Doing being applied linguists: the importance of experience
SEVEN CASE STUDIES
Language and identity
In his Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious John Joseph (2004a) attempts to show that language and identity:
are ultimately inseparable … Thinking about language and identity ought to improve our understanding of who we are in our own eyes and in other people’s, and consequently it should deepen our comprehension of social interaction. Each of us, after all, is engaged with language in a lifelong project of constructing who we are, and who everyone is that we meet, or whose utterances we simply hear or read
(Joseph 2004a: 13, 14)
To illustrate his argument. Joseph offers two case studies, one of Hong Kong, the other of Lebanon. There he shows how the position of French has changed:
In the Ottoman period … anyone who knew French … was an educated Christian, and more specifically a Maronite or Roman Catholic. Anyone who knew English was likely to be an educated Muslim (probably Druze) or Orthodox Christian (probably Greek) … Under the French mandate … knowledge of French spread … [I]n the case of Muslim girls, it … quadrupled.
(ibid: 197–8)
Since the start of the civil war in the 1970s, the status of French has declined. Arabic asserted itself as the marker of Lebanese identity and this continued until about 2000 when the Israelis withdrew from southern Lebanon. The Syrians were also supposed to withdraw from the rest of Lebanon but did not do so. Maronites, who before 2000 had asserted that Arabic was the real language of Lebanon, now responded to the question: ‘what language is spoken in Lebanon?’ with the answer: ‘French’. Maronite identity was no longer attached to Arabic solidarity across the Middle East. Beleaguered Christians now saw their identity as European not as Arab.
‘Language,’ concludes Joseph, ‘in the sense of what a particular person says or writes … is central to individual identity. It inscribes the person within national and other corporate identities, including establishing the person’s rank within the identity’ (ibid: 225). Joseph qualifies Benedict Arnold’s thesis of the ‘imagined community’. Yes, Joseph maintains, national languages do shape individual identities but also ‘national identities shape national languages’ (ibid 13).
