An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4.5 Language and identity
In his 
Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious
John Joseph (2004a)
attempts to show that language and identity:
are ultimately inseparable … Thinking about language and identity ought to
improve our understanding of who we are in our own eyes and in other people’s,
and consequently it should deepen our comprehension of social interaction. Each
of us, after all, is engaged with language in a lifelong project of constructing who
we are, and who everyone is that we meet, or whose utterances we simply hear or
read
(Joseph 2004a: 13, 14)
To illustrate his argument. Joseph offers two case studies, one of Hong Kong, the
other of Lebanon. There he shows how the position of French has changed:
In the Ottoman period … anyone who knew French … was an educated
Christian, and more specifically a Maronite or Roman Catholic. Anyone who
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knew English was likely to be an educated Muslim (probably Druze) or Orthodox
Christian (probably Greek) … Under the French mandate … knowledge of
French spread … [I]n the case of Muslim girls, it … quadrupled.
(ibid: 197–8)
Since the start of the civil war in the 1970s, the status of French has declined.
Arabic asserted itself as the marker of Lebanese identity and this continued until
about 2000 when the Israelis withdrew from southern Lebanon. The Syrians were
also supposed to withdraw from the rest of Lebanon but did not do so. Maronites,
who before 2000 had asserted that Arabic was the real language of Lebanon, now
responded to the question: ‘what language is spoken in Lebanon?’ with the answer:
‘French’. Maronite identity was no longer attached to Arabic solidarity across the
Middle East. Beleaguered Christians now saw their identity as European not as Arab.
‘Language,’ concludes Joseph, ‘in the sense of what a particular person says or
writes … is central to individual identity. It inscribes the person within national
and other corporate identities, including establishing the person’s rank within the
identity’ (ibid: 225). Joseph qualifies Benedict Arnold’s thesis of the ‘imagined
community’. Yes, Joseph maintains, national languages do shape individual identities
but also ‘national identities shape national languages’ (ibid 13).