2.1 Language and identity

Language really can change the world!

Imagine you’re at the wedding of two friends. They’ve walked down the aisle, they’ve said lovely things about each other, they’ve exchanged rings, some people are shedding happy tears, and things are approaching the big moment:

One says, “I do.”

The other says, “I do”.

And the officiant says, “I now pronounce you married.”

They kiss, you cheer, and the world is a little bit different now. Just a few moments ago your friends were unmarried and now they’re married! This has real-world, material consequences for them. Perhaps your friends filed separate taxes last year, now they have to file together. Maybe they had different medical insurance policies, but now one of them could be a dependent on the other’s plan. If they live in a common law country, they now have spousal privilege. All of these changes to the world can be traced to those three utterances: “I do” “I do” “I now pronounce you married”!  By uttering these words, your friends and the officiant have changed the world, ever so slightly.

There are other words and phrases, like pronounce and I do, that affect the world. For example, if you’re playing a game of chess and realize that your chances of winning are not too good, you might tell your opponent “I concede”. The game is now over and you have lost (sorry). After a job interview, if the interviewer says “you’re hired!”, well congratulations! You have a job now!

The philosopher J. L. Austin wrote about these kinds of utterances in his book, How to Do Things With Words, which is all about the performativity of language. Words and phrases like “I concede,” or “I sentence you to three years in prison,” are called performative speech acts. These are utterances that not only convey some kind of information but also perform a function or an action that affects reality. We will revisit performative speech acts in a later Section when we discuss theories of meaning.

Performative speech acts are powerful in the sense that they change the world, but they also rely on the appropriate context to bring about that change. If a group of kids at recess act out a wedding, and Madison and Alex get married, it doesn’t matter how many times or how loud Taylor says, “I now pronounce you married”, the world has not changed in the same way that it does at a real wedding with a licensed officiant. If you simply shout “I declare bankruptcy!” that’s not enough to erase your credit-card debt.

The power of certain words and phrases to perform real-world actions depends on a combination of the authority and sincerity of the utterer and the uptake of the audience and general population. In other words, does the audience recognize the authority and sincerity behind the words and, therefore, do they accept their power to perform the intended action? For words to do things, society has to agree that certain words can do certain things in certain contexts. They have the power they do because we recognize that they have this power.  And if there’s not widespread agreement that certain words have certain powers, that can lead to some pretty serious conflict in a society.

The philosopher Judith Butler extended the idea of performativity from certain speech acts, like “I promise,” or “I hereby declare.” Butler argued that not just language but other social practices also have performative effects in the world, especially in creating and expressing people’s identities.

Butler’s focus was on gender as a ‘performative accomplishment’. Society associates certain social practices, including language, with men or women (or not). And then those social practices are perceived as masculine or feminine (or not). Then as people who express themselves as masculine or feminine (or not) repeat these patterns over and over again, a link between certain social practice and gender gets reinforced. Social practices that reinforce gender include things like wearing a necktie or wearing a ruffly blouse, doing embroidery or mowing the lawn, walking into the ladies’ room or the men’s room, or, most importantly for us, using language in certain ways. As we’ll discuss in a later Chapter, language features play a role, both directly and indirectly, in various ways of performing gender.

We can extend Butler’s idea beyond gender and understand all aspects of our identity as being performative accomplishments. Our identity is something socially constructed, and through sustained social practice that we mutually agree has certain meanings, we are active in its construction. Every time I say that stereotype of Canadian English, eh, I’m both carving out my identity as a Canadian and reinforcing the link between eh and being Canadian. I know, eh?

If I use a swear word in a university lecture, I signal that I’m being casual and that my class isn’t one of those stuffy formal ones like other university courses. If I take a sip of a beer and, using the jargon of craft beer connoisseurship, ask “Is that a hint of Cascade hops on the finish?” I’m staking a claim as a member of the craft beer drinking community: I’m expressing not only that I enjoy and am knowledgeable about the craft beer but that I am the kind of person who enjoys and is knowledgeable about craft beer. Linguist Lex Konnelly (2020) showed the kind of person who uses craft beer jargon is likely masculine, millennial, a hipster, and not too serious like those wine people.

When we talk about performativity it’s important to make a distinction with another common understanding of performance. When we say that aspects of our identity are performative, we aren’t saying that, for example, our gender is like a role we play in stage performance. It’s not about acting and definitely not about acting like someone who isn’t you. When we talk about the performativity of language, we mean that language performs certain functions for us. It’s the idea that we make ourselves through our behaviours and language performs that function for us.

If language can be used to perform actions in the world, then language has power to enact good and to enact harm.

References

Konnelly, L. (2020). Brutoglossia: Democracy, authenticity, and the enregisterment of connoirsseurship in ‘craft beer talk’. Language & Communication, 75, 69–82.