Language and social identity an integrationist critique

The concepts of native speaker and mother tongue which attribute to the individual one fixed underlying linguistic identity (or two in the case of bilinguals) are shunned by socio cultural linguists with in interest in group identities precisely because identities while being linguistically constructed are held by the ethnographer to be fluid and never ante cedently given Sociolinguists working on identity within the sociocultural framework have therefore turned their back on any dialectological questions preferring to focus on how linguistic features may contextually index a social identity as part of styles (rat her thin varieties of language) This paper critically examines the work of two American anthropologists and linguists Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall from the vantage point of an integrational critique of linguistics (cf also Pable and Haas 2010) The focal point of our critique is the conviction that identities as first order communicational phenomena cannot be the object of scientific empirical research because this presupposes that indexical values are viewed is micro contextually determined and available to outsiders with an insider view The integrationist in turn secs identity as a metadiscursive label used by lay speakers to cope with their everyday first order experience For the integrationist this is where identity research begins and ends (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved