Navigating Identity Through Language

Transcript

Penelope Webb: 0:00

Welcome to The Exceptional Humans Podcast, where we discuss questions related to language, identity, education, and behavior. I'm your host, Penelope and I have a background in education, linguistics, and behavioral science. Today, I thought we would talk about culture, identity and language through the lens of sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics is a term used to describe the interaction between language, society and personal identity and assists humans in understanding and navigating through the world around them. There are many factors that influence our identity. These can include things like culture, geographic, familial, personal, and power. Today, I thought we would discuss two of these factors that influence our identity. I'm going to break these down into various categories. It should be noted that this list is not a complete list of categories that would fall under cultural and geographical factors influencing identity. However, I think that they are some of the larger and more approachable concepts for us to consider when we explore how these particular categories have impacted our personal identity. So the first one is our ethnic background. This is closely linked to our second factor, which is cultural heritage. Often people see these two terms as interchangeable, and these two factors are closely linked. Ethnicity and cultural heritage have a huge impact in our identity. Being a first generation Australian on both sides of my family with parents from different countries of origin is quite a significant part of my personal identity. The next factor that influences our identity is language. My first language is English. However, I grew up in a household speaking British English at home and Australian English outside of the house, particularly at school. This has had quite a big impact on my vocabulary and how I express myself in different social situations. It has given me quite a unique accent and means that I can code switch or switch between British English and Australian English unconsciously depending on the cultural identity of the people I am with. This has been strengthened by the fact that I spent quite a number of years working in British international schools around the world. The next factor that influences identity is religion. Whether or not we identify ourselves as practicing a religion, often the religious affiliations in our extended family impact the way that we express ourselves and certain aspects of our identity. National identity and location are also significant factors in how we communicate. As I previously stated, I identify as a first generation Australian. This means that there is a certain amount of distance created between myself and mainstream Australian identities, and this affects the way that I can communicate with others. Ironically, I was born in one of Australia's capital cities. However, I grew up in a rural area of Australia and attended an incredibly small rural Australian primary school. This experience made me very aware of how different I was from the majority of students in my peer group. I did not look the same as them, I did not sound the same as them, I didn't even eat the same foods as them. And those experiences helped strengthen my identity as a first generation Australian and helped reinforce the distance I feel between myself and mainstream Australian culture. And that leads into the last of the factors I wanted to discuss today. The last of the factors that I wanted to discuss is language communities. I mentioned code switching before. Code switching is something we do where we change things like our vocabulary, our sentence structure, even sometimes the language we are speaking depending on who we are communicating with and our desire to be part of that communication group. As I me mentioned before, I spent a significant part of my adult life working in international schools. The majority of that time was spent in the Middle East. However, I also spent time teaching in Asia. As part of that experience, I have acquired some understanding and vocabulary of the languages spoken in the countries in which I lived. I do speak some Arabic, I can also read Arabic. I also have a intense appreciation for anybody who can speak a tonal language after attempting to learn Vietnamese and realizing that I could not accurately distinguish between the various tones used in Vietnamese. All of these factors contribute to our willingness to engage with various language communities, as well as impacting how we engage. I would be curious to know if any of the factors discussed have had a significant impact on your personal identity and how you believe they have ident, and how you believe those factors have influenced your identity. Furthermore, all of these factors influence how we communicate with others on a daily basis. They influence not only the words that we use and the way we may structure a sentence, they also influence a willingness to enter into various language communities as well as influencing the biases we might have around language. The Exceptional Humans Podcast is written and recorded on Kabi Cubby and Gender Barra lands. We would like to pay our respects to their elders past, present, and emerging, and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today.