ABSTRACT
It is commonly noted that, owing to technological advances in transportation and communication, the redistribution of production and labour, and other reasons, the potential for intercultural contact is currently greater than it has ever been in human history. Moreover, with an estimated 6,900 languages across the approximately 200 countries of the world (Lewis 2009), it is very likely that intercultural contact will involve encounters between people who speak different languages. Sometimes, these encounters take place between members of groups with a long history of interaction and thus they are rather routine, such that personal and normative expectations regarding language use effectively guide the communication process to predictable, if not mutually satisfying, outcomes. At other times, we are less well acquainted with our interlocutors’ practices, and so part of the process of communication involves grappling with the acquisition of new verbal and nonverbal communication systems. Regardless of the level of familiarity, a variety of sociopsychological and sociocultural processes operate within every intercultural interaction. In this chapter, we focus on how the languages we speak are linked to feelings of identity in
intercultural encounters. This relation is a reciprocal one: the languages we learn and use open up possibilities for new identities, while at the same time our identities can have implications for engagement in language learning and use. We begin with a review of how scholars in social psychology, communication studies and applied linguistics have defined identity and described its function in intercultural communication. We discuss some prominent themes that reverberate (or not) across disciplines, particularly as they relate to notions of identity, language and culture, and we consider what the various conceptualizations of these constructs imply for research methodology. In so doing, we highlight areas where we believe that theory and research can be informed through interdisciplinary rapprochement.
