26.3008, Review: Anthropological Ling; Discourse; Socioling: Breyer, Leimgruber, Lacoste (2014)

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Subject: 26.3008, Review: Anthropological Ling; Discourse; Socioling: Breyer, Leimgruber, Lacoste (2014)

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Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 15:33:47
From: Laura Callahan [Lcallahan at aol.com]
Subject: Indexing Authenticity

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-3762.html

EDITOR: Véronique  Lacoste
EDITOR: Jakob R. E. Leimgruber
EDITOR: Thiemo  Breyer
TITLE: Indexing Authenticity
SUBTITLE: Sociolinguistic Perspectives
SERIES TITLE: De Gruyter linguae & litterae 39
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Laura Michele Callahan, City College of New York (CUNY)

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This volume contains fifteen papers, divided into three sections, preceded by
a preface and introduction, and followed by an index. Thirteen of the papers
were presented at the November 2011 conference entitled Indexing Authenticity:
Perspectives from linguistics and anthropology, held at the University of
Frieburg and sponsored by FRIAS, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. 

Preface: Authenticity: Véronique Lacoste, Jakob Leimgruber and Thiemo Breyer.
“A view from inside and outside sociolinguistics.” The editors set the stage
for the volume, asking whether it is ever possible to achieve authenticity,
whether it is a fundamental quality, or one that must be attributed. Is
authenticity essential, constructed, and/or subject to validation—and
moreover, must these even be mutually exclusive?

Introduction: Nikolas Coupland. “ Language, society and authenticity: Themes
and perspectives.” The author (re)examines the possible meanings of the term
authenticity, authentic language, the role of authenticity in indexical
meaning, the role language plays relative to authenticity, and authenticity’s
role relative to personal and social identities. Coupland characterizes
authenticity as an “elephant in the room” that can no longer be ignored, but
whose meanings are far from resolved (p. 35).

Section One: Indexing local meanings of authenticity

Chapter 1: Penelope Eckert. “The trouble with authenticity.” Eckert continues
with the elephant-in- the-room metaphor, giving examples of which types of
speakers would or would not be considered authentic under older criteria. In
contrast, under the new “dynamic view of variation […] as constructing as well
as reflecting social categories,” authenticity cannot be assigned (p. 44).
Eckert presents data from fieldwork at two Northern California schools, in
which preteens adopt vocalic variants associated with Chicanos or Anglos,
variants which in turn index the quality of being “cool”, or socially
desirable, on the local social market, in this case controlled by the crowd of
popular youngsters whose actions and language determine what is considered
fashionable speech and behavior. 

Chapter 2: Lauren Hall-Lew. “Chinese social practice and San Franciscan
authenticity.” Hall-Lew reports on the transformation of Chinese social
practices in San Francisco from “authentically foreign” to “authentically San
Franciscan” (p. 57). Social practices formerly seen as strictly Chinese have
also been appropriated by young white San Franciscans. This gives rise to a
situation in which these white youth have full access to resources that enable
them to “construct a cosmopolitan, transnational-yet-local identity”, while
the group from which the resources originated cannot escape a state in between
“fully foreign” and “honorary white” (Tuan 1998) (p. 57). Hall-Lew examines
the label ‘FOB’ through the lens of interviews with residents of San
Francisco’s Sunset District, a neighborhood often described as New Chinatown
due to its large Chinese population.

Chapter 3: Lefteris Kailoglou. “Being more alternative and less Brit-pop: The
quest for originality in three urban styles in Athens.” Kailoglou investigates
the use of innovative metaphors by three groups, composed of people 22-35
years of age. Data was collected at three sites in Athens, Greece, each
frequented by individuals known to cultivate a particular style of dress,
taste in music, and linguistic usage. Each group endeavored to project a
distinctiveness from the other two, although each one also abhorred labels.
Members of each group strove to achieve authenticity within the intra-group
hierarchy. The primary inter-group distinction was between mainstream and
alternative, with the group known (albeit to its chagrin) as mainstream using
conventional metaphors, and the two groups considered to be alternative using
“instant creations (Hapax Legomena)” which are never repeated or spread beyond
the group (p. 90).

Chapter 4: Barbara Johnstone. “‘100 % Authentic Pittsburgh’: Sociolinguistic
authenticity and the linguistics of particularity.” Johnstone points out that
authenticity used to be deemed a quality with which only a very specific group
of speakers were endowed, namely members of the working class who had had
little to no contact with outgroup members. Such speakers were thought to
offer the best data to study language variation and change. Authenticity is no
longer conceptualized in such a static manner and forms of contact that once
would have been seen as a source of contamination—such as wider, more
flexible, social networks—are assumed. Johnstone analyzes a t-shirt that
purports to list the traits of an authentic Pittsburgher. Her analysis makes
use of the linguistics of particularity (Becker 1988), a set of heuristics
that include such statements as “Texts evoke and reshape interpersonal
relations” and “Texts are loud about some things and silent about others; they
evoke and reshape conventions about the sayable and the unsayable” (p. 101).

Chapter 5: Britta Schneider.  “ ‘Oh boy, ¿hablas español?’ –Salsa and the
multiple value of authenticity in late capitalism.” Schneider studies the
performance of multiple identities by socioeconomically mobile Australians,
who speak Spanish as a second language and take salsa lessons taught by Latin
Americans in dance schools owned by Australians of Anglo descent. Following
Hannerz (1996), she notes that “[t]he contradictions in relation to ethnic
authenticity that emerge in the discourses of Salsa informants […] are partly
explainable through the privileged position that the cosmopolitan creates
through accessing but not committing to Latin culture” (p. 129). Similar to
Hall-Lew’s (this volume) young white San Franciscans, these Australian salsa
aficionados are able to access another ethnic group’s authenticity from a
transnational perspective, while the non-mainstream group that makes it
possible for them to achieve this has no such opportunity to assume and divest
themselves of their authenticity at will.

Chapter 6: Monica Heller. “The commodification of authenticity.” Heller
analyzes the strategies of Francophones in Canada to sell “Frenchness” to
tourists and to confront potential challenges to Francophone claims to
authenticity and legitimacy. Phenomena observed include the successful
representation of authentic “francité” for Anglophone consumers with a minimum
of linguistic accommodation to the latter, the appropriation of First Nations
peoples’ indigeneity, and ironic humor in reaction to Francophone elites’
imposition of language standards that devalue the vernacular used by many
younger and ethnic minority Francophones.

Section Two: Indexing authenticity in delocalised settings 

Chapter 7: Michael Silverstein. “The race from place: Dialect eradication vs.
the linguistic “authenticity” of terroir.” Silverstein explicates the
phenomenon of regional and socioeconomic speech varieties having indexical
functions. He traces the urbanization of the US population and its impact on
socio-cultural privilege for the few and the social prestige of their speech.
This historical outline sets the stage for the author’s analysis of a 2010 New
York Times article detailing speakers’ attempts to eradicate a Brooklynese
accent, as well as of the themes that emerged from readers’ comments on this
story.

Chapter 8: Graham M. Jones. “Reported Speech as an authentication tactic in
computer-mediated communication.” Jones demonstrates how reported speech— at
times in combination with emoticons—brings text messages and other
interpersonal channels of computer-mediated communication closer to
face-to-face conversation. His corpus comes from U.S. teens and young adults.
Quotative ‘like’ and ‘all’ serve to index “phatic authenticity” (p. 204).

Chapter 9: Andrea Moll. “Authenticity in dialect performance? A case study of
‘Cyber-Jamaican’.” The author outlines challenges to some of the assumptions
of earlier sociolinguistic work. More recent studies, including hers, are
predicated on the supposition that authentic speech need not necessarily be
spontaneous, that “authentication [is] the outcome of discursive negotiation”,
and that globalization has given rise to “processes of deterritorialisation
and the recontextualisation of languages and linguistic resources” (p. 210).
Using the Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican, Moll finds a jocular or frank stance as
well as certain linguistic features to be factors that mark a particular
passage of cyber-text as authentically Jamaican for her survey participants.

Chapter 10: Theresa Heyd and Christian Mair. “From vernacular to digital
ethnolinguistic repertoire: The case of Nigerian Pidgin.” Heyd and Mair
continue with the focus on computer mediated communication and authenticity in
diasporic vernaculars. In their examination of Nigerian Pidgin in an online
forum, the authors demonstrate how four scenarios figure into the propagation
of this vernacular: the Internet functions as a stage, classroom, resource,
and infrastructure. Heyd and Mair conclude that Nigerian Pidgin in an online
context has become a mobile resource (Blommaert 2010), one that is not bound
by the more fixed standards or criteria of face-to-face interaction in order
to achieve or index authenticity.

Chapter 11: Akinmade T. Akande. “Hybridity as authenticity in Nigerian hip-hop
lyrics”. Akande draws on the concept of ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1995).
Rather than imitating all aspects of African American hip-hop artists’ music,
Nigerian performers’ work is characterized by a hybridity in which their style
and lyrics contain global elements with references to local places and issues.
Akande quotes Omoniyi, who states that “Nigerian hip-hop departs significantly
from mainstream norms by excluding features such as gangsta, heavy
sexualization, misogyny, politics and monolingualism” (Omoniyi 2006: 198 in
Akande, p. 271). Although Nigerian hip-hop lyrics may include some African
American Vernacular English, they often also contain codeswitching between
Nigerian Pidgin English, Yoruba, and English.

Section Three: Authenticity construction in other mediatised contexts 

Chapter 12: Florian Coulmas. “Authentic writing.” Coulmas elucidates the
original and enduring role of written language in notions of authenticity from
the individual to the national level. He observes that everyone except
linguists “tend to regard writing as more genuine and trustworthy than speech
[an…] attitude [that] manifests itself in various practices and institutions”
(p. 289). Coulmas’ overview of some of these practices and institutions traces
spelling reforms, the adoption of new writing systems, the movement away from
multilingual empires to nations officially defined by a common language. He
points out that the references used for most projects of normativization have
been written texts.

Chapter 13: Anna Kristina Hultgren.”Lexical variation at the internationalized
university: Are indexicality and authenticity always relevant?” Hultgren
questions whether referential and social meanings can always be disentangled,
and whether social meaning may in some cases play a smaller role or no role at
all in language use. The use of Danish instead of English is advocated by
various groups for various motives, ranging from nationalist to egalitarian.
However, in the workplace referential meaning seems to be prioritized; and,
according to Hultgren’s Danish university science instructor informants, this
is the main factor in their decision to use English more than Danish for
certain technical terms. 

Chapter 14: Martin Gill. “‘Real communities’, rhetorical borders:
Authenticating British identity in political discourse and on-line debate”.
Gill examines “the definition and production of authentic Britishness” (p.
331, footnote), which, as he points out, is not limited to Britain.
Politicians and anonymous bloggers contribute to the construction of an
imagined, idealized nation, to be an authentic member of which requires not
only the ability to speak English but also adoption of the host country’s
customs and culture. Gill shows how this is framed in the discourse of public
figures and online newspaper readers as ‘common sense’, thus naturalizing the
views expressed and rendering further debate impossible. 

Chapter 15: Johanna Sprondel and Tilman Haug. “What’s in a promesse
authentique? Doubting and confirming authenticity in 17th-century French
diplomacy”. Sprondel and Haug examine the notion of authenticity in early
modern Europe, specifically the case of royal ambassadors. They show how
acting in an authentic manner could take various forms, and was closely linked
to possessing authority—either one’s own or by association. The enactment of
one’s authenticity required the regular and strategic use of deception—or
dissimulation—thus differing greatly from later senses of authenticity, in
which truthfulness is at all times considered paramount. Sprondel and Haug
also highlight the ability of written language to enhance claims to
authenticity (see also Coulmas, this volume).

EVALUATION

This collection of papers provides an engrossing orientation to and
application of newer paradigms in the field of sociolinguistics as concerns
the question of authenticity. It is directed at an audience in
sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, in particular although not
limited to researchers interested in language and identity, globalization,
hybridity, and place-based identities. In terms of organization, the chapters
are arranged in a logical fashion, such that concepts encountered in one are
often reinforced, developed or refocused in a subsequent chapter. Each paper
can also be read in isolation, with or without having first read the preface
or introduction, both of which however greatly enrich the reader’s experience.

In terms of content, as editors Lacoste, Leimgruber and Breyer state, the
book’s contributors “problematise the ‘authentic speaker’ as a reflection of a
complex, dynamic, deployment of socio-linguistic and socio-pragmatic
resources” (p. 4). The automatic assignation of authenticity to speakers—or
even membership in pre-determined groups—on the basis of attributes such as
native language, gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, for example, is no
longer considered tenable (see Callahan 2012). Membership in or identification
with a community of practice may serve as an alternate form of categorization.
For example, Kailoglou’s (Chapter 3) subjects are organized into three groups
according to lifestyle, while Schneider’s (Chapter 5) groups are based on
devotion to a particular type of salsa dancing. 

The question arises as to whether authenticity that is discursively
constructed and performed is nevertheless subject to validation. As an
example, for the evaluation of the Jamaicanness of texts posted on an Internet
forum frequented by members of the Jamaican diaspora, Moll (Chapter 9) turns
to “native and near-native speakers of JC [Jamaican Creole], whom ‘first-wave’
sociolinguists would accept as ‘authentic’ speakers of the language” (p. 226;
see also Eckert 2012). This serves as a reminder of the tension that remains
between older and newer means of categorization. In a similar vein, Schneider
(Chapter 5) cites a case in which a speaker who would be considered more
authentic under first-wave criteria protests—but is unable to effectively
contest— the privilege enjoyed by an Anglo “dance school owner, who partly
constructs her identity and the image of her school on the connection to
‘authentic’ Latin culture” (p. 125). 

Eckert argues that “authenticity is always a claim—whether a claim made by the
researcher who assigns speakers to analytic categories, or a claim made by
speakers as they define, and orient to, their own categories. The speaker’s
claim expresses desire, and is transformative both of the speaker and of the
category on the basis of which he or she claims authenticity” (p. 53).
This volume is replete with topics worth further investigation. Among the many
questions suggested is: When does self-authentification via discursive
negotiation and performance become appropriation, and can authenticities be
licensed by one group to another?

REFERENCES 

Becker, Alton L. 1988. Language in particular: A lecture. In Deborah Tannen,
ed. Linguistics in context: Connecting observation and understanding. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex: 17-35.

Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Callahan, Laura. 2012. Pre-imposition vs. in-situ negotiation of group and
individual identities: Spanish and English in US service encounters. Critical
Multilingualism Studies. 1(1). 57-73. 

Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: language variation and identity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of
meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of
Anthropology. 41. 87-100. 

Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture. In Ulf Hannerz.
Transnational connections. Culture, people, places. London: Routledge.
102-111. 

Omoniyi, Tope. 2006. Hip-hop through the world Englishes lens: A response to
globalization. World Englishes 25(2). 195-208.

Robertson, Roland. 1995. Glocalization: Time-space and
homogeneity-heterogeneity. In Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland
Robertson, eds. Global modernities. Thousand Oaks: Sage. 25-44.

Tuan, Mia. 1998. Forever foreigners or honorary whites? The Asian ethnic
experience today. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Laura Callahan is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of
Foreign Languages & Literatures at The City College, City University of New
York (CUNY). She is a member of the doctoral faculty in the Ph.D. Program in
Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures & Languages at the Graduate Center,
CUNY, and has given seminars on Language & Identity and Language &
Intercultural Communication. She is author of the books Spanish and English in
U.S. Service Encounters (2009) and Spanish/English Codeswitching in a Written
Corpus (2004). Her articles have appeared in various journals, including
Intercultural Pragmatics, International Multilingual Research Journal,
Heritage Language Journal, Language & Intercultural Communication, and Journal
of Multilingual & Multicultural Development.





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