small town (25,000 inhabitants) in the Peloponnese, South Greece. At that point, they were re-sitting their University entrance exams and, as such, were outside the school framework. Their daily routine thus involved self-study in the mornings, private tuition in the early afternoons, and socializing thereafter, that mostly took the form of hanging out with one another and chatting at cafés.1 This regular socializing over a long period of time (the participants had been best friends for ten years) had resulted in a dense interactional history, rich in shared assumptions that were consistently and more or less strategically drawn upon to suit various purposes in local interactional contexts.

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The ethnographic study of the group brought to the fore two notable points for this analysis: The first has to do with the participants’ shared linguistic practices; the second involves the semiotic and socio-symbolic meanings of the participants’ space in the sense of practiced place (De Certeau 1984) and the ways in which these are constitutive of plots in story lines about men. To take each issue separately, the participants had a whole identity kit as an emblem of their togetherness: they dressed similarly, went to the same gym, shared music tastes, etc. In the ethnographic interviews and their conversations, a number of shared linguistic identity practices also emerged which, in line with Bucholtz (1999a:212), can be classified as positive and negative. This distinction should not be taken as an absolute or nonnegotiable one. It is rather used here as a heuristic for identifying broad zones of affiliation and disaffiliation which the participants operate with (i.e. draw upon, invoke, cue) when engaging in positionings of others, in this case men. Following Bucholtz (1999a:211), positive identity practices are those in which individuals engage in order to actively construct a chosen identity; negative identity practices are those that individuals employ to distance themselves from an identity. These are listed in Table 1. Table 1. Linguistic identity practices of “best friends” Irene, Fotini, Vivi and Tonia Positive

Imitation of (aspiration to) the Athenian 2 accent

“Correct” pronunciation/use use of foreign (mainly English) words or set phrases

Orientation to language form (e.g. language play, mixing of formal and informal varieties, word coinage, nicknames)

Negative

Avoidance /parody of pronunciation and lexis of local dialect

Avoidance /parody of the (mainly phonological) “hellenization” of foreign words

Parody of parents’ (mainly mothers’) language

An integral part of men’s positioning in the group’s conversations involves locating them in physical time and space in the participants’ small town.

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These spatiotemporal locations are mostly articulated in stories (i.e. meaningful configurations of temporally ordered events, characters, and activities). This process of locating has to be seen in the context of courting and dating: it involves informing other participants of the recent whereabouts of men they are interested in; it also allows them to make plans for future meetings with a man. In terms of physical place, locating involves the participants’ most central places of socializing, e.g. cafeterias, pubs, bars, etc. I have rendered the groups’ characterization of those places (stekia) as hangouts, and discussed their social and symbolic meanings elsewhere (Georgakopoulou 2003c: 418–419). Here, it suffices to add that hang-outs become associated with particular men, types of activities and events, and dating possibilities and scenarios. As we will see below, these contingent plots can play an important role in the positionings of men.

3.

Analysis

3.1

Positioning cues and narrative activities

Positionings of men in the data are part of a certain style of talking about men within specific storytelling activities. As already suggested, distinctiveness is one of the key-features of style. Here, this distinctiveness is shaped by and allusive to the group’s shared interactional history; a rich semiotic system that links associatively speakers, speech styles, talked about parties, social categories, and interactional contexts in “key episodes” and “key-events” (that is, lived or interactional narratives) in the group’s history (cf. Bauman 2001; Irvine 2001: 77). It comprises co-occurring signals or cues on a continuum of explicitness by means of which men are referred to, identified, socially categorized, and assessed. The main positioning cues are as follows: Nicknames: In their histories of practice, these start off as being loosely connected with the talked about person’s particularities, e.g. physical attributes, personality traits, occupation, habits, etc. However, through repeated uses (recycling) in various local interactional contexts (recontextualization) and for various local purposes, they acquire extra layers of meaning. Over time, their meanings become indexical (e.g. Silverstein 1976): they act as short-circuiting devices that evoke a whole range of associations and connotations for the participants.

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Assessments: As in the case of nicknames, assessments which invariably refer to personality traits are mediated by the group’s interactional history and tend to be both indexical and frozen expressions. For instance, the characterization of a particular man as “shy” (dropalos) has ended up in the group’s conversations evoking notions of lack of communication and sociability skills, which are not necessarily denoted by the term, as is widely used in Greek. Membership categorization devices (and category-bound activities): As Sacks (1992) has shown, social categories frequently go hand-in-hand with activities that members routinely attach to them. Both act as constructions of social and moral orders and realities. Stylizations: These involve exaggerated and performance-oriented quotations or interanimations of men’s voices that introduce shifts to “codes” other than the one of the surrounding talk (and, for that matter, the participants’ baseline idiolect). As both Rampton (1999) and Coupland (2001) have argued, stylizations bring into play stereotyped images and values associated with types of people, social groups and situations. In the data at hand, stylizations are mostly quoted punchlines or formulaic fragments from shared stories (see below). In this case too, recontextualisation leads to formulaicity in language expression. As already suggested, positioning cues are mainly traceable to the group’s interactional history, particularly their shared stories. As I have shown elsewhere (2001, 2002), the stories of the group are dialogically interrelated: stories of past events that the group have co-experienced or told are revisited and retold in the context of other stories about future events. In this way, past plots shape a horizon of expectations for future ones. In addition, the storytellings are heavily embedded in their surrounding talk (as opposed to self-contained), unfinished (ongoing), and intertextually linked. As discussed in detail elsewhere (2002), the main type of stories in the data is that of projections (i.e., stories of projected events). These are typically about men, in the sense of planning a meeting with and/or asking out the man that one of the participants happens to be romantically interested in. This planning involves a turn-by-turn co-authoring and negotiation of details in the tale-world, particularly of an orientation kind (e.g. time, place). The plotline typically consists of planned events and verbal interactions of the “You/we will say – he will say” kind. Stories of projected events are dialogically connected to stories of shared (known) past events.

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Finally, breaking news stories are literally stories in the making, as they report recent sightings of “newsworthy” men. 3.2. Positioning in action The following discussion will show positioning cues at work in stories through focusing on three interrelated processes of locating men, styling men, and assessing men. Locating men As suggested, an important function of positioning in the data is to locate men, that is, to situate them in (social) time and place, thus “conferring spatial and temporal specificity on them” (Butler 1997: 29). In doing so, the participants mark the men for certain identities, roles, and activities by associatively linking them with plots, i.e. meaningful activity types and event sequences that are routinely attached to the specific time and space coordinates. In the process, these plots can be reaffirmed and reinforced in their local use and/or they can render new plots intelligible. Excerpt (1) below, a “breaking news” story, introduces the character talked about with a nickname (line 2, ǼțȜĮȚȡȐțȚ [‘Eclairette’]). Nicknames figure prominently in breaking news: conversations take place in public places (normally in hangouts) and it is important that the participants use their secret code. At the same time, nicknames are positioning cues inasmuch as they conjure up a host of shared meanings that make the activities reported intelligible: (1)3 Participants: Tonia (T), Fotini (F), Vivi (V). 1 T: A:: (.) įİ ıĮȢ İȓʌĮ. ȉȠ ʌȡȦȓ ʌİȡȞȐȦ Įʌ 'ĲȠ (( )) (..) İȓȤİ țȩıȝȠ 2 (0.5) ʌȠȪ ȞĮȚ ĲȠ ǼțȜĮȚȡȐ::țȚ? (.) ʌȠȪ ȞĮȚ ĲȠ ǼțȜĮȚȡȐ::țȚ? (.) 3 ȞȐ::ĲȠ ĲȠ ǼțȜĮȚȡȐțȚ. Ǽțİȓ ıĲȘ ȖȦȞȓĮ (.) ȝİ ĲȘ ıțȠȪʌĮ ‘Oh ::(.) I didn't tell you. This morning I go past (( )) it was packed (0.5) where's Eclaire::tte? (.) where's Eclaire::tte? (.) the::re's Eclairette. There in a corner (.) with his brush’ ((or vacuum cleaner))’ 4 F: ȇİ (.) Ș ıțȠȪʌĮ țĮȚ ĲȠ ǼțȜĮȚȡȐțȚ ȑȤȠȣȞ ȖȓȞİȚ // ȑȞĮ ‘Man (.) the brush and Eclairette have become // one’ ĺ5 V: // Ǿ ıțȠȪʌĮ ĭȓȜȚʌȢ ȡȠȣĳȐİȚ ĲȘ ıțȩȞȘ //‘The Phillips vacuum cleaner sucks the dust’ ((sings a TV commercial jingle))

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((They all laugh)) 6 T: ȆĮȚįȓ ȝȠȣ (.) țĮȚ ȞĮ ʌȦ ȩĲȚ İȓȞĮȚ ȖȣȞĮȓțĮ ȝİ ĲȘ ıțȠȪʌĮ (..) ĮȣĲȩ: ĲȠ ʌȡȐȝĮ! ‘Guys (.) as if he were a woman with a brush (.) wha:t a thing!’ 7 F: ĬĮ 'ȤȦ țȚ ȐȞĲȡĮ ȞȠȚțȠțȪȡȘ ȡİ:: (..) ĲȚ ȐȜȜȠ șȑȜȦ:? ‘I'll have a house-proud man guys (..) what else do I want?’ 8 V: ǼȓȤİ ĳȐİȚ țȠȣȡĮȝʌȚȑ: țĮȚ ıțȠȪ:ʌȚȗİ? ‘Had he had a kourabies ((traditional pastry with icing sugar)) and he was clea:ning?’ 9 T: ȤĮ ȤĮ (..) ȆİȡȞȐİȚ (( )) țĮȚ ȜİȑȚ (.) țĮȜȐ İȓȤİ ʌȚȐıİȚ ȕȡȠȤȒ:?= ‘hhhh hhh (( )) passes and says (.) wow did it rain?=’ 10 F: =ȤĮ ȤĮ (..) ǲȕȡİȤİ ȜȚȤȠȣįȚȐ? ‘=hhhhhh (.) Had it been raining sweets?’

“Eclairette” (line 2) is the diminutive form of a pastry and has loose connections with the fact that the talked about person frequently buys that pastry in quantities from the patisserie that Fotini’s father owns. In the interactional history of the participants, there has been a suspicion that such visits are owed more to the love interest that the man in question has for Fotini and less to the actual pastry. Nonetheless, over a period of three years in use, the nickname has developed added layers of meaning. Its associations with sweetness (the character is frequently referred to as sweet) have lent themselves to the attribution of feminine qualities to Eclairette. Elsewhere (2005: 172–178), I have argued that the positioning that this nickname short-circuits is that of a “soft” (i.e. feminine) man which is systematically juxtaposed in the data with the positioning of a “hard” (i.e. tough, macho) man. Here, I am not going to discuss the kinds and discourses of masculinities being evoked and brought about by such positionings. I am rather interested in how in local contexts, shared images and meanings about the men talked about are indexed, added to and reaffirmed. In addition to reporting the latest whereabouts of Eclairette, excerpt (1) is about evoking and reaffirming familiar associations regarding the character talked about. The re-affirmation of such associations seems to hold the key to this story’s tellability in the sense of its current local relevance. At the same time, the re-affirmation of the familiar is a pleasurable activity in itself, as the participants’ playful and allusive collusion in drawing up a positioning for Eclairette suggests. The reported activity of vacuum cleaning gives rise to a playful exchange where an ironic tone is added by the reference to a shared text, a slogan from a TV commercial (line 5) that is sung by Fotini. Tonia adds to the domestic line of association in line 6 by

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bringing in a membership category bound activity: Cleaning is something women do and not men. This line of association works in parallel with sweetness. The latter is picked up (again) in line 8 by Vivi. Locating men in the social space of the community and, in the process, invoking activities and events associated with it is not just a playful activity of reaffirmation of shared assumptions. It is also instrumental in the joint drafting of dating scenarios and possibilities. Although I do not wish to suggest that discourse practices automatically and necessarily translate into “real-life” decisions and choices, it is still notable that, as we will see below, the suitability of each man as a partner ultimately hinges on the kinds of (interactionally debated, contested, and negotiated) positionings that the group come to draw up. In an excerpt from a projected story, there is a synergy of positioning cues with regard to the man talked about that shape the events under construction. The character talked about owes his nickname Carnation (a brand of milk) to the nature of his family business (a traditional dairy-products patisserie). As is the case with Eclairette, the nickname has developed additional connotations. It also tends to co-occur with semantically related cues (e.g. references to dairy products). (2) 37 V: 38

39 T: 40 V: 41 T: 42 43 44

45 V:

KĮ:ȜȐ: ȡİ TOȞȚĮ ȦȡĮȓĮ (.) șĮ ʌĮȢ ȑȞĮ ʌȡȦȓ ıĲȠȣ ȀĮȞĮĲȐ İțİȓ ʌȠȣ țȐșİĲĮȚ ıĲȘȞ ʌȩȡĲĮ șĮ ĲȘ ıĲȒıİȚȢ țĮȡĮȠȪȜȚ ĮʌȑȞĮȞĲȚ ıĲȠ ȋȩȞĲȠ ‘That’s okay Tonia (.) so you'll go one morning to Kanata's when he stands at the door you’ll be waiting ((to catch him)) opposite at Hondo’s’ ((cosmetic shop)) ǻİȞ İȓȞĮȚ țĮțȩ ĮȣĲȩ ‘That’s not a bad idea’ >ĬĮ ıİ įİȚ șĮ ĲȠȞ įİȚȢ< șĮ ıȠȣ ʌİȚ ʌȫ:Ȣ Įʌȩ įȦ! ‘He’ll see you you’ll see him he’ll say what brings you here?’ ȁȠȚʌȩ:Ȟ șĮ ĲȠȣ ʌȦ >ʌȐȦ ȞĮ ʌȐȡȦ țȐĲȚ Įʌȩ ĲȠ ȋȩȞĲȠ< șĮ ʌȚȐıȠȣȝİ ĲȘȞ țȠȣȕȑȞĲĮ ȖİȞȚțȫȢ țĮȜȐ șĮ ĲȠȣ ʌȦ (.) İıȪ ȩĲĮȞ ĲİȜİȚȫȞİȚȢ Įʌȩ įȦ įİȞ ʌĮȢ ʌȠȣșİȞȐ? ((ȤĮ ȤĮ)) ı' ȑȤİȚ ĳȐİȚ ĲȠ ȖĮȜĮțĲȠȝʌȠȪȡİțȠ= ‘So I’ll tell him I’m just popping to Hondo’s to get something we’ll strike up a conversation about this and that then I’ll say you going somewhere when you finish here heh huh or are you too preoccupied with the milk pies?’ ȤĮ ȤĮ ǻİȞ șİȢ ȞĮ ʌȐȝİ ȖȚĮ țȡİȝȠȪ:ȜİȢ ‘heh huh don’t you want to go for a crème brû:lée?’

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Before line 37, Tonia and Vivi negotiate the time and place of the projected meeting with “Carnation”. It is only when the character is located by Vivi in the familiar surroundings of his family business (Kanata’s, the name of the patisserie) and when the meeting is projected there that Tonia seems to agree with the time and space co-ordinates of the projected events (39). The agreed on place of the meeting immediately invokes category bound activities which are drawn upon humorously by Tonia as part of her plotting the meeting. The dairy product (milk-pies) is mentioned jokingly as the character’s preoccupation (line 44), as perhaps one that Tonia will try to take the character away from for a social outing. Vivi (line 45) responds with another joking reference to a dairy product (crème brûlée). In addition to colluding with Tonia in reaffirming shared images about the character, Vivi formulates a suggestion for a date on its basis which is a twist of the theme of “let’s go out for a drink”. By dislocating the character’s activities from the patisserie and relocating them in the incongruous context of a date, new associations are momentarily created and evoked.4 Deciding on the plot of stories ultimately hinges on the participants’ joint locating of men in time and place; working around their sports playing or watching activities; considering the implications of meeting them in one hang-out as opposed to another; debating over and rehearsing the lines appropriate for one meeting place as opposed to another. Styling men Stylizations of men more often than not draw on iterative, quotable fragments of language (see Coupland 2001: 345). This is where the recontextualization of shared sources in the group comes into its own. Every talked about man has developed in the group’s conversations a recognizable voice that is time and again discursively re-enacted and, through such reenactments, increasingly stylized. Men’s stylized voices are invariably traceable to quotations from shared stories. For stylization to work, the language in which the voice is performed has to deviate from that of the current speaking context. Stereotyped and exaggerated renderings of other voices are a necessary ingredient here. The participants have a wide range of social varieties as well as French and English at their disposal. Of those, they mostly opt for a) the local dialect, frequently mixed with elements of other regional dialects, b) mangika (a sociolect based on slang and historically associated with marginalized groups of men), c) baby-talk, and d) katharevousa (lit. pure; a formal variety of Greek that originates in its long

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history of diglossia, which was officially abolished in 1976). What they borrow from those sociolects is the pronunciation (particularly regarding a– c above) and a specific (limited in repertoire) lexis. However, the actual instances of stylizations are made up of quotations that have some kind of meaning for the group and are rooted in the group’s shared interactional history. In this sense, culturally familiar codes blend in with and are mediated by micro-culturally shared codes. A case in point is the colloquial phrase se pao (‘I fancy you’). The group frequently stylizes its (Northern Greek) dialectal form se pau (note the raising of the unstressed mid-vowel /o/ to /u/). This stylization originates in a quotation from a shared story line involving a truck-driver who made an unsuccessful pass at one of the participants. The use of the dialectal form combines associations of lack of sophistication and unfortunate chat-up lines. It thus stands for a male social type, frequently called by the participants as vlachos (‘peasant’).5 In this case, the use of a regional (and, in effect, social) dialect “becomes imagined as connected with focal individuals and scenes, or with characteristic activities and ways of being” (Irvine 2001: 31).6 In turn, those connections or associations “become available as a frame of reference within which speakers create performances and within which audiences interpret them” (idem). Mila tu re, mila tu (‘Talk to him man, talk to him’) is another quotable fragment, partly overlapping in connotations with se pau, as it is frequently used to stylize the voice of inarticulate men. It nonetheless also indexes men’s awkwardness around women and shyness, in the general sense outlined above. In the story from where the phrase was originally extracted, it served as the punchline and was addressed (by one of his friends) to Mikes, a male character that epitomizes lack of communication skills and sociability in the group. As in the case of other positioning cues, what is notable about stylized phrases like Mila tu re, mila tu is the reflexivity, meta-awareness and knowing allusiveness that is involved in their recycling (cf. Coupland 2001). Their use brings up what is known and familiar thus inviting the participants to look for an understanding of what is said beyond the encounter on hand. Tellingly, all of the stylizations in the data are done laughingly and playfully and immediately responded to as such: there is shared enjoyment in the acknowledgement and reaffirmation of the familier, even if the local use of a stylization may be contested afterwards, as we will see below:

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(3) ȍȡĮȓĮ (…) ȕȡȓıțȦ İįȫ țȐʌȠȣ ĲȠ ȂȐțȘ ( ..) ȑĲıȚ? ‘Tell me now … we are talking serious. Okay … I bump into Makis right?’ 22 F: MȚȜȐİȚ Ƞ ȆĮȪȜȠȢ ȝİ ĲȘ ǺȚȕȒ İțİȓ, țȚ Ƞ ȂȐțȘȢ İȓȞĮȚ İțİȓ, țĮȚ ĲȚ ĲȠȣ ȜİȢ, TI TȅȊ ȁEȈ? ‘Pavlos is talking to Vivi, and Makis is there, and what would you tell him, Ǿǹȉ?’ ĺ23 T: Ta țȐȜĮȞĲȡĮ?= ‘The carols?=’ 24 V: =Ta țȐȜĮȞĲȡĮ ‘The carols’ ((laughs)) 25 F: ǵȤȚ ĲĮ țȐȜĮȞĲȡĮ ȡİ ʌĮȚįȓ ȝȠȣ, ȐȝĮ ıȠȣ ĲȪȤİȚ ʌȡȫĲĮ Įʌ’ ȩȜĮ (..) ȞĲȐȟİȚ? ‘Not the carols man, assuming it’s going to happen (..) right? WHAT do I tell him?’ ĺ26 V: ĬĮ ĲȠȣ ȝȚȜȒıİȚȢ ıĲȘ ȖȜȫııĮ ĲȠȣ ĲȠȣ ʌĮȚįȚȠȪ, ıİ ʌȐ:Ƞȣ ȤĮ ȤĮ ȤĮ ‘You’ll speak to the guy in his language, I fa::ncy you hhh=’ ĺ27 T: ȅȣ ȓįȚȠȣȢ ȤĮ ȤĮ ȤĮ ‘=hhhh It’s me=’ ĺ28 F: Ǿ ȓįjȚĮ, Ș ĭȦĲİȚȞȒ. EȖȫ ıİ ȟȑȡȠȣ:, ȤĮ ȤĮ ȤĮ İıȪ įİ ȝİ ȟȑȡİȚȢ? ‘=It’s me, Fotini. I kno:w you, hhhhh (..) d’you know me:?’ 29 F: ȀĮȚ ʌİȢ ȩĲȚ țȠȚĲȐȦ Įʌȩ įȦ, ʌȦȢ șa ĲȠȣ ĲȡĮȕȒȟȦ ĲȘȞ ʌȡȠıȠȤȒ? ‘And say he’s looking this way, how am I going to draw his attention?’ ĺ30 V: ȤĮ ȤĮ ȤĮ MȓȜĮ ĲȠȣ ȡİ: ȝȓȜĮ ĲȠȣ ‘hhhhhh Ta:lk to him man, huh talk to him man’ ((personation of Pavlos, allusion to a shared story)) ((They all laugh)) (2.0) 31 T: KaȜȐ: (..) ʌȐȞĲȦȢ Ƞ ȆĮȪȜȠȢ İȓȤİ ʌȠȜȪ ȖȑȜȚȠ ‘Gee (..) Pavlos was so funny’ 32 F: EȁA ȇE( ..) EȁA ȇE, ȑĲıȚ ȑțĮȞİ ȡİ ʌĮȚįȓĮ, ĲȠȞ ȟȑȡİȞĮ ĲȠ ȤȡȚıĲȚĮȞȩ= ‘COME ON (..) come on you gu:ys, he d-didn’t mean it tha::t way, they were all friends of the guy=’ 21 F:

Makis (nickname Mikes) is the man that Fotini is at that point romantically interested in and the participants are planning a meeting with him. Makis is stylized with regionally marked forms. The first involves a dialectal form (kalandra instead of the standard form kalanda, line 23), as a response to Fotini’s question about her projected verbal interaction with Mikes. The second involves the quotable fragment se pau (line 26), which we discussed

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above. This comes as an example of “his language”, in other words, it indexes Makis’s language as a regionally marked variety and himself as a peasant. As instances of stylization constitute a temporary breach of the ongoing activity (cf. Rampton 1999), that is, a ludic and playful moment, they tend to generate further stylizations. The uptake of Vivi’s se pau is laughter and further stylizations on the same theme by both of her interlocutors: e.g. the /o/ of o idjos (lit. ‘the same’; ‘it’s me’) and of kser-o (‘know’) in lines 27 and 28 is raised to /u/ (kseru). Furthermore, mila tu re, mila tu indexes similar images, associations, and personality attributes in line 30. Laughter from all three interlocutors is the typical response to the stylizations. However, Fotini, having conformed to the norm of positive uptake, goes on (line 32) to differentiate her position (come on come on you guys) and defends the talked-about character, implying that he was not being unsociable and shy as he is being accused of by her interlocutors (he didn’t mean it that way). The above suggests that not only have repeated performances led to a specific set of stylized phrases but they have also generated a closed set of sequentially immediate responses (e.g. laughter, exact repetition, repetition with variation, further stylization), which can be subsequently followed up by a wide variety of affiliative or disaffiliative moves. Assessing men Positioning men invariably involves an element of assessment (cf. evaluation): past actions and words (in specific time and place) are scrutinized, and, on their basis, future actions gauged, predicted, allowed, and disallowed. It is through a joint process of piecing together events and interpretative viewpoints that the participants decide on who the good men are and equally who should be avoided. Assessments frequently mobilize membership categorization devices. The term γatos (‘cat’) is reserved for older, cunning, and sexually exploitative men; the term aϑoa peristera (lit. ‘innocent pigeon’) is used for men who lie, yet protest too much about their innocence.7 As suggested above, stylizations too index social roles and attributes. Over a period of negotiation and debate in the interactional history of the group, a list of good and bad male personality traits has been agreed on by the participants: lying is close to the top, but being shy, as defined by the participants, is worse.8 These assessments come close to Davies and Harré’s known roles: they tend to be larger roles and attributes that the participants know to hold

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above and beyond local storytelling situations. As such, they can be described as the talked about men’s “transportable” identities that can be at any stage brought about in local contexts and made relevant (Zimmerman 1998). The degree of routinization that accompanies other positioning cues is to be found here too. Talk about Eclairette for instance very frequently generates the phrase Eclairaki kai pali Eclairaki (‘Eclairette again and again’). Recontextualizations of assessments often serve as argumentative devices in the course of jointly constructing stories. In other words, participants invoke them in order to defend their own views and challenge their interlocutors’ viewpoint or version of events. In that role, assessments tend to appear later in the course of storytelling, as the ultimate negotiating chips, when the argumentative use of other positioning cues (e.g. nicknames, stylizations) has failed. A case in point is the long projection story, from which excerpt (3) is taken from. The gradual undermining of Mikes by Tonia and Vivi9 by means of stylizations (the phrase “talk to him man, talk to him man” is brought up 5 times in the course of the storytelling), references to shared stories, and membership categorization devices find a lot of resistance from Fotini. Tellingly, assessments come in towards the end of the story: Mikes is called anti-social by Vivi in line 179 (the story is 206 lines long); the assessment is immediately colluded by Tonia: (4) 179 V: 180

181 F:

ǲȁǹ ȇǼ, įİȞ İȓȞĮȚ țȠȚȞȦȞȚțȩȢ (..) ĲİȜİȓĮ ʌĮȪȜĮ= ‘OH COME on, he is not sociable (..) full stop= =ȂĮ ĲȚ ȜİȢ (...) ĮȣĲȩȢ? ȉȑȡĮȢ țȠȚȞȦȞȚțȠʌȠȓȘıȘȢ. =You don’t say (…) him? But they don’t come more social than that.’ ǺȚȕȒ, įİȞ ȟȑȡİȚȢ, ȝʌȠȡİȓ ȞĮ ĲȠȞ įȦ țĮȚ ȞĮ ȝȘ ȝ’ĮȡȑıİȚ, ȝʌȠȡİȓ ȞĮ ȝİ įİȚ țĮȚ ȞĮ ĳȪȖİȚ ȝĮțȡȚȐ, įİȞ ȟȑȡİȚȢ. ‘Vivi, you don’t know, I may not fancy him once I meet him, he might see me an’ run a mile, you ju:st don’t know.’

This assessment is not challenged by Fotini; what her next turn simply shows is that she is still keen on the meeting with Mikes. Typically, assessments are accepted as agreed on and un-contestable, holding above and beyond the local context of the current telling. Assessments frequently involve comparisons between men, which reinforce the group’s agreed positive and negative evaluations of certain per-

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sonality traits. In the story of Fotini’s meeting with Mikes, Eclairette is towards the end of the story invoked as a more suitable candidate for a date with Fotini than Mikes:

(5) 1 T: 2 V: 3 F: 4 V: 5 T: 6 V:

=ȇİ (.) ĲȠ ǼțȜĮȚȡȐțȚ İȓȞĮȚ ıĮĳȫ::Ȣ țĮȜȪĲİȡȠ!= ‘=Man (.) Eclairette’s s-so:: much better!=’ ȂĮțȡȐȞ (..) ȝĮțȡȐȞ ‘=By far (..) by far’ ȇİ ǺǿȕȒ ȝȘ ȝȠȣ ȜİȢ ȝĮțȡȐȞ, ʌȑıȝȠȣ ȦȢ ʌȡȠȢ TI:? ‘Don’t by far me VIvi, you tell me on account of WHA:T?’ >ȍȢ ʌȡȠȢ İȝĳȐȞȚıȘ<= ‘>On account of looks<=’ =>ȍȢ ʌȡȠȢ ȤĮȡĮțĲȒȡĮ<= ‘=>On account of character<=’ >=ȍȢ ʌȡȠȢ ĲȘȞ ʌȡȠıȦʌȚțȩĲȘĲĮ<= ‘>=On account of personality<’

Similarly, in the excerpt below, Tonia has just finished a breaking news story about Job (nickname), an older man who is frequently labeled as a “cat”. The participants are wary of “cats”, even if they find them attractive.10

(6) 1 T: 2 V: 3 F: 4 T:

ȆȚȠ ȦȡĮȓȠȢ Ƞ īȚȠȝʌ Įʌȩ ĲȘ ȋȩȞĲĮ? ‘ ((Is)) Job better-looking than Honda?’ ȂȘȞ ĲȠ ıțȑĳĲİıĮȚ țĮșȩ:ȜȠȣ, >șĮ ȖȓȞȠȣȝİ ıțĮĲȐ!< ‘Don’t even think about it, >we’ll fall out big time!<’ ȉI ı’ ĮȡȑıİȚ ʌȐȞȦ ĲȠȣ? ‘WHAT d’ you see in him?’ ȉȚ ıȠȣ ȜȑİȚ ȖȚĮ ȝȑȞĮ? ‘((singing)) What is s/he telling you about me?’

Vivi’s response (line 2) to Tonia’s question seems to cancel out the validity of a comparison between Job and Honda; the emphatic refusal to enter the terms of the comparison also seems to presuppose that the answer that Tonia is looking for is “yes”. Fotini indexes prior knowledge by explicitly asking Tonia what she sees in the man talked about (line 3). Tonia ends this “assessment quiz” by singing the line “What is s/he telling you about me?”

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(line 4) from a popular Greek song that forms a commonly routinized response in the group to men’s positioning cues (e.g. stylizations of men’s voices, assessments). The line seems to serve as an imaginary reaction on the part of the talked about man; it is as if he addressed the person who negatively evaluates him. In this way, the mode-switching involved in the line (from talking to singing) signposts and ties in with a shift in voice and perspective.

4.

Discussion: From other-positionings to self-identities

So far, I have shed light on the linguistic resources by which the participants draw up men’s. I have argued that those resources are stylistic (in the sense of forming distinctive systems for projecting social personas and meanings), indexical and embedded in the group’s stories. They also work together to position men as social actors in specific locales, associated with typical events and activities, ways of talking and (inter)acting. The identities that they construct for those men can by no means be sequestered from the social practice of dating and courting which is of paramount importance in the participants’ lives. The men are primarily talked about as potential sexual partners. As such, through the discourse practice of positioning men, participants come to resolve who is appropriate or permissible to go out with, what sort of a dating scenario suits them, what to say and do in courting situations. In this way, the joint construction of men’s positionings progressively provides interpretative grids for collectively assessing past, present, and future relationships with men and for drafting shared ideologies of what a good or bad sexual relationship is. This warrants a view of positioning men as a relational process: through their intense preoccupation with the other, the participants ultimately make sense of self as a heterosexual social actor. What their own expectations of a relationship, likes and dislikes are; what their understandings about sexual and social boundaries are. Heterosexuality and by extension femininity are at the heart of these processes. Both of them are, however, co-constructions: fashioned and contested within the economies of friendship and with reference to shared interactional practices. Female adolescents’ friendship has often been described as the basis for forms of social subjectivity (e.g. Hey 1997). In this case, it is important to note that the participants’ identities of femininity and

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sexuality, albeit negotiated and jointly fashioned, are by no means uniform or undifferentiated. As I have argued elsewhere (2005), the four women differ significantly in their gendered identities.11 Vivi, who is in many ways the leading figure of the group, is the only sexually active member of the group; Tonia faces her heterosexual desires with fear and consistently frames the friendship bonds within the group as a safe environment for working through her fears, as a mediator for her anticipated engagement with the “heterosexual market-place” (Griffin 1985); Fotini frequently orients to the community’s disapproval of sexually active women at the participants’ age and seeks romantic love (cf. Hey 1997: 97–99). Finally, Irene being “conservative” and a “church-goer”, finds it difficult to articulate or act upon her desires and fantasies except for within the group practice of positioning men. Despite these differences, they are all fully aware of – even if critical – the boundaries and constraints of their community regarding what is acceptable female behaviour. In particular, they articulate and debate the tension between finding a “nice guy” and a “cool guy”. As discussed above, “cats” endlessly fascinate them, although they have come to agree on the fact that they are “dangerous”. On the other hand, “nice” or “sweet” men (that, as seen, tend to be associated with domesticity) can be “too nice” and “boring”. The positionings of two of the men exemplified above, namely Eclairette and Mikes, over time (i.e. in the course of six months) are revealing of this dynamic: As seen in excerpt (1), Eclairette is routinely and playfully positioned as a nice, sweet, and domestic guy. At the same time, Mikes (excerpt (3)), who is a also a potential romantic interest of Fotini, is parodied as one of the crude guys (peasants), but Fotini is undoubtedly attracted to him and his suitability as a boyfriend is intensely debated. Although Eclairette is on occasion assessed as being more suitable than Mikes (excerpt (5)), from the audio-recordings it becomes apparent that social positions constructed for the two men become increasingly parodic, polarized, and crystallized in the course of six months: the positioning of Eclairette as sweet and domestic is pushed to the emic category of a “soft” (cf. camp) man while Mikes is gradually labelled in a polarized way as a “cat”. In real life, Fotini does not end up going out with any of them. Instead, she starts dating Vassilis, about whom the group have made the decision – after intense debate – that he is not a cat. Positionings of men are thus ways of both othering and intimating them in the process of the participants making sense of their own heterosexual roles and identities.

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Conclusion

Using as its point of departure, positioning as defined in Davies and Harré, and discourse approaches to identity, this study has attempted to address the discourse practice of talk about men (and constructions of men) that resonates across narrative episodes in the conversations of four adolescent female best friends. Positioning has provided an analytical framework for exploring links between stylistic choices, discourse activities within which these take place and constructions of identities. It has thus enabled the analysis to capture a set of interrelated phenomena that are usually kept apart. Although the close association between positioning and narrative has been well attested, less attention has been paid to the empirical, micro-discursive ways in which positioning takes place within story lines. Explicit characterizations that tend to be viewed as evaluative phenomena have captured most analytical attention, while indexical resources for drawing up positionings have not been looked into sufficiently (Wortham 2000: 166–167). The salience in the data at hand of talk about men called for a repositioning of positioning as a construction of “other” that shifted away from the focus of the literature on “self” and delved into the systematicities of other-constructions. At the same time, to account for those systematicities, it was necessary to move beyond the local encounters on hand and into a trajectory of interactions that constitute the group’s interactional history and relational identity constructions. It was shown that men’s positionings were more often than not implicit rather than named, articulated through indirect references to the group’s shared semiotic associations between styles and social meanings and personas, or to their shared stories. As men’s positionings were invariably embedded in (fantasy events) stories of dating, they placed heterosexual roles and identities at the heart of the participants’ micro- and macro-concerns. Other positionings thus implicated self-constructions of femininity, of finding the right place in the heterosexual market. In many respects, these reported practices are comparable with the findings of numerous sociological and psycho-social studies of adolescent girls’ private micro-cultures of friendship, which have stressed the significance of relationships with boys in their economies of friendship (e.g. Hey 1997; Griffin 1985; McRobbie 1991). The imperative to intimate and enter the heterosexual market is key to the forms of social subjectivity of adolescent girls. Analysts have in that respect noted that female subjectivity cannot be understood but with reference to how women experience boys and mascu-

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linity, as boys are in their head even if they are not around (Holland et al 1991 quoted in Hey 1997: 128). However, if men are in the girls’ head, they unfortunately tend to be absent from the analysis of their discourse practices, making for scarce empirical research on exactly how girls bring up, evoke and represent men in their discourse practices and what this means for their own identities. The same lacuna can be noted in studies of language and gender. Despite the long tradition here of nuanced attention to details of talk as a prerequisite for identity analysis (e.g. see Bucholtz 1999b), talk about others (cf. discourse of alterity) has been consistently neglected. As a result, the analytic vocabulary for linking the two processes of positionality of the other and self-constructions is far from refined or complete. Given these limitations, this chapter has put forth a connection between other-positionings and self-identities on the basis of combining interactional analysis with an ethnographic perspective on the data at hand. This integrative methodology is in line with the latest practice-view of identities that sees them as bound up with the types of activities participants are engaged in with others in a specific point of their lives (e.g. via Bourdieu 1977; Bucholtz 1999b; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1999; Wenger 1998). Within such a framework, there is still much scope for exploring the implications of other-positionings for self-identity. In this study, other-positionings entailed iterative and performative enactments of stylistic resources. Routinized performances have been linked with processes of subject formation and more specifically with the constitution of gendered subjects and positions (Butler 1993, 1997). Empirical fine-grained analysis could explore how the interactional construction of gendered positions other than a speaker’s demonstrable ones can be legitimately brought together with the process of exploring and ultimately naturalizing (Butler 1993) own gendered positions. Another notable aspect of the men’s positionings in the data at hand was that of fantasy and (erotic if not sexual) desire. The discursive construction of desire is only now beginning to be put on the map of sociolinguistics and the links with empirical analyses remain tenuous (see Cameron and Kulick 2003). As Rampton suggests (2006), the complex interaction between language, visual imagery, sensations, fantasy, desire, and anxieties is rarely attended to within sociolinguistics (see discussion in ch 9); and he urges a recognition of processes that bring linguistic analysis closer to the cultural analysts’ discussions of subjectivity (257). A detailed documentation of the sites, forms and (hegemonic or counter-hegemonic) practices of gendered other-positionings should be central to this project.

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Notes 1. This routine was quite typical of a large number of the participants’ contemporaries in Greece. Entrance to a Greek university was highly competitive, with only 1 in 4 candidates securing a place, so re-sits of the “Panhellenic” exams the following year were quite common. (The educational system has undergone certain changes since then.) 2. It is important to note here that the Athenian accent is not to be taken as an undifferentiated whole. Although sociolinguistic studies of its variation are sadly missing, participants seem to model their own accent on certain youthoriented TV shows and media personalities. 3. ĺ is used for stylizations; bold for other positioning cues. 4. This idea of experimenting with the men’s usual location in stories certainly resonates across the group’s conversations, where one of the frequent imaginary scenarios in projections involves taking male characters out of their surroundings (e.g. in some cases outside the town) and re-casting their usual activities, frequently to a humorous effect. 5. This is a derogatory term in Greek that can be indiscriminately directed against non-Athenians. Interestingly, the participants, who are not Athenians themselves, use this term to characterize certain social types and groups within their small community. This discourse practice is intimately linked with the participants’ shared linguistic identity practices, as discussed above, particularly their disaffiliation from the local dialect. 6. Elsewhere (2005:174–176), I discuss the role of dialect style in the positioning of a macho man. 7. Both are adapted from everyday usage in Greek, but extra meanings and connotations have been added. 8. This was articulated in the ethnographic interviews with the participants. 9. Elsewhere (2002, 2003b), I have discussed the ways in which the participants’ larger social roles and identities (e.g. hierarchy within the group) bear on their discourse identities (e.g. ratification of challenge of interlocutors’ views, collusion) in local conversational contexts. 10. There are numerous interactional debates in the data as to whether the participants should go out with a man that falls into this category. Over time, and on the basis of Vivi’s bad experience with a specific ‘cat’, the term becomes increasingly pejorative and the positioning of a man as cat normally precludes a dating possibility. 11. These diffferences emerged not only from the analysis of the interactional data, but also from the itnerviews and the fieldnotes.

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References Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bamberg, Michael 1997 Positioning between structure and performance. In: Bamberg, M. (ed.), Oral versions of personal experience: Three decades of narrative analysis. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7, 335–342. 2004 Narrative discourse and identities. In: Meister, Jan Christoph, T. Kindt, W. Schernus, and M. Stein (eds.), Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. http://www.clarku.edu/~mbamberg/Papers/discourse_identities.htm Bamberg, Michael (ed.) 2000 Special issue: Narrative Identity. Narrative Inquiry 10(1). Bauman, Richard 2001 The ethnography of genre in a Mexican market: Form, function, variation. In: Eckert, Penelope and John Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 57–77. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice, R. Nice (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bucholtz, M. 1999a “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a group of nerd girls. Language in Society 28, 203–223. 1999b Bad examples. Transgression and progress in language and gender studies. In: Bucholtz, M., A. C. Liang, and L. A. Sutton (eds.), Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3–24. Butler, Judith 1993 Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York/London: Routledge. 1997 Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York/London: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah and Don Kulick 2003 Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coupland, Justine and Nikolas Coupland 2004 A place for stance? Stance, role, frame and identity in geriatric medicine. In: Sociolinguistics Symposium 15: Culture – ContactChange, Abstracts. Newcastle upon Tyne, 1–4 April.

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Coupland, Nikolas 2001a Language, situation and the relational self: Theorising dialect style in sociolinguistics. In: Eckert, P. and J. Rickford. (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 185–200. 2001b Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30, 245–375. Davies, Bronwyn and Rom Harré 1990 Positioning: The discursive construction of selves. Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour 20, 43–63. De Certeau, Michel 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet 1999 New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research. Language in Society 28, 185–201. Eckert, Penelope and John Rickford (eds.) 2001 Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 2000 Analytical positioning vis-à-vis narrative positioning. Commentary of Wortham, S. “Interactional positioning and narrative self-construction”, 157–184. Special issue: Narrative Identity. Narrative Inquiry 10, 185–190. 2001 Arguing about the future: On indirect disagreements in conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 33, 1881–1900. 2002 Narrative and identity management: Discourse and social identities in a tale of tomorrow. Research on Language and Social Interaction 35, 427–451. 2003a Positioning self and other in jointly produced story lines: Where are we? Paper presented to the Panel on Positioning in Discourse at the 2003 AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics) Conference, Arlington, VA, 22–25 March. 2003b Looking back when looking ahead: Adolescents’ identity management in narrative practices. In: Androutsopoulos, J. and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 75–91. 2003c Plotting the “right place” and the “right time”: Place and time as interactional resources in narratives. Narrative Inquiry 13, 413–432. 2005 Styling men and masculinities: Interactional and identity aspects at work. Language in Society, 163–184.

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Small and large identities in narrative (inter)-action. In: Schiffrin, D., A. De Fina, and M. Bamberg (eds.), Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 83–102. Griffin, Christine 1985 Typical Girls? Young Women from School to the Job Market. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hall, Stuart 1996 Introduction: Who needs identity? In: Hall, Stuart and Paul du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 2–17. Heritage, John 1997 Conversation analysis and institutional talk: Analysing data. In: Silverman, David (ed.), Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice. London: Sage, 161–182. Hey, Valerie 1997 The Company She Keeps: An Ethnography of Girls’ Friendship. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press. Irvine, Judith 2001 ‘Style’ as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In: Eckert, Penelope and John Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 21–43. Lucius-Hoene, Gabriele and Arnulf Deppermann 2000 Narrative identity empiricized: A dialogical and positioning approach to autobiographical research interviews. Special issue: Narrative Identity. Narrative Inquiry 10, 199–222. McRobbie, Angela 1991 Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. London: Macmillan. Rampton, Ben (ed.) 1999 Styling the other: Introduction. Special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics 3, 421–427. 2006 Language in Late Modernity. Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, Harvey 1992 Lectures on Conversation, vols. 1 and 2, G. Jefferson (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Silverstein, Michael 1976 Shifters, linguistic categories and cultural description. In: Basso, Keith H. and Henry A. Selby (eds.), Meaning in Anthropology. Arbuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 11–55.

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Wenger, Etienne 1998 Communities of Practice. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Widdicombe, Sue 1998 Identity as an analysts’ and a participants’ resource. In: Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, 191–206. Wilkinson, Sue 2003 Constructing health, gender and sexuality: Positioning in action. Keynote address at the Murdoch Symposium on Talk-in-Interaction, Murdoch, 15–17 December. Wortham, Stanton 2000 Interactional positioning and narrative self-construction. Special Issue: Narrative Identity. Narrative Inquiry 10, 157–184. Zimmerman, Don H. 1998 Identity, context and interaction. In: Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, 87–106.

Chapter 14 The construction of otherness in reported dialogues as a resource for identity work* Susanne Günthner 1.

Introduction We are what we are because they are not what we are. (Tajfel and Forgas 1981: 124)

As Thomas Luckmann (1979, 1983, 2003) in his account of the origin of identity in communicative social interactions points out, in face-to-face encounters the experience of self is built up in the experience of others, i.e. the individual experiences her/himself in relation to others.1 This paper is intended to study the connection between self and other, between identity and alterity, between “what we are” and “what they are not” by looking at ways in which speakers in everyday interactions construct their own identities by (explicitly and implicitly) positioning themselves in opposition to characters animated in their narratives. Focusing on reported dialogues in everyday interactions and exploring reporters’ ways of animating and stylizing others, I will argue that reported speech is a resource speakers creatively and strategically draw upon to contextualize social types and do identity work. In the process of categorizing their animated characters as social types or as representatives of social groups, such as ‘foreigners’, ‘innocent children’, ‘snobs’, ‘machos’, etc. (Günthner 1997a and b, 1999a, 2000), reporters not only evaluate the quoted characters and their behavior but implicitly position themselves and construct their own identity; i.e. the construction of alterity is closely connected to the reporters’ own identity management. Hereby, heterogeneities within linguistic systems as well as “social communicative styles” (Kallmeyer 1995) play a major role. Furthermore, I will show that identities are not only built up in sequences of reported dialogues but they also become interactively consequential: by animating their characters as representatives of (negative) so-

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cial types, narrators invite their recipients to disaffiliate from the staged figures and affiliate with the narrators’ own stances and positions. In this way, common identities and forms of “(as)sociation” (Simmel 1908 [1958]) between the interactants are constructed. The study will concentrate on the following questions: (i)

What linguistic resources – i.e. linguistic varieties, prosody, voice quality, lexico-semantics, etc. – do speakers use to symbolize social types in reported speech? (ii) Which methods do speakers exploit in order to express their disaffiliation from the social characters portrayed in the quoted dialogues? (iii) What is the relation between the construction of otherness and the construction of a speakers’ own identity? In what ways is the discourse of alterity connected to the discourse of identity? The analysis is based on informal encounters (conversations over dinner, coffee-break chats and telephone interactions among friends and family members) as well as institutional interactions (conversations during a training program organized by a German airline, radio-phone-ins, and institutional consultation sessions) recorded from 1986 until 2002 in Germany. The study uses the methods of interpretative sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and the interactional analysis of prosody.

2.

The construction of social identities by stylizing otherness in reported speech

In reporting utterances, narrators often stage past dialogues as “little shows” (Goffman 1974 [1986]: 506). In this way, speakers not only signal whose voice is being quoted and what kind of activity the quoted character is aiming at, but, at the same time, reporters comment on the utterances and provide “speech about speech, utterance about utterance” (Voloshinov 1978). The staging of past utterances and interactions is an ideal device with which to stylize social characters and position oneself by indicating one’s affiliation with or disaffiliation from these characters and their way of (mis)behaving (Günthner 1999a, 2000, 2001). For example, in reporting past reproaches, we frequently evaluate these reproaches as inappropriate, hysterical, unjustified, too aggressive, etc. and typify the reproacher as ‘a

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petty bourgeois’, ‘an eccentric’, ‘a choleric type’, etc. (Günthner 1999a). These constructions of otherness form the subtext for the reporters’ selfpositioning; i.e. the dissociation from the constructed other brings to bear upon the reporter’s self-positioning and serves as means for her/his own identity work.2 In line with positioning analysis (Bamberg 2003, 2004), I shall investigate the process of performing identity within the acts of a narrator’s construction of alterity. This involves looking at the communicative resources and repertoires used by narrators in the process of interaction in order to position themselves and others. The analysis will reveal that the use of communicative styles (Kallmeyer 1995) – i.e. sets of co-occurring cues and communicative patterns (located on various linguistic levels) which receive social meanings as a whole in the particular community – plays a major role in the construction of social types through animated dialogues and in the narrators’ positioning of themselves in and via these dialogues. I will first consider sequences in which speakers use reported speech to animate their characters and stylize them as social types. I will then explore the resources reporters use to position themselves and construct their own identities through these reported dialogues. Thus, a dynamic, interactional oriented view of positioning analysis will be used to explore the interactive construction of identities.3 2.1. The construction of social types in reported dialogues – four examples The following analysis of four transcript segments will show how reporters in everyday narratives make use of heterogeneities within the linguistic system to animate their characters, to cast them into a social category4 and at the same time express their disaffiliation from the quoted characters. (1) The ‘Oberschullehrer’ (‘school inspector’) The first example STIPENDIUM (‘SCHOLARSHIP’) is taken from a telephone conversation between two friends, Inge and Klara. Both are students in a PhD program at a German university. Inge has applied for a scholarship to study in Paris and has just come back from the interview when Klara calls her to find out how the interview went. Inge produces the following ‘complaint story’.5 She has just reported how ‘horrible’ the interview was when Klara asks her for more details:

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STIPENDIUM (SCHOLARSHIP) ja=und wie LIEFs=n dann? 38 Klara: ‘yeah and then what happened?’ ja also die also die alle saßen mir (.) so gegenÜBer. 39 Inge: ‘yeah well they well they all sat (.) across from me.’ < lauter f FU:RCHTbar wichtige gesichter;> 40 < ‘a bunch of terribly important faces;’> hihihihihhh[hh] 41 Klara: ‘heeheeheehh[hh]’ 42 Inge: [un] bombard↑Ie:rten mich mit (-) echt ↑SAU blödn fragen. ‘[and] they bombarded me with (-) totally stupid questions.’ 43 Klara: ( ) der eine kam mit <<manieriert, h> ↑tja (.) 44 Inge: lyoTARD is doch eine epi↑GO::ne.> ‘one of them said <<mannered voice, h> yeah (.) lyotard is really an epigone.>’ HHH O::H .hhh [↑↓IRRE. ] 45 Klara: ‘hhh oh .hhh [wild]’ 46 Inge: [der nächste] meinte ich sollte ihm mal erKlÄRN, ‘[the next one] wanted me to explain to him,’ was man unter ↑DEkonstruktion ver [steht.] 47 ‘what deconstruction [is.]’ 48 Klara: [hihihi] [‘heehee’] das das wär doch en ↑↓mO::de (.)↑GAG. < un weiter 49 Inge: nichts.> ‘it was just a silly fashion. < and nothing more.>’ ja sind die eigntlich be↑SCHEUert. ne::h.= 50 Klara: ‘yeah are they totally stupid or what.’= ja < man könnts echt mein=n>. 51 Inge: ‘=hm < you’d think so.>’ 52 (--) naja. eh: hh ja:hh und ein einer (.) der war echt Ü:bel 53 Inge: drauf. ‘well eh: hh well and one one of them he was really bad.’ (heh?) 54 Klara: (‘hm?’) ( ) hat mich auf franZÖsisch angesprochen. 55 Inge: ( ) ‘he started talking to me in french.’ 56 Klara: [mhm. wollt dich testn.] [‘mhm he wanted to test you.’] prüfungsmäßig)] 57 Inge: [( [( ‘like an exam’)] jaja. < war so=n ↑OBERschullehrer (.) typ.>= 58 ‘yeahyeah < he was the school inspector type.>’=

The construction of otherness in reported dialogues 59

Klara:

60

Inge:

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Klara:

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=kanns mir leibhaftig VO:R[stelln.] =‘I can really imagine [that.]’ [naja] (-) [‘oh well’] (-) jedenfalls machte er mich auch ↑BLÖD an; ‘in any case he also got on my back;’ von=wegen < pour↑quoi ça doit être à pAr↑I:s.> ‘went like < pourquoi ça doit être à pari:s.>’ ‘why does it have to be paris’ ↑↓NE::HH. (hast du ) ‘no. (did you )’

Starting in line 39 ff., Inge depicts the details of the interview. By metaphorically referring to the interviewers’ series of questions as a ‘bombardment’, she evokes the image of a war setting, where she is being attacked by her opponents sitting ‘across from her’. She explicitly evaluates the interviewer’s questions as ‘totally stupid’ (line 42), and in order to illustrate this evaluation, she reconstructs their utterances. The first interviewer’s commentary ↑tja (.) lyoTARD is doch eine epi↑GO::ne.>. (‘yeah lyotard is really an epigone’) (line 44) is reproduced in such a way that it is given an arrogant overtone: the mannered articulation of the particle ↑tja contextualizes the arrogance of the quoted character, and the noun epi↑GO::ne. (‘epigone’) is prosodically distorted in such a way that we can detect a “layering of voices” (Bakhtin 1981; Günthner 1997b; Schwitalla 1997): We ‘hear’ the voice of the interviewer but – due to the prosodic stylization – we also ‘hear’ Inge’s evaluation of this utterance as exaggerated, inappropriate, and arrogant. Thus, several voices are superimposed on one utterance: The reported speech of the character blends with the narrator’s negative evaluation (Günthner 1999a, 2000, 2002). The staging of the interview situation invites Klara to communicate her indignation about the interviewer’s behavior. Her affectively marked sign of disapproval HHH O::H .hhh ↑↓IRRE. (‘hhh oh .hhh wild’) displays her co-alignment. The lengthening of the vowel O::H, the marked rise-fall intonation contour and the adjective IRRE (‘wild’) function as indignation markers, i.e. ritualized expressions which the recipients employ at strategically important locations in order to signal affective co-orientation and coindignation (Günthner 2000). In re-animating the second interviewer, we also recognize this “layering of voices” even though it occurs in indirect speech: das das wär doch en ↑↓mO::de (.)↑GAG. < un weiter nichts.> (‘it was just a silly fashion. < and nothing more.>’) (line 49). The lengthening of the vowel O::,

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the high onset with the falling glide on ↑↓mO::de and the high onset on ↑GAG communicate a certain condescension. Furthermore, the reported speech is stylized in such a way that it comes close to what Bakhtin (1981: 339) calls “parodistic stylization”, i.e. a “malicious and deliberately parodistic distortion of another’s word, slander”. For Bakhtin, parodistic stylization is the subversive part of a polyphonic utterance: the reporter uses the voice of the other and exploits it for his own purposes (Günthner 1997a, b). Silverstein (1985), who draws on Jakobson’s insights on the metalinguistic function of language (messages about messages), treats reported speech as ‘metapragmatic activity’ par excellence: by quoting past utterances, speakers represent and comment on the use of language. In doing so, they express their stance. Inge’s stance of the interviewer’s attitude towards deconstructivism as ‘a silly fashion’ is supported by Klara's reply in line 50: ja sind die eigntlich be↑SCHEUert. ne::h.= (‘yeah are they totally stupid or what.=’). In the episode at hand, the narrator indicates – by means of indirectly commenting on the reproduced utterance – her stance towards the quoted characters and distances herself from their arrogant habitus. The dramatic staging of the characters’ styles of interviewing invites the recipient, Klara, to communicate her alignment with the reporter’s perspective on the inadequate behavior of the antagonists (lines 45; 48; 50). In line 53, Inge introduces the third interviewer with the explicit, evaluative comment ‘he was really bad’ and refers to the fact that he spoke French. Klara (line 56) as well as Inge (line 57) interpret his code-switching into French as his attempt to construct ‘an exam situation’. By adding the membership category ↑OBERschullehrer (.) typ. (‘the school inspector type’), Inge explicitly introduces social categorization.6 In German, the term Oberschullehrer is ambiguous: On the one hand it refers to a high school teacher, on the other hand, Ober- can be interpreted as an intensification of the category school teacher, i.e. an exaggerated school teacher type. As Bucholtz and Hall (2004: 37) argue, by categorizing someone, the speaker positions him/herself. By labelling the interviewer Oberschullehrer, Inge disaligns herself from this social type and constructs her own identity ex negativo: in stating what “they are”, Inge indirectly expresses what “she is not”. Thus, the construction of alterity serves as a resource for the construction of self. In the following, Inge uses category-bound activities (Sacks 1972: 335) to substantiate the social category of the Oberschullehrer. These are based on the use of French in combination with marked prosody and change in voice quality, i.e. increase in volume, high register and an aggressive, impertinent-sounding voice: < ̓pour↑quoi ça doit être à pAr↑I:s.>

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(‘why does it have to be paris’). The reporter’s code-switching into French (line 61) is used as a resource to stage the interviewer with the corresponding membership activity (to test the interviewee) and, at the same time, to claim authenticity. This French speaking↑OBERschullehrer (.) typ tops the other two interviewers (in the list of three) by his outrageous communicative behavior. Again, the recipient shows her alignment with the reporter’s stance, and her reaction (↑↓NE::HH. (‘no’)) is oriented towards the staging of the third interviewer’s utterance. In categorizing the interviewers as men who believe themselves to be important (‘terribly self important faces’), who attack the protagonist in a war-like scenario (‘bombarded me’), who are arrogant but who are not academically up-to-date (‘stupid questions’), who do not appreciate or understand deconstructivism and who turn the interview into a school-like testing situation (by even asking questions in French), the narrator implicitly positions herself as someone who is in favor of deconstructivism, who is academically up-to-date and who is more of a true scholar than the ‘school inspector types’ who were interviewing her. The contrast built up between the arrogant interviewers (who are only school teacher types) and the up-to-date candidate (i.e. the narrator) can be understood as justification for the fact that the interview did not go well, that it, in fact, was ‘horrible’. (2) The ‘arrogant, condescending doctors’ In STIPENDIUM (‘SCHOLARSHIP’) the reporter used code-switching into a different language in co-occurrence with prosody, voice quality, and the reconstruction of communicative activities (asking ‘stupid questions’) to symbolize social types and disaffiliate herself from them. In the following transcript LUNGENKREBS (‘LUNG CANCER’), the narrator makes use of code-switching into standard German in combination with particular prosodic and lexico-semantic features to construct otherness.7 Hedda, her niece Ulla and Ulla’s daughter Sara are having coffee, when Hedda tells them about her doctor’s behaviour when her husband had lung cancer. The participants speak in the local Southern German dialect (Swabian): LUNGENKREBS (LUNG CANCER) 32 Hedda: i han dortmols no: (.)zum doktor ↑↓hartmann gsa: (0.8) ‘well I then (.) said to doctor hartmann’ (0.8) 33 i TRAU net. ‘I am sceptical.’

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34 35 36

37

Sara:

38

Hedda:

39

Sara:

40

Ulla:

41

Hedda:

42

Ulla:

ob des net LUNGEkrebs isch. ‘if it isn't lung cancer.’ no hot der glei gsa ‘then he immediately said’ <<spitz, manieriert,↑↑> ACH. DAS könnt auch was ANDERS SEIN.> <<sharply, with mannered voice,↑↑> ‘ah it could also be something else.’> hat der ↑↓gsagt. ‘that's what he said.’ <<↓> ja.> <<↓> ‘yes.’> und der hats aber GWIßT. ‘but he knew it.’ haja. FREILE.= ‘yes. of course.’= =haja. [(des )] ‘=of course.[(it )]’ [(der hat)] ja s' ergebnis vom labor ghät. ‘[(he already)] had the results from the laboratory.’

Hedda reconstructs a dialogue-scene between herself and her doctor. In line 34, she quotes the I-protagonist’s worries about her husband’s illness by using the local Swabian dialect and thus the same variety the participants in the reporting world (Ulla, Sara and Hedda) are speaking. However, with the doctor’s reply she switches to standard German (line 36) <<spitz, manieriert, ↑↑> ACH. DAS könnt auch was ANDERS SEIN.> (‘<<sharply, with mannered voice, ↑↑> ah it could also be something else.>’). This codeswitching stands out from the surrounding context and contrasts not only with the local dialect variety used by the protagonist but also with the local dialect variety of the participants in the reporting world. Thus, heterogeneity within the linguistic system (dialect variety vs. standard German) becomes a resource with which to symbolically express otherness, and to create a separation between ‘us’ and ‘him’. In co-occurrence with the marked prosody (very high register and the sharp voice), this switch to standard German also contextualizes the doctor’s condescension towards his patient. Due to the exaggerated prosodic stylization (by means of a very high register and a mannered articulation), the reporter contextualizes her own evaluation of the doctor’s behavior. Thus, again we can observe a “multi-

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voiced text” (Bakhtin 1981): the narrator’s voice penetrates the character’s reply and evaluates it. The reconstructed scene between Hedda and the doctor reflects different ways of communicating: The I-protagonist’s concerned inquiry about her husband’s illness is contrasted with the arrogant sounding dismissal of the doctor, who even lies to her. Instead of employing explicit category names (such as ‘arrogant doctors’), the reporter relies mainly on indexical means (such as code-switching into standard German, prosodic features, means of voice quality, the interjection ACH) to signal social meanings and at the same time to contextualize her evaluation of the doctor’s communicative behavior. Thus, what Voloshinov (1978) calls “speech interference”, also happens in everyday reported speech: one utterance can simultaneously belong to two persons (the quoted figure as well as the reporter), it can be anchored in two “worlds” (the story-world and the reporting-world) and it can carry two points of view (the quoted figure’s perspective and the evaluative perspective of the reporter). As in STIPENDIUM (‘SCHOLARSHIP’), we can also observe in LUNGENKREBS (‘LUNG CANCER’) how linguistic stylization in reported speech is closely connected to the social categorization of the animated figures and how code-switching into different languages or varieties in co-occurrence with prosodic means, voice quality, and particular communicative activities are used to construct otherness and to produce patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Instead of a single parameter, reporters make use of co-occurring cues – i.e. of social communicative styles – to typify the animated figures. As the following example will show, social communicative styles and social categorizing are related to shared cultural knowledge and stereotypes concerning social groups. (3) ‘Kanaken (‘wogs’) trying to exploit the German welfare system’ In the preceding examples, reporters used code-switching into French and standard German to stylize individual characters and typify them as members of particular social groups (‘aggressive interviewers’, ‘condescending doctors’). In the following piece of talk (TEPPICHJODEL ‘CARPET SALESMAN’), code-switching into pidgin German is exploited to reconstruct and animate ethnic groups. The transcript segment stems from an interaction between a carpet salesman (T) and Willi and Bea Müller. While at the Müllers’ house trying to sell carpets, the salesman talks about politics. In the following lines he

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complains about foreigners who come to Germany to exploit the German welfare system: TEPPICHJODEL (CARPET SALESMAN)8 32 T: ne?= ‘right?’= 33 W: =[des stimmt.] =[‘that's right.’] 34 T: [die kanAK]en komm=n hier an, ‘[the wogs] arrive here (in Germany),’ und sagn [ich mein eh eh,] 35 T: ‘and say [I mean eh eh,]’ 36 W: [da hasch schon recht.] [‘you are right about that.’] die sagn, 37 T: ‘they say,’ < was wiss=du (du-du-du-du) deutsche 38 LAND?> < ‘what you want (you-you-you-you) german land?’> die ruMÄnen alle (.) nech? 39 ‘all the romanians (.)right?’ < geh du DEUTSCHland,> 40 < ‘go you germany,’> < du vier hundert MARK,> 41 < ‘you four hundred german marks,’> ja. 42 B: ‘yeah.’ < die frau nich arbeiten BRAUCH,> 43 T: < ‘the wife not need work,’> < KIND (.) jedes jahr KIND.> 44 < ‘child (.) every year child.’> JAHAJAHAHA 45 W: ‘YEAHHAYEAHHAHA’ ne: (.) un=un=un=un=und die andern ja AUCH. 46 T: ‘right (.) an=an=an=an=and the others too.’ nech? 47 ‘right?’ die TÜ:Rken und so weider, nech? 48 ‘the turks and so on right?’ jedes jahr KI:ND, 49 ‘every year child,’ < u=u=u=u=und schöne GEld (kinder-),> 50 << falsetto, choked > ‘a=a=a=a=and good money (children),’> < du du (.) rEIche MANN,> 51 < ‘you you (.) rich man,’> < zehn jahre du zuRÜCK nach=nach=e (.) 52 türKEI,> < ‘ten years you back to=to=eh (.)turkey,’>

The construction of otherness in reported dialogues 53 54 55

W: T:

429

< du rEIche MANN.>= < ‘you rich man.’>= =HAHAHAHA[HAHAJAJA] [ja is] doch WAHR; ‘[well] it really is true;’

T complains about die kanAKen9 (‘the wogs’) who come to Germany to exploit the German welfare system by having many children and receiving child benefits. In using the derogative and even racist term kanAKen (‘wogs’) and in animating their voices in a stylized pidgin German variety with a high pitched falsetto voice, T’s negative stance is apparent: < was wiss=du (du-du-du-du) deutsche LAND?> (‘< what you want (you-you-you-you) german land?>’). In line 39, T explicitly introduces the ethnic category of the Romanians and reanimates their voices speaking as one; i.e. as “choral dialogue” (Tannen 1989: 113f.): Individuals are melted into one social group speaking with one voice. Romanian migrants address other Romanians and encourage them in pidgin German (with a high pitched, choked, falsetto voice) to go to Germany and benefit from the German social system (lines 40–44): < geh du DEUTSCHland, du vier hundert MARK, die frau nich arbeiten BRAUCH, KIND (.) jedes jahr KIND.> (‘< you go germany, you four hundred german marks, the wife not need work,> child (.) every year child.>’). Again, we can detect polyphonic strategies: The quoted utterances simultaneously express the (seeming) attitudes of the characters, and the refracted intention of the reporter. The high pitched falsetto voice parodistically distorts the quoted speech. Again, the reporter uses the voice of the other and exploits it for his own purposes (Günthner 1997a, b). W acknowledges T’s performance by laughing out loud (lines 45 and 54). In line 48, T switches to the ethnic category of ‘the Turks and so on’. Without explicitly introducing the reported speech in line 49, the reporter “puts on the voice” (Rampton 1995: 54) of Turkish immigrants addressing Turkish recipients and telling them – again in pidgin German – how to make use of the German social system by collecting child benefits in order to get rich: jedes jahr KI:ND,< u=u=u=u=und schöne GEld (kinder-),>< du du (.) rEIche MANN, zehn jahre du zuRÜCK nach=nach= (.) türKEI, du rEIche MANN.> (‘every year another child,> < a=a=a=a=and good money (children-), you you (.) a rich man,>< ten years you back to=to=eh (.) Turkey,> you rich man.>’). Again, we observe a layering of voices (Bakhtin 1981; Günthner 1999a, 2002; Deppermann in

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this volume): We hear the animated voices of the foreigners (the Turks and Romanians) who advise other foreigners to go to Germany, exploit the German social system and get rich, but we also hear the reporter’s negative evaluation of the animated figures and their way of thinking. T’s performance invites his recipients to co-align with his evaluation towards immigrants; and W’s laughter in lines 45 and 54 shows his appreciation of T’s performance and his co-alignment. In this example, the reporter T makes use of various membership categories (die kanAKen (‘the wogs’), die ruMÄnen (‘the romanians’), and die TÜ:Rken (‘the turks’)). In order to illustrate category-bound ways of thinking and speaking, he applies specific linguistic resources (morphological, syntactic, and lexico-semantic elements) stereotypically associated with the verbal style of guest-workers (‘Gastarbeiterdeutsch’): – deletion of definite and indefinite articles: KIND (.) jedes jahr KIND (instead of standard German: ein Kind, jedes Jahr ein Kind) – inadequate congruence in complex NP: u=u=u=u=und schöne GELD (kinder-), du du (.) rEIche MANN; (instead of: und schönes Geld, du du reicher Mann) – deletion of prepositions: geh du DEUTSCHland (instead of: gehst du nach Deutschland) – incorrect use of prepositions: zehn jahre du zuRÜCK nach=nach=e (.) türKEI (instead of: nach zehn jahren gehst du zurück in die Türkei) – deletion of verbs: jedes jahr KI:ND, du vier hundert MARK, du du (.) rEIche MANN, zehn jahre du zuRÜCK nach=nach=e (.) türKEI (instead of: jedes Jahr bekommst du ein Kind, du bekommst vier hundert Mark, du du bist ein reicher Mann, nach zehn jahren gehst du zurück in die Türkei) – reduced morphology: wiss=du, BRAUCH, geh du (instead of: willst du, braucht, gehst du). Thus, the subsumption of the animated characters under the social category kanAKen is supported by their category-bound ways of speaking; i.e. the choice of a particular verbal style embodies ethnic characters. Linguistic and communicative choices are portrayed as part of collective actions and wider social processes. The lack of prestige of the staged variety is obvious. The linguistic features of the animated style (pidgin German) have sociosymbolic value and are made relevant for the construction of social groups (Kallmeyer and Keim 1994; Kallmeyer 2002; Deppermann in this volume).

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(4) The ‘Nazi’ So far, reporters drew on code-switching into various linguistic varieties (French, standard German, pidgin German) in co-occurrence with prosody and voice quality to index social types and to portray otherness. In the next example, DIE NAZIS (‘THE NAZIS’), the reporter uses particular communicative activities and routine formulas – combined with prosodic means and features of voice quality – to animate a quoted figure and portray him as a ‘Nazi’. The segment is taken from an interaction between Hedda and her greatniece Sara. Sara is asking Hedda about the Jews in their village during Hitler’s reign, and whether the villagers had any idea what had happened to them. When Hedda reveals that everyone had known about torture and concentration camps, Sara asks why no one did anything about it: DIE NAZIS (THE NAZIS) ha MÄDle, 112 Hedda: ‘well my girl,’ < do hosch NIX sage DÜ::rfe,(.)> 113 < ‘you could not say anything,’(.)> < zu HITlers ZEIte.> 114 < ‘during hitler's times.’> < do: wärsch jo: DRA: komme,> 115 < ‘they would have caught you,’> nebe danne de HUTmacher, 116 ‘our neighbor this hutmacher10,’ < ob der dir no DENKT,> (.) ne 117 < ‘you still remember him,’> (.)‘ne’ wenn mer do äls morgens NAUS isch, (.) 118 ‘when we went out there in the morning,’ (.) gute MORge, 119 ‘good morning,’ 120 (0.8) < weisch du NET wie des HEIßt.>= 121 < ‘don't you know what you have to say.’>= =< des heißt HEIL HITler.> 122 =< ‘you have to say HEIL HITLER.’> <<entrüstet> hi hh' hoh hh'> 123 Sara: < hi hh' hoh hh' > hot der gmacht 124 Hedda: ‘that's what he did’ < wahnsinn.> 125 Sara: < ‘unbelievable.’> net? (-) 126 Hedda: ‘isn't it?’ (-) < und wenn des no oimol sächsch,> 127 < ‘and if you say that once again,’>

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128 129 130 Sara: 131 Hedda:

< no MELD i DE.> < ‘I'll report you’>. (0.5) [( )] [SO] hots do NAzi dabeighät. ‘[there] were such nazis.’

In lines 113–115 Hedda uses a cautionary, whispering voice to iconically illustrate the danger of speaking out during Hitler’s time. Starting in line 116, she provides an exemplary story to support her previous evaluation that it was dangerous to stand up against Hitler’s regime. First, she introduces the villager de HUTmacher, and in line 118f. she sets up the scene of somebody going to a certain part of the village and greeting Hutmacher in the usual, unmarked way: gute MORge (‘good morning’). After a short pause, without explicit introduction, we are confronted with a reproachful tone of voice: the falling terminal pitch, the global increase of loudness and tempo, the high register, and the narrow focus (in line 121) contextualize affective irritation and aggression.11 These prosodic features are in sharp contrast to the preceding, prosodically unmarked greeting routine (line 119). The stylization of an aggressive, commanding voice and the addressing of his co-participant as du (the T-version of the German address system) contextualizes an authoritarian figure. Furthermore, in this little reconstructed greeting-dialogue, the first pair part (the greeting routine gute MORge) which makes a second greeting conditionally relevant, is instead answered by a reproach. The combination of the reproach activity with the accompanying aggressive, irritated tone of voice indicates a demonstration of power, and the staged voice can easily be attributed to the figure of Hutmacher. The prosodic features and voice quality in combination with the reproach activity and the routine formula ‘HEIL HITler.’ clearly display the antagonist as a member of a certain category: the ‘Nazis’. Sara reacts by showing her indignation at this kind of behavior, and thus orients to the reporter’s stance. In line 127f., again, we are confronted with the antagonist’s voice without any explicit introduction. Such direct confrontations with quoted voices are possible once a particular voice is established as being characteristic of a particular figure. Hedda uses the already established prosodic design to reanimate Hutmacher’s voice and to stage his threat. The selection of a particular semantic inventory, such as melden (‘report’) and the extreme case formulation no oimol (‘once again’) in combination with the communicative activity of threatening function as category-bound features indexing the

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particular social identity. Only in line 131 does Hedda explicitly introduce the membership category: the ‘Nazis’. 2.2. Identity work through the foil of portraying otherness On the basis of the analysis we shall now try to answer the questions raised in the beginning: (i)

What linguistic resources do speakers use to symbolize social types in reported speech?

As the four examples show – and as Sacks (1972) argues – participants coselect various category-bound features in doing membership categorization. In stylizing and typifying their characters as members of social categories (arrogant school inspector types, condescending doctors, immigrants exploiting the German welfare system, and Nazis), reporters heavily rely on indexical means, such as code-switching, prosody, voice quality, lexicosemantic cues, and the use of particular routine formulas. Instead of a single parameter, reporters make use of co-occurring cues – i.e. of social communicative styles – to typify the animated figures. (ii) Which methods do speakers exploit in order to express their disaffiliation from the social characters portrayed in the reenacted dialogues? Instead of explicitly evaluating the portrayed characters and their activities, tellers frequently make use of Bakhtinian polyphony to express their stances towards the portrayed types. Techniques of “layering of voices” are employed to implicitly present various perspectives within one utterance: the perspective of the quoted figure and the perspective of the teller. Through the exaggerated stylizations and distortions of the quoted utterances, we can discover the reporters’ negative evaluations of the portrayed characters and their activities. In STIPENDIUM (‘SCHOLARSHIP’), LUNGENKREBS (‘LUNG CANCER’) and TEPPICHJODEL (‘CARPET SALESMAN’), reporters use code-switching into French, standard German, and pidgin German to build a contrast between the variety spoken by the antagonist(s) in the story-world on one hand and the I-protagonist and participants of the reporting-world on the other. Thus, linguistic heterogeneities are used as resources to construct otherness and to produce patterns of inclusion (‘we’) and exclusion ( ‘they’). In DIE NAZIS (‘THE NAZIS’), the teller contrasts different ways of greeting to portray social belongings: a

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friendly gute MORge (‘good morning’) is answered by a harsh reproach and contrasted with the Nazi routine formula HEIL HITler. Furthermore, the transcripts reveal that in staging different ways of communicating, social categories not only become relevant but also consequential (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998: 3): Recipients are invited to show their disaffiliation from the animated social characters and their misbehavior, and, at the same time, to affiliate with the reporters’ own behavior and stance. The recipients’ reactions (their laughter, indignation signals, signs of disapproval, etc.) indicate how the staging of the characters functions as a device to evoke emotional and moral co-alignment and contribute to the construction of common identities (‘we’ against ‘they’).12 (iii) What is the relation between the construction of otherness and the construction of a speakers’ own identity? In what ways is the discourse of alterity connected to the discourse of identity? As Bamberg (2004: 6) says: “By offering and telling a narrative, the speaker lodges a claim for him/herself in terms of who he/she is”. However, the question arises: How do reporters communicate their own social identity? Instead of using explicit means of self-categorization (e.g. ‘I am a real academic’, ‘I am a worried wife’, ‘we are hard-working Germans’, ‘I was not a Nazi’), narrators in our data categorize themselves en passant by indexing who they are in contrast to the animated social figures. Such techniques of negation (Iser 1972: 67ff.), where the narrators position themselves through the negative foil of inadequate behavior, can be observed in all four examples: In STIPENDIUM (‘SCHOLARSHIP’), by distancing herself from the arrogant school inspector types who bombarded her with silly questions about deconstruction and who – by speaking French – turned the interview situation into a school-testing situation, Inge reflects on herself as an academically up-to-date scholar. In LUNGENKREBS (‘LUNG CANCER’), Hedda portrays herself as a concerned wife – speaking in the local dialect – in contrast to an arrogant condescending doctor who answers in standard German and even lies about her husband’s illness. In TEPPICHJODEL (‘CARPET SALESMAN’), T, by constructing the social category of the Kanaken (the ‘wogs’) who take advantage of the German social system in order to become rich, constructs his own identity along with that of his coparticipants, as German citizens, who are exploited by foreigners. In DIE NAZIS (‘THE NAZIS’), Hedda contrasts her own friendly way of greeting by using the routine formula Guten Morgen with the antagonist’s aggres-

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sive reaction and his insistence on greeting with Heil Hitler. Hereby, ‘she implicitly categorizes herself as a non-Nazi. In highlighting the antagonists’ impolite, inadequate and marked ways of communicating, tellers not only construct themselves as morally superior but also distance themselves from the social categories attributed to the animated characters. As Luckmann (1979: 43) argues, the reconstruction of identity-specific features always involves comparison.13 Or, as Sacks (1972: 334) points out: Social categorization often tends to be “duplicatively organized” such that one category evokes its complementary category as well. In our examples, we observed how the construction of identity relies on contrasting different ways of speaking. By making use of different communicative styles to build up contrasts between the antagonists’ ways of speaking and their own, narrators do identity work: Speakers communicate who they are by portraying those who they are not. At the same time, such indirect strategies of self-positioning through the foil of portraying otherness turn out to be a successful method to construct common identities among the participants: The staging of the antagonists’ (mis)behavior and their ways of communicating invite the recipients to coalign. By distancing themselves from the animated others, and from those ‘we are not’, participants create involvement and common values (Günthner 2000). Staged dialogues, thus, are used as means to construe co-membership and “forms of (a)sociation” (Simmel 1908 [1958]). Bamberg’s (2004: 6) argument that “by offering and telling a narrative, the speaker lodges a claim for him/herself in terms of who he/she is” can be supplemented by stating: “By offering and telling a narrative, the speaker and the recipients lodge a claim for themselves in terms of who they are – in contrast to those they are not.”14

3.

Conclusion

As the episodes reveal, narratives and reported dialogues – irrespective of whether the narrator is the main protagonist or not – are resources for identity work: The narrative point-of-view, the construction of the characters and their communicative activities in the story-world reflect the stance from which the narrator presents her- or himself. In these fragmentary reconstructions of past dialogues, linguistic stylizations are exploited to ascribe, avow, and display social membership. For an animated character to be a representative of a certain social type is to cast her/him into a category with associ-

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ated linguistic features and communicative behavior. Such casting relies heavily upon indexical means, i.e. on the use of particular linguistic varieties, prosodic design, features of voice quality, communicative actions and communicative styles. At the same time, these narrative reconstructions shed light on the identity of the teller: The voices of the animated characters reveal the reporter’s evaluative stance or point-of-view. Instead of positively categorizing themselves, speakers – in our data – tend to prefer implicit identity work by distancing themselves from the portrayed social characters and their ways of behaving. The portrayal of the other becomes the antithesis of the definition of self: It is that which separates us from the other that helps us to construe on our own self.15 As Hahn (1999: 80) in his phenomenological approach to identity and alterity states: “Wir verdanken uns den anderen, wie diese sich uns verdanken” (‘We owe our selves to others as much as they owe their selves to us’; own translation; S.G.). Through the staging of different communicative styles, identities are not only constructed but they become consequential: Narrators invite their recipients to show their disaffiliation from the animated characters and, at the same time, to affiliate with the reporters’ own behaviour and stance. Thus, affiliation and disaffiliation become important for constructing common identities (‘we’ against ‘they’) among the participants. At the same time, these episodes reveal that ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’ – ‘we’ and ‘they’ are not objective relationships of given entities between individuals or groups but are the result of interactive accomplishments and interactive processes of attributions (Günthner 1999b). Within constructivist approaches, social identities are treated as interactively constituted and locally managed. The analysis of our examples reveals that even though social categorization is an interactive accomplishment, it also relies on shared knowledge about social groups and their perceived ways of speaking. Thus, even though identity work is part of the routine of everyday conversation and emerges in social interaction by drawing on shared knowledge and attitudes towards certain linguistic patterns and communicative styles, it goes beyond the ad hoc emerging situations and relates to socially shared forms of knowledge. In the interactive process of constructing social categories such as Nazis, Kanaken and even school-inspectors types or arrogant doctors, narrators reactivate existing social knowledge (i.e. stereotypes) concerning specific ways of speaking and behaving. Social categorization and acts of identity which occur by way of staging communicative activities “are not done in a social vacuum” (Auer, Arnhold, and Bueno-Aniola this volume), but pre-existing knowl-

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edge is reactivated in the hic et nunc of the present interaction. Thus, identity negotiation and the construction of social categories can be seen as links between the ongoing interaction and larger sociocultural contexts: By evoking particular social categories and illustrating category-bound communicative activities, interactants link their utterances to shared cultural knowledge,16 and reshape and reactivate this knowledge to fit the interaction at hand. To conclude: Identität also […] ist niemals Substanz, sondern stets Relation, nicht Totalität, sondern Selektion, weder Faktum noch Datum, sondern soziale Konstruktion, nicht Resultat der Realität des Geschehens, sondern jeweils neues Ereignis von Konsens und Konflikt, Erinnern und Vergessen, Behaupten und Bestreiten, Beschwören und Verdrängen, Reden und Schweigen. Thus, identity is never substance but always relation, it is not totality but selection, neither fact nor datum but social construction, not result of an event but each time a new outcoming of consenting and dissenting, memorizing and forgetting, claiming and disputing, conjuring and repressing, talking and keeping silent (Hahn 1999:86–87; own translation; S.G.).

Appendix. Transcription conventions (based on GAT) [] [] = (.) (-) (1,0), (1.5) and=uh :, ::, ::: uh, ah, etc. so(h)o haha hoho heehee ((laughing)) ? , ; .

overlap latching of new turns or single units micro-pause short pause estimated pauses slurring within units lengthening, according to duration hesitation signals, so-called “filled pauses” laughter particles during speech syllabic laughing description of laughter high rise rise to mid level pitch fall to mid low fall

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((cough)) <> <<surprised> ( (such) al(s)o ACcent ↓ ↑ ↑↓SO ↓↑SO <<↓> <<↑> < < <

< < < < < < h, hh, hhh

> )

> > > > > > > > > > > >

paralinguistic and non-linguistic actions and events accompanying paralinguistic and non-linguistic actions and events over a stretch of speech interpretive comments over a stretch of speech unintelligible passage, according to its duration presumed wording presumed sound or syllable primary or main accent pitch step-down pitch step-up rise-fall fall-rise low pitch register high pitch register forte, loud fortissimo, very loud piano, soft pianissimo, very soft allegro, fast lento, slow crescendo, becoming louder diminuendo, becoming softer accelerando, becoming faster rallentando, becoming slower breathing, according to duration.

Notes *

Thanks to Peter Auer for his comments on a previous version. Thanks also to Lisa Roebuck for checking the English. 1. Cf. also Hahn (1999) for the construction of identity by means of affiliation with and disaffiliation from others. 2. As Thomas Luckmann (2003: 5) argues – in line with George Herbert Mead’s account of the origin of the Self – personal identity is formed in communicative social interaction within relevant social relations: “It follows that personal identities are socially constructed just as much as institutions are socially constructed.”

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3. Cf. also Georgakopoulou (in this volume) for a dynamic, interactively oriented way of looking at “positioning by stylistic means”. 4. As Taifel and Forgas (1981: 114f.) point out, “social categorization lies at the heart of commonsense, everyday knowledge and understanding”. The way we identify similarities and differences between persons and groups is the basis of everyday interactions. “Social categorization is thus much more than a purely cognitive task: it is central to social life, and as such, it is subject to the pressures and distortions of the rich and variegated culture within which it arises.” 5. Complaint stories belong to reconstructive genres, which speakers use to complain about the mis/behavior of one or several absent persons (cf. Günthner 2000). 6. Cf. also Günthner (1999a, 2000, 2002) and Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2002: 234) on the role of reported speech for social categorization. 7. Cf. also Kallmeyer and Keim (1994) and Günthner (2000) on the use of standard German in reported speech. 8. Features of ‘pidgin German’ will be translated into ‘pidgin English’. 9. Kanaken is an abusive term used in Germany for people of Turkish or SouthEast-European origin. 10. ‘Hutmacher’ is the name of a person. 11. Cf. Günthner (1996) for the contextualization of a reproachful voice. 12. In my data, recipients in general orient to the reporters’ stances; sequences in which recipients do not co-align turn out to be very rare (cf. Günthner 2000). 13. Cf. also Tajfel and Forgas (1981: 124ff.) on social categorization of others and the construction of one’s own identity: “We propose thus that social categorization insofar as it affects group differences, is intricately related to an individual’s social identity” (Tajfel and Forgas 1981: 126). 14. Positioning analysis, thus, cannot be reduced to analyzing the positioning of the ‘self’ but has to include the dialogical construction of the (co-present as well as absent) other. Cf. also Georgakopoulou (in this volume). 15. Cooley (1902 [1967]) coined the metaphor of the “looking-glass effect” in the construction of personal identity (Luckmann 2003): In face-to-face encounters the experience of one’s self is built up in the experiences of others; i.e. the individual experiences her/himself in relation to the other. 16. This kind of reactivating of shared social categories can be seen as referring to social topoi (Hausendorf 2002: 101); i.e. we recognize social categorizing and identity constructions which go beyond the Here-and-Now of the singular interaction, as they are based on socially shared stereotypical knowledge of certain social groups.

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References Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.) 2003 Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe 1998 Identity as an achievement and as a tool. In: Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, 1–14. Auer, Peter, Jacinta Arnhold, and Cintia Bueno-Aniola this volume Being a ‘colono’ and being ‘daitsch’ in Rio Grande do Sul: Linguistic choice and linguistic heterogeneity as a resource for social categorisation. Bakhtin, Michael M. 1981 Discourse in the novel. In: Holquist, M. (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 259–422. 1986 The problem of speech genres. In: Bakhtin, M. M. (ed.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 60–102. Bamberg, Michael 2003 Positioning with David Hogan. Stories, tellings, and identities. In: Daiute, Collette and Cynthia Lightfoot (eds.), Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development in Society. London: Sage, 135–157. 2004 Narrative discourse and identities. http://www.clarku.edu/-mbamberg/positioning_and_identity.htm Bauman, Richard 2000 Language, identity, performance. Pragmatics 10(1), 1–6. Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs 1990 Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19, 59–88. Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall 2004 Language and identity. In: Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Malden: Blackwell, 369–394. 2005 Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4–5), 585–614. Christmann, Gabriele 1996 Die Aktivität des ‘Sich-Mokierens’ als konversationelle Satire. Wie sich Umweltschützer/innen über den ‘Otto-Normalverbraucher mokieren. In: Kotthoff, H. (ed.), Scherzkommunikation. Beiträge zur empirischen Gesprächsforschung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 49–80. Cooley, Charles Horton 1902 [1967] Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Schocken.

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Goffman, Erving 1974 [1986] Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Gumperz, John J. 1983 Communication and social identity. In: Jacobson-Widding, A. (ed.), Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 111–122. Günthner, Susanne 1996 The prosodic contextualization of moral work: An analysis of reproaches in ‘why’ formats. In: Couper-Kuhlen, E. and M. Selting (eds.), Prosody in Conversation: Interactional Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 271–302. 1997a The contextualization of affect in reported dialogues. In: Niemeier, S. and R. Dirven (eds.), The Language of Emotions. Conceptualization, Expression, and Theoretical Foundation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 247–276. 1997b Stilisierungsverfahren in der Redewiedergabe – Die ‘Überlagerung von Stimmen’ als Mittel der moralischen Verurteilung in Vorwurfsrekonstruktionen. In: Sandig, B. and M. Selting (eds.), Sprech- und Gesprächsstile. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. 1999a Polyphony and the ‘layering of voices’ in reported dialogues: An analysis of the use of prosodic devices in everyday reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics 31, 685–708. 1999b Zur Aktualisierung kultureller Differenzen in Alltagsinteraktionen. In: Rieger, Stefan, Schamma Schahadat, and Martin Weinberg (eds.), Interkulturalität. Zwischen Inszenierung und Archiv. Tübingen, Narr, 251–268. 2000 Vorwurfsaktivitäten in der Alltagsinteraktion. Grammatische, prosodische, rhetorisch-stilistische und interaktive Verfahren bei der Konstitution kommunikativer Muster und Gattungen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 2002 Stimmenvielfalt im Diskurs: Formen der Stilisierung und Ästhetisierung in der Redewiedergabe. Gesprächsforschung online, www.gespraechsforschung-ozs.de 3, 59–80. Hahn, Alois 1999. Eigenes durch Fremdes. Warum wir anderen unsere Identität verdanken. In: Huber Jörg and Martin Heller (eds.), Konstruktionen Sichtbarkeiten. Vienna: Interventionen, 61–87. Hanks, William F. 1989 Text and textuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 18, 95–127.

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Hausendorf, Heiko 2002 Intertextualität der Mündlichkeit. Kommunikationssemantische Überlegungen am Beispiel des Redens über soziale Gruppen. In: Deppermann, A. and T. Spranz-Fogasy (eds.), be-deuten. Wie Bedeutung im Gespräch entsteht. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 81–105. Iser, Wolfgang 1972 Der implizite Leser. Munich: Fink. Kallmeyer, Werner 1995 Zur Darstellung von kommunikativem sozialen Stil in soziolinguistischen Gruppenporträts. In: Keim, Inken, Kommunikation in der Stadt, vol. 3. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1–25. 2002 Verbal practices of perspective grounding. In: Graumann, C. F. and W. Kallmeyer (eds.), Perspective and Perspectivation in Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, 113–141. Kallmeyer, Werner and Inken Keim 1994 Phonologische Variation als Mittel der Symbolisierung sozialer Identität in der Filsbachwelt. In: Kallmeyer, W. (ed.), Kommunikation in der Stadt. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 142–237. 2003 Variation and identity in a German-Turkish setting. In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 29–46. Kotthoff, Helga 1998 Spaß Verstehen. Zur Pragmatik von konversationellem Humor. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Le Page, Robert 1978 Projection, focussing, diffusion. Or: Steps towards a sociolinguistic theory of language. York Papers in Linguistics 9, 9–31. Lucius-Hoene, Gabriele and Arnulf Deppermann 2002 Rekonstruktion narrativer Identität. Ein Arbeitsbuch zur Analyse narrativer Interviews. Opladen: Leske&Budrich. Luckmann, Thomas 1979 Persönliche Identität und Lebenslauf – Gesellschaftliche Voraussetzungen. In: Klingenstein, G., H. Lutz, and G. Stourzh (eds.), Biographie und Geschichtswissenschaft. Munich: Oldenbourg, 29–46. 1983 Remarks on personal identity: Inner, social and historical time. In: Jacobson-Widding, A. (ed.), Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 67–92. 2003 On the evolution and historical construction of personal Identity. Manuscript, University of Constance.

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Perelman, Chaim 1979 Juristische Logik als Argumentationslehre. Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber. Rampton, Ben 1995 Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents. London/New York: Longman. Sacks, Harvey 1972 On the analyzability of stories by children. In: Gumperz, John J. and Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 329–345. Schwitalla, Johannes 1997 Gesprochenes Deutsch. Eine Einführung. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. Silverstein, Michael 1985 Language and the culture of gender. In: Mertz, E. and R. Parmentier (eds.), Semiotic Mediation. Orlando: Academic Press, 219–259. 1992 The indeterminacy of contextualization: When is enough enough? In: Auer, Peter and A. di Luzio (eds.), The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 55–76. Simmel, Georg 1908 [1958] Der Streit. In: Simmel, Georg (ed.), Soziologie. Untersuchung über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Dunck/Humblot, 186–255. Taifel, Henri and Joseph P. Forgas 1981 Social categorization: Cognitions, values and groups. In: Forgas, Joseph P. (ed.), Social Categorization. Perspectives on Everyday Understanding. London/New York: Academic Press, 113–140. Tannen, Deborah 1989 Talking Voices. Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voloshinov, Valentin N. 1978 Reported speech. In: Matejka, L. and K. Pomorska (eds.), Readings in Russian Poetics. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publication.

Chapter 15 The humorous stylization of ‘new’ women and men and conservative others Helga Kotthoff 1.

Introduction

In this article I will discuss how a circle of middle-aged academics recreates its moral order of new gender standards by a consonant staging of the ‘others’ and the ‘self’ – ‘them’ vs. ‘us’. The progressive self as well as the conservative other with whom the self is confronted are exaggeratedly stylized in a similarly disjunctive way over the course of various stories. Hyper-stylization sharpens a juxtaposition of social types which is humorously overdrawn. The comical performance becomes a factor of amusement for the group. Ever since G. H. Mead’s (1934) groundbreaking work on mind, self and society we have been aware of the symbolic relationship between “what I do” and “who I am”. He argued that the self is immanently social, a conversation between our experience (“me”) and our position at a particular moment (“I”). In this way the self is emergent; it is created out of social life. The assumption of mutuality makes social life moral. For Taylor (1989: 34) “we are only selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good”. He sees identity as a web of connections, not only to others but to “moral or spiritual commitment as well” (1989: 27). To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by my commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand (ibid.).

The set of commitments and attachments that define the self are constitutive of what it means to be a self. Selves,1 as Malone points out in discussing the moral nature of interaction (1989: 19), are not accidentally attached

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to values and beliefs and behaviors; they are constituted by those attachments. According to Taylor (1989), individuals are not only self-interpreting entities, but this interpreting also involves others. The interpretation of the self and of the world is based on trans-utilitarian “strong evaluations” of the self’s goals and actions. It is only these that lead to direction and meaning in life, for they give us an idea of what is right and wrong, beautiful or ugly, better or worse, higher or lower in value. Such evaluations help us to judge behavior and needs morally, and they are constitutive for the achievement of personal identity. In order to give life a direction, individuals need a “moral landscape” of the important and unimportant, relevant and irrelevant, which Taylor (1991) has called the “ethic frame.” Without way-signs, neither planned action nor self-experience is possible. Action, thinking and personality succeed only by reference to “hyper-goods” of a coherent lifeplan (1989: 122ff., 175ff.). These possess a quasi-ontological status, and are therefore constitutive of the self. In this regard there is little to be gained from post-modern attempts to constitute the self by liberating it from such hyper-goods and their frameworks. If that is supposed to be the empirical ground of the modern world, then we ought to observe the dissolution of social cohesion. Social cohesion, however, does not dissolve even for those individuals who set new way-signs in the social world. In this article, I shall show that the new paths departing from traditional gender orders do not lead simply in random directions, but rather the in-group stamps out a common path with a shared orientation which is evoked, not debated. Within the face-toface exchanges of a social network, co-constructed patterns of a positive self and of a caricaturized typification of others arise. I will analyze stories which thematically turn around the confrontation of old and new gender arrangements. The morality of gender order is relevant for the social circle of German academics living in border region of Switzerland and Germany (the Alemannic region), who, however, are not native to this region. They speak a colloquial language which moves between standard German and a shallow level of the dialect. In their stories, they attribute deeper dialect levels to certain characters, in order to assign them conservative stances. Thus, linguistic variation takes part in stylizing the self and others. But the story performance is always influenced by the current context of talk. Dialect is by no means the only index of a stance the group finds odd. Formulaic phrases or a childish speech style might fulfill a similar function of indexing behavioral distinctions.

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We will look at how the persons spoken about are cast into categories with associated characteristics or features. I see the narratively produced identity facets as “membership of some feature-rich category” (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998: 2). Special attention will be paid to reported speech (see also Günthner, this volume). The story tellers sometimes use South German dialects (Alemannic) and a marked prosody to stylize the “traditionalists” in quotations, citing their own speech mostly in standard colloquial German and in a relaxed manner of speaking. Of course, the content side of the stories is also important. In modern society, explicit moralizing is dispreferred (Bergmann and Luckmann 1999). Implicit moralizing is all the more important, as it is achieved, for example, in narration by stylizing and hyper-stylizing personas. Comic hyperbole is a salient technique for implicit moralizing. It exploits well-known stylistic elements (see also Deppermann, this volume), which includes dialect with its linguistic connotations. Humor often works with hyper-typification, with the skillful exaggeration of the figures and their ways of speaking. By means of hyperbole, the narrator can stylize a figure as a caricature and position her- or himself in contradistinction to this figure. Alfred Schutz’ idea of the typicality of experience presumes a necessary concept for my study of humorous stories among progressive German intellectuals which I will present here. The less familiar another person is to us, the more they are treated as types. Our human “stock of knowledge” is composed of these “typifications,” which reduce the complexity of the world to cognitively manageable proportions (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 7–8).2 They also presume that interlocutors share a “system of relevances” (Schutz 1970: 204) so that intentions and motivations can be inferred. A self is positioned within a network of similar and different personas and has situation-transcendent relevance. Style and typification are connected. Research on style has moved from a Labovian framework that identified it with the degree of use of certain linguistic variables by social groups, towards a more interactive framework in which style is seen as a strategy to present personas or groups (de Fina, this volume). Stylistic production is a terrain for the negotiation of social meaning and identity. Eckert (2000: 41) views identity as one’s “meaning in the world.” A person’s place in relation to other people, a person’s perspective on the rest of the world, a person’s understanding of his or her value to others – all of these are integral to the individual’s

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experience of the self, and are constructed in collaboration with others as those others engage in the same construction for themselves. The individual’s engagement in the world is a constant process of identity construction – one might most profitably think of identity as a process of engagement (and disengagement) – and the study of meaning in sociolinguistic variation is a study of the relation between variation and identity.

With these concepts in the background, I shall analyze here how this group of German academics creates its own progressive identity in regard to gender norms, differentiated from a conservative type. In their conversations they often narratively evoke scenes in which they are confronted with backward, local people. The progressive self is positioned in contrast to the conservative “other” and elaborated by narrative fine tuning. Hyperbole always plays a role in the stereotypical stylizations, as well as in the labeling of some of the dramatis personae. The conservative figures, especially, are presented as exaggerated caricatures.3 The discourse of the locals is reproduced in Alemannic dialect if the auditors of the stories are able to comprehend this type of play with dialect ways of speaking. The social circle whose stories I will analyze gave my co-workers and myself a sort of general permission to make occasional recordings of their gatherings; the circle consists of men and women in the ‘thirty-something to forty-something’ age group. The majority of the 52 persons are employed in academic professions or have an academic training background: journalists, psychologists, economists, book dealers, teachers, university literature and linguistics teachers, a tour guide, a physician, a social pedagogue, a designer, a speech therapist, etc. There are couples and (temporarily) singles, lesbians/homosexuals and heterosexuals, parents of children and childless persons. All are at least open to the goals of the women’s movement, if not strongly identifying with it. They agree more with the politics of the Social Democrats and the Green party than with that of the Christian Democrats. Men in this group belong to the five percent in Germany who temporarily take over the tasks of child-rearing and for a short time give up their professions (they take advantage of the so-called “baby-year”). There are no housewives in the group. Women’s and men’s professional careers are similar. Homosexual relationships are not regarded as something unusual. They have a global orientation and do not originally stem from the region at the German-Swiss-border. This progressive milieu is thus not that of the German societal majority, but in terms of professional status and lifestyles it does not represent a marginalized group, either. In Bourdieuian

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terminology one can say that the group has much “cultural capital” and to this extent plays an accepted role in society (Kotthoff 1998). In the region of southern Baden and eastern Switzerland High Alemannic is spoken. The dialect is highly accepted as the spoken language; in Switzerland it is even the rule. On the German side of the border, we can differentiate a scale of levels from deep dialect up to the standard of High German, which can be used as a contextualization device. On the Swiss side, the scale is restricted to dialect and “Schriftdeutsch” (Standard German). There is no colloquial level in between. Speaking in the dialect is highly obligatory among the Swiss locals; the standard is only spoken to non-natives and in special media contexts (news presentations, for example) (Barbour and Stevenson 1999; Siebenhaar 2005). Socio-economic class has an influence on linguistic choice, but not in a strong sense. The study adheres to the tradition of interactional sociolinguistics, which is interested in the culture-creating potential of conversations and the dialogic creation of meaning (Gumperz 1982, 1996). I will focus on how progressive and conservative stances are made accountable, how “doing being progressive” (in ethnomethodological terms) is acted out in a humorous way in dinner conversations. This involves “styling the other and styling the self” (Rampton 1999). We can witness the formation of “identities in interaction” (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998). Methodologically, I will be using conversational data which were recorded during 20 dinners among friends. All gatherings were of mixed sex and took place in German circles either in a German city close to the Swiss border or in a Swiss city close to the German border. I see the analysis of conversations as a means of learning a) how social relations and social identities are created, affirmed and changed, b) how communication practices and life styles are evaluated, c) how individuals practice humor to implicitly negotiate moral orders, and d) how the connotations of linguistic variation are used to position identities in relation to one another. Interactional sociolinguists observe how symbolic distinctions between social groups are fought out on quite different activity levels, one being communicative forms, variants and styles (Kallmeyer 1994).

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Comical stylization of the self and the other

Social distinction (“othering”) is practiced in everyday life along many lines, for example generation lines, socio-economic lines, ethnic lines, gender lines and so on. Social distinction often draws on material resources which one either has access to or not. Not everyone, for example, can perform herself as being rich, because such a performance needs a material basis. While some performances strongly rest on a material basis, others do less and are therefore more open to discursive negotiation. Progressiveness vs. conservatism is one type of line that can be drawn in discourse. However, this is not only a matter of explicit, content oriented discourse but also implicitly enacted, for example in stories that recount how the narrator was confronted with a person from the camp on the other side of the line. In the stories discussed below, conservatives are exaggeratedly typified and stylized through labeling, categorization devices, positioning and reported speech. In the episodes presented below, social distinction has to do with arrangements between the sexes. The conservatives are morally devalued as sticking to outdated norms or prejudices. The group members cohere in the stylization of the self as courageous, energetic and initiative – and focus others as prejudiced, aggressive, childish, authoritarian, embarrassed or astonished about new standards. They concoct an “anti-type” through which we can also infer the intended self. Some of the conservatives are performed as hopelessly bad characters, some others as quite nice, even cute, maintaining strange attitudes but willing to learn a lesson. The unidirectionality of the social stylizations and the contrastive positioning of the figures (the progressive self in confrontation with a conservative other) are carnevalesque in a Bakhtinian (Bakhtin 1969 [1985]) sense. Performance is always at stake. Humor permits implicit moralization, especially since, in a humorist keying, narrators can implicitly assure themselves that others share their frame of mind, perspective, or behavior. Funny labels, the selection of tellable scenes, and reported speech play together to create conversational caricatures of the conservatives who are mocked in similar ways. Also, the self is portrayed with a touch of comical distance so as to invite reception with amusement. Co-alignment in the design of the confrontation stories communicates solidarity and rapport within the group of friends. The implicit adjustment of moral norms in humorous communication especially suits members of a society who are establishing new behavioral standards

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in regard to gender among themselves. In Western societies, social milieus today differ in regard to gender politics. The analysis of humorous self and other typification helps to reconstruct categorical work, such as ascription, display and positioning.4 Sociological humor theorists have pointed out that those who laugh together build an in-group which unites in joint amusement about some incongruity, some playful breaking of contextual assumptions (Dupréel 1924; Mulkay 1988). The group indulges in removing normality from the normal contextual assumptions.

3.

Stylizing conservative women and men using the Alemannic dialect

3.1. The stingy millionaire Example (1) is taken from an informal evening conversation among friends who either live in the same neighborhood or are friends and colleagues and meet regularly. Rudolph is a 35 year old physician. David owns a book shop where all the people who play a role in the transcripts of this article are regular customers. David and Katharina, who is six years older than he and teaches psychology at the university, are an unmarried couple. Johannes and Maria are a married couple of thirty-eight years. He teaches psychology at the university and is a colleague of Katharina’s. Maria works at a cultural center in a bordering Swiss town. All of them have lived for more than 12 years in the border region and know many people there, among them “the millionaire,” who owns many houses and extracts as much rent as he can. The latter is single and not considered a pleasant person. Since Maria once lived in one of his houses, she had occasionally ridiculed him in his absence, so that “the millionaire” need not be named, as would be normal. The selection of the label “millionaire” points to caricature and highlights one his attributes: he is rich. The background of example (1) is that Rudolph, the main narrator, has unexpectedly married a Czech woman whom he only has known for a few months. In the course of an evening, the conversation among friends turns around what was being said about this in his circle of acquaintances. Here, Rudolph presents the warnings against the marriage of a man whom the group labels “the millionaire”.

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In the first two lines Rudolph tells about the millionaire’s blunt and outspoken warnings against his marriage plans: his future wife will only be interested in Rudolph’s money. He uses a colloquial phrase (‘has me by the purse’). The phrase points to a stereotype of Eastern European women common in Germany in the late nineties: They want to marry Western men just for reasons of money. (1) (Conversation 14) David (D); Ernst (E); Inge (I); Johannes (J); Katharina (K); Maria (M); several (m); Rudolph (R). 1

R:

2 3

M:

4 5 6

R: K: M:

7

R:

8 9 10

11 12

m: M:

und dann hat, der der der der millionÄr hat halt gemeint, ‘and then the the the the millionaire simply commented,’ eh, die frau geht mir annen gEldbeutel. ‘uh, the woman has me by the purse.’ ach jA? ‘really?’ hehe[hehehehe [hehe dEr. dEr. ‘he himself.’ es war der hAmmer. < bisch wAhnsinnig? ‘it was the last straw. <> are you crazy? kannsch net mAche. mEnschenskinder, ‘you can’t do that. good god,’ die frAU dU:, ha wennsch dere lAngweilig isch, ‘the woman, when she is bored,’ got die EIkaufe, dann hot die schUh dU für tausend mark.> ‘she'll go shopping, then she will have shoes for a thousand marks’> hahahahaha [hahahahahahaha [IS DAS TO:::LL hehe [‘IS THAT GREA::T hehe’

‘The woman’ instead of ‘my wife’ mimics the millionaire’s wording and gives the phrase an element of citation. It is a typical formulation in Alemannic German. Maria is astonished, two people laugh. In line 7 Rudolph begins to stage the millionaire’s words directly. The quotation is introduced with a strong evaluation of ‘it was the last straw’ (es war der Hammer).5 Then Rudolph modifies his voice and switches to the Alemannic dialect (bisch wahnsinnig?). He renders the entire speech of the millionaire somewhat more softly and with tense articulation (kannsch net mache), an iconization of the millionaire’s stinginess. Through this alone the millionaire makes a disagreeable impression. He approaches Rudolph with strong

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warnings (bisch wahnsinnig? kannsch net mache. wennsch dere langweilig isch, got die eikaufe, dann hot die schuh für tausend mark) rendered in Alemannic dialect. Remarkable are the two verbs in the second person and the contraction of the conjunction wenn ‘if’ with the pronoun es ‘it’, which stand syntactically in the first position and which result in a repetitive final SH, a salient pronounciation feature of integral /st/ and /sp/ and of some final /s/ in the Alemannic dialects, such as bisch (7) … kannsch (8) … wennsch (9). Interjections like Menschenskinder (‘good god’) (8) and ha (9) and the very colloquial, familiar form of address Du (‘you’ in line 9 and 10; this is hard to translate into English) are used. He makes the millionaire’s warnings sound very urgent and not very sophisticated. The interjection ha is typical for the Alemannic dialect. Alemannic dialect serves here as a marker of backward attitudes. For Bakhtin (1986: 89), such stylizations are important evidence for his often cited dictum that “our speech... is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of ‘our-own-ness’, varying degrees of awareness and detachment”. Here the varying assignment of dialect and standard language participates in authorizing social distinctions. Rudolf himself speaks standard German. Contrasting stylizations of social types play an important role here in lending comical twists to situations, as they often do in our everyday conversations. Details are put in the mouth of the millionaire, e.g. that Rudolph’s wife will buy thousand-mark shoes at Rudolph’s expense. Together with the ironic designation millionaire, these procedures help to create a conversational caricature of him as hopelessly prejudiced against women from Eastern Europe, maybe against women in general – and as stingy. With Tannen (1989), Couper-Kuhlen (1998) and Günthner (1996, 1999, this volume), I see reported dialogue as a play with double voicing in the sense of Bakhtin. The persons and situations spoken about are stylized and typified like the characters in a joke. The dialogues are reported with a claim to authenticity but nonetheless extend into the realm of fictitious dramatization (Günthner 1999; Kotthoff 1998, 2002). These implicit typifications of the dramatis personae are easily identifiable for the group members because they are based on shared knowledge about typical speech styles, which is confirmed in this manner. The prejudiced man is not sophisticated and neither is his speech style. The shared morals of what the group considers to be a good or bad attitude are also confirmed. The group is very amused by Rudolph’s stylization. There is long laughter in line 11. In this little nar-

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rated scene, the self remains in the background, but we can infer its attitude. A discourse of indignation does not result and is not aimed at. The attitude that the story-teller and his audience communicate with respect to prejudiced people such as the millionaire is one of amused distance. Indeed, the presentation is even judged by Maria in line 12 as “great”. This reception makes it evident that the quality of the performance is appreciated immediately and that it is essential for the shared amusement. In the next story the central figure is also introduced by a label. 3.2. The rapist In Example (2) Maria parodies the way of speaking of the Swiss owner of a bakery. This person is introduced as ‘the rapist,’ without any explanation. In the course of the narrative it becomes obvious that this labeling simply serves as a very negative characterization of a shop owner who is seen very critically by the group. Line 1 already violates normal expectations, since we normally do not associate rapists with cooking recipes. The labeling creates interest in the man introduced so negatively. Only David, Johannes, Ulf and Maria know the man. The example stems from another evening with the two couples David and Katharina and Johannes and Maria. Ulf, a German journalist of 36 years, invited them to his house on the Swiss side of the border, including his friends Anni and Bernada, two Sinologists from Berlin. Johannes and Maria also know Anni and Bernada quite well. Until recently, Johannes shared the house with Ulf. (2) (Conversation 6) Anni (A); Bernada (B); David (D); Johannes (J); Katharina (K); Maria (M); several (m); Ulf (U). 1

M:

die rezepte gibts beim vergewAltiger. ‘the recipes are from the rapist.’ Ihr könntet die mitbringen. (- -) die (? ?) ‘you could bring them with you. (- -) they- (? ?)’ der anni schick ich immer vom vergewaltiger diese ‘i always send Anni these cheesecake recipes from the rapist.’ kÄsküchlirezepte.

A:

wer is denn der vergewAltiger?

2 3

4 5

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6 7 7 8 8 9 9 10 10 11 12 12 13 13 14 14 15 15 16

M:

A: A: M: M: D: D: U: U: D: D: M: M:

J:

17 M: 18 D: 19 M: 20

21 A: 22 U:

23 m: 24 D: 25 M: 26 D: 27 M:

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‘who exactly is the rapist?’ hehehehe (‘hh) ja ich will jetzt nich mehr da ‘hehehehehe (‘hh) well, now I don’t want’ hIngange. ‘to go there any more.’ ach sO. ‘oh, I see.’ (? ?) ↑dIE dinger. (? ?) ↑’these things.’ warum vergewAltiger? ‘why rapist?’ ((noise in the background)) aus wOhlfeilen gründen, würd ich sagen. ‘for good reasons, I would say.’ °ach° °‘ah’° des is son schmIeriger typ, ‘he’s such a greasy type,’ der da unten den laden hat. ‘the one who has the shop down there.’ na. ‘oh.’ ein faschIst. irgendwie AUsländerfeindlich, ‘a fascist. sort of xenophobic,’ der bO:cksberger, ach, dE:n kenn ich auch. ‘Old Bo:cksberger, ah, I know him too.’ wenn du da hingehst, un willst sEmmeli, ‘if you go there and want buns,’ und <((affektiert))bei u:ns heißen die semmeln ↑gIpfeli:> ‘AND < ((pretentious)) ↑here the buns are called ↑Gipfeli.>’ die hab ich gern gekocht. ‘I liked cooking them.’ WA::S? bi Ü::s heiße die ↑gIpfeli:: (-) ‘WHAT? Here the buns are called ↑Gipfeli:: he[hehe’ [hehehe und der hat so ne gAnz kleine, zarte frau. ‘and he has such a really small, fragile wife.’ ja und die schEIßt der zammen. vor allen. ‘yeah and he bitches at her. in front of everyone.’ vor lEUten. ja ja. ‘in front of people. yeah yeah.’ po::: ‘po:::’

The rapist figure (Vergewaltiger) is introduced quite abruptly without any explanation. Maria informs the group about where they could get copies of

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the recipes. The suggestion in line 2 is made to Ulf and his former cohabitant Johannes, who often buy from the “rapist”. In lines 3–4 Ulf is being informed as to why he should bring the recipes from the rapist, which are available free at his bakery. The abrupt introduction of the unusually designated figure evokes a question from Anni (5). But at first Maria laughs and explains that she does not want to go there anymore. Then David also asks about the rapist (10). Ulf seems to know the man and agrees with Maria, using an extremely elevated formulation (aus wohlfeilen6 Gründen, würd ich sagen ‘for good reasons, I would say’), but does not answer the question either (12). In lines 14–15 Maria characterizes the shop owner as a greasy type. The harsh term and negative characterization evoke a critical “well” (na) from Johannes. Then Maria intensifies the negative characterization still more (17). David reveals that he suddenly recognizes the person (Old Bocksberger). Maria then performs a scene in his shop with a direct quotation. She uses the generalized personal address form du. She portrays herself trying to speak Swiss German to him by tagging the Swiss diminutive li to a Bavarian word for buns (producing Semmeli). Herr Bocksberger is cited without introduction (merely a phatically spoken und), uttering a pretentious correction (20); he wants the term for bread rolls to be correct in Swiss-German dialect: Gipfeli. The words of the fascist (Faschist) are spoken louder to iconize Bocksberger’s excitement. Maria, who is a native speaker of Alemannic dialect, is playing here with linguistic knowledge, presenting herself as naïvely mixing Bavarian and Swiss German lexemes like a recent immigrant to the South. For speakers familiar with these dialects, there is a witty effect in attaching a Swiss diminutive ending to a Bavarian word and then pretending to offer it as Swiss German. The diminutive li is one of the most characteristic morphemes in Swiss German. Anni, a guest from Berlin, does not react to this staging, but in line 21 she offers an additional comment on the recipes. In line 22 Ulf repeats and dramatizes the Bocksberger quotation in better Swiss German (bi ü::s heiße die ↑Gipfeli::). He elongates two vowels and produces with Gipfeli the typical Swiss German intonation contour with high onset. He laughs at this himself, which also elicits responsive laughter from others present. David offers more information about Herr Bocksberger (24): he snaps at his wife in front of people. Maria uses this to further negatively characterize him (25, ‘he bitches at her’), which David affirms with a further specification. In line 27 Maria utters an interjection of indignation. Herr Bocksberger is characterized as totally disagreeable. His correction activities are parodied as simply aggressive. In the co-constructed narrative

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the group agrees on a shared moral attitude towards him and people like him. Husbands who ‘bitch at’ their wives (zammenscheißen) are vehemently condemned. The parody in example (2) is embedded in a characterization which works with exaggerated categorizations of a man (‘fascist’, ‘xenophobic’) and his activities (zammenscheißen). The person is staged in quotations which do not correspond to the categories used for him but help to create a distinction. For the group members it is clear that he never raped anyone, and that uttering harsh words is not enough to qualify someone as a fascist. It seems to be obvious to everybody that realistic characterizations are not at stake here. From the start, the choice of wildly exaggerated characterizations eliminates any claim to realism in the restaging and prepares the audience for a fictitious dramatization. Again, the performance as such is pushed into the foreground, along with subtle irony in regard to the exaggerated moralizing of progressives. The presentation relies on the background knowledge that in certain left-oriented milieus labels like fascist and rapist are used in an inflationary manner. Speakers distance themselves even from their own voices via comic exaggeration. In conclusion, speakers’ high knowledge of typical formulations is exemplified once again. In the example, the narrator Maria uses some dialect features (hingange in line 7 instead of hingehen). She presents herself as accepting and speaking the Alemannic dialect and striving even to manage Swiss German. But Bocksberger’s tolerance is too small to appreciate her endeavor. In southwestern Germany the Alemannic dialect is accepted, but most educated persons with a global professional orientation speak a colloquial language quite close to the standard. This is true for many members of the network of acquaintences, including Ulf and Maria, who are from the Southwest. In Switzerland, however, we have a diglossic situation (Siebenhaar 2004). The switch to standard is made mainly in conversation with foreigners. Bocksberger is portrayed as someone who is unable to perform stylistic variants. The episode around his wife is meant to further discredit him. In Example (3) the dialect is also associated with a kind of social backwardness.

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3.3. The kitchen appliance demonstrator The scene talked about in Example (3) takes place in Germany; in conversation 7 nearly the same round of people is having dinner together as in conversation 6. Instead of Johannes and Maria, the two 38 year old linguists Juergen and Erika take part. Ulf tells how he once attended a kitchen appliance demonstration and how he took part in the demonstrator’s presentation. He staged himself as a modern man interested in kitchen appliances and the saleswomen as being astonished about this. (3) (Conversation 7) A: Anni; B: Bernarda; D: David; E: Erika; J: Juergen; K: Katharina; U: Ulf. 1

U:

2 3

K:

4

U:

5 6

A: U:

7 8 9 D: 10 U: 11 12 13 14 E:

15 U: 16 17 ?:

ich war AUch mal bei so ner küchenvorführung für ‘I, too, was once at such a cooking demonstration for’ heimische küchenmaschinen, ‘home kitchen appliances,’ ja ‘yes’ bei hUber auf der klosterstätte. ‘at Huber on Klosterstätte.’ (? ?) und dann hat die frau so frAgen gestellt, ‘and then the woman asked questions,’ und dann hab Ich gesagt, also ich find ja beim RÜHRteig, ‘and then i said, well i find with batter,’ hat er ja ne gewisse schwÄche. ‘it really has a certain weakness.’ hahahaha und die frau °ja woher wisset sIE des?° ‘and the woman °well how do you know that?°’ ich, ja denken sie ich mach kEIne kuchen? ‘I, well do you think I do not make cakes?’ und und dann hab ich mit der rumgefachsimpelt über ‘and and then I talked shop with her about’ über rÜblitorte und was ich fürn rezept hätte, ‘about carrot cake and what sort of recipe I have’ und da dachtense nIcht, du bist professioneller kondit(h)or? ‘and didn't they think you are a professional p(h)astry cook?’ nein °und dann hat se gemeint,° °ja wIsset sie,° ‘no °and then she said, well, you know°’ weil am Anfang ham se gelacht, ne? ‘because at the start they laughed, you know?’ mhm ‘uh-huh’

The humorous stylization of ‘new’ women and men and conservative others 18 U: 19 E: 20 U: 21 E: 22 U: 23 24 25 E: 26 U: 27 28 E: 29 U:

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und ham gedacht, was will denn der DEPP da? ‘and they thought, what does that dope want?’ hehe der mAnn, der k(h)ennt sich doch überhaupt nich aus, ‘the man he kno(he)ws nothing at all ab(h)out it,’ ja(haha) ‘yes(haha)’ wenns um kÜchenmaschinen geht. ‘when we are talking about kitchen appliances.’ und dann wurde mir also verspätet zugegeben ‘and then it was admitted belatedly’ °ja die mÄnner heute, die brauchen auch sowas.° ‘°well the men today, they also need such things.°’ hehehehe ham se sich da(ha) also(he) allgemein AUsget(h)auscht. ‘they generally excha(he)nged opinions.’ hehe dass die z(h)eit(h)en sich geÄndert haben. ‘hehe that t(h)im(h)es have changed.’ hehehehe fand ich sEhr schön irgendwie. ‘I found that really nice somehow.’

In lines 7 and 8 he animates a commentary he made in the manner of an expert and in a rather stilted language (beim Rührteig hat er ja ne gewisse Schwäche ‘with batter it really has a certain weakness’). David immediately laughs. The kitchen appliance demonstrator is presented as very astonished in direct speech, speaking in Alemannic dialect (woher wisset sie des?). After that, in line 11, the narrator renders himself in standard language. He presents himself as being astonished by the woman’s question. Then a metalinguistic orientation is given to the further course of the conversation’s topics in the shop. Erika asks a question in regard to the impression he made on the kitchen appliance saleswoman (14), which Ulf answers in the negative. In line 15, Ulf commences a further, not consistently maintained, presentation of the saleswoman, again using Alemannic dialect (wisset). Then he goes back in time to the beginning of the dialogue and acts out the reservations of the women present (18, 20, 22). Erika laughs. In conclusion, the women are quoted as persons who have learned their lesson about the new men: °ja die MÄnner heute, die brauchen auch sowas°. Ulf summarizes the consciousness expanding impression of the women in Standard German and in conclusion makes a positive evaluation of the whole exchange: times have changed and he finds it “really nice somehow”.

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In example (3) Ulf approaches conservative women in an everyday scene to make clear to them that the old division of labor between the sexes is no longer self-evident. Modern men also want to be addressed with questions of kitchen appliances. The contours of a progressive identity emerge in the course of the conversation. The favorite emotion of this self is by no means outrage at the environment’s inappropriate gender categories but rather an amused superiority. Again a play with typified ways of speaking is involved. This parodistic sort of intertextual humor allows the teller to demonstrate and test for shared social knowledge and authenticates a self that is well-placed in the social cosmos. 3.4. The Social Democrat In example (4) the group talks about a Swiss couple that is of opposed political opinions. Ulf and Maria jointly recount an episode which they experienced with Herr and Frau Vroner at a reception they participated in for professional reasons. Herr Dr. Vroner is one of Maria’s superiors in a cultural center in a Swiss border town. He is conservative, whereas his wife had just campaigned for the Social Democrats. In line 18 Maria characterizes his wife as ‘a very very nice woman’. The journalist Ulf then informs the group about her husband, the director of a cultural center. For the majority of the others present, the Vroners are simply casual acquaintances. Absent bosses and higher-placed persons often serve as objects of mocking humor in intimate groups. In the story-telling we recognize a similar configuration of personalities as in examples (1), (2), and (3). The conservative Dr. Vroner is most strongly caricatured by a childish way of speaking, not by quoting him in an Alemannic speech variety. (4) (Conversation 6 Episode 4) Everyone (a); Anni (A); Bernada (B); David (D); Johannes (J); Katharina (K); Maria (M); several (m); Ulf (U). 19 U: 20

21

des is AUch so nett, also ihr mann ist ‘that is also so nice, well her husband is’ kultUramtsleiter und schreibt für die zÜrcher, ‘director of the cultural center and writes for the zürcher7,’ eigentlich auch n ganz lIEber, aber doch eher e bissle kOnservativ. ‘actually also a darling, but still a bit conservative.’

The humorous stylization of ‘new’ women and men and conservative others 22 23

24 M: 25 U: 26 J: 27 D: 28 U: 29 30 31 32 m: 33 J: 34 M: 35 36 36 37 a: 38 A: 39 M: 40 m: 41 M: 42 43 44

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und dann eh ich hab dann eh ich hab dann mich nur mit ‘and then uh I have uh I have only chatted with’ der frau vroner über die eff a Achtzehn bomber unterhalten, ‘mrs. vroner about the eff a eighteen bombers,’ ja ‘yes’ und warum man die NICHT beschaffen soll, ‘and why one should NOT buy them,’ nei:n. ‘no:.’ mhm ‘mhm’ un da hatter °ja.° hat gesagt, °also° ‘an then he said °well.° °then°’ des hAb ich dir doch jetzt schon so: Oft gesagt. ‘I have told you that already so: often.’ (-) wir WOLLEN ↑NICHT mehr über die (-) ‘we do ↑NOT WANT to talk about’ bomberbeschaffung reden. ‘buying the bombers any more.’ hehehehehehehehehe [he [aja: [‘I see:’ ja ja. und zum Ulf hat sie auch gesagt beim essen, ja, ‘yeah yeah. and she also said during the meal to Ulf,’ ich bin ↑schO:n eine sozialdemokratin. ‘well, I ↑am after all a social democrat.’ °und er immer°, psch::::t, psch:::::t ‘°and he was like° <((puts a finger on her mouth))psh::::t, psh:::::t >’ hahahahahahahahahahahahaha [ha:::::: [sü:::ß: [‘cu:::te’ hahahahaha [hehehehehe [und jetzt war er wohl auch nich so GANZ [‘and now he probably was not so ENTIRELY’ einverstanden, dass seine frau kandidiert, ‘pleased that his wife was going to campaign for office,’ hat peter dObendorfer gesagt, ‘Peter Dobendorfer said,’ <((acc)) un gleichzeitig aber auch stOlz>. <((acc))‘and at the same time also proud, however.’>

The sentence des ist auch so nett (‘that is also so nice’) functions as an evaluative introduction. Mr. Vroner is characterized in terms of profession, character and political attitude, whereby n ganz lieber (‘a darling’) in line

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21 and konservativ (‘conservative’) are presented as almost contrasting by the adverb doch (still). The conversational topic F A 18 bombers contains a certain tension, since it was being heatedly debated between conservatives and progressives at the time of the recording (1995). Herr Dr. Vroner’s attitude is conservative, i.e., he favors continuing to arm the Swiss army with fighter jets. His wife and the circle whose evening chats make up the subject of this article are against a further armament of the Swiss army. In line 25 Ulf attributes self-evidence to his position and performs for himself a cool daredevil attitude. Johannes utters an astonished nein (‘no’), presumably in comprehending the touchy, conflict-laden situation. Ulf presents himself as self-assertive. He doesn’t attempt to hide his opinion. In line 28 he starts to parody Herr Vroner with a direct quote. He reproduces Herr Vroner’s speech with a typical conversational introduction, ja, also (‘well, then’), which is spoken much more softly. A strongly stereotypical parental statement follows (I have told you that already so often), directed at his wife (who thinks like Ulf), with the paternalistic “we” (she was talking about purchasing the bombers, while he was not involved) and an elongation of the so:, which signals emphasis. Mr. Vroner starts softly and increases volume in line 30. Everyone laughs. The culture office director is parodied as old-fashioned and avuncular. He forbids his wife, who thinks differently, to continue talking about controversial topics. The avuncular manner of speaking attributed to him violates the usual conception of a formal and distinguished culture office director (and men in similar positions). The amusingly hyperbolistic stylizing of the protagonists through quotation procedures again holds the center here. Maria continues the story of the meal with the Vroners from line 34 onwards. She also quotes Frau Vroner in direct speech. The sentence ich bin ↑SCHO:N EINE Sozialdemokratin (‘I am after all a Social Democrat’) is clearly articulated, as is typical for Swiss who speak Standard High German. Maria imitates the Swiss-German sentence intonation with the strong rise on schon (‘after all’) and the following fall. The German modal particle schon translated here as ‘after all’ is also interesting because Frau Vroner’s statement is thereby shaped as a concession. The modestly progressive selfidentification of the culture office director’s wife is thereby presented as an act of courage. Maria parodies Dr. Vroner as being shocked about his wife’s political commitment and tells his wife to be silent. In an extremely paternalistic manner, Frau Vroner’s self-identification as a Social Democrat is declared taboo by Herr Vroner. This is particularly implausible, because she has just

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campaigned for this party in the community council elections (the group knows that). The interjections pscht in line 36 are accompanied by the appropriate childish gesture of laying a finger on the mouth. Herr Vroner, known as an authority figure with a high office, is turned into a caricature thereof in Ulf’s and Maria’s dialogue construction. His authority is undermined. Speakers can increase intimacy among friends through shared amusement at the expense of people who, due to their power, are potentially threatening. The mocking has a releasing function, but also communicates distinction from social circles like those of the Vroners. Maria hyperstylizes Herr Vroner’s shock at his wife’s confession. He is presented as if for him Social Democrats were something quite monstrous. Everyone laughs. Maria rates Herr Vroner’s speech as cute which also presupposes ‘not dangerous’. Starting in line 41 she explains Herrn Vroner’s contradictory attitude toward his wife’s political candidacy. The image of the self which is carried out in episodes like example (4) could be paraphrased as: we know these funny conservatives and amuse ourselves about them. They are mocked. Mocking humor always integrates a grain of indignation (Christmann 1996). This indignation is not proclaimed in a straight manner but evoked in dialogue parody and sometimes in exaggerated labelings of the dramatis personae.

4.

Other means of stylization

4.1. The pan-seller in the street In example (5) a chat is recounted which three of the women present at the dinner table had that day with a Swiss saleswoman trying to sell teflon pans in the street. In this chat, Erika portrayed herself as though she had a husband who did everything in the kitchen. This is not the actual state of affairs, but it created astonishment on the part of the saleswoman and amusement on the part of the listeners. In the story, many voices intermingle. Example (5) is hard to follow because the narrators Erika, Anni and Bernarda restage the chat in the street without explicitly indicating from moment to moment with whose voice they are speaking. We hear an intermingling of voices even in one turn. Exaggerated typification is again an important element in the directly reported speech (Brünner 1991; Kotthoff 1998). However, the saleswoman is not cited in Alemannic dialect. As a reason for this I see that Anni and

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Bernada who participated in the scene and also in the narration are from Berlin and not able to join the play with variation. The group is amused by the little talkshow with the saleswoman, which is now being recreated at the table. (5) (Conversation 7) K: Katharina; E: Erika; A: Anni; U: Ulf; B: Bernarda; D: David; J: Juergen; s: some of them. 1

E:

2 3

B:

4 A:

5 6

s: B:

7 8

s: J:

9 s: 10 E: 11 K: 12 B: 13 E: 14 B: 15 E: 16 B: 17 E: 18 19 B: 20 21 A:

ich hab heut schon mit dir Angegeben. mein mann kOcht. ‘i already bragged about you today. my husband cooks.’ hehe[hehehe [ja(ha) (? [ ?) [‘ye(he)s’ (? [ ?) [ mit bU(h)tter. ha[hahahahahahaha [‘with bu(h)tter. ha[hahahahahahahaha’ [hahahahahahahahaha [naI:v [‘nai:ve’ [hahahahahahahahahaha [aber gesU:nd. hehe [‘but hea:lthy. Hehe’ [hehehehehe [hehehehehe [ja er kocht SE::HR gesund und bewusst. [‘yes he cooks ve::ry health consciously.’ WAS? ‘WHAT?’ wir wurden gefrAgt auf der straße, und da hat‘we were asked on the street, and then-’ über unsere Essgewohnheiten. von einer schwEIzerin. ‘about our eating habits. by a swiss lady.’ wer kOcht. mein mAnn. (-) [sagt sIE. ‘who cooks. my husband (-) [she says.’ [ich wollt n tOpf für meinen mann. [‘I wanted a pot for my husband.’ wie Oft? jEden tag. (-) [was für tÖpfe haben sie. ‘how often? every day. (-) [what sort of pots do you have.’ [wI:rklich? wie die mich [‘really? how she looked at me.’ Angeguckt [hat. [(? geschirr?) aluminium, tEflon, [‘(?utensils?) aluminium, teflon,’ °wEIß ich nich. mein MANN kocht.° [na und dann hab ich gesagt, ‘°I don't know. my husband cooks.° [well and then I said,’ [hehehehe

The humorous stylization of ‘new’ women and men and conservative others 22 B: 23 A: 24 E: 25 26 B: 27 E:

28 B: 29 E: 30 s: 31 E: 32 33 U: 34 35 K: 36 E: 37 U: 38 M: 39 K: 40 B: 41 K: 42 43 s:

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ihr habt Alles. Ver [schIEdenes. ‘you have everything. Var [ious things.’ [hehehehehehe[hehehe [und dann hat se noch [‘and then she’ gfragt, (- -) wo [mIt er kocht. ‘asked, (- -) with [what he cooks.’ [womIt kocht er. [‘with what does he cook.’ hamma gsagt, manchmal mit Ö::l, aber natürlich mit BUTTER. ‘we said, sometimes with oi::l, but of course with BUTTER.’ und da gesagt WA:::S? ‘and then she said, WHA:::T?’ und DAS nennen sie gesundes essen? ja SEHR. ‘and you call that healthy food? yes VERY.’ hahahahahaha die wollte uns nämlich nur so was verkaufen, wo du gAr ‘she only wanted to sell us something for which you’ nichts brauchst. hehehehehe ‘don't need anything. hehehehe’ (? ?) von der schweizerischen megalit. ‘from the swiss firm megalit.’ ((hard to understand)) SCHMECKT doch alles überhaupt nich. ‘but nothing has any flavor at all.’ ja ja. ‘yeah yeah.’ ach sO. das war son stAnd. ‘ah. there was such a stand.’ ja ja. ‘yeah yeah’ dann habt ihr natürlich die ganze statistik ruiniert. ‘then you naturally ruined all the statistics.’ (? ?) mein mann kOcht. das macht Alles mein mann. ‘with my husband cooks. my husband does all that.’ ich habe überhaupt keine ahnung. ‘I know nothi(h)ng at all.’ hahahahahahahahaha

Jürgen enters with a fish dish and Erika, Jürgen’s wife, then takes up the culinarily accomplished husband as a topic. The transcript begins here. Erika says that she has already bragged about Jürgen that day and then quotes herself in direct speech: ‘my husband cooks’. She laughs and

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thereby contextualizes what follows as a humorous story. Anni laughingly presents a further detail from Erika’s self-citation in line 4: with bu(h)tter. ha[hahahahahahahaha. Bernarda comments, naiv (‘naive’) in line 6. At first glance the adjective naiv makes little sense. It may be that Bernada finds it naïve to cook with butter. But it is more plausible to suppose that Bernada has adopted the voice of the saleswoman to whom Erika bragged about her husband. She assumes a role in the dialogue which occurred on the street. Anni and Bernarda identify themselves as having participated in the episode to be narrated. It is mostly the three women who participated in the episode who laugh in response to this. Jürgen laughingly offers a commentary in line 8 which also provokes a mirthful response. Although it is rather uncertain with whose voice Bernarda spoke the word “naïve”, the comment could be understood as a reference to cooking with butter. Jürgen defends this practice with an exaggerated intonation and laughter. Thus, a play with stereotypical comments is staged in reference to cooking practices, which the others also consider funny. Erika in line 10 again places herself directly in the dialogue on the street, which has not as yet been otherwise introduced. In line 11 Katharina shows problems in reception. Bernarda and Erika give background information in a highly collaborative manner. Again in line 14 Bernarda cites the question of the saleswoman (‘who cooks?’) and then Erika’s answer (‘my husband’); then Erika continues to explain what she wanted from the Swiss saleswoman: a pot for her husband. In line 16 Bernarda again recounts the dialogue between Erika and the pan-seller; she first takes on the voice of the Swiss saleswoman, then switches to Erika’s voice (‘every day’), and back again to the saleswoman’s question (‘what sort of pots do you have’). Erika’s questioning wirklich ‘really’ in line 17 is staged as if taken from the saleswoman’s lips. She portrays her as astonished. In line 19, Bernarda presumably first restages the saleswoman’s questions about their cooking utensils in order to reply suddenly with Erika’s voice (in line 20): ‘°I don't know. my husband cooks.°’ Then she cites her own contribution (‘well and then I said, you have everything. various things’). In lines 24 and 25, Erika adopts indirect speech to recount the saleswoman’s further questions. Bernada repeats it transformed into a direct question. Erika quotes the group’s answer in the street. The three women have tried to shock the saleswoman not only by having a husband who does all the cooking but also by not favoring fatfree ways of preparing food. In line 28 Bernarda repeats the saleswoman’s cry

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of astonishment (‘wha::::t?’). Again, Erika continues the cry of astonishment (‘and you call that healthy food?’). She then quotes her own reply (‘yes very’). A few listeners laugh. Then Erika explains what the woman was selling (‘special pots for which no fat is needed’). Ulf knows the manufacturer of the pots (33). Katharina rejects such products in line 34, thereby joining her friends’ attitude concerning cooking without fat. Ulf also shows his sudden understanding of the narrated scene in line 35. Katharina summarizes the event in regard to German and Swiss statistics about the division of household labor (37). Namely, it has invalidated the statistics which for decades have said that in Germany and Switzerland women do a greater share of homework. In line 39 she speaks with Erika’s voice in the dialogue with the kitchen utensil saleswoman. Bernarda continues the speech in the same role (‘I know nothi(H)ng at all’). The audience laughs. Two performances are intertwined here, the one on the street and the one at the table. On the street, the three provoked the saleswoman and taught her that her expectations about normality are out of date. At the table they present themselves as being able to use an everyday situation for a little stand up comedy. The saleswoman is portrayed as simply taken aback by Erika’s revelation. The progressive customer replies quite matter-of-factly, with a manner of speaking suggesting that it is a foregone conclusion. Erika presents her norm-violating marital relationship with the greatest matter-of-factness. This modality of certainty is used here to obtain a double effect: first, in contact with the saleswoman, as a means of stylizing herself as a ‘new woman’ with a ‘new man’. Second, it is offered to the group as a successful portrayal of ‘pulling the saleswoman’s leg’. The listeners laugh at the special stylizations in this “mimetic satire” (Auerbach 1971; Schwitalla 1994; Jaffe 1998). Those present know that Erika has greatly exaggerated in portraying her husband as a house-husband. She plays with gender norms. The group’s presentation at the dinner table serves, for one thing, as an amusing way to tell about provoking the saleswoman in the street, second, reproduces a distinction in regard to life styles (the saleswoman embodies the littlevalued normalcy), and, third, helps to characterize the narrators as persons capable of exploiting the comic potential inherent in everyday situations, thus as active and go-ahead fellows. At the end, Katharina evaluates the performance as such, recapitulating a few of the key punch lines. The play with “others’” voices was evidently made accessible to all. That may be the reason that the pan-seller was not

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mimed in Swiss German, since the participants Bernarda and Anna, from Berlin, can’t speak a word of it. In example (3) we witnessed a very similar content, with a similar constellation of dramatis personae and performance. Ulf’s self-stylization in example (3) is very close to that of the three women in example (5) (Erika, Anni, and Bernada) who told their story first and later enjoyed Ulf’s story. However, the three women do not use dialect features to portray those whom they confronted with their different life style. Anni and Bernada are unable to play with Alemannic dialects. Thus, in example (3) and in example (5) the self is staged as confronting the world with new standards of behavior. Voices are rendered in a very similar way, and the ideological relations confirm those in the other stories being told in the group. The narrator Ulf affiliates himself with Erika, Anni and Bernada. 4.2. The young gentleman In the next example, dialect again plays no role in the citation. The cited mother is from Northern Germany. Nevertheless, a specific speech style can be attributed to her. Martin, a homosexual journalist, shows his friends around his new flat. The group arrives in the kitchen. (6) (Conversation 12 Episode 4) Friederike (F); Annette (A); Martin (M); Lars (L); Bernd (B). 1

F:

2

L:

3

A:

4

L:

hier hats ja nur ein fEnster. ‘there is only one window.’ is aber doch schÖn fürn jungen herrn. weischt. ‘but it is really nice for a young gentleman. you know.’ ja das rEI(hhh)cht fürn jungen mann. ‘yes, it suffi(hhh)ces for a young man.’ fürn jungen hErrn, sagt deine mutter immer. ‘for a young gentleman, your mother always says.’

Friederike (a lecturer of about the same age) notes that Bernd’s kitchen has only one window and will accordingly be dimly lit during the daytime. Thereupon Lars delivers a phrase from the repertoire of elderly women: is aber doch schön fürn jungen Herrn. Annette agrees with her boyfriend and raises the level of playful impoliteness. Bernd, the forty year old journalist,

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is defined as a ‘young gentleman’ who needs no brightly illuminated kitchen. This activity integrates dimensions of a mock challenge. In line 4 Lars makes the source of the flowery phrase explicit, Annette’s mother. The attribution of domains and objects to gentlemen and ladies is found equally absurd in this circle. Lars also corrects Annette’s utterance ‘young man’ to ‘young gentleman’. The correct wording is important for the stylization. It is unclear whether ‘really nice for a young gentleman’ should be understood as a compliment or just as being ironic.8 This scene, too, lives on knowledge about typical ways of speaking. These, inserted in the manner of unintroduced quotation-like speech, suggest the attitudes of those from which the self is differentiated. Categories like ‘young gentleman’ appear from the beginning as if in quotation marks. Both ‘you know’ as well as the laugh particles and the correction in line 4 point to these symbolically.

5.

Humorous distance

All six dialogs that I have grouped together here for the analysis of identity deal with normative encounters in the life of the sexes. They deal with marriage candidates, division of labor in the kitchen, couple’s differences of opinion, patterns of behavior of married men, and generally with gender attributes. The narrators present themselves in confrontation with persons from whom they differentiate themselves in the story world and in the narrative situation. They do this with humorous keying,9 in which, however, the degree of exaggeration of the staged persons varies. The conservative figures are made to appear conservative by placing highly formulaic phrases in their mouths, by letting them speak on stage in dialect, react inflexibly and unsophisticated and get excited. Likewise, in confrontation the self shapes itself on the levels of the story world and the current, real situation. In mutual, complementary orientation to one another, common facets of identification can thus be created. Humorous keying inhibits the appearance of arrogance. The self in the story world takes the initiative, but without stress. It does not hesitate to introduce its own view of things to the locals. In this way, the self’s standpoint as well as its brashness are displayed as morally correct. The congruency of the stories confirms this model of the self in the current situation. Working with exaggerated categorization and deconstruction, the story-tellers also create distance from their

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own selves. In all of the stories, the performance is accountable and as such is enjoyed. As already mentioned before, explicit moralization has a bad reputation in the Western world (Bergmann and Luckmann 1999), but people try to give their identities a moral underpinning. Attributing superiority to one’s own attitude and behavior is also a delicate undertaking. As Coupland (2001) put it: Straightforward formulation might be too obvious and stark a claim to succeed in the late-modern climate. Humorous stylizing of ingroup and outgroup seems to be a successful symbolic practice that can achieve a distanced validation of speakers’ social identities. The humorous keying allows the members of the network to play with distanced validation: the conservatives are more strongly typified and distanced, but also for their own social image a certain distance remains. Also, the orientation to gender remains indirect in these episodes but accountable. In humorous discourses this issue is dealt with in a playful frame. Attitudes are transmitted mainly by evocation. Stylization is thus a subversive form of multi-voiced utterance, one that can discredit a voice and a person by reworking them into the local purpose of a playful realization of the superiority of the speaker’s own attitude. In direct or mediated contact the group processes the constant changes in political, economic and ecological developments in a similar manner; the members show each other what is normal, what knowledge and what attitude one disposes of – and by doing this they simultaneously constitute features of their social identity. Gender relations have in the meantime become milieu-specific in the Western world (Koppetsch and Burkart 2000). We face a range of masculinities and femininities (Connell 1995; Baron and Kotthoff 2002), integrating a variety of different lifestyles and behavioral standards, among them the traditional ones. As in the past, traditional masculinity is, for example, still symbolized in certain professions and types of sport (Connell 1995, 2002; Behnke and Meuser 2002). Clear power relations with male dominance continue to exist in the higher spheres of politics, economy, religion and the sciences. Traditional femininity still centers around home, beauty and body care. Alongside these, there are varied deviations from traditional roles and norms. Even if we must start from the fact that milieus with symmetrical gender relationships constitute a minority in the Germanspeaking countries, it is nevertheless (or precisely for this reason) interesting to observe how these groups create normality for their social identity, which diverges from traditional societal standards.

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Appendix: Transcription conventions (-) (- -) (0.5) (? what ?) (? ?) ..[.. ..[.... . =

one hyphen indicates a short pause two hyphens indicate a longer pause (less than half a second) pause of half a second; long pauses are counted in half seconds indicates uncertain transcription indicates an incomprehensible utterance

indicates overlap or interruption latching of an utterance of one person; no interruption hahaha laughter hehehe slight laughter goo(h)d integrated laughter (h) audible exhalation ('h) audible inhalation , slightly rising intonation ? rising intonation . falling intonation , ongoing intonation : indicates elongated sound ° blabla° lower amplitude and pitch COME ON emphatic stress (pitch and volume shift) come On accent syllable (only in the German original) ↑_ high onset of pitch ↓ pitch goes down <↓blabla> low pitch register within the brackets <((smiling) > comments ((sits down)) nonverbal actions or comments

Notes 1. Mummendey (1995) discusses various sociological and psychological concepts of the self and of identity. He concludes that the concept of self overlaps with that of identity, with the exception of a few special traditions. An individual performs various social and situational identities, but is also identical with heror himself. For him it seems justified to translate self to identity and to see the two concepts as semantically equivalent.

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2. Davies (2006) analyzes the humor of movie characters in connection with typification. 3. In this article I am not concerned with humor theory; see Kotthoff (1998) on that matter. When I speak of conversational caricatures, I mean the exaggeration of character traits, created by linguistic rather than visual effects. 4. I also have data from other social milieus. Mocking humor which relates to gender norms I only found among the academics of this age group. 5. Such introductions are typical for humorous stories. 6. In German this is a stylistically elevated expression. 7. The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. 8. See Kotthoff (2002) on conversational irony and its relation to citation-like footing. 9. The term keying is used in the sense of Hymes (1974).

References Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe 1998 Identity as an achievement and as a tool. In: Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London, 1–14. Auerbach, Erich 1971 Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. Bern/Munich: Francke. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (Bachtin, Michail M.) 1969 [1985] Literatur und Karneval. Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur. Munich: Hanser. 1981 The Dialogic Imagination, C. Emerson and M. Holquist (eds.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barbour, Stephen and Patrick Stevenson 1999 Variation in German. A Critical Approach to German Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baron, Bettina and Helga Kotthoff (eds.) 2002 Gender in Interaction. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Behnke, Cornelia and Michael Meuser 2002 Gender and habitus: Fundamental securities and crisis tendencies among men. In: Baron, Bettina and Helga Kotthoff (eds.), Gender in Interaction. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 153–175. Bourdieu, Pierre 1979 Distinction. Paris: Minuit. Brünner, Gisela 1991 Redewiedergabe in Gesprächen. Deutsche Sprache 1, 1–16.

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Christmann, Gabriele 1996 Die Aktivität des „Sich-Mokierens“ als konversationelle Satire. Wie sich Umweltschützer/innen über den „Otto-Normalverbraucher“ mokieren. In: Kotthoff, Helga (ed.), Scherzkommunikation. Beiträge zur empirischen Gesprächsforschung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 49–80. Connell, Robert W. 1995 Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cook-Gumperz, Jenny and John Gumperz 1976 Context in children’s speech. In: Papers on Language and Context. Working Papers 46. Berkeley, CA: Language Behaviour Research Laboratory. Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 1999 Coherent voicing. On prosody in conversational reported speech. In: Bublitz, Wolfram et al. (eds.), Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse, 11–35. Coupland, Nikolas 2001 Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30(3), 345– 375. Davies, Catherine E. 2006 Gendered sense of humor as expressed through aesthetic typifications. Journal of Pragmatics 38(1), 96–114. Deppermann, Arnulf this volume Playing with the voice of the other – Stylized Kanaksprak in conversations among German adolescents. In: Auer, Peter (ed.), Style and Social Identities: Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Heterogeneity. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. de Fina, Anna this volume Style and stylization in the construction of identities in a cardplaying club. In: Auer, Peter (ed.), Style and Social Identities: Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Heterogeneity. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dupréel, Emile 1928 Le problème sociologique de rire. Revue Philosophique 196, 213– 260. Eckert, Penelope 2000 Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. London: Blackwell. Goffman, Erving 1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Günthner, Susanne 1996 The contextualization of affect in reported dialogue. In: Niemeyer, S. and R. Dirven (eds.), The Language of Emotions. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 247–277. 1999 Polyphony and the ‘layering of voices’ in reported dialogue: An analysis of the use of prosodic devices in everyday reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics 31, 685–708. this volume The construction of otherness in reported dialogues as a resource for identity work. In: Auer, Peter (ed.), Style and Social Identities: Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Heterogeneity. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gumperz, John 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996 The linguistic and cultural relativity of inference. In: Gumperz, John J. and Stephen Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 374–407. Hymes, Dell 1974 Ways of speaking. In: Bauman, Richard and Joel Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 433–451. Jaffe, Alexandra 1998 Comic performance and the articulation of hybrid identity. Pragmatics 10(1), 39–59. Koppetsch, Cornelia and Günter Burkart 1999 Die Illusion der Emanzipation. Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz. Kotthoff, Helga 1996 Impoliteness and conversational joking: On relational politics. Folia Linguistica 30(3–4), 299–327. 1998 Spass Verstehen. Zur Pragmatik von konversationellem Humor. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 2000 Konversationelle Parodie. Über komische Intertextualität in der Alltagskommunikation. Germanistische Linguistik 153, 159–186. 2002 Irony, quotation, and other forms of staged intertextuality. In: Graumann, Carl and Werner Kallmeyer (eds.), Perspective and Perspectivation in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 201–233. 2006 Gender and humor. The state of the art. Journal of Pragmatics 38(1), 4–26. Malone, Martin J. 1997 Worlds of Talk. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Conversation. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Mead, George Herbert 1934 Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mulkay, Michael 1988 Humor. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mummendey, Hans-Dieter 1995 Psychologie der Selbstdarstellung. Göttingen: Hogrefe. Rampton, Ben 1999 Styling the other. Special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4). Schutz, Alfred 1970 On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann 1973 The Structures of the Life-World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schwitalla, Johannes 1994 Sprachliche Ausdrucksformen für soziale Identität beim Erzählen. Beobachtungen zu vier Gruppen in Vogelstang. In: Kallmeyer, Werner (ed.), Kommunikation in der Stadt. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 511–577. Siebenhaar, Beat 2005 Dialekt und Hochsprache in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz. Zurich: Wyler. Tannen, Deborah 1989 Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles 1989 Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Voloshinov, Valentin N. 1926 [1978] Reported speech. In: Matejka, Ladislav and Kristina Pomorska (eds.), Readings in Russian Poetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 149–175.

Chapter 16 A postscript: Style and identity in interactional sociolinguistics John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz

Identity may well be gaining a significance beyond that of an intrinsic human life-cycle, and its stages and crises. For, in our time the historical emphasis on the differences between individual, national and even religious identities must find a re-orientation that emphasizes and cultivates the essential unity of all human identities. By this I mean the consciousness and ethical responsibility of being one species that must learn to orient its outlook and inventions towards the preservation and enrichment of all life instead of a deadly extension of senseless, technical perfection and power. For this however, it is necessary to learn to understand fully what a specieswide identity can do for each individual’s and each community’s vitality to make senseless mass murder impossible. Erik H. Erikson (1983)

1.

Identity as a social construct

The above statement from the father of psychoanalytic identity theory and social biography stresses the need for a common intellectual frame that can bring together different and divergent views in times of political change and uncertainty. If Erikson’s statement seems somewhat idealistic or vague, speaking as it does of the unity of humankind, it was written in response to what he saw as the exceptional challenges of the beginning of the nuclear age. For the citation dates back more than two decades to a time when scholars saw an unavoidable tension between the individual’s embodied distinctiveness and the socially shared cultural solidarity of group belonging, or between the individual psychologically constituted ego and the laws of the social world. As anthropologist Meyer Fortes (1983) commented at the same conference, the problem facing research on identity is that it appears to be cast in terms of fluctuations between two ends of a continuum.

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In other words, identity is “located in the space between two poles”. For the individual the emphasis is on “what goes on inside my skin”, at the other pole one says “What I am is what society makes of me” (1983: 393). Both positions are constitutive of a person’s identity, but traditionally researchers have looked for causal explanations exclusively at one or the other end of the continuum. The possibility Fortes introduces, i.e. that we are neither made entirely by others nor do we make ourselves without other’s support and interaction, was ignored. More recent social theories which adopt the perspective of ordinary societal members rather than the analyst’s position as primary view the person as a thinking, speaking being, an active agent within a social world constructed through interaction with others. These theories have changed the focus of identity theorizing. We can now see that identity involves not the opposition between the individual and the social; rather, the two are intertwined and it is the continuity of the person that we work to maintain through acts of speaking. We present a stable social self by providing internally consistent narratives about our selves and our actions in a changing world. If identity is communicated through acts of speaking then we can think of speaking styles as representations of such identities. Treating identity as a communicated phenomenon allows for the possibility of multiple and flexible, inherently contingent selves that have coherence only from specific points of view and in specific contexts.

2.

Identity as life style

Contemporary society is increasingly shaped by mediating bureaucratic institutions that impact many areas of daily life and mandate communicative standards of their own. We now recognize that while identity requires continuous validation of a bureaucratically sanctioned self on the one hand, on the other it also calls for the on-going reinvention of the individual persona. This position therefore presents specific challenges. Individuals are expected to construct coherence through explanations about their own fit or lack of fit to bureaucratically mandated categories, yet at the same time they must present a self that in any one context can be seen as continuous with a history that both precedes and extends beyond the narrative present. The situation becomes even more complex when we consider that late modern societies also provide new possibilities for individual change and for the progressive development of the self. Change inevitably involves

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risks, but it also requires that individuals present themselves as socially acceptable and attractive beings – the new growth industry of selfawareness. As Giddens (1991) describes it, late modern society’s emphasis on new life-style movements “represents an era beyond the emancipation from want and from hierarchical domination into a politics of choice. Life politics is centered on lifestyle choices and issues of self-actualization from which political consequences flow” (1991: 209). From our own position we argue that these choices are ultimately mediated by sociolinguistic choices and, as this paper and others in this volume show, not by selection from among a limited set of behavioral options. Judith Irvine (2001) suggests that speech styles share some of the characteristics of dress styles: they can be put on to suit an occasion and a situation. However, speech styles also gain durability over time as they become typified as indexes of identity. Though open to some revision, they count as an integral part of an individual’s self presentation. To quote Giddens again: In the post-traditional order of modernity and against the back-drop of new forms of mediated experience self identity becomes a reflexively organized endeavor. The reflexive product of the self which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised biographical narrative takes place in the context of multiple choices as filtered through abstract systems. The more tradition loosens its hold, and the more daily life is reconstituted in terms of the dialectical inter-play of the local and global the more individuals are forced to negotiate life-style choices among a diversity of options (1991: 5).

Giddens’ use of the term “biographical narrative” here, notions of “discourse” suggest that modernity theorists are growing aware of the crucial importance of language as discourse. Yet, as we argue below, speech styles have only recently come to be recognized as relevant to social science theorizing. There is moreover little if any agreement on what we mean by these terms and how we can relate them to social categorizations.

3.

Linguistic style

Our current notions of linguistic style can be traced back to Thomas Sebeok’s (1960) edited volume Style in Language that brought together literary scholars, psycholinguists and linguists, all writing on various aspects of

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style each from their own disciplinary perspectives. While the linguists mostly took up problems emerging from the stylistics of written literary texts, the questions of spoken language and performance remained in the background. Roman Jakobson calls attention to these limitations. In his postscript to the volume entitled “Linguistics and Poetics”, he criticizes the narrowness of then current linguists’ work as follows: Keeping linguistics apart from poetics is warranted only when the field of linguistics appears to be illicitly restricted, when the sentence is viewed by some linguists as the highest analyzable construction or when the scope of linguistics is confined to grammar alone, or uniquely to non-semantic questions of semantic form, or to the inventory of denotative devices with no reference to free variations (1960: 352).

Asking “what do language and poetry have in common?”, Jakobson argues that both are communicative acts and the relationship between them must be assessed at the super-ordinate level of speech event not through morpheme by morpheme sentence level comparative linguistic analysis. Jakobson’s suggestive paper was one of the first to suggest that context be treated as a communicative phenomenon. Although his functional semiotic perspective on speaking has undergone extensive theoretical and conceptual refinement in the course of the last few decades, it was and continues to be fundamental to the ethnography of communication and related interpretive anthropological linguistic research on discourse where, as we will show in this chapter, notions of poetic, emotive and metapragmatic aspects of performance are again at the center of attention. 3.1. Linguistic style as community-wide resource A second main tradition in the study of linguistic style is that of William Labov who rejected his predecessors’ person-centered approach to linguistic analysis, arguing that regularities of speaking can only be revealed at the community level. Labov incorporates style into sociolinguistic theory as one of two key dimensions of variability that relate the linguistic to the social by combining the dialectologists’ measures of variability with the quantitative sociologists’ model of society. His initial goal was to devise valid, replicable methods for charting on-going processes of linguistic change in urban language. To achieve these goals he understood that it was necessary to account for both inter-speaker variability and for individuals’

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variation across different speaking contexts. The concept of style, defined as a relation between linguistic and extra-linguistically defined social (or rather macro-societal) measures such as education, social class and prestige was introduced to account for the variations across contexts. The speech community’s linguistic resources no longer focus on a language or a dialect and its variants, but a repertoire, a set of speech varieties with respect to which speakers’ stylistic variability is assessed. The purpose of Labov’s analysis is to determine the range of variability that characterizes the speech community. Rules of variable use are then incorporated into grammatical description by distinguishing between categorical rules, that is, those which hold for the community as a whole, and variable rules that change along social or geographical parameters. In this way, the linguistic and the social are treated as related. Although they count as separate entities, they can be studied in relation to each other, first through qualitative observation and then through quantitative validation. Stylistic variation thus becomes the crucial nexus between individual speech and a community’s shared practices. The assumption is that the styles that constitute the repertoire vary from the vernacular to the prestigious standard-like ways of speaking, monitored for conformance to stabilizing influences imposed from above. Such prestige scales are seen to mirror the society’s class based social structure. It is the vernacular that most closely reflects variability, and is thus most likely to reveal locally based changes. Labov goes on to argue that stylistic variation can be elicited in field studies by presenting speakers with different situations and topics. Labovian sociolinguistics has dominated linguists’ research on style, even as the range of social phenomena dealt with has expanded and the notion of a clearly definable speech community and its distinct norms becomes more controversial (Coupland, this volume). More recently we are beginning to see a shift in this basic paradigm so as to account for speakers’ creative use of stylistic features to mark an individual’s identity in relation to changing social situations, and to newly emerging speech norms associated with them (Eckert and Rickford 2001). The scope of variability analysis has also been broadened from concentrating on ongoing processes of linguistic change and social class variation in geographic regions, to issues of ethnicity identity and gender variation (Baugh 2000; Eckert 2000; Rickford 1999). Yet, despite these developments, linguists continue to treat the linguistic and the social as essentially independent entities.

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3.2. Style as an index of distinctiveness Judith Irvine’s 2001 paper shifts the focus of attention away from language use as such to propose a more broadly conceived semiotics of style, constitutive of linguistic ideologies of distinctiveness that characterizes human societies in general. From this more abstract perspective, speaking style counts as one among several means by which individuals set themselves off from others, in ways that are similar in communicative effect to dress style, consumption patterns, and other options that make up “life style” – the ways of living in late modern societies. Such a concept of style involves a notion of the social, which is not bounded by extra-communicatively defined a priori regional, social or ethnic categories. Boundaries are reflected in individuals’ ways of speaking and acting. Speakers can be shown to trade on this knowledge and its distribution as communicative resources. This new position reflects not only different views on the relationship between speaking and society, but also views of verbal communication that move beyond the specifics of sentence bound grammar to ground usage in a broader Jakobsonian linguistic perspective on semiotic processes. We therefore need to reconsider the means by which current social categories are constructed, to show how on the one hand they are represented in what we say at any one time, and on the other hand are being changed or reinforced through speaking practices over time. Irvine’s key argument is that a style gains communicative effect by being seen as part of an ideologically based “system of distinctions in which one style contrasts with other styles within the context of that system and its social meaning contrasts with other social meanings in the system” (2001: 24). Styles in other words are not inherently meaningful by themselves. They should not be studied in isolation but should be examined in terms of a) their relation to other styles and b) to the semiotic principles of stylistic differentiation in what Irvine calls the “continuously evolving sociolinguistic systems” of which they are part. The communicative effect of styles is mediated by ideology (defined as that aspect of culture by which we evaluate ideas, objects and actions). Sociolinguists generally agree that ways of speaking index the social formations with which they are typically associated. According to the Peircian theory of semiotics from which current notion derives, an index can only lead to social action if it acts as a sign, and a sign requires an interpretant, that is, it must be meaningful and understandable to at least some of those individuals whose reactions it is designed to affect. Indexes in other words

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rely for their communicative import on someone’s interpretation, and this involves both propositional content and knowledge of the surrounding social world and its history. The social and the cultural therefore do not entirely exist apart from talk. Together they become intrinsic ingredients of the semiotics of human action. As a consequence understandings are culturally variable, that is they are neither universal nor entirely predictable from social positionings such as ethnic identity or socioeconomic class without consideration of local history and cultural tradition. The notion of style as a marker of distinctiveness is shared by several of the chapters in this volume where stylistic distinctions are constructed in the course of people’s shared history over a time period and their current adaptations to local conditions. The organization of social styles leads to variable stylization practices in which positioning is in opposition to other’s use of linguistic resources for indexing social identity as well the aesthetics of verbal form. Interactional sociolinguistics analysis enables in-depth examination of such variable stylization practices.

4.

An interactional sociolinguistics of style

Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) is best described as the application of interpretive methods of discourse analysis to gain insight into social/cultural issues that tend to arise in today’s social environments by systematically looking at how speakers and listeners involved in these issues talk about them. Typically, IS research begins with the ethnographic study of everyday local practices, participant observation and interviewing in selected settings, to gain insight into communicative conventions and ideologies of interpersonal relations. The initial aim is to locate naturally organized situations (Garfinkel 1967) where the practices to be examined are likely to come up for discussion, and to collect tape or video recordings suitable for in depth study. For purposes of in-depth analysis extracts from these recordings are then divided into speech events. Broadly defined an event can be treated a any sequentially organized string of speech exchanges marked by a detectable beginning and an end that presents evidence of the event’s communicative outcome (Gumperz and Berenz 1993). Central to (IS) is the assumption that all communication is dialogically grounded in that it involves active collaboration among two or more individuals. Interlocutors’ interpretive assessments depend to a significant extent on the interactive processes through which communicative work gets

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done; meanings are finely tuned and negotiated. As empirical work on discourse and conversation has long shown, participants in such exchanges respond to what they assume others intend to convey. They do not base their interpretations on the denotational meaning of individual lexical items or on sentences extracted from discourse. IS argues that to account for the observable facts of interpretation we must broaden our view of how verbal communication works, and adopt a Peircian semiotic perspective which argues that understanding rests on symbolic signs that communicate via grammar and lexicon, as well as on indexical signs defined as a association between sign and context (Silverstein 1996; Lucy 1996). When seen in these terms communication is always intentional in that participants respond to their perceived understanding of the other’s communicative intent, and everyday language relies on simultaneously conveyed symbolic and indexical signs, one working in conjunction with the other. Understanding, in other words, goes beyond grammar and lexical knowledge and depends on additional inferential processes incorporating among other factors wider culturally based presuppositions. We have to assume that at any one point in a discursive exchange members must, if only in very general terms, agree on what activity they are engaged in, how it is framed and what the likely outcome are, as well on the conventions that underlie participants’ ongoing interpretations in the course of the interaction. Without such agreements there can be no conversational involvement. The conversational management process also relies on additional verbal and non-verbal signaling processes that are referred to as contextualization cues (Gumperz 1982, 1992) along with grammar and lexicon. Inferential processes are basically indexical, that is what is heard and seen at any one time is evaluated in order to retrieve the contextual grounds of what is communicatively intended. Since they are acquired in through everyday culturally communicative practice indexical signs are by definition highly culture bound and sensitive to subtle shifts in contextual presuppositions. The above perspective differs from commonly accepted notions of understanding in its treatment of cultural knowledge as an essential input to the interpretive process. Culture here affects interpretation in two ways. One, it provides background knowledge that we rely on to formulate tentative interpretations. Second, interpretations once made are then validated on the basis of the way they can be integrated into the event as a whole. Some researchers use the term social meaning to refer to indexically conveyed information, but we believe it is useful to draw a distinction between deno-

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tational meanings, meanings can be extracted from context bound talk and listed in dictionaries, and indexes, based on culture and context bound inferences that are either validated or rejected by what happens in the course of the event. In this way understanding in communicative practice draws on elements of background knowledge (Garfinkel 1967), opening the way for further interpretations that go beyond first order indexing, by showing how listeners and speakers build up second orders of indexicality (Silverstein 1995). We use this latter term to refer to inferences made by participants in the course of a communicative event that construct an envisagement of an activity or communicative exchange. The construction process here involves additional culturally based knowledge indicating how specific aspects in the discourse are able to move beyond stereotypical categorizations of persons or situations to reach out into more abstract social worlds. As we have argued above, interactional sociolinguistics enables stylization practices, i.e. the processes by which speech varieties come to function as the means by which individuals set themselves off from others, to be explored analytically. Resources for stylization include among other things linguistic, prosodic, rhythmic and timing constituents together with gesture that act as contextualization cues in everyday talk. Other resources for stylization are semiotic particulars such as embodied features of dress and posture. Style switching or shifting relies on some or all of these working in co-occurrence with each other to achieve communicative ends. It is this issue of co-occurring constituents that makes styles of speaking creatively variable and marks a distinctive interactional sociolinguistic approach. We provide some brief examples of this process below. Other chapters in this volume also exemplify the process. The following two examples demonstrate how speaking styles operate to position participants in a bureaucratically mediated social world, showing how they fit or differ from the social categories made available to them. In other words the ideologically inscribed distinctions of language operate as resources to enable members of a group to select or highlight certain features of speech that others bound by the same ideology recognize. In example (1), professors in a large research university take part in a bureaucratically typical oral assessment of a student’s performance. In example (2), American Indians resident in a small California town, several of whom hold professional positions in the region, meet informally with two researchers to discuss their concerns over local interethnic relations.

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4.1. Example (1) As our initial example we present four excerpts from an American university oral Ph.D. examination for an older woman graduate student. The formal interview section of the proceedings has just concluded. Participants are casually seated around a table in a seminar room. Lee, the candidate, has left and is waiting outside as the professors discuss the completed dissertation: Adam, the chair, who is also her graduate advisor, Sherm, the most senior department member, James, a member of another department, and Pat, a junior woman faculty member. The talk, for the most part, takes the form of a casual discussion, marked by frequent false starts, clauses left incomplete and much hedging. Given this overall frame we further distinguish two modes of speaking: a) ‘on record evaluative style’ (bold type) with comparatively slow tempo, contoured intonation and relatively high incidence of technical terminology, and b) ‘off record style’ with more rapid tempo and less pronounced intonation contours. Consider the following initial comments by James, the outside member, who sums up what he has to say as follows: Excerpt (A)1 1 J:

I would certainly be in favor of, you know, (ral) passing her. (acc) Obviously with the kinds of suggestions we'll have for revision and so forth.

The passage begins in off record style, but with the phrase passing her the tempo momentarily slows to more measured pace and contoured intonation, of the kind that distinguishes on record evaluative talk throughout the transcript. Immediately afterwards the off-record talk sets in again. The effect is to set off the above phrase from the preceding and following discourse. Adam, the chair, then follows up. He begins with an informal personal anecdote about his own Ph.D. examination (not reproduced here). Then, after a brief pause he continues, picking up on James’ passing her in the preceding turn: Excerpt (B) 1 2 3 4

A: J: A: J:

So you say pass. Oh yeah. And that is ... that’s a neutral term. I’m not sure.

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Note that grammar and lexical meanings cannot alone account for the dynamics of what “is going on” here. Clearly participants go beyond denotation to infer what is intended. But how are these inferences constructed? How are they grounded in the interaction? We assume that as faculty in the same institution all examiners are familiar with the basic examination procedures. They expect for instance hat evaluations are first proposed and then collaboratively and negotiated and agreed upon, unless someone dissents. Also, participants generally draw a distinction between formal assessments that enter into the written record, and informal opinions about the candidate that may for example affect how faculty members describe the candidate’ ability. Such procedural knowledge forms part of the general background knowledge that underlies interpretation. Note that although Adam’s turn has the surface form of a statement repeating information and ventrilocating the intonation contour of James’ prior evaluative turn. But James’ reply “oh yeah” in turn two treats it as a request. A likely inference is that James understands Adam as intending to convey something like: “What kind of a pass do you mean, how well has the candidate performed?” But since James does not elaborate we can assume that he does not want to be more specific. Adam's next remark in turn 3 begins in on-record style as if he were expecting a formal assessment. But then after a brief pause Adam repairs, shifting to off-record style with “That’s a neutral term” which can be interpreted as a request for further clarification, but this time an informal one. As we pointed out above, committee members share an understanding that academic assessments when first given may often be hedged. They know from past experience that the final evaluation will ultimately be collaboratively achieved and how they should be interpreted for the record is then determined cooperatively through further negotiations of the kind illustrated here. But additional forms of socio-cultural and linguistic knowledge also affect the outcome of the negotiation process. For example to comprehend any one utterance we must assume that in absence of cues to the contrary, the speaker intends that it should fit in with the agreed upon communicative goals of the encounter. Such assumptions of conversational cooperation motivate listeners to search for information given in preceding talk, as well as for other types of background information relevant to understanding of what has just been said. All of these affect the inferential process by re-

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trieving interpretive frames suggesting how message segments can be linked to create a thematic whole. One way in which contextualization conventions function is to serve as guide posts for monitoring the progress of the interaction. We use our knowledge of grammar and lexicon, along with contextualization conventions and whatever background information about settings and participants we have to decide what discourse task is being performed, what activity is being signaled and how it is framed. We then build on these predictions to identify the communicative intent that underlies particular utterances. Contextualization conventions channel interpretations in one direction or another. The interpretive assessments made at any one time are contingent assessments both for analysts and conversationalists. Once made, they are either confirmed or disproved by what happens subsequently. If they are confirmed expectations are reinforced, if they are disconfirmed we attempt to reinterpret what we have heard and change our expectations of the goals, outcomes and/or speaker’s intent. In the present situation where the examiners are members of the same academic community, we expect to find a fairly high degree of sharing of contextualization conventions and shared background knowledge. Our analysis reveals the degree to which interpretation of what goes on depends on this sharing and how the cues signal that the candidate is being evaluated. Adam’s anecdote has introduced a more informal, off-record speech style where the shift between on-record and off record styles conveys additional information that enters into the interpretation. In order to show how the stylistic parameters, once established, become essential to the interaction, we concentrate on two more passages. In the first of these James responds to Adam’s preceding turn. Apparently he is now ready to provide more, albeit informal, detail on what he thinks about the performance: Excerpt (C) 1 J: 2 3 4 5

Well/ I think..my sense is that..uh..she has done../A GOOD JOB/ ...and she certainly has..uh.../ I mean..this project for her is being everything and more I think..that a dissertation...should be/ ...and at the state of her professional development I think. a..a GOOD JOB / and she ought to be commended//

The above passage provides another illustration of what participants recognize as the on-record style, marked here by relatively slow enunciation and

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the use of technical evaluative terms. The capitalized “a good job” which appears in the first line and is repeated in the last serves as a key evaluative expression. On each of its occurrences it is pronounced with the same unique prosodic contour, consisting of an increase in volume (here marked by capitals) and fall-rise fall intonation contour on “good” followed by fall to lower pitch fall on “job” which set off the phrase from others in the preceding passages as a formulaic expression. Such prosodic treatment suggests that more is intended than mere emphasis, but exactly and possibly intentionally what that is, is not spelled out in words. Excerpt (D) marks a highlight of the evaluation portion of the defense. Note that Sherm's contoured opening statement “it's a-fine job” ventrilocates the prosody and rhythm of James' formulaic “good job”. We can infer that he agrees with James's 'on record' evaluation or is at least willing to let it stand with all its ambiguities. His follow-up remarks, which take up the remainder of the first three lines below, begin by picking up on what James had said about the length of the dissertation. They are delivered in off record style with accelerated tempo that includes a chuckle suggesting that it is intended as a humorous off-record comment. Pat the junior faculty member’s laughter supports this. In turn 5, Sherm then goes on to what he marks prosodically as more substantive matters by returning to a rhythmically contoured on record style with short phrases, frequent pauses, and false starts with comments often preceded by introductory formulaic phrases that lexically mark the passage as an evaluation (line 5; 12; 22): Excerpt (D) 1 S: oh ...it's a FINE JOB//...by my/..lights uh.../ I would have 2 wished it was shorter//[laughs] (acc) I have some sympathy for 3 the twenty five/...page psych../ dissertations// 4 P: (laughing)...Right/ (clears throat) 5 S: Uh...the uh...uh...// this/...the one comment I'd 6 have/... ha-has to do with her writing/...uh these up// 7 ...uh uh her/...the dissertation was written/...was 8 written with the frame // these are the extent theories// lets 9 use these/...to derive hypotheses/ and get some data/ and cast 10 them against/..against the theories// (sigh) uh that's/ 11 that's/ fine// uh..uh.. but it also...uh/..al imit//...uh..because 12 it leads her/...for example not to/...ask..such questions as 13 the kind of things I was pushing her on a little bit uh/..what 14 alternative meanings/ might be given to/.. the uh..the/.. the 15 class/..variable// ...other than the socialization //

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

it is true that/ in this literature/.. the class variable is interpreted as a socialization variable// ...but that’s not/... necessarily the/..case if you start/... from the more general question/ ..of how can we explain radicalism/...rather than the more particular question/..of.. ...given the theories currently used to explain/..radicalism// ...uh uh...uh she could I think/..write/.. some of this stuff up/..within the more limited frame//it'd be better it seems to me/ if she would/...expand her vision a little bit/...uh...so that she's not necessarily limited// ...although/ ...let me take it back//...in the longer run I would want her to do that// ...in the shorter run I'm not so sure// ...It may be wise to/ ...restrict her vision/...in order to ...uh...to/ ..to get some things done/ ... and now I think it's important for her/ ... to uh...to quickly move/ to get at least one piece out and in the literature/ just to give her the confidence that she can do it//

Given the speaker’s position as the senior member of the group his comments carry the authority that makes the interaction cohere as an oral examination. Yet analysis of the written transcript alone does not account for the talk’s communicative effect. In performance we see the interplay of several verbal and non-verbal channels, with both rhythmic patterning and contouring coordinated with head nodding and symbolically appropriate hand gestures. For example, in referring to what Lee, the candidate, could have done apart from what she did, Sherm makes a gesture of bringing his finger tips together in a flat tent-like arch; and then, as his slow rhythmic delivery continues, he resolves the problem he has set up in his talk. As he does so, he flattens the arch. Here we mention the kinesics only anecdotally. However the point is that discursive practice goes beyond lexical content by providing a rendering which has kinesic and gestural features that gives the impression of a fully developed summing up, and provide the members of the group with a sense that there has been a careful discussion of the thesis as an academic accomplishment. It is by means of such strategies that the speech legitimates the event as a properly conducted examination. From the key prosodic, paralinguistic and lexical strategies through which the communicative effect is achieved and from the chunking of the talk into phrases, we can infer that the speaker Sherm is thinking out loud.

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The relatively high number of hesitation pauses, self corrections and asides, as well as the many incomplete clauses, tone groupings and pausings, all frequently violate our syntactically based expectations about clause boundaries Connections are frequently not lexicalized so that many individual clauses make no sense by themselves. The description dwells on the factual aspects of the candidate’s actions. Little direct evaluative vocabulary is used, so that seen from the perspective of propositional content, it is not immediately evident that the speaker is “doing evaluating” as such. One might of course paraphrase the first few lines as implicating that the candidate took existing theories for granted and that the work is limited because her theoretical position kept her from exploring alternative solutions. But it is left to the audience to infer such information. The passage appears to cohere mainly through its prosody and phrasing, just as it is transformed into an evaluative, ceremonial statement in part through its kinesics and body rhythm. Some of the incomplete utterances could be conflated to make two or three major points, in a manner more consistent with the performance style commonly associated with oral examinations. To construct such contracted summaries of the argument, however, would be to risk losing sight of the ceremonial/indexical character of the actual performance, and thus destroy its effect. To repeat our earlier remarks, in highlighting the role of prosody and the setting up discursive oppositions between on and off-record style we are not claiming that contextualization cues such as style switching convey ‘meanings’ in the semanticists’ sense. The claim is that contextualization cues in co-occurrence with other linguistic signs and background knowledge, lead us to frame the interaction in such a way as to favor certain classes of interpretations. Specific inferences as to what is intended are always locally negotiated. Excerpts (A) and (B) illustrate this point. When Adam uses contoured style to ask James to clarify his statement he is – given the sequential positioning of his question – implicating that he is interested in an on record judgment rather than in the specifics of James’s own personal opinion. In this, as well as elsewhere in the defense, what looks like a potentially “uncomfortable moment” that could lead to an overtly expressed differences of opinion is avoided, because the paralinguistics of the performance indirectly bring the organizational particulars to the surface. And by following up with the on-record committee talk Adam, as chair, implicitly reminds the other participants that it is now time to bring the formal proceedings to a conclusion. Such reminders are however in no way lexicalized and not made part of the official proceedings. To

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have done so would have been to engage in a controlling act with potentially altogether different interpretive consequences. We could say therefore that prosodic and other contextualization cues facilitate the smooth conduct of the defense. We can go further and say that the participants, in recognizing the on-record/off-record opposition, and in the systematic ways in which they react to each others cues, are cooperating not only in producing an academic evaluation, but recognition of group co-membership as academic gatekeepers. As Erickson (2004) refers to it, they recognize each others performed social identity or situational co-membership. This comembership then provides a warrant for any further use of on-record features to be seen as evaluative, and for further strengthening of the group’s bonds by off-record laughter and personal anecdotes.

4.2

Example (2)

The material in this example was obtained in cooperation with the defense team in a high profile Northern California trial, in which the initial verdict had been overturned by the court and a retrial ordered. Arguing that the case can only be understood on the basis of knowledge of local history, culture and interethnic relations, the defense asked the researchers to help with collecting background material. In order to do this the researchers participated in local discussions about relationships between the local Indian community and the White population organized by local residents for their benefit. The discussion takes place in a recently completed housing development belonging to the Karuk tribe, and friends and relatives of the defendant are present. The key speakers are all women. Speaker A is a community worker employed by the Karuk housing association, speaker B is a local dental technician and speaker C is another community member. The data consists of three excerpts from a longer three hour discussion touching on a range of issues concerning interrelations with the local community. Linguistic research in American Indian communities has traditionally concentrated, and to some extent continues to concentrate, on the grammatical systems of specific American Indian languages in order to save them from extinction. In recent years however linguistic anthropologists have turned to sociolinguistic investigations of the English spoken by Native American groups. Several initial findings of this work are of particular

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significance for this discussion. Many English speaking Indian communities, particularly those who live in reservations separate from the surrounding white groups, tend to speak varieties of English that show characteristics of discourse level stress, rhythm and intonation and modes of argumentation reflecting those of parent American Indian languages. In addition Native American English rhetorical practices govern among other things the use of silence and matters of discourse organization: who speaks to whom, when and under what circumstances. Modes of indicating agreement or disagreement and the like, are to a significant degree carried over as well (Basso 1986). The transcript begins a few minutes into the discussion as the community worker tells an anecdote about what happened when the Karuk housing association was making plans for the construction of the homes. Excerpt (A)2 1 A: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 B:

like when we purchased this LAnd out here; on the ROad up here, a:n; there w's a big WRiteup;= in the PAper,.. an people were get'n real’.. kinda’ ..LEery lo ya know, o:h the're gonna have a reserVAvation, ya know, AVenues that they were try'n to DO, to try to keep US,... (cause you were) too: close to town.

A begins “people were getting kinda leary, you know” and then, shifting to reported speech by lowering her voice and decreasing tempo she goes on “Oh, they’re, they’re gonna have a reservation, ya know”. She repeats the quote once more with slightly different wording before commenting in unmarked style that “they” were trying to stop “us” from purchasing land. The discussion then turns to reservations, their status as partly selfgoverning units in California and in other states, and the Indians’ rights to deal with their own affairs. In all of this Indians speak of themselves as part of a population unit that is separate from “them”, i.e. mainstream Americans. But in this context they are not speaking as members of particular tribes like Shasta or Karuk, each with their own presumably culturally specific traditions. They tend to employ the general term Indian to refer to themselves, that is to say to an “us”, which includes Arizona Indians as

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well as other Californians like the Hoopa. The two participants A and B go on to talk about the legal status of their community, contrasting Arizona with California, with reference to a federal law (280) governing Indian affairs and their relationship to local laws. Excerpt (B) 25 A: THis is a Two eighty State though; caliFOrnia is a TWO EIGHTY State. 26 B: it IS <stac> a TWO EIGHTY;=but ah, 27 like the CIty police; don't have no authority; (----) COunty. 28 A: (oh, .. like city) (-------) 29 B: (but you know), COunty would have to’ or STate, 30 but the City’ Would’ Loose’ their jurisdiction. 31 A: That's kinda makin it real’.. (--------) 32 B: that means that ah like in Other (-----) 33 A: public law two Eighty:, like in Arizona and what not; you know the’.. 34 police cannot GO there and arrest an India:n, (-----) 35 but in California’.., its a Two eighty State =so if they can- you know if they can- (---) 36 C: how does the- tribal (-----) 37 B: The’.. Indi[ae]:ns and their .. COuncil .. have a:h, 38 TRibal’.. LAws’.., that they could, .. ah they have, 39 jurisdIction over’ a lot of things. (----) ah:.. 40 C: (-----------) 41 B: yeah. Say like THeir Huntin and THeir Fishing and Certing’.. Cert'n ah:; 42 you know, non violent Crimes=stuff like that,... the tribe has jurisdiction= over', 43 =over their’... ahm’...Territory =their’... Indi[ae]n LA:nd; 44 but in’.Public law TWo Eighty =which is’, and caliFornia is under that, 45 uh, ..the INdia:n’..., Ma:n, Still’.. has to:, the County and the STtate’.. 46 has more jurisdiction over what goes on there; 47 =say their “hunting.. and their “fishing, and, if they’ve murders that’s going on; 48 (-----) THey Would Have more jurisdiction to take over’ (------) In the Tribe 49 , the tribal jurisdiction is more or less lost.

Examining our text at the level of discourse we find that although the native language has been lost and only few of those present still speak it at all,

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certain markers of traditional discursive practice are carried over into English and continue to play a role in communication with peers. That is to say the discussion is carried on in a style of English that grammatically does not differ systematically from that of that of other Northern California small town residents. Linguists who have worked on the local languages tend to argue that Native Americans in the region do not speak an English dialect of their own, yet we note what at first seem like oddities at the level of lexical choice, prosody and discourse organization, systematically recurs throughout the texts. Particularly striking is the pronunciation of the word Indian in lines 35, 38, 44 and 46. It is enunciated with a tone of voice that sets it apart from ordinary everyday speech. There is a high tense [I] in the first syllable and a fronted, often lengthened [ae] in the second and the word as a whole has a distinct accent. In addition we recurrently note seemingly odd ways of stressing and rhythmic sequences and as in: the INdiae:ns and their Council (line 38), TRibal’..LA:ws (39), and INdiae:n LAe:nd and also HOopa Tribe that are quite distinct from what precedes and follows. In addition, especially in sentences containing these phrases we find unusually frequent pausing with information chunked into a small clauses. These features taken together make a distinctive style shift into us Indians versus the others in the community. In the third excerpt (C), participant A tells a narrative that deals with the group's history. The thematic narrative analysis of the passage provides additional insight into the ideologized historical context that motivates the style shifts analyzed in the first two excerpts. Excerpt (C) 1 A: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

You know’ most of us are All reLA:ted. .. because’. a long time ago they came DOwn the RIver, . and they picked up a lot of the Indi[ae]:ns do:wn ThE:re and brought them out here and stuck them on this’.reserVAtion out here in the VAlley. that's how they, beCA:me reserVAtion ‘Indi[ae]ns out there; an they’.. picked and start gathering Indiaens up an start TAk'n them OUta the:re same way when they came=an they’, they picked up All the KIds; the Indi[ae]:n PEoples ‘KIds; aLOng the RIver;…They CAme in Buses an’.. PIcked am A:Ll Up, and hauled them Up to Boarding School. Some of the kids- some of their PArentses, didn't even ‘know,.. Where their Kids Were.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

they tried to do Religion O:n the Indi[ae]:ns, they tried all these different things to CHange the Indi[ae]:n, they couldn't change them until they.. DId the Boarding Schools. and broke down the family unit…. Because the family unity was sorta strong= No matter what they did ah;’.. they couldn't break down the culture.

The prosodic foregrounding here is selective as the incidence of foregrounded phrases increases at the high point of the narration. These are in bold for the purposes of this analysis. Foregrounding picks out material that is closely associated with the groups’ own local and hence culturally specific experiences. In a very real sense, the foregounded phrases embody that experience. It might be argued that participants are code switching between an in-group and an out-group style of English, but there is no evidence of two separate independent styles. Rather the foregrounded phrases can be seen as indexical signs and contextualization cues that guide (but do not determine) interpretation at the level of discursive practice (Gumperz 1996). As we stated earlier, stylistic shifts have no meaning in isolation. They should not be analyzed by themselves but in terms of the semiotic principles of stylistic differentiation that are continuously evolving. The stylistic features here suggest that in this passage the narrative is part of a repeatedly retold ‘master narrative’ that plays an important role in the construction of shared memories as part of the ethnic revitalization to increase political awareness among the local Indians and thus provides an ideological context for the analysis. Later parts of the group’s discussion not analyzed here, highlights the significance of these stylistic shifts as markers of identity in which the political reassertion of tribal rights plays a significant part. In summary: we began this paper with a brief discussion of recent work on identity which goes beyond earlier social science research’s reliance on analysts’ abstractions to focus on new perspectives that addresses members’ own categorization processes. As Giddens argues late modern societies provide for individuals’ self actualization and for what he calls ‘life politics’, thus shifting the research focus toward personal style as realized through the multiple choices that arise as part of the dialectical interplay between the global and the local. We argue that from this point of view identity must be treated as mediated through language and verbal communication.

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We then went on to review linguists’ work on style, covering issues from Jakobson’s functional semiotic approach to style to Labov’s focus on style as speech-community based group variability. The latter argues that speakers’ identities are a community-wide phenomena in that members react to the same range of linguistic variables in similar ways and in similar periods of chronological time. Labov’s notion of social styles is restricted to scalar differences in societal prestige rankings and covers only a small portion of the social/cultural knowledge that enters into interpretation. Judith Irvine’s in a recent paper takes a different approach pointing out that the culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation adds a new ideological dimension to the issue. She sees style as one of several semiotic means by which we distinguish ourselves from others, suggesting style conveys meaning by the way it contrasts with other styles in the same system. Ideology, when seen in this perspective, becomes an integral constituent of the interpretive process. Although there has been much discussion in the literature about how talk establishes individual identity, there had been little work until recently on how specific linguistic features mark speaking styles to build identity. Our basic argument has been that in order to answer this question we must begin by looking more closely at the interpretative processes and in our two examples we have explored some possibilities of the interactional sociolinguistics approach to these issues. In these two examples we emphasize that the linguistic and the social should not be seen as independent entities. Not only do cultural assumptions enter into the interpretative process but the two mutually support each other. Taking the two examples together we find little to confirm common stereotypes of style switching/shifting as context-bound alternation between two empirically distinct bounded varieties. In both cases we find some clearly localized passages where style shifting is readily evident. But elsewhere the linguistic markers of stylistic distinctiveness serve to foreground individual words or phrases embedded in passages that are otherwise entirely in one or the other of the two styles. To account for these facts we argue that style shifting itself serves as an indexical cue. Other aspects of stylistic distinctions support this view. Note for instance in example one how the communicative import of the style shifts is first negotiated through regular alternation, and that later in the discussion listeners react negatively when they perceive what they regard as an inappropriate shift, whereupon the situation is soon repaired. Such stylistic distinctions are recognizable as having communicative import only to those who have the background

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knowledge to see that they function as indexical signs. Most educated English speaking professionals for example would recognize Sherm’s long speech as typical of assessment talk, but the significance of the negotiation that takes place through the on-record/off-record contrast would only be apparent to members of this or similar university community. In example (2) our analysis shows the important role of style shifting in evoking memories and in raising political awareness among local Indians.

5.

Concluding remarks

In this paper we have looked at style, or more specifically style shifting as a communicative resource, one of a number of constituents of communicative practice, along with grammar, lexicon, culture/ideology and background knowledge of various types that enter into interpretations of interlocutors’ communicative intent. Our basic premise is that to account for the inherent heterogeneities that in recent years have become so central to today’s communicative environments; we need to find new ways to deal with both the linguistic and the socio-cultural dimensions of communicative processes. We can no longer think of speaking as merely a matter of individuals relying on their linguistic knowledge to produce grammatical sentences. Meanings cannot be taken for granted. They do not literally ‘inhere’ in written or spoken words. Speaking, we claim, is ultimately an interactive phenomenon, grounded in dialogically organized discursive exchanges that require active cooperation of speakers and audiences in the production of shared interpretations. Culture moreover counts as more than an abstract system of meanings, part of the external circumstances that surround the interaction. In our two examples we show how knowledge of the institutional culture of university examinations and of the history and values that shape local interethnic relations are directly introduced into the interpretive process through style switching. Interactional sociolinguistic analysis thus enables us to go beyond the surface of what is literally said. Deepening our understanding of what it takes to produce coherent discourse and what interactants assume is going on at any one time in the event as a whole, enables us to deal with social/cultural and linguistic dimensions of talk within a single analytical framework.

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Notes 1. Transcription symbols used in this section: // Final fall / Slight fall ? Final rise , Slight rise as in listing intonation Truncated word .. Small pause … Longer pause : Lengthened segment Caps Prominent segment ( xxx) unintelligible or unclear speech 2. Transcription symbols used in this section: [ ] phonetic transcription .. Small pause … Longer pause : Lengthened segment Caps Prominent segment [] upward intonation

References Basso, Keith 1986 Conversations with the Whiteman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baugh, John 1997 Beyond Ebonics:Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice. London/New York: Oxford University Press. Eckert, Penelope 2000 Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Eckert, Penelope and John R. Rickford (eds.) 2001 Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Erickson, Frederick 2004 Talk and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Erikson, Erik H. 1983 Afterword. In: Jacobson-Widding, A. (ed.), Identity: Personal and Social-Cultural. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 403.

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Fortes, Myer 1983 Problems of identity and person. In: Jacobson-Widding, A. (ed.), Identity: Personal and Social-Cultural. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 389–401. Garfinkel, Harold 1967 Studies Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Giddens, Anthony 1991 Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gumperz, John J. 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. 1992 Contextualization and understanding. In: Duranti, A. and C. Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 229–252. Gumperz, John J. and Norine Berenz 1993 Transcribing conversational exchanges. In: Edwards, J.A. and M.D. Lampert (eds.), Talking Languages. A Handbook for the Transcription and Coding of Spoken Language. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 91–121. Irvine, Judith 2001 ‘Style’ as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In: Eckert, P. and J. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 21–43. Jakobson, Roman 1960 Closing statement: Poetics and linguistics. In: Sebeok, T. (ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge: Technology Press of MIT, 350–377. Labov, William 1972 Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1984 Field methods of the project on Linguistic Change and Variation. In: Baugh, J. and J. Sherzer (eds.), Language in Use. Englewood NJ: Prentice Hall, 28–53. 2001 The anatomy of style shifting. In: Eckert, P. and J. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 85–108.

A postscript: Style and identity in interactional sociolinguistics

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Lucy, John A. 1993 Reflexive language and the human disciplines. In: Lucy, J. A. (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 9–32. Rampton, Ben 1995 Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rickford, John R. 1999 African American Vernacular: Features, Evolution and Educational Implications. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Sebeok, Thomas 1960 Style in Language. Cambridge: Technology Press of MIT. Silverstein, Michael 1993 Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In: Lucy, J. A. (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 33–58. 1996 Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. In: Ide, R., R. Parker, and Y. Sunayoshi (eds.), Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium of Language and Society. University of Texas: Austin, Texas, 66–295.

Index

Abruzzese 74 abuses 166–168 accommodation 192, 193, 197, 198, 217, 219 act of identity 4, 8, 67, 76–79, 122, 125, 187, 190, 193,195, 217, 323, 363, 365, 366, 367, 370, 375, 385, 436 adolescents 190, 325–354, 326, 332, 343, 348, 368 African-Caribbean 367 females 412 identity constructions 148 language choice 194 adressee’s identity 192 aesthetic performance 160 see performance affiliation 41, 188, 193, 195 African-American 308 speech 376 street culture 281 see black styles African-Caribbean 368, 371 age 137, 148 Alemannic dialect 447, 451, 453, 456, 459, 463 ‘Ali G’ 322–323, 361–387 alliteration 128 alterity 9, 324, 397, 424, 434 see other American Indian communities 492 American Indian languages 493 Aneurin Bevan 213–241 anti-language 61 ‘anti-traditional’ identity 165 apologizing 176 artist’s homepages 294–8

assessments 341, 342, 347, 400, 408, 410, 487, 498 of men by adolescent women 407 association 420, 435 assonance 128 attribution 122 audience design 11, 219 audience participation 235 audience support 233 authenticity 201, 238, 373 authoritative discourse 239 authority 250, 272, 490

baby-talk 404 Bakhtin 218, 239 Barcelona 190, 191–205, Bavarian 456 Berlin rap 300, 303 biculturalism 29 bilingualism 25, 29, 85, 86 bilingual identity 25 minorities 2 passive 192 style 93 biographical narrative 479 biographies 274 Black British 362–7 black cultural styles 365 black people’s language 384 black youth culture 363, 367, 370 board discussions 296, 297 boasting 129 boundary marking 32 boys 139 Brazil 85–119

504

Index

breakdance 124–126 breaking news 401, 409 bricolage 14 British democratic socialism 213 brought about/brought along 30, 107 bystanders 36, 187, 189, 190, 197–9, 201, 202 Calabrese 61 calls to order 167 Canadian 25 Caribbean Creole 372 Caribbean youth 385 caricatures 448 carnevalesque 351, 450 Castilian 191–205 Catalan 191–205 categorization 3, 6, 4, 63, 118,122, 456 duplicatively organized 435 overt 14 self-categorization 434 category 8, 9 see membership category, social category animation 332, 334, 336, 337, 338, 347–50 membership 85,86, 248 category-bound activities 400, 404, 424, 437 category-bound features 432, 433 category-indexical 336, 347 chat channels 289 children’s humor 142 citation 347 class war 237 classmates 193 classroom 195, 200 bystanders 194 closing a formal meeting 177 closing formula 178

clustering of feature 12, 75, 280 see co-occurrence co-alignment 423, 430, 450 coarse language 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 179 co-categorisation 101, 106, 117 code names 128 code marking 340 code-mixing 58, 65, 98, 157, 163 style 117, 119 code-switching 7, 15, 32–36, 43, 45, 48, 65–67, 85, 99, 117, 122, 129, 201, 133, 136, 138, 139, 168, 291, 327, 334, 341, 349, 424–7, 433, 496 as a discourse mode 34 as style 49 local functions 35 global socio-political functions 35 identity-related functions 350 into dialect 71 into standard German 425 into stylized Kanaksprak 351 metaphorical 30, 37–48 co-involvement 101 colono 89, 90–93, 101, 107, 117 comedy 330 formats 326 co-membership 9, 101, 118, 492 comics 361 communicative styles 170 communities of practice 63, 283 community 361–387, 480 competence 66 competition 341, 343, 348 complaint story 421 computer mediated communication 279–312, 363, 378 computer mediated discourse field 283, 309 constructionism 218

Index contextualization 43, 45, 67, 122, 217, 394, 484, 485, 488, 491, 492 contextualization cue 148, 166, 383–5 contrast 425 conversational identity 123 conversational involvement 484 conversational routines 291 co-occurrences 327 co-occurring cues 427 co-occurring features 160 correlational sociolinguistics 4 correlationist sociolinguistic 9 Creole 367–71, 373, 375, 376, 380–2 critique boards 294 crossing 6, 13, 65, 217, 322, 376, cultural capital 336, 342, 348, 350, 449 cultural formulae 138 cultural identity 124 culture 498 de-authentication 238 de-ethnization 143 Denmark 25 denunciation frame 225, 228 desire 413 dialect 72, 73, 75, 93, 99, 101, 115, 123, 139, 220, 336, 398, 404, 406, 425, 426, 446, 449, 452, 453, 457, 468, 469 and illiteracy 71 ideologies 72 diffusion 5, 199 disaffiliation 393, 420, 433, 434, 436 disagreement 41, 269 discourse identities 10, 188 discursive frame 220, 224 discursive practice 496 discussion board 289, 298, 301, 310 display of bilingualism 119

505

of identities 93 of knowledge 265 dispreferred response 256 dissent 328 ‘dissing’ 137, 139, 303 distancing 13, 59, 435, 450 distinctiveness (of style) 31, 71, 160, 8, 399, 393, 482, 497 doing evaluating 491 identity 376 Dominican American 29–50 Don Quixote 190 double indexicality 348 double-voicing 336 ‘dragging’ 137

‘Eastern European women’ 452 Eastern German 7, 248–275 specific vocabulary 251, 252, 254, 255, 257, 259, 265 encounter 189 English 287, 398, 493 on the web 291 Southern British English 362, 371, 372, 374 epistemic rights 249 erasure 191 establishment voice 232 ethnic 91, 93, 118 ambiguity 363, 373 background 107 category 429 groups 31, 427 identity 37, 63, 188, 202, 363, 377, 379, 380, 383, 483 radical identity 37 self-presentation 78 stylizations 323

506

Index

ethnicity 40, 59, 121, 148, 161, 169, 361, 362, 365, 373, 378, 381, 384, 385, 481 and masculinity 139 ethno-comedy 148 ethnography of communication 480 ethnolect 322, 325, 349 tertiary 26 ethnolinguistic identity 194, 195, 199 face 60, 70, 73, 105, 115 face-to-back communication 187, 190, 202 family roles 64 ‘famous names’ 123 femininity 397, 410, 470 fictitious 136 dramatization, 453, 457 encounter 130 identities 123 performance 133 presentations of self 140 field 5 first name 126, 142 focussed 5, 199 footing 35, 101, 224, 225, 336 ‘foreigner’ 121 formal/informal 398 format tying 343 formulaic phrases 489 formulas 167, 291 frame 166, 237, 224 French 434, 425 fun-code 328, 339 games 73 ‘gangsta’ rap 300, 309 ‘gangsta’ stereotype 290 Gastarbeiterdeutsch 14, 325, 337, 430

gate-keepers 189 gatherings 189, 202, 203 gaucho identity 94 gender 137, 140, 148, 198, 325, 411, 413, 445, 446, 448, 451, 467, 469, 470, 481 identities 63, 141 old and new arrangements 446 order 446 stylization 323 gendered identities 139 genre 279, 281, 284, 294, 297, 298, 310, 394 blending 284 conventions 285 German 142, 287, 345, 424, 446 Brazilians 87 new varieties of 325 -/Portuguese bilingual 85–119 school system 157 -/Turkish 155, 162 Germanness 87 gestalt characteristics of style 12, 160 girls 139, 140, 144, 145, 164 globalization 282 ‘glocal’ 123, 128, 149 Greek women 397 Greek: Northern 405 grotesque 137 guest workers 156, 325 see Gastarbeiter guestbooks 373 habitus 5, 12, 16, 32, 336 Haitian 37, 39 Hawacks 328, 332 hearsay 261 hedge 262, 268 heterosexuality 410 ‘hicks’ 41–43 high modernity 221, 238

Index high school students 29–50 hinterland 89 hip hop 125, 128, 129, 138, 139, 148, 279–312, 361, 385 code name 126 identities 281 on the web 310 slang 309 holistic analysis (of style) 13, 14, 220, 279 homepage, personal 289, 297 honorifics 136 humor 447, 449–51, 469 Hunsrück dialect (in Brazil) 93, 106, 117 hyperbole 137, 447, 448 hyper-correct 236

iconicization 191 identification 393 identity 36, 40, 42, 57, 64, 66, 76, 78, 79, 85, 187, 195–7, 199, 200, 247, 249, 376, 394, 398, 412, 419, 435–7, 445, 447, 469, 477–498, and alterity 436 collective identity 1, 60, 78, 80 construction 58, 63 displays 57 fluid identity 190 hybrid identity 2 images 237 in interaction 8, 86, 93, 187, 189, 449 in talk 379 mixed identity 199 online identity 379 patchwork identity 124 personal identity 248, 259, 264, 446 positive identity practices 398 role identities 63

507

self-displays 118, 132 shift identities 259 situated identities 60, 63 situational identities 10, 188 social identity 3, 59, 60, 63, 121, 148, 160, 202, 221, 248, 250, 321, 327, 430, 433, 470 social-cultural identity 155 speaker-focused identity 192 switch 70 theory 477 transportable identity 10, 188, 193, 408 work 10, 65, 87, 321, 377, 435 ideology 80, 285, 482, 485, 497 immigrants 126 adolescent 330 second generation 149 Sicilian 124 stereotypical immigrant 138 see migrants index 79, 482 indexical 8, 32, 57 indexing 434 inferential processes 484 in-group 496 identity 201 style 179 inner city neighbourhood 147 institutional roles 101 institutional transaction 100 insults 374 interactional analysis 80 interactional history 399, 400, 402, 407 interactional sociolinguistics 122, 188, 483–485, 497 interference 427 interlocutor 259 introducing oneself 134, 136, 137 involvement style 106 Italian 71, 122

508

Index

dialects 58 ethnic identity 64, 133 immigrants 62, 121–150 (in Germany) Italian-American 60, 61, 78 identity 79 Italianized English 130 Italianness 58 Jamaican Creole 362, 365, 371, 372, 374, 385 joking 39, 73, 145, 147 Kanaksprak 322, 325–354, 429 Karuk 492, 493 katharevousa 404 keying 224 knowledge 252, 253, 257, 258, 261, 265, 269 asymmetries 247 cultural knowledge 437, 484 direct 264 display 273, 249, 250 second-hand 261 shared 255 source 269 koiné 93

Labour Party 215 language choice 65, 136, 194, 195, 394 language crossing 290 see crossing language ideologies 2 see ideologies language mixing 78 see code-mixing language purism 36, 49 Latino identity 31, 40

‘layering of voices’ 423, 429, 433 learner varieties 157 life style 478, 482 linguistic minorities 121 minority code 327 linguistic repertoire 93 linguistic variable 15, 57 literacy practices 310 ‘local people’ 262, 269, 448 location 385 see place London 370, 371, 372 London English 366–8 London Jamaican 363, 366, 367, 370, 373 ‘macho’ 134, 137, 139, 335, 402 stereotypical ‘macho’ 148 male 148 address forms 169 adolescent identity 143 Mannheim 155, 157 dialect 125, 130 Martha’s Vineyard 7 masculinity 138, 140, 142, 402, 470 ‘master narrative’ 496 media 127, 148, 326, 327, 349, 361, 362 discourse 123, 280 genres 130, 133 models 328, 347, 348 new media 282 niche media 289 sources 351 talk 132 membership categorisation 9, 126, 321, 377, 400, 407, 424, 430, 433 see category, social category category bound activity 403 men’s positioning 398 men’s voices 400

Index message boards 372, 373, 375–8 metaparodic 232 metaphorical meanings (of a language) 35, 48 metapragmatic sequel 105 mezzogiorno culture 139 migrants 29–50, 121, 132, 158, 249–51, 261, 266, 269, 274 see immigrants identity 259, 272 languages 287 migration 140, 156 milieu 161, 470 mixed languages 2 mock challenge 469 mock Spanish 350, 376 mocking 6, 42, 44, 48, 235, 463 model groups 5 moderator 173 monitoring 11 monolingual 32, 163 German 162 moral authority 238 moral norms 450 moralization 470 multimodality 284 multi-party encounters 189 multiracial vernacular 369, 370, 373, 375 multivoiced 427, 470 Mundstuhl 328, 329, 347 names 121, 124, 125, 134, 136,138, 140, 148, 202 naming practices 124, 130, 290 narrative 147, 323, 412, 434, 454, 495, 496 activities 395 analysis 394 co-constructed narrative 457 nation states 2, 49

509

national identities 1 nation-building 2 Native American English rhetorical practices 493 Native Americans 495 negative face-wants 176 negative identity practices 398 negotiation of social identities 29–50 netspeak 280 ‘New Catalans’ 196, 199, 201 ‘new men’ 459 nicknames 124, 125, 126, 136, 140, 141, 143, 144, 148, 290, 398–403, 406, 408 nonce borrowings 46 non-standard orthography 302 non-standard pronoun forms 374 non-standard pronunciations 73 non-standard spellings 374 non-standard language on the web 287 non-standard verb forms 374 off record style 491, 498 on record style 486, 488, 491, 498 online 361–387 communities 284, 286 ethnography 286, 300 genres 285, 288 identity 310 interaction 310 literacy practices 286 style 284, 309 talk 300 writing 296 opposition-building 13 Other 396, 412, 419 and self 445 othering 450 otherness 419–437

510

Index

outsiders 265 overhearer 201 overlap 45

paired repeats 347, 349 parodic 137 parodistic stylization 424 parody 136, 398, 457 participation framework 66 passing 197 Patwa 366–7 peer group 59, 123, 124, 133, 139, 158, 343 style 156, 163 talk 29 performance 6, 73, 79, 130, 209, 285, 323, 338 routinized 413 space 224 performative view of self 70, 75, 395 performativity 123 performing identity 421 persona 87, 221, 237, 321, 363, 385 Ph.D. examination 486 phonetics 345 pidgin German 427 place 323, 398, 399, 401, 404 playful assessments 339, 349, 350 playful competition 166 poetic competition 342 poetic structure 343 poetic variation 341 politeness 170, 172, 177 forms 176 political oratory 215 political speech 225 polyphony 429, 433 Portuguese 106 positioning 15, 87, 156, 247–9, 252, 262, 269, 273, 338, 335, 336, 348,

350, 393–414, 394–6, 400, 412, 419 analysis 421 first order positioning 265, 274 in storytelling 396 of men by young women 396, 399, 410 of others 396, 398 other-positionings 397, 413 second order positioning 274 self-positioning 274, 343, 435 social 6, 13, 145, 483 power 137 practice 59, 187 prestige 481 ‘progressive’ identity 448 projection 5 pronunciation 405 prosody 424, 426, 491, 495 prosodic features 432, 489, 490 prosodic foregrounding 496 prosodic stylization 426 provincialism 138 pseudonyms 125–128, 134, 136, 148 public speech 237 pun 132 quotation 43, 332–336, 338, 348–50, 404, 405, 429, 452, 456, 457, 469 race 49, 378, 384 racial identity 378, 379 racism 348 rap 282, 307, 308 rebukes 73 recontextualisation 400, 408 record reviews 294 record style 486 referee design 251 regional identity 59

Index regionyms 147 repetition and variation 343 reported dialogues 419–437 reported speech 427, 433, 447 representation 122, 123 request 172 reviews 298 rhetorical design 224 rhyme 128, 134, 137, 141–2 Rio Grande do Sul 85–119 ritual 168, 177 ritual insults 165, 167, 179 ritualized 347 performative acts 143 Received Pronunciation (English) 230, 232, 233, 235, 238, 239 Romanians 429 routines 347 rurality 47, 90, 118

sameness/otherness 436 satire, mimetic 467 scanning rhythm 338 scatological reference 142 schools 169, 203 ideology 161 self 412, 419, 445, 446, 450 relational self 236 self-deprecation 70 self-revelations 384 sequence organization 329 sexual formulas 165 shibboleth 12, 191 Sicilian 73, 74, 125, 126, 133, 134, 136, 137, 142, 143, 144, 148 ‘signifiying’ 137, 141 single parameter variation 209 see variables slang evaluators 291 small talk 100, 101, 116, 117

511

social categories 3, 29, 49, 57, 60, 85, 148, 248, 321, 437 also see categories, membership categories social categorization 13, 16, 85, 145, 395, 424, 427, 435, 436 social class 238 social differentiation 160 social distance 172 social groups 161 social integration 160 social network 199 social phonetic profile 235 social relationships 221 social roles 59, 394, 407 social status 144 social types 421 social worlds 160, 175 socioeconomic class 483 sociolinguistic research first/second/third wave of 218 socio-phonetic features 228, 230, 232, 237 socio-phonetic stylisations 240 solidarity 117 South Wales 213, 216, 239 see Valleys South Wales (Valleys) English 220, 230 South Walisian 229 Southern Italian identity 134 Spanish/English 29–50 speaker design 280 speech 283 speech community 221, 481, 497 spelling 308, 310 alternation 300 colloquial 299 pronunciation 236 rebellion 293 variants 287, 291, 294 spoken syntax on the web 295

512

Index

stance 251, 256, 424, 429, 436 standard/non-standard language 279, 309 standard English 371, 377, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384 standard German 342, 426, 453, 459, standard Italian 58, 125, 139 stereotype 10, 90, 101, 249, 321, 340, 351, 362 stereotyped image 400 story 399, 468, 450 lines 395 shared 400, 404, 405 tellings 397, 400, 408 see narratives street gangs 165 style 6, 11, 12, 32, 36, 57, 58–60, 65, 72, 76, 79, 85, 98, 101, 118, 216, 220, 236, 237, 279, 321, 393, 395, 419, 421, 436, 477–498 as persona management 217 as practice 14 communicative style 139, 155, 250, 435 features 288 formation 160, 161, 178 markers 285 on the web 282 personal style 58, 76–79, 79 shifting 65, 219, 220, 251, 309, 497, 498 social style 85, 124, 160, 161, 170, 280, 285, 321, 327 switching 161, 485 styling 6, 221, 224, 298, 447, 449, 470 styling men 404 stylistic development 160 stylistic transformations 156 stylization 12, 13, 16, 57, 58, 60, 67, 70–3, 75, 76, 79, 236, 321, 400,

405, 407, 408, 410, 427, 433, 445, 450, 453, 454, 463, 467 other-stylization 419 practices 485 self-stylization 468 stylized African-American English 291 stylized Kanaksprak 326, 327, 328, 332, 341, 342, 343, 345, 347, 348, 350 stylized pidgin German 429 Swiss German 456, 457, 462, 468 Switzerland 449 symbolic practices 65

taboo lexis 372, 4 teasing 133, 140, 142, 144, 148 teasing rituals 148 territory 124, 137, 250 territory of information 265, 269, 272 ‘they code’ 350 tone of voice 432, 495 toponymy 144, 147 Tories 215, 235, 225, 230, 232, 237, 239 ‘traditional Turkish woman’ 169, 178 trial 492 Türkenslang 325 see Kanaksprak Turkish 338, 341, 342 female Turkish role 161 Mannheim Turkish 162, 163 migrant families 164 migrants 158 -/German mixing 178 Turkishness 159, 169, 178 typification 447, 463

urbanity 90, 118

Index Valleys 233, 236, 239 see Southern Wales Valleys English 222 variability 497 variable rules 481 variables 87, 118, 497 see single parameter variation variation space 87 variation studies 12, 15 variationist sociolinguistics 1, 216 verbal aggression 304 verbal duelling 140, 165, 167, 338 verbal games 141 virtual communities 283 virtual ghetto 362, 373, 375, 377, 383, 385 voice 46, 67, 75, 79, 229, 232, 282, 334, 351, 404, 410, 420, 423, 424, 427, 429, see double-voicing vulgar expressions 168, 169, 329

513

Wales see Southern Wales ways of speaking 12, 85 ‘we code’ 48, 350 West Indian 366 Western German 7, 247, 248 migrants 252 world wide web 279–312, 283, 284 literacy practices 282

youth (sub-)culture 122, 310 youth culture 123 youth language 136, 142, 143, 161 youth slang 329, 342 youth-cultural media styles 286