I.Bilateral I.Derecha I.Izquierda Sin Contenido Con Contenido

In subsequent years, Giles (1977) Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT) in social psychology, and the work of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) on Acts of identity became highly influential in shaping later views of identity in sociolinguistics. On one hand, the idea that speakers were active in changing their identities while in interactions in order to associate or distance themselves from interlocutors was the basis of iles’ (1977) SAT, and on the other hand, the work of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) on creole languages has been crucially significant in providing a premise for theories on identity in sociolinguistic studies. The strength of their work lay in that fact that it acknowledges that neither of speakers’ voices nor their social position in society are passive, but that they sometimes consciously decide as how to speak (see Banda 2009; Blackledge & Creese 2010 & Pennycook 2010). In this regard, García (2010:524) contends that multilingual speakers “…decide who they want to be and choose their language practices accordingly”. Thus, according to Dyer (2007:104), speakers in this model are seen as “actively exploiting linguistic resources available to them in order to project differing identities for different contexts”. This type of a choice represents an act of identity (Johnstone 2008). This conceptualization on language and identity also provided insights to the study as the researcher sought to find out how interlocutors used their linguistic repertoires in projecting multiple identities in modern Lusaka.

In as much as Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s (1985) studies may be considered obsolete, their emphasis on the individual agency in social identity construction has been carried forward in most recent models on language and identity (see Banda 2009; Johnstone 2008; Pennycook 2010; Blackledge & Creese 2010; Hall 2011). The main argument of Le Page and Tabouret- Keller’s (1985) research is that by exploiting the linguistic resources in their repertoire, speakers are not simply products of a social structure reproducing the same social structure, but rather they can create the identity they wish to project in an interaction. In this case, identities are regarded as dynamic and not as fixed phenomenon (cf. Johnstone 2008; Pennycook 2010;

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Blackledge & Creese 2010). It is from this understanding that Banda (2009) argues that social structures should not be assigned a priori but rather they should be left to emerge from social interactions.

3.4.2. Identity and practice

As stated, it follows that much of the sociolinguistic work from the late 1980s to date are in tandem with the theoretical insights of Giles (1977) and Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), especially with regard to the prominent role that has been assigned to identity. In the recent times social constructionist paradigm has been central to studies on identity in sociolinguistics and discourse analytic research (cf. De Fina, Schiffrin & Bamberg 2006). This paradigm is based on the significance of interactants local construction of social reality, on the centrality assigned to the notion of practice and on the close observation of social behavior in real contexts of interaction (cf. Pennycook 2010). Thus, De Fina (2007) argues that participants in social activities do identity work and align or distance themselves from social categories or belonging depending on the local context of interaction and its insertion in the wider social world (cf. Hall 2011). Her argument sees identity claims and displays as embedded in social practices and pliant to the complex interplay of local and global factors and thus researchers ought not to assign a priori that interactants would identify with categories related to their social profile (cf. Banda 2009). Antaki and Widdicombe (1998) have demonstrated how, for example, speakers often times construct allegiances with social groups that are not owned by them. That they go beyond traditionally established boundaries between categories by claiming new non-normative identities such as transsexual ones, and that they enact subtle identity differences with groups and communities that are socially constructed as homogenous (Bailey 2007; De Fina 2003). These studies have demonstrated that neither identity categories nor social meaning can be taken for granted, and that scholars have to learn a lot about the kinds of identities that are relevant to people in different social contexts and about the strategies that they put in place in order to claim them (De Fina 2007).

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Gender studies and discursive psychology have further contributed to our understanding of identity by rejecting the anti-essentialist vision of the ‘self’. They have rejected the notion of ‘self’ as something that people have and represents the core essence of a person. ender studies in particular have shown that people can display “polyphonous” identities, that is, simultaneously assume voices that are associated with different identity categories, and “that they can “perform” identities (Johnstone 2008), that is, represent themselves as different from what their personal “visible” characteristics would suggest” (De Fina et al. 2006:15). This argument implies that there is nothing given or natural about being part of a social category and that social identities are dynamic.

3.4.3. Identity and the notion of indexicality

The notion of indexicality of language refers to the process by which language comes to be linked to specific locally or contextually significant social characteristics (Dyer 2007). This notion is important in discussing language and identity as language or a mere linguistic form can become an index or a marker to an individual’s social identity as well as to traditional activities of that individual (Milroy 2000; Johnstone 2008; Bucholtz & Hall 2005). In this regard Dyer (2007) states that indexicality implies an association of a language or a linguistic form with some kind of socially meaningful characteristics. She further adds that this is often times observed in code switching where speakers shift between different languages that may carry different social meanings in their community. Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouk (2005:199) argue that “indexicality forces us to look at social processes as culturalized, that is, as turned into complexes of meaningful and understandable (indexical) items that offer semiotic potential to people”. This perspective was used in the current study to examine different aspects of social life to see a variety of indexicalities for hybrid discourse practices involving English and local languages, including contestations of meanings within the same spaces of social life (Higgins 2009).

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Johnstone (2008) and Dyer (2007) argue that social identities can be indexed by styles of discourse. For example, an individual would adopt a certain way of talking associated with a particular group, if he or she wants to identify with that category and others may use a person’s speech style in categorizing him or her in gender terms. Johnstone (2008) argues that people can adopt certain characteristics associated with groups with which others would likely associate them and that people may also adopt features associated with identities with which others may not normally associate them. The current study looks at how Lusaka interactants index their social identities by styles of discourse they adopt.

Dyer (2007) argues that the indexicality of language may however work against an individual where the speaker’s dialect is perceived and evaluated negatively by interlocutors. For example, a listener may ascribe certain social characteristics that the speaker might want to resist. She contends that where speakers have access to different languages or dialects, language can also be used to resist other imposed identities. On this account, she argues, identity can be seen as a function of both “self and other ascriptions” (Dyer 2007:102).

3.4.4. Identity as a contact phenomenon

In later years, researchers within the variationist school of thought began searching for explanations of variation that go beyond a view of identity defined by social category. This attempt was seen in methodologies applied in data collection, analysis and interpretation in order to understand in detail how variation may be more locally situated (Dyer 2007). This entailed employing ethnographic methods that allowed researchers to immerse themselves in the communities in order to have insider’s perspectives of the speakers (Dyer 2007). In this approach, social and geographical mobility in terms of who a speaker mixes and identifies with, as well as macro social factors, were shown to be important in understanding variation. Individual speaker’s variation could be explained in terms of the speakers’ social network connections. In this regard, Dyer acknowledges the Milroy (1980) study which credited contact

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with others as being highly important in terms of the influences on the speaker’s linguistic identity (see Blackledge & Creese 2010). Therefore the network theory acknowledges the importance of contact in language variation and has been used to explain individuals’ behaviors of various kinds which could not be accounted for in terms of corporate group membership (Milroy 1980).

This kind of approach has allowed for exciting results in understanding social identity as a process speakers engage with in negotiating and (re)construction of identities (cf. Bucholtz & Hall 2005). I find this kind of approach important for the current study as it shares similar theoretical orientations with current perspectives on identity and language. Therefore, the current study drew some insights from it.

From this current scholarly positions, on language and identity, sociolinguist have adopted the reconceptualization of identity in other fields most notably sociology, (e.g. Bucholtz 1999 & Norton 2000). In this vein, sociolinguists have begun to view a speaker as more than just a product of his or her social context, and rather as more of an agent with the ability to select linguistic resources available to him or her in the community repertoire (see Hall 2011; Johnstone 2008; Pennycook 2010; Blackledge & Creese 2010; Bucholtz & Hall 2005). This post- structrualist approach to identity accentuates the individual as an active agent in shaping his identities and less on the community and views identity as “complex, contradictory, multifaceted and dynamic across time and place” (Dyer 2007:105). This partly the approach that has informed the current study on identity and language as the study sought to understand how multilinguals exploited their linguistic repertoires in negotiating, performing and constructing their multiple identities.