ABSTRACT
In an influential statement more than a decade ago, Deborah Cameron (1990) ‘demythologizes’ sociolinguistics, arguing that non-circular explanations for sociolinguistic correlations need to be sociologically rather than ‘linguistically’ based. In this study we try to apply and extend Cameron’s insights by exploring a very fluid, local-level language/identity situation, and by demanding a recourse to transdisciplinary conceptualizations in order to be able to interpret and understand what is going on. In a sense, the situation we are dealing with in this study , and the sociohistorical processes involved, come very close to what is discussed by Tabouret-Keller (1992: 193) in relation to what she calls ‘focusing’: membership identification to a community through language, paralleled with the consequences of agencies that support social integration processes which the people themselves may not wish.1
