ABSTRACT
Erving Goffman's seminal book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was the first book to ever devote its main attention to mundane face-to-face interaction. According to Goffman, playing an appropriate role for a chosen setting and a chosen end resulted in "coherence". This chapter is about the exact contrary, i.e., purposeful "incoherence" in interaction. It explores the similarities between the emergence of new social styles and roles. The chapter focuses on coherence in language and social roles in the modern world. "Pre-modern" diversity was reduced in an attempt to render the sociolinguistic situation in modern states "clearer". The sociolinguistic situation has become more similar to modernist imaginations, but it has become more complex to study language and identity. If legitimate language is possessed by all, as is most clearly the case in Japan, or if the racist and excluding functions of legitimate language become visible as in England and in Germany, then legitimate languages suffers a loss of legitimacy.
