14 - Language and ethnicity

Summary

Language plays a crucial role in the construction and maintenance of ethnic identity. The ethnicity has a more striking relationship to language than other social factors such as gender, age, or social class. The construction of race and ethnicity varies greatly across communities, as well as across and within individuals. Researchers generally agree that both race and ethnicity are socially constructed categories. Sociolinguistic research on ethnically diverse linguistic communities has identified a number of linguistic resources available to speakers for use in constructing ethnic identities, including the following: a heritage language, specific sociolinguistic features, code-switching, suprasegmental features, discourse features and language use, and using a borrowed variety. Researchers across a variety of disciplines have established that the construction of an identity involves the integration and coordination of a variety of social factors in a way that is more complex than a simple additive model would predict.