Riassunto esame Lingua Inglese, prof. Russo, libro consigliato Language, Culture and Identity, Riley

EIDOS: Individuals have 'world-views', i. e. sets of ideas, beliefs, representations, values and

attitudes which form the interpretative repertoire they use to organize and make sense of their

experience.

PRAXIS: The appropriate participation in social activities is knowledge-based: the individual

acquires the linguistic, communicative and cultural competence, including both forms and norms

and the parameters of variation, which are relevant to their social identity and self. In any

interaction, the individual occupies a specific discursive position which show the roles which are

the dynamic and punctual manifestations of social identity.

2.4 'Culture' as knowledge: cultural markers

The knowledge established within the social knowledge system, will be defined as 'culture'.

However, this doesn’t mean that all members of a given society 'have the same culture': they can’t

know all and only the same things, because their participation in society varies. Individuals

construct their personal cultural repertoires on the basis of the interactional opportunities available

to them, so since cultural knowledge is extremely diverse, two individuals in the same society may

have very different cultures. Culture, then, consists of the totality of social knowledge and is

distributed differently. Culture, being what people have to learn as distinct from their biological

heritage, must consist of the end-product of learning: knowledge in the widest sense of the term. So,

culture has to be transmitted and any society that can’t pass its knowledge to future generations,

doesn’t to reproduce itself. The communicative systems through which culture is transmitted are

divided in three categories of cultural knowledge: know-that, know-of and know-how. Know-that

consists of what individuals believe to be true: their political and religious 'philosophies' and values,

their versions of geography and history and so on. This forms what we might call relatively

permanent background knowledge and is the individual's version of 'how the world works'. An

indication of the close relationships between culture, language and identity is evident through

cultural markers, where culture is directly encoded or lexicalized.

CULTURAL MARKERS

Acronyms and abbreviations: BBC / Places: Scotland Yard / 'Days': Halloween / Characters:

Peter Pan, James Bond / Newspapers: the Sun, The Times

Cultural markers may form extended patterns on the basis of domains of reference, often with

figurative meaning. They can be extremely regular: a case would be the way in which French towns

are associated with a specific set of historical or gastronomic references: Bordeaux: wine / Vichy:

mineral water. Such expressions can also be used for social categorization and references of this

kind are often extremely powerful symbols. Together, these three forms of knowledge form the

individual's cultural competence, the sum of the beliefs, information and skills which one needs to

share and apply in the situations in which one finds oneself. So, Paul Grice proposes four

interpretative Maxims, namely those of quality, quantity, relevance and manner:

Quality: speakers' utterances should be true to the best of their knowledge. They should not say

anything for which they lack adequate evidence.

Quantity: speakers' utterances should be as informative as is required to the conversation.

Relevance: speakers' utterances should be clearly related to the matter in question.

Manner: utterances should be perspicuous; they should avoid obscurity and ambiguity.

Anyway, some academics made serious objections to this approach, since there are many examples

of speakers regularly violating the maxims in many different cultures.

Knowledge is distributed differentially in society, in fact, the number of people who possess a

particular item of knowledge can vary from the whole of the community in question to a single

dyad. There are things 'everybody knows' and things that are 'between you and me'. However, it is

possible to know one item without knowing all the others which are necessary to be, and to be

recognized as, a competent member of the group in question, or to know something about that

group. Each kind of knowledge corresponds to an aspect of the social identities of the individuals

concerned: family, community of residence, nation. So between the extremes of dyad and the

community, we have innumerable levels and figurations: sports clubs and trades unions,

professions, political parties, religious groups, each with their own knowledge base.

Conversation, and in particular the kind of conversation we often denigrate as 'gossip', is the most

important channel for the constant reaffirmation of shared values. When we gossip we are

continually referring to those values to evaluate things, ideas and people positively or negatively. It

is the practice of gossip, then, which maintains the group's identity and its common sense, its social

reality. The second reason why gossip is important is that it show the main mechanism for the

management and distribution of knowledge and information. Knowledge is distributed

differentially, in fact, we don’t know the same things, because we don’t have the same chances to

learn. According to the nature and quality of the social interactions in which we participate, we have

access to different kinds of knowledge. This social distribution of knowledge is largely paralleled

by the social distribution of language - and the two are constitutive of social identity.

2.5 Knowledge, identity and competence

Linguistic competence is Chomsky' s term for the ability of a native speaker to produce or recognize

correct sentences in a language. This ability is the dynamic expression of an ideal native-speaker's

knowledge of the system of rules (the units, morphological, syntactic and paradigmatic structures,

functions) which form the internal code. Communicative competence can be defined as the ability to

adapt one's utterances to the situation. Our speech varies according to who we are and who we are

speaking to, where and when, and what about. Communicative competence requires knowledge of

the socio linguistic norms governing variation and enables speakers to speak in appropriate ways.

The concept of sociocultural competence brings together our knowledge of language with our

knowledge of the world, the society, situations and culture of which we are members. Every society

has its vision of the competent adult, a concept of personhood, and tries to reproduce individuals

who will act satisfactorily into the society. Taken together, these form a theory of what human

nature is and how you become an accepted member of society, a theory of communication and of

learning or acculturation. Since every society has different views of human nature and different

expectations as regards the competent adult, its representations of the learner, learning and what is

to be learnt also differ. So, we can say that linguistic competence means being a grammarian,

communicative competence means being a speaker and sociocultural competence means being a

member; they combine with each other, so that sociocultural competence includes communicative

competence which, in turn, includes linguistic competence.

Societal bilingualism

This term refers to the coexistence within a society of two language varieties. A language variety is

a set of linguistic forms having the same distribution with respect to social criteria such as religion,

topic, functional domains, age, sex, region and so on. In some cases, the two varieties may be

considered as independent languages (often because both have been standardized, as is the case in

the Swedish-speaking areas of Finland). In others, one of the two varieties is considered as a

language while the other is relegated to an inferior position (dialect, patois, etc.) or neither the one

nor the other is a standard language. Since the varieties in question may have very different statuses

and functions, the forms and patterns of bilingualism, whether social or individual, tend to vary

considerably with immediate implications for the types of personhood and configurations of social

identity made available. So, the bilingual individual will be a member of both speech communities.

What has been said about societal bilingualism also applies to multilingualism, the coexistence of

three or more varieties, though there is an increase in the number of community identities available.

Indeed, in many cases the proliferation of distinct varieties can only be explained in terms of the

affirmation of group identities.

Diglossia

This is a form of standardized societal bilingualism, characterized by the complementary

distribution of the functions of two language varieties: each of the varieties is used in a closed

repertoire. There is a relation of superiority/inferiority between a high variety (H) and a low variety

(L): H is more prestigious, standardized and written, official and formal, learnt in a dedicated

institutional setting, and is symbolic of national and religious identity; L is local, acquired

informally and expresses social solidarity. For example, sermons in a church or radio news bulletins

are given in H, but L will be used for instructions to a worker or a TV serial.

Polyglossia

This term refers to a form of standardized societal multilingualism where at least three language

varieties coexist on the basis of complementary functional specializations.

Individual bilingualism

We may define individual bilingualism as the coexistence of two or more varieties within the same

th

person. In the 19 century, bilingualism had a negative connotation, supported by various ideas:

• No one individual ever speaks even one language 'perfectly';

• Bilinguals realize functional and specific language choices. They use one language in certain

situations - at work, for example, or when writing, or when discussing a particular topic - and

another at home, or in church, and so on. They don’t necessarily play the same roles in both

languages.

• The conditions of acquisition of the two varieties determine the individual's form of (bilingual)

competence and the principal constituents of his other social identity.

Today we are still living with linguistic wrongs that are the product of the belief in the normality of

monolingualism and the dangers of multilingualism to the securing of the nations state, so both are

dangerous myths.

Plurilingualism

This term refers to an individual who is capable of using appropriately several language varieties.

As in the case of bilingualism, the plurilingual individual possesses a specific form of

communicative competence which consists in managing his or her linguistic repertoire according to

a wide range of situational and cultural factors and parameters including domains. However, the

differences between monolingualism, bilingualism and plurilingualism are quantitative: even the

most 'monolingual' of individuals is constantly making similar decisio