ABSTRACT
In reference to Polari, I have also had to consider the question ‘What is a language?’ carefully. Although some speakers used Polari in a complex, creative way that meant it was mutually unintelligible to outsiders, others merely employed it as a limited lexicon, relying to a greater extent upon an English base. Even people who knew it very well would be hardpressed to extend their knowledge of Polari to communicate as effectively as they could in English. For these reasons, Polari cannot be called a language in the same way that English, French, Italian etc. are languages. Therefore, early in this book I considered classifying Polari in other ways: dialect, language variety, sociolect, creole, pidgin etc. Halliday’s term anti-language appeared most useful in describing Polari’s function in relation to its users. Anti-languages can provide (multiple) lexical items for concepts considered important to a particular ‘anti-society’ – they allow the anti-society to remain hidden, the shared language acts as a bonding mechanism and means of identification, and, most importantly, the antilanguage allows its users to construct an alternative social reality and alternative identities for themselves.
