My favorite books on language and identity and why it matters

This remarkably clear and engaging read opened my eyes to the identity dimension of style. Using plenty of examples, it shows how we pick and mix from the many alternative ways we can say something to present and position ourselves in society in a specific way. 

Nikolas Coupland, currently Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University, thoroughly reviews previous sociolinguistic studies on style, from traditional to modern, steering research towards a more sophisticated and wide-ranging understanding of the ways specific contexts, local interactions, personal access to the resources of language and individual aesthetic choices make meaning in the presentation of the self.

Identity is currently the dominant frame in public discourse, with individuals of a specific ethnicity, religion, gender, social background, environmental opinion or other identifying factors developing shared agendas, which are often expressed through a recognizable style. In this book (revisited in 2002 with the subtitle Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think to relate the book’s content to the 2000 US presidential election─also used for the book’s third edition, issued in 2016), George Lakoff applies cognitive linguistics to the study of contemporary American politics, illustrating the different conceptual models of morality conservatives (strict father model) and liberals (nurturant parent model) hold. These models revolve around contrasting views of the relationship between the State and citizens, springing from an understanding of the nation and its governance through the metaphor of the family. 

In 1971, in response to a protest by women students at the Harvard Divinity School against the masculine universal, the chair of Harvard’s linguistics department, Calvert Watkins, wrote a letter to Crimson, cosigned by other colleagues. Explaining the concept of ‘markedness,’ he contended there was “really no cause for anxiety or pronoun-envy on the part of those seeking such changes.” Anna Livia’s book─originally her PhD thesis at Berkeley, uses the controversial phrase as the departure point for an enlightening analysis of a wide range of English and French texts problematizing the traditional linguistic gender system. The study reveals that rather than stemming from undue envy, gendered language is justifiably at the core of feminist battles. How can we express ourselves fully if our identities are not adequately represented in discourse?

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana cultural theorist, an activist, and a queer feminist scholar, and this book─which well mirrors this complexity, can be approached from many possible perspectives. Lying between essay writing, poetry, and semi-autobiographical memoir, it discloses how the author’s identity was shaped by a daily confrontation between Mexican and Indian traditions and the Anglo-American present: cultures that edge each other on the borderlands of the Rio Grande.

While this may not appear to be a book on language at first glance, Borderlands/La Frontera unveils language’s central role in the writer’s personal identity-shaping (“Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity─I am my language”), also tangibly in its mixture of English and Spanish. Moreover, moving as it does over broad territory, the book has contributed to challenging how laypeople, not just scholars or intellectuals, think about identity.

This is a polyphonic narration of London, witnessing contemporary urban everyday language and identity practices. Zadie Smith completed her (debut) novel in her final year at Cambridge, after an auction for the rights was won by Hamish Hamilton (currently part of Penguin Random House), based on a partial manuscript.

Recent trends in language studies have produced a human turn in research to make sense of present—intricate, transnationally connected and dynamic—complexity, problematizing the countability and representability of cultures, languages, and identities as single entities. This book offers a glimpse of the type of languaging which naturally emerges in spaces inhabited by polyglots and other individuals drawing from several linguistic repertoires in urban landscapes. Each character stands out for their idyosincractic speech, with little Standard English being used and a number of different varieties appearing alongside it.