Language of Identity

In the three articles from this week, the common theme amongst them was language does not function independent from social environments. The Sumner paper explains that language influences our memory, social judgment (early on in the linguistic interaction) and our identity. The article with Podesva and colleagues outlines how an entire public persona is constructed through language, while the joint Sumner and Kataoka paper illustrates the importance of semantic comprehension of non General American English accents (NYC and British English) by speakers of General American English. 

The Sumner article was particularly thought provoking, especially when it notes that speakers of stigmatized accents find it hard to remember the speech of other speakers from the same stigmatized dialect.  More importantly, however, is that this recollection pattern is also consistent for speakers who do not speak the stigmatized dialect. This fact shocked me because it highlights a subtle intrinsic self-depreciating belief of speakers with marginalized dialects that often times reflects the social capital of that group. If intuitively they do not understand speech of their own dialect then they may not see their dialect as valuable or comprehensive compared to more coveted dialects like General American English and Southern British English. This could contribute to the lack of resources and value that people invest in the physical aspects of that language community. Is language the source of these disparities? Did it create the social gap between communities? Conversely, in the Podesva paper it seems like there are also facets of language that can create elite identities from a plethora of dialects even marginalized ones, such as the one of Condoleeza Rice.  The joint article (Sumner and Kataoka) provided some solid data based insights for how this phenomenon occurs, which also is interesting in understanding why people value her as a person and how the different linguistic features of her speech may work together to have a specific effect on the audience.

Overall, I felt that the goal of the papers was to unearthing some of the subtleties of societal norms and ideologies (i.e certain stereotypes that have developed). It seemed like we were getting close to a reason behind the “just because response” that people give when they try to explain a particular behavior such as those explored in the texts (why we can understand some speakers and not others) and even ones such as why we stigmatize, idolize, categorize and judge people a certain way. It seems like language is a major component to the lens we use to interpret the situations around us; which in turn affects the our behavior, assumptions and decisions. It quite amazing how much language shapes our psyche; an idea reminiscent of the Wharfian hypothesis, that language controls the saliency of our world experiences, shaping our culture environment and our selves.