Hi everybody, my name is Gabi and today we’re going to talk about an interesting but controversial subject once more. Navigating the seas of Sociolinguistics can be daunting territory because a lot of the literature touches on subjects that are difficult to speak about nowadays such as race, gender, ethnicity, language, sense of belonging to a community among others.
I haven’t been able to come up with one satisfactory definition for the word ethnicity. It’s turned out to be a much more elusive subject that I would’ve imagined. But here we are and I’ve concocted a preliminary definition:
Scholars in the fields of anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, and even linguistics all have their own version of the definition of ethnicity. However, there is a more recent point of convergence in the definition as of lately.
First, ethnicity is a social construct so it isn’t tangible in any sense. It used to be the case that ethnicity was the social counterpart of the biological term race, but this categorization was discarded, because the term race turned out to be impossible to define in biological terms. the fact that “ethnicity” and “race” may be socially constructed does not mean they are purely hypothetical concepts that have no basis in reality. It does not matter if we believe race and ethnicity should or should not have major roles in our society.
On one hand, the ideologies associated with race and ethnicity create their own social realities on the other hand gender and social class are other variables to take into consideration when trying to understand the real meaning of ethnicity. And this is the reason why we tend to group together a particular race with a social class. Race and ethnicity include both self-identification and the perception of one’s identity by others. Race is especially noticeable when you first meet someone of mixed races and unconsciously struggle to categorize him or her.
Race can also vary depending on the context. For example, a darker skinned person may be categorized as white in a predominantly black environment. And that same person would be categorized as brown in a predominantly white environment. Native Americans have their community practices and their own way of assigning an ethnic background to another Native American and thus classify him or her as belonging to a specific tribe. In other groups, for instance, African Americans, the fact that you may descend from Africans does not suffice to belong to the community.
You need to adhere to certain practices in order to be accepted as a member.
A definition that I happen to like more is the following:
[Ethnic groups are] human groups that entertain a subject belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and What is ethnicity? . . . it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists. (Weber, cited in Smelser et al. 2001:3)
Race and ethnicity are grouped in one single definition by some authors but are separated for others by one common factor, namely, physical features. Smelser et al have their own definition of race:
“[R]ace” is a social category based on the identification of (1) a physical marker transmitted through reproduction and (2) individual, group and cultural attributes associated with that marker. D
In the us as we all know race is basically centered by two axes: black and white. In the usa there was the one drop rule in which a white woman who happens to have only one distant black ancestor is black. This leads to paradoxical cases in which a white woman can give birth to a black child but a black woman cannot give birth to a white child. In other places such as South Africa there are three categories: black, white and colored. Colored being people of mixed ancestry.
The one-drop rule sometimes doesn’t apply in some contexts. For example, in southAmerica you may have a black ancestor far back into your sixth generation and that would hardly qualify you as being black. If anything, the umbrella term latino would be a better descriptor.
Even you have happen to have one black parent, you would be described as half black at best.
The concept of ethnicity becomes less fuzzy when we take into account race as a marker. None of the other markers are as significant to the eyes of people as race to determine the ethnicity os someone. Religion, customs and ways of dressing are less prone to be ethnically recognizable than race because racial characteristics are 100% visual and thus recognizable in nature.
There is the idea of a continuum of ethnic differences among groups. Such continuum may be conceived as a group of perceptions that are relatively prominent when comparing two distinct ethnic groups. It comprises both cultural and racial markers. In the low end of the spectrum we have markers identified as ethnic and not racial in terms of phenotype and culture.
For example Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans are both recognizably different in contexts such as the previous settlements in New York. Other kinds of outward ethnic signs could be dress and religion as for instance with the Amish in Pennsylvania. Some perceptions of difference such as language are very obvious and some others such as food may be less so. For amish dress codes are extremely important in telling them apart from the rest of people.
Race could sometimes be a fuzzy element too. In Dominican Republic only Haitians count as black but in the USA any black or racially mixed Dominican would be black. Sometimes traveling make you become
Within black communities lighter-skinned black women tend to have a wider array of options to marry as opposed to darker-skinned women.
In some groups such as Mexican-Americans claiming white ancestry is viewed in disfavor so children of white and Mexican descent tend to conceal their white parent in fear of being ostracized by other members.
The ascription to race is sometimes a fuzzy classification because it tends to mutate according to the context. Italians, Irish and jews weren’t considered fully white in the same way that anglo-Saxons and Germans were when they first immigrated to America, but this changed as they integrated into American society making differences seem smaller in comparison to the rest of the groups classified as white.
They could intermarry and weren’t banned to sit on public buses the same way blacks obviously were but were nevertheless viewed differently.
Sometimes traveling will have you ascribe to more than one just ethnic group. If you happen to be black and from Panama, then in the US you would be black-latina.
Language and ethnicity
People may index several markers of their ethnicity when speaking. For example, a native New Yorker of Porto-Rican descent, a white elderly man and a Chinese-American while all New Yorkers may differentiate each other when they speak.
They may signal social-class, ethnic background and even gender. Sometimes there might even be a degree of variation.
You might signal you have higher education, but at the same time you might not want to sound too white. You might signal you’re a woman and favor woman causes, but you might not want to take a radical stance or you might not want to be seen as radical by others. According to the context speakers may want to diminish linguistic displays that index different aspects of their identities which means that speakers have a repertoire of identities.
In some communities such as the Mexican-American community thee might be a series of codes that community members draw on: standard English, regional varieties of Spanish, code-switching among others.
There are certain resources that emerge in order to build an identity:
A heritage language: Spanish. There is a certain pride that comes with it, for instance, if you speak Spanish, then you must be Spanish or have Spanish origins. In Mexican and Dominican communities in the US speaking the language, namely, Spanish, makes a person member of a community right away. Maintaining the language is a life-time effort which serves to preserve the identity of the community.
Code-switching, process of shifting from one linguistic code (a language or dialect) to another, depending on the social context or conversational setting according to Britannica. One good thing about it is the ability to voice an inherent affiliation to multiple identities at the same time.
An interesting feature of code-switching is that you can index certain types of small phonetic or syntactic nuances to your dialect.
Suprasegmental features such as intonation or syllable timing can index even more information even when speaking a standard variety of English.
People will often index multiple facets of their identity when speaking. For example, a drag queen enact an identity that relies on the audience’s knowing that they are, in fact, biologically male.
They will use words such as cute and awesome and will also use typical female intonation if they wish to convey the fact that they are representing a female version of themselves, But then at the same time they might want to index male features of language in their speech in order to index the fact that they are biologically male. They might index their race by using linguistic features of their racial background.
Code-switching is especially interesting in bilingual contexts in which people will pretty much associate a member of a community to a set of ideas and presuppositions depending on the language they speak.
This will go as far as people typically changing their demeanor towards a person if they hear that person speak a regional dialect versus the dominant language. For instance, speaking smaller dialects in Italy tend to be regarded as evidence of lack of education and narrow-mindedness while perfectly speaking the standard variety of Italian will open more doors and will rank you in a higher position.
The opposite can be said in countries where the regional language or dialect will position you higher in the local social hierarchy. That is the case of the Basque Country and Catalonia in Spain in which speaking the local languages will typically position in a higher place in society.
Striking a balance between the local variety and the dominant language simultaneously in a conversation will grant you a positive perception from everyone around because it will mean that you are well-aware of the privilege you have while also aware of the sensitivities of those less privileged than you.
The same thing goes when speaking the local variety of Spanish of your own migration diaspora in appropriate contexts and in the company of the persons who understand and feel the said variety in the same way you do and switching to the dominant version of the variety in Spain when the context demands it.
Thank you very much for listening and I hope you had a great time. Please don’t forget to subscribe.
