ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 of this book provided a broad, overall conceptual picture of the approach taken in this book. It discussed and explained the key words of English, Language, Identity and Discourse, and provided an overview on research and ideas relating to the notion of language as discourse. A discursive approach interrelates four aspects of language study:
Firstly, such study acknowledges and is set against both the background of the wider historical and sociopolitical contexts within which language is used, and the sets of beliefs, values, assumptions or ideologies that underpin these contexts.
Secondly, there are the social and cultural contexts in which language use occurs.
Thirdly, there is the identification of the actual linguistic variability in any particular variety of Englishes;
Fourthly, there is the issue of agency: the degree to which any language user is aware of all three aspects or dimensions, but chooses to index their identity to place, in particular, through enregistering specific linguistic variables, especially phonological, and at times lexical and morphosyntactic.
As already mentioned in Chapter 1, the cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin was concerned particularly with the relationship between language and history, offering new and radical concepts and ways of understanding the social functions of language. He writes:At any given moment in its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strictest sense of the word, according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic, but also – and this is the essential point – into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘generic’ languages, languages of generations and so forth.
(1981: 259)