What comes first: the identity, or the identified?

It is common vernacular in the English language to call someone who exhibits a style or aura outside of the typical cultural norm a "hipster". However, when we categorically classify someone as "hipster" or otherwise, we assume that these attributes are innate to their holder. However, is this person a "hipster" because their unique values are outside of the cultural norm and they thereby choose to consciously exhibit their alternative persona through atypical appearance? Or does their lifelong subconscious interpretation, encoding, and storage of counter-cultural norms create their hipster persona altogether? 

This colloquial example better clarifies a question I had when examining this week's readings -- do we create our own identities through conscious manipulation of our linguistic attributes, or are we simply an amalgamation of linguistic attributes observed and subconsciously retained since birth? In Sumner's The Social Weight of Spoken Words, the idea that “variation provides information about not only sounds and words, but also a talker’s age, gender, accent, emotion, and style” is highlighted, developed through both “speed, posture, style in our gait” and through the “varying use of our language.” (Sumner 238) Because we learn to activate the understanding of these social representations early in our linguistic development, we create the environment for systemic, and often subconscious, social weighting, or difference in encoding and retention of auditory information based on social biases. Before we even learn to properly form sentences or modulate our voices to suit a chosen phonological identity, for example, we learn to speak our first words by listening to the voices of our parents. It is no coincidence by extension, for example, that society tends to better associate the idea of a caregiver, babysitter, nurse, midwife, or mother with the female voice; female speech patterns are associated with the nurturing guardianship of a mother than most infants experience throughout their early linguistic and cognitive development. According to Sumner’s point, we encode and categorize phonological patterns even as infants, and thus develop both efficiencies in recognition of and tendency to stereotype linguistic variations.

Due to our interaction with and storage of patterns of language variation, we respond to voice characteristics differently based on experience. In Voice-Specific Effects in Semantic Association, King and Sumner suggest that “the acoustic signal activates exemplars based on similarity, so acoustic cues to a women’s voice give preferentially more activation to female-produced exemplars than to male-produced exemplars,” which is likely due to our lifelong categorization of female speech patterns with women’s acoustic cues, as discussed in the previous example (King and Sumner). The correlation between semantic recognition and a listener’s past linguistic experiences is proposed through the conclusion of King and Sumner’s two experiments, using free-association tasks to link acoustic cues of speaker sex to sex-specific connotations. It was found that in a more “typical” white female speaker prompt, there was less asymmetry within semantic connotation than with a more “atypical” elderly black male prompt. Knowing that experience plays a role in the way we encode linguistic patterns is important and relates to our question regarding identity – because we can more easily recognize and encode patterns we are used to, we are more likely to store the linguistic variants that we normally experience and these are very likely integral attributes to our linguistic identity.

The direct conflict of self-creation versus societal-shaping of linguistic identity is seen in a case study of Condoleezza Rice’s linguistic identity through Podesva’s Condoleezza Rice and the Sociophonetic Construction of Identity. After analysis of Condoleezza Rice’s phonological and phonetic patterns in both formal speech and a more informal Question-and-Answer context, Podesva seems to suggest that Rice’s linguistic identity is both an amalgamation of her past experiences and self-created based on the context of her environment. For example, while Rice maintains the distinction between BOT and BOUGHT which is typical of her Alabaman childhood, she has a tendency to back BAT before obstruents in more formal speech contexts, which may be an accommodation to a Californian audience. Furthermore, Podevsa suggests that Rice’s “Vowel production can be seen as indexing a particular identity of a person who overcame social adversity by means of educational attainment… a particularly educated construction of the American Dream” (Podesva 76). While this is undoubtedly a developed part of Rice’s developed identity through personal development gleaned over a lifetime of facing adversity, it is also probable that she further self-imposes linguistic attributes to further promote this identity in public speech contexts. Evidently, Condoleezza Rice’s linguistic identity is a combination of development (recognition and encoding of societal speech patterns) and self-creation (implementation of these speech patterns to develop a unique identity). As an affiliated member of many groups. Rice is a clear example of the way both “nature” of self-creation and “nurture” of personal development interact to create the human linguistic identity.

The answer to my question, then, seems to lie in the gray area: while linguistic identity is based off the storage and mimicry of myriad linguistic patterns encoded since birth, parts of our identity can be emphasized and twisted to fit our liking and our particular context. Perhaps when examining the roots of our linguistic identities, we must compromise to simply heed the words of Margaret Mead: “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”