Self-identifying as British (was: UKer)

[Lynne Murphy]

For us naturalised (< see? you can tell from the 's' there) citizens and
those without English/Scottish/Welsh ethnicity, 'British' is all we've got.

A student of mine last year did her undergrad dissertation on the word
'British' among 20-something UK-born Indian and white/English folk, and as
I remember, the Indians (who were mostly children of people who'd emigrated
from East Africa) self-ID'd as 'British' (often hyphenated) but the white
kids not so much.

Lynne

--On Monday, February 7, 2011 21:27 +0000 Damien Hall
<damien.hall at YORK.AC.UK> wrote:

> It's not quite true that the only UKers to self-identify as British are
> the
> Northern Irish.
>
> That's actually an important question in the project I currently work on,
> Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border (our website is in my
> signature, the one ending in 'aiseb', if you're interested). We are
> working
> in four towns on the English-Scottish border, two on each side, and at one
> point ask interviewees about their personal identity, and give them a list
> of adjectives to choose between and rank according to how they feel about
> themselves: 'Scottish' or 'English' depending on the town, 'British',
> 'European', 'Borderer', an adjective describing origin from that town
> ('Berwicker' etc), and an adjective describing origin from their part of
> their nation ('Northerner' etc). People can choose any of these that are
> important to them, and have to place them along a line from 'Most
> important' to 'Least important'. We find that a significant number of
> people don't include 'British', but by no means all of them - so a good
> number of English and Scottish people on the border do self-identify as
> British these days.
>
> Alas, it's also no longer true that citizens of the UK are referred to as
> 'UK subjects' - not since 1983:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_subject#After_1983
>
> There is one very restricted category of people who are still subjects,
> but
> the mere fact of being a citizen of this particular monarchy doesn't make
> one a subject any more, as once it did.
>
> Damien
>
> --
> Damien Hall
>
> Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border
> Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York
>
> Tel. +44 (0)1904 322665
> Fax  +44 (0)1904 322673
>
> http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb
> http://www.york.ac.uk/language/staff/academic-research/damien-hall/
> http://www.york.ac.uk/hrc/
>
> Times Higher Education University of the Year 2010
>
> DISCLAIMER: http://www.york.ac.uk/docs/disclaimer/email.htm



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics
Director of English Language and Linguistics
School of English
Arts B348
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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