LINGUIST List 15.838

Thu Mar 11 2004

Review: Discourse: Androutsopoulos & Georgakopoulou

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

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  • Janet Fuller, Discourse Construction of Youth Identities

    Message 1: Discourse Construction of Youth Identities

     Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 15:14:34 -0500 (EST)
    From: Janet Fuller <jmfullersiu.edu>
    Subject: Discourse Construction of Youth Identities


    EDITORS: Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Alexandra Georgakopoulou TITLE: Discourse Construction of Youth Identities PUBLISHER: John Benjamins Publishing Company YEAR: 2003

    Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-1656.html

    Janet M. Fuller, Department of Linguistics, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

    The purpose of this volume is to apply major themes in research on the construction of identity through language to youth culture. To this end, it contains an introduction and twelve chapters on youth interactions in a variety of European settings. The introduction frames the studies included in the volume by discussing major themes in research on the construction of identity in general and youth identity and language in particular. The assumption for all of the chapters is that identity is not a fixed characteristic, but something which is locally created in interactions. Beyond this common thread, the research methods are many and varied.

    The editors address the use of the term 'youth', and state that in these studies, it is operationalized not only through a comparison to adult and child categories, but also by membership in certain group activities. That is, the status of an individual as a 'youth' is ethnographically derived, and/or based on their participation in situated communities emerging from shared interests or activities, i.e., 'communities of practice.'. These sub-cultures are viewed as important practices in their own right, and not as a substitute, or practice, for adult culture.

    The chapters in this volume link these youth (sub)cultures to linguistic choices or devices which they use to express their identities. While youth culture often departs from the mainstream, it is also shaped by macro-culture, and thus the youths use linguistic resources to position themselves in relation to both societal norms and interactional negotiations of self.

    The book is comprised of three sections, each of which contains four chapters. The studies in Part I all deal with children in face-to-face interactions within a community of practice which provides them the linguistic resources with which they create and display their identities. The first, Werner Kallmeyer and Inken Keim's study titled 'Linguistic variation and the construction of social identity in a German-Turkish setting: A case study of an immigrant youth group in Mannheim, Germany', illustrates how teen-age girls in a youth center use language choice to index various aspects of their identities. The codes discussed are Turkish, German, Turkish-German codeswitching, and 'district talk', a simplified colloquial variety of German associated with tough youth culture.

    Vally Lytra's contribution, 'Nicknames and teasing: a case study of a linguistically and culturally mixed peer-group', examines the linguistic behavior of five Greek-Turkish bilingual 4th graders (two girls and three boys) who are part of a larger peer group comprised largely of monolingual Greek speakers. Teasing was used to indicate both alignment and conflict with the recipient of the teasing. The most interesting aspect of this work is how teasing -- which clearly functions to negotiate group identity -- also functions to renegotiate gender roles. In particular, the girls' behavior in teasing sequences positioned them in a non-traditional, assertive female role, in which they proved themselves to be as capable as boys in teasing interactions.

    The third chapter, 'Looking back when looking ahead: On adolescents' identity management in narrative practices', by Alexandra Georgakopoulou, looks at spontaneously occurring personal experience stories among four Greek 17-year-old women who are close friends. The author links the roles in narration to social identities. In the main sequence analyzed, one speaker is the 'teller', focused on relating past events, and the other the 'assessor', who is focused on potential future events. These roles in the narrative form part of their respective identities as a young woman in a more traditional, passive female role and a street-wise, assertive woman. Anna-Brita Stenstrom's comparison of male and female same-sex conversation, 'It's not that I really care about him personally you know: The construction of gender identity in London teenage talk' is the final chapter of Part I. This is an analysis of four conversations from the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language. Gender differences were found solely in the content of talk: girls talked about feelings and people (especially boys), and boys talked about events and activities. Previous findings on the tendency for male speakers to use more taboo words, and female speakers to be more interactionally cooperative, were not corroborated.

    Part II addresses the tension between mainstream norms/rules and the negotiation of personal identities. All of these articles show how youths use language to carve out identities for themselves in ways that transcend institutional or standard language restrictions. Kuniyoshi Kataoka's chapter titled 'Emotion and youth identities in personal letter writing: An analysis of pictorial signs and unconventional punctuation' looks at letters of Japanese women aged 16-25 and claims that a diverse set of letter shapes and invented signs are used by these women. The members of a community of practice using these signs recognize them as affective markers which mark the discourse as important for its own sake -- i.e., the main purpose of the letter writing is not to convey important information, but to establish and maintain relationships. 'Spelling Rebellion', Mark Sebba's contribution to the volume, looks at English-language graffiti and the writing of a non-standardized language, Jamaican Creole, used in a variety of media in urban Britain (published poems, dub poetry, dialogue in prose, personal letters, and graffiti). He shows how writers use non-conventionalized spellings to create a symbolic distance from the mainstream. For adolescents, this is one way of rebelling against adult norms, and expressing an 'inner life' which is set apart from traditional forms of communication.

    Anita Wilson's chapter, 'Nike trainers, my one true love -- without you I am nothing: Youth, identity and the language of trainers for young men in prison', focuses on how incarcerated young men use discourse to create a 'third space', i.e., a world which sits between prison and outside societies. In particular, messages associated with Nike trainers are used by these young men to construct personal identities to hold on to within the confines of prison -- specifically, it indexes their lives as youths, not prisoners.

    The final chapter of Part II is by Jan Berns and Peter Schlobinski: 'Construction of identity in German hip-hop culture'. This selection deals with the expression of group membership for hip-hop performers. Primarily, these performers stress 'being real', which means being part of the underground, as opposed to the commercial, hip-hop movement; being relevant for their (German) audience; and showing knowledge of former hip-hop artists. If performers -- and fans -- succeed in conveying their allegiance to 'being real', then and only then do they belong to the culture. The demands of membership to this youth culture index its importance to its members as part of their socio-political identity.

    Part III of the volume includes four chapters which look at the multiplicity of meanings of code choices. Peter Auer and Inci Dirim's contribution, 'Socio-cultural orientation, urban youth styles and the spontaneous acquisition of Turkish by non-Turkish adolescents in Germany' describes how youths in Hamburg use Turkish to index youth culture, ethnic or cultural affiliation with Turks, or 'street' culture. The particularly interesting finding in this study is that some speakers embrace one of these aspects of identity, but reject the others. Thus, the same code can be used to mark very different identities, which overlap only in that they are alternatives to mainstream culture.

    Catrin Norrby and Karolina Wirdenas' chapter, 'Swedish youth discourse: On performing relevant selves in interaction' examines the use of pragmatic devices in mixed-sex informal interviews. They find that the use of certain pragmatic devices can be linked to particular discourse roles (particularly, Mitigator and Supporter) taken on by the participants, while those who put themselves in the roles of Expert and Contradictor use few of these pragmatic devices. In addition, certain pragmatic devices, as markers of adolescent speech, are used to establish group solidarity when a topic dealing with youth culture is discussed. Thus, both individual and group identities are constructed through the use of the same pragmatic devices.

    In Tore Kristiansen's, 'The youth and the gatekeepers: Reproduction and change in language norm and variation', the attitudes and use of three varieties of Danish are examined. The three varieties are a 'high' Copenhagen variety, a 'low' Copenhagen variety, and a local variety. It is shown that while youths assign covert prestige to their local variety, they accept that this way of speaking does not have high social status. They are much more open to use of the 'low' version of the Copenhagan dialect. However, this reflects their participation in the national re-evaluation of this variety across Danish society, and thus the overall picture is one of loyalty to, and not challenge of, standard language ideology.

    The final chapter, 'Mediated experience and youth identities in a post-traditional order', by Lilie Chouliaraki, is a critical discourse analysis of two group interviews with Greek youths. She examines how they position themselves in relation to a political event based on media representations of that event. She finds that they construct identities for themselves which include both traditional and post-traditional stances, which both accept and reject nationalist media discourses.

    Overall, the volume is thematically coherent while covering a broad range of perspectives and methodologies. As is to be expected, along with this diversity in approaches comes variation in the strength of the contributions. While several of the articles are based on comprehensive ethnographic fieldwork which indicates a clear understanding of the micro- and macro-issues the speakers face when making choices about how to use their linguistic resources (e.g., Kallmeyre and Keim, Wilson), some chapters are much less ambitious in its both their analyses and claims (e.g., Stenstrom, Kataoka). This is not to say that ethnographic studies are, overall, to be more highly valued; some of the best chapters of the volume are those which assess public discourse (Berns and Schlobinski), present results of task-based studies (Kristiansen, Norrby and Wirdenas), and use both observation and interviews to assess acts of identity (Auer and Dirim, Georgakopoulou). The variety of methods employed by the researchers is a strength of the volume, although overall I would prefer more explicit discussion of the research methodologies used, and their goals and limitations.

    A minor criticism of the volume is that the organization of the articles into three neat sections of four is somewhat artificial, and the internal coherence of the sections is not complete. The first section ('Peer Group Identities') deals with discourse between intimates in peer groups, but since this could be said for several of the articles in the other two sections, it is not a feature which clearly unites these chapters. Nonetheless, these four chapters do complement each other in their approaches and start the book off well.

    Part II ('Recasting Literacy Practices') is also somewhat inaptly named, as only the first two articles truly deal with an analysis of literary practices. While Wilson's analysis does involve written communication, its real focus transcends this aspect of the analysis, and Berns and Schlobinski's article has little if anything to do with literacy. In addition, Kataoka's article, which analyzes letters and thus clearly fits the title of the section, unfortunately only minimally addresses the issue of youth identity, simply linking the symbols used to youth culture because they are part of youth practices.

    Finally, the last four articles are introduced with the title, 'Representation and Positionings', a title which seems to be missing a valuable perspective. In my opinion, the fascinating thread which links these four studies is that they all deal with the different meanings of particular code choices or linguistic devices. Viewed from this perspective, these last four chapters complement each other admirably well, and leave the reader well satisfied.

    These organizational issues are relatively minor, however, and overall the volume reads well, has a clear focus, and treats youth identities seriously and as an important part of the cultures in which they develop. It should be required reading for scholars with interests in language and identity and those who focus on youth culture.

    ABOUT THE REVIEWER:

    Janet M. Fuller is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her research interests include bilingualism and language contact, discourse analysis, and language and gender. She is currently involved in a project examining the language choices and identity negotiation of Mexican-American youths.