Words Constituting Identity

So, no funny post name...and I'm just gonna say it, I have no idea what this topic is all about. Damn uni net being down throwing everything out of wack and meaning we didn't get a decent tutorial on it. But I'll do my best.

So, just from that first paragraph, from the words I've used you get some sort of idea as to who I am as a person, a brief glimpse of me personality. So, how did I come off? Honest? Humerous? Is it obvious I'm not taking things too seriously? (As you might also get from my other blog posts).

This works on a larger scale as well though, the specific words and phrases that a particular social or cultural group use grow to identify that group. These types of jargon then become linked with that group to outsiders as well as those inside the group, so we are able to assign people to their social or cultural groups sight unseen by the types of words they use. Perhaps the best example of this is the stereotypical Surfey culture formed in the 80's, where words like radical, gnarly etc. were almost solely exclusive to that group.

In an essay on language use in courts Gibson (2004) briefly put forward an idea that through our language use we can create a variety of different identities for ourselves. From this point I started thinking, I speak differently around friends, family, at univeristy... and under each of those things I have a different identity, friend, son/brother, student. This then, helps to show just how strong the effect of words can be on identity.

Thanks for reading Katie...and any other insane pepole who for some reason felt the need to read this blog post


P.S.
I have views on my blog from Russia, and that makes me happy.

Gibson, K (2004). "English Only Court Cases Involving the U.S. Workplace: the Myths of Language Use and the Homogenization of Bilingual Workers' Identities". Second Language Studies, 22(2), pp. 1-60.