Introduction

If William the Conqueror had not invaded England in the year 1066, standard English would have looked completely different today. Not only would the enormous French component in the English vocabulary have been considerably smaller, the standard language would in all likelihood have had its origin in a different dialect as well. While present-day standard English derives primarily from the east midland dialects, as the end product of a process which began after the age of Chaucer, a standardisation process was already going on well before that time, in the tenth century. This process affected the West Saxon dialect, with Winchester as its main cultural centre. The Norman Conquest, which introduced French as the language of the government and of administration alongside Latin as the language of the church, brought this situation to an abrupt end. English effectively ceased to be a written language, with the Peterborough Chronicle one of the very few witnesses to what proved to be a futile attempt to keep the medium alive. With the exception of some local pockets where the English literary tradition continued unbroken, English was consequently reduced to a spoken medium.

The earliest standardisation attempts, which go back as far as the reign of King Alfred (b. 849–901) and even beyond, aimed at making English – or rather West Saxon – the official language, to be used as the medium of teaching and of scholarship.

Theoretical preliminaries

The status of proper names

Names is a technical term for a subset of the nominal expressions of a language which are used for referring (‘identifying or selecting in context’) and, in some cases, for addressing a partner in communication. Nominal expressions are in general headed by nouns. According to one of the most ancient distinctions in linguistics, nouns may be common or proper, which has something to do with whether they denote a class or an individual (e.g. queen vs Victoria), where individual means a single-member set of any sort, not just a person. Much discussion has taken place about how this distinction should be refined to be both accurate and useful, for instance by addressing the obvious difficulty that a typical proper noun denoting persons may denote many separate individuals who bear it, and that common nouns may refer to individuals by being constructed into phrases (the queen). I will leave the concept [± proper], applied to nouns, for intuitive or educated recognition before returning to discussion of the inclusive concept of proper names directly. Proper nouns have no inherent semantic content, even when they are homonymous with lexical words (Daisy, Wells), and many, perhaps all, cultures recognise nouns whose sole function is to be proper (Sarah, Ipswich). Typically they have a unique intended referent in a context of utterance.

Introduction

We can be certain that, for as long as the English language has been established in Britain, so dialect variation has also existed. If we examine dialect variation in present-day English, even if it is possible to assume that there is a single over-arching speech community which makes up the language which we might, for the lack of a better term and with acknowledgement of the insult thereby perpetrated on the Irish, call ‘British English’, there remains the problem of what we recognise as the dialects of that community. We could simply recognise the individual nations, and talk about English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish dialects. But it takes only a moment to see that that will not do. The speaker from Kent does not see his or her dialect as the same as that of someone from Newcastle, any more than speakers from Aberdeen and Glasgow think that they share a single dialect.

Suppose, however, that we were able to set out a geography of British English dialects which somehow overcame the above points. Dialects are not merely a matter of geography. For dialects vary by much more than geography. Speakers vary in age, gender, social class and, increasingly, ethnicity. So, speakers from the same geographical area must differ from each other because of their age, their gender, and other social variables. All these variations may cause difficulties for the student of present-day English. But for the historian of English they are even worse.

Introduction

The final quinquennium of the twentieth century saw an unprecedented interest in the topic of global English, articulated at both popular and academic levels, and a discernible step forward in the generality with which the phenomenon was discussed. To the media of the time, the global spread of English was an established and straightforward fact. ‘English Rules’ (The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 12 July 1997) was just one of many newspaper headlines presenting to the world an uncomplicated scenario that took for granted the universality of the language's spread, the speed with which it had happened, and the likelihood of its continuation. A statement prominently displayed in the body of the associated article, memorable for its alliterative ingenuity but for little else, reinforced the initial impression: ‘The British Empire may be in full retreat with the handover of Hong Kong. But from Bengal to Belize and Las Vegas to Lahore, the language of the sceptred isle is rapidly becoming the first global lingua franca.’ Millennial retrospectives and prognostications continued in the same vein, with several major newspapers and magazines finding in the subject of the English language an apt symbol for the themes of globalisation, diversification, progress and identity addressed in their special editions (e.g. Ryan, 1999). Certainly, by the turn of the century, the topic must have made contact with millions of popular intuitions at a level which had simply not existed a decade before.

In this chapter, we explore the notion of commodified identity and introduce a series of tools and frameworks by which to analyse its discursive constitution. We pursue four different interpretations of the term ‘commodified identities’:

1. Identities of consumers (accounts for and practices of consumption).

2. The process of identity commodification through acts of consumption (How do commercial discourses such as advertisements ‘speak’ to us and engage us with their message?).

3. Representations of identities in commodified contexts (for example, consumer femininity, commodified ‘laddism’).

4. Self-commodifying discourses (for example, personal advertisements, job applications/CVs/references, commercial telephone sex lines).

In order to address all of these connotations of ‘commodified identity’ we draw on critical discourse analysis and critical discursive psychology. In other words, we analyse the linguistic content of advertising or promotional material, but will, in a detailed case study of men's lifestyle magazines, relate this to in-depth interviews and reader-response exercises conducted with groups of male consumers. This kind of two-way analysis captures meanings at the interface between contexts of production, text and consumption and is allied to a growing tradition of research known as a ‘circuits of culture’ model central to contemporary cultural studies (for example, Du Gay et al. 1997; Johnson 1986). A circuits of culture model acknowledges the importance of a global consideration of all moments in the broader context of commercial culture (that is, production, text, consumption, lived identities of consumers) and the often complex ways in which they may intersect.

In this chapter, we consider how to define and analyse ‘institutional identities’, This is a less straightforward task than might initially seem the case. Does ‘institutional identity’ refer to fixed, pre-discursive and complementary pair roles, such as ‘doctor and patient’? Does it refer to any identity that is displayed in talk oriented to institutional goals or activities? Is it possible to identify ‘institutionality’ linguistically? Do we need prior knowledge of institutional encounters to understand them?

We discuss two main approaches to understanding the links between institutions, discourse and identity. Ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (CA) approaches argue that ‘institutionality’ or institutional identities are emergent properties of talk-in-interaction. In contrast, critical discourse analytic (CDA) accounts argue that the way people interact in social situations reflects existing macro-social forces. Any analysis of institutional interaction starts with a critique of institutions as structures that embed power relations within them. Institutional identity is therefore a function of these existing relations. The tension between these two approaches is summarised usefully by Mäkitalo and Saljö (2000: 48):

This chapter contrasts two approaches to the analysis of identity in conversation: performativity and ethnomethodological approaches. We have chosen to focus on just those studies that analyse identity in everyday interaction. This cuts out a large literature based on interview or focus group talk and studies of institutional settings. It is probably fair to say that the majority of discourse-based work analyses identity construction in interviews and focus groups, particularly in the study of gender identity, sexuality and ethnicity. Some of this interviewbased work is discussed in Chapter 4 (Narrative Identities) and Chapter 5 (Commodified Identities). Identity practices in institutional talk are explored in Chapter 3 (Institutional Identities), Chapter 4 and Chapter 6 (Spatial Identities).

Let us start by considering some data, which come from a conversation between friends before embarking on a night out together:

Extract 2.1: VH: 3: 90–111 Simplified transcript

Dawn: We need to go in three quarters of an hour.

Elena: Okay.

Marie: Oh MAN I haven't even gone out and I'm sweating like a rapist! (Laughter and ‘horrified’ reaction)

Marie: I'm really hot!

Elena: You two have got to stop with that phrase.

Marie: Has anyone – has anyone got any really non sweaty stuff.

Dawn: Dave has. But you'll smell like a man.

Kate: (Laughs)

Marie: Right has anyone got any feminine non sweaty stuff.

Kate: I've got erm roll on.

We start this chapter with the following quotation from a public Internet discussion site describing activities of the members of the board:

Extract 7.1: Internet discussion site

We go on coach trips to Narnia and have Mary Poppins round for tea on a regular basis.

This embodies, in a tongue-in-cheek way, many of the utopian possibilities of virtual identity. In cyberspace, space, time and identity it would seem are no impediment to doing whatever we want to do, or being whomever we wish to be. Identity on the Internet is playful, creative, impressive and limitless, and (so popular discourse would have it) an entirely different proposition from identity in the ‘real world’, In this chapter, we critically explore the concept of ‘virtual identity’ and its relationship to language, and attempt to elucidate its relationship to what is called ‘real life’ (RL) identity.

After exploring ‘virtuality’ as a concept, and summarising work that has explored ‘identity’ and ‘community’ online, we look at the genre-specific realisations of the language of computer-mediated communication (CMC). We argue that it owes much of its distinctiveness to an attempt to compensate for an absence of audio-visual context in the medium (notwithstanding interactions via ‘Webcam’!). This absence has implications for notions of ‘embodiment’ and space introduced in the previous chapter (‘Spatial Identities’) and forms a crucial element of identity work online. We illustrate our discussion with data from two message boards, one a soap opera discussion list and the other a graphic novel message board.