Language has long been seen as closely connected with identity in a number of distinctive ways.

Traditionally, the language people speak has been connected with their national identity:
English, Spanish, Japanese and so on. Within any one language there are different language
varieties which are also connected with particular identities. In Britain, accent and dialect reflect
a persons regional and social identity. In the United States, speaking Black English Vernacular
is connected with being African-American. Sociolinguists have also studied differences of accent,
dialect and communicative style in the language of people of different age groups and
generations, in order to find out how languages shift and change over the course of time, and in
men and womens use of language, which has been seen as reflecting gendered socialisation
practices and unequal power relationships.
It is also recognised that children and adults from different social groups bring different kinds of
language resources into the classroom and that these influence their identity as a student.
Particular uses of language and literacy are highly valued in the classroom and seen as centrally
important for learning, and there has been considerable argument about how far the language of
children and adults from various ethnic and class communities is different or deficient in relation
to competencies required in educational settings. These associations of language use and group
identity (class, gender, generation, ethnicity) remain significant, but a number of important
theoretical shifts in the ways in which social scientists conceptualise the role of language in
relation to other aspects of social life have had some profound implications for issues of
language and identity. Briefly, there has been what is referred to as a shift from a structuralist
approach, which conceives of identity as a relatively fixed set of attributes, to the post-
structuralist notion of identity as a more fluid ongoing contested process, with people
constructing and reconstructing various aspects of their identity throughout different experiences
in their lives. Post-structuralists often use the term subjectivity to indicate that identity is a
continual process of making the self, the subject. The term identification is also used to
emphasise that identity is an ongoing, interactive process rather than a fixed product.
Throughout this section we use the term identity because, it is the everyday word for peoples
sense of who they are. But we use it to incorporate the post-structuralist emphasis on identity
as a process rather than any fixed set of social attributes or roles.
The theoretical shift in ways of looking at identity is part of a more general acknowledgement
within the social sciences of the importance of the dynamic processes of social life and the role
of language within these. For instance, there has been an increasing interest in the way in which
people use language collaboratively to accomplish intellectual as well as practical tasks. In
sociocultural theory, which we explored in section 1, cognitive development is seen as socially
driven, and knowledge as socially constructed, through the medium of teaching and learning
dialogues. As we stressed in section 1, language is both the medium and the message of
education. This more social constructionist approach sees knowledge not so much as a body of
facts and information but rather as the outcome of particular kinds of social interactions and
processes. It has also been applied to understanding other aspects of social life. So, for instance,
social categories like class, gender or ethnicity are increasingly seen not as intrinsic labels of
identity residing within the individual, but as experienced by people as a more or less salient
aspect of who they are through their experience in different interactions and dialogues, across
different contexts.
Alongside an increasing emphasis on the role of language in the ongoing construction of
knowledge and identities, there has also been a growing recognition of the ideological nature
and functions of language. Rather than being a neutral, transparent medium for expressing and
constructing ideas, language use reflects ideologies, that is systems of values, beliefs and social
practices (as Hicks wrote in the first reading). The meaning of language in any specific
interaction is shot through with these social and ideological associations, which are an intrinsic
aspect of the immediate and the broader context. In this section, we are using the term
discourse in both the ways outlined in section 1, that is, to mean actual stretches of language
in context, and systems of knowledge and cultural frameworks. An aspect of discourse that we
will be focusing on in this section is the ideological dimension.
Philosophers and scientists have been examining the connection between thought and language for three
thousand years. One major topic of research has been whether language evolved from thought or vice
versa. Whatever the truth, all theories agree that our language, our culture and our identity are inextricably
linked.

The way we express ourselves determines how we as individuals, as a generation, as a group or as a
nation behave and are perceived. To what extent this is the case becomes apparent when we talk to
people whose native language is not our own. The differences in the way they use the language are often
surprising, and can give us a clue as to how different their patterns of thought and their identity are from
ours.