ABSTRACT
At first glance, it may appear that the association of language with ethnic group affiliation is one of the more obvious relationships between language and culture. Practically all of the approximately 6,000 languages of the world, for example, are strongly associated with an ethnocultural group of some type. But this initial transparency is betrayed by the fact that language is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for ethnic group membership (Fishman 1999). Like sociocultural borders, linguistic boundaries are permeable, negotiated constructs typically defined more on the basis of sociopolitical and ideological considerations than on the basis of structural linguistic parameters. Even the dichotomy between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ turns out to be based more on cultural and political issues than on mutual intelligibility or structural linguistic properties. Thus, Sino-Tibetan language varieties such as Cantonese and Mandarin are commonly referred to as dialects of Chinese even though they may not be mutually intelligible, whereas Norwegian and Swedish are considered to be different languages although speakers usually understand each other. In the former case, there is an overarching cultural unity that transcends linguistic typology whereas, in the latter case, there is a national political border that reifies minimal structural diversity in linguistic varieties. By the same token, sociopolitical struggles about language – such as those over the status of Afrikaans in South Africa, the role of French and English in Canada, or the legitimacy of African American English (so-called ‘Ebonics’) in the United States – are ultimately not about language, but about ideology, identity, and sociopolitical power.
