Influence Of Language On Identity

Does language influences on people’s identity? Identity may be a word that most of people take it easy to understand, but we do not really know all the things that involves. Identity can be defined generally as the characteristics that define you as a person, for example the place where you were born, cultural background, religion, language, among others. Identity can be constructed through several aspects of a relationship between self and others. An important aspect that builds our identity is the interaction with others, and in order to interact we use language. Language can lead us to identity and identity can leads us to social aspects. Some of these social aspects are the aim of this paper, such as language choice and code-switching,

According to Mesthrie (2009), Fishman defines language choice as “who speaks what language to whom and when” (p.147). A speaker can change the way they speak according to whom they are talking to. This process was explained by Giles in terms of speech accommodation theory (p. 150). In some cases speakers tend to imitate a variety in order to fit; therefore they make a linguistic change. Allan Bell (1984) found that newsreaders on New Zealand radio stations tailored their pronunciations to different audiences, depending on whether they were broadcasting on national radio or a local community station (p.151), this is an example of accommodation. When speakers want to let others know of their variety and do not accommodate, it is called agency. Researches tried to explain why people vary the way they speak in interaction with others. The technique used by investigators was the matched guise and it helps to know how listeners may have linguistic attitudes towards different language varieties. The technique consists on recording a same person reading in two or more different languages. The recording is presented to

Some of them are face to face interaction and frame. According to Deckert and Vickers (2011), face to face interaction refers to people in interaction while they are physically present or virtually present, but in real time (p. 91). First people create ethnography of communication, in other words an environment is created. Then, people are concerned with the message, which refers to the conversation analysis. After that, they pay attention to physical aspects like the clothing or how the hair of the other interactant looks. Another thing that people are concerned with is making sure that they “fit in”. As a result of all this aspects, the message is successfully transmitted. When people are interacting, they pay attention to conversational factors; this leads us to frame. Frame has to do with the context in which interaction takes place. Goffman (1974), states that people define the situation as being serious or not serious, formal or informal (p. 92). An example is when a person is in the office and receives a call, they answer in a formal manner, but when he/she realizes that is a friend, the frame changes to informal. Other approaches are participation frameworks and footing and they have to do with context as well. The use of language in interaction is different according to contexts, but it is also different in