Identity and Language Variation in a Rural Community

This article investigates an external variable critical to the understanding of sociolinguistic variation in a rural, tri-ethnic community in the Southern United States. Cultural identity, the orientation of the speaker to the community, was first observed in variationist work by Labov (1963) but has not been regularly analyzed as have sex, age, and ethnicity. Cultural identity is postulated as a speaker’s orientation to the local and larger regional cultures, and in Warren County, North Carolina, this orientation correlates strongly with vernacular variants of present and past tense be. For copula absence (e.g. They ∅ real nice people), was regularization (e.g. We was going), and past tense wont (e.g. We wont gonna go), the cultural identity of the speaker had statistically significant effects on language variation. To understand language variation in this community, the interactions of cultural identity and other external variables must be considered.*

1. The linguistic effects of cultural identity

Within the study of language, formal linguistics analyzes linguistic factors exclusively and, until recently in the optimality movement, held that the linguistic processes were inviolably and categorically determined by the mental grammar (Guy 1997:336). For example a process like copula absence (e.g. They ∅ real nice folk), if analyzed under the assumption of the ideal speaker-hearer, occurs every time the appropriate environmental conditions apply. Sociolinguistic variationists (hereafter variationists) view linguistic processes as possibly violable and nondeterministic (happening a percentage of the time in the same environment): for example, the following grammatical environment constrains the rate of copula absence but does not determine it (e.g. gonna in She gonna be the president favors copula absence more than an NP in She the president) (Baugh 1980, Blake 1997, Hazen 2000, Labov 1969, Rickford 1998, Rickford et al. 1991, Wolfram 1974).

Variationists also investigate how nonlinguistic factors possibly affect linguistic variation in both speech communities and individual speakers (for speech communities: e.g. Butters & Nix 1986, Fasold 1972, Hazen 2000, Labov 1963, 1989, Milroy 1987, Patrick 2002, Poplack & Tagliamonte 1991, Trudgill 1974, Wolfram et al. 1999; for individuals: e.g. Bailey et al. 1991, Milroy 1987, Rickford & McNair-Knox 1994, Silva 1997, Wolfram et al. 1997). Of course speech communities are composed of individual speakers, but the goal of many variationist studies has been to describe and explain the variation of the speech community as an entity (i.e. the grammar of the speech community). In their argument against the homogeneous idiolect being the only theoretically viable entity for linguistic study (Bloomfield 1933, Chomsky 1965, Paul 1880, Saussure 1972), Weinreich et al. 1968 present the study of synchronic and diachronic variation as a study of the grammar of the speech community (see also Labov 1989).

For these two variationist approaches, that of the speech community and that of the individual, the nonlinguistic factors influencing language variation are cast in different ways. Drawing from sociology, the speech-community approach identifies social factors that divide a speech community: age, sex, ethnicity, and social class have become the standard social factors correlated with dependent linguistic variables (Chambers 1993; also see Ash 2002, Cheshire 2002, Fought 2002). By this model, a person is an intersection of social groups. Wolfram, Hazen, and Tamburro (1997) take this model to its logical conclusion when investigating a speech community of one, the last lifelong African American in Ocracoke, North Carolina. In contrast, drawing partly from Goffman’s (1959) study of ‘self’, the work of anthropological communication studies (Gumperz 1982), and social psychology (Giles & St. Clair 1979), the individual approach encapsulates nonlinguistic factors in a person’s identity.¹ Investigating identity allows inclusion of speakers’ attitudes and beliefs in the explanation of language variation, which can enhance traditional speech community studies (Mendoza-Denton 2002). The overarching identity of a speaker usually comprises subidentities of age, gender,² ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation (Jacobs 1996), and communities of practice (Holmes 1999, Meyerhoff 2002).

I argue here for an additional subidentity: cultural identity. Cultural identity is a sociolinguistic factor that involves how speakers conceive of themselves in relation to their local and larger regional communities. In one of the foundational works for...