Individual Identities: The Use of Lingua Francas and Language Choice

Abstract

While the preceding chapters have focused on collective identities which are basically top-down, such as racial, regional, religious and orthographical, the next three chapters focus on individual identities — a survey of “bottom-up” processes which argues that people are able to intentionally choose their particular identities. Top-down forces are often taken for granted, and people often continue with their passive postures, thereby serving and perpetuating the interest of the existing social order. In contrast, individual identities are linked more closely to the “constructionist” paradigm. Here, people intentionally choose the identites they wish to construct for themselves and use language in communicative ways that reflect their own self-conceptions and preoccupations. Hence, identities may not necessarily be entities into which one is “raised”, rather one “assumes” an identity and then works on it. In brief, individuals possess the ability to actually exploit linguistic resources available to them to project the identity or identities they specifically desire and to change their speech moment-by-moment and place-by-place as an indication of that choice (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes, 2006).