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Language and identity
Randolph Quirk
a
a
University College London
Published online: 30 Aug 2007.
To cite this article: Randolph Quirk (2000) Language and identity, English
Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, 17:1, 2-11, DOI:
10.1080/10131750085310031
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10131750085310031
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L a n g u a g e a n d I d e n t i t y 1
Randolph Quirk
It has become so commonplace to talk of national identity, social identity, personal
identity, identity crisis that it is easy to forget how recent is our interest in such
things. The last of these phrases - identity crisis - has been current for only about
forty years, becoming a major talking point in the decade that saw the appearance
of Nigel Dennis' Cards of Identity: the novel in 1955, the stage play at the Royal
Court a year later. And it was in 1959 that Erik Erikson expounded in
Psychological Issues his influential theory of ' identity formation' as central to
proceeding from baby to adult.
A recent interest but not a particularly new concept. As we might expect from
its focus upon the individual private self, this Erikson sense of identity was of great
concern in the Romantic era (Keats' letters, for example, show him tweaking the
notion twice in the space of a month) and was explored rather earlier by the
Scottish philosopher, David Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature (1793): ' Of all
relations the most universal is that of identity, being common to every being whose
existence has any duration' . And its relation to language has always been obvious.
The uniqueness of each person' s language is as unalienable as DNA and far more
easily recognised and publicly asserted, from voice quality (instantaneously spotted
even on a busy telephone line) to choice of words, accent, peculiarities of idiom,
the whole amalgam of features we call personal style. Language articulates the
means by which we feel our own identity (the message ' Know thyself' was already
inscribed in the temple of Delphi) and assert our fidelity to it, as in the no less
delphic words of Polonius to his son, ' To thine own self be true' .
All this is well reflected in modem educational practice where, especially in
Europe and North America, there has been a sharp reversal from the processes of
choric learning and group character training to a concentration upon cultivating
individual propensities and a sense of individual identity. Although the British
Government' s Kingman Report of 1988 on the teaching of English enjoined a
departure from some recently fashionable teaching practices and was a bit sniffy
about overly free ' self-expression' , it firmly endorsed the importance of language
education as an instrument of personal development and in promoting a sense of
personal identity: the ' shaping of personality and the exploration of sel f are
inextricably bound up with language development' .
But this is to talk only about identity in, as it were, Erikson' s sense: the ' Know
t hysel f sense. The ' sameness' that lies half buried in the word (Latin idem) has of
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Randolph Quirk
course two dimensions. The one (as Hume implies) is primarily diachronic in its
thrust: I must believe, for sheer sanity's sake, that my identity is stable, the same
t oday as it was yesterday. The other dimension is primarily synchronic: I rejoice in
a feeling of identity with (say) a group of friends because we share a sameness of
interests and assumptions, a sameness most convincingly recognised in, as well as
expressed by, a sameness of language.
These two aspects of identity are obviously in potential conflict: the one sees
the sel f as supreme, the other seeks to submerge the individual sel f in the wider
identity of the group - and the potential for conflict between the two aspects is
obvious. A familiar illustration of the tension between the two types of identity is
provided by team sports. A soccer team plays as a disciplined cooperative unit,
each member identifying with his team in opposition to the team competing with it.
Each goal is scored through the effectiveness of that cooperation, one player
realising his team identity by perhaps denying his personal ambitions as he passes
the ball to another player. And it is the team that is rightly credited with the goal.
But - as we all know from our TV screens - when the goal is scored, individual
triumph is displayed by the man who actually netted the ball and who then asserts
his individual identity with arms outstretched in personal appeal for personal
applause from the fans before whom he briefly and ecstatically parades himself: not
' Us! Us! Us!' but ' Me! Me! Me!'
A moment ' s reflection, of course, and one, sees that - in paradoxical tension
and potential conflict or not - the two aspects of identity are complementary. The
triumphal scorer could not have achieved the goal i f he hadn' t been part of the
team; and it is only through the personal skills of individual players that the team
wins a match.
In connection with individual identity I quoted the Scot, David Hume; let me
quote an Irishman from the same 18 th century in connection with this group
concept of identity. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Edmund
Burke commended to his readers an ' enlightened self-interest' which is willing to
' identify with an interest more enlarged and publick' .
A willingness to subordinate the me-me-me to the ' more enlarged and publick'
us-us-us is as vital in the educational process as it is in sport. I have mentioned the
role that the Kingman Report sees for mother-tongue teaching in helping to
establish and develop a child's individual identity. But the Report had far more to
say on the role of language teaching in developing wider identities. From
childhood, it says, we ' l ear n to use language not only to identify with certain
groups but also to exclude others' . From this natural and universal process, the
Report emphasised the need for children to widen their horizons and prepare
themselves to enter a ' public world' , the passport to which is language: language
seen as opening pathways not only to careers but also to fulfilment in identifying
with a civilised community, indefinitely large. A noble prospect and at a price that
is surely modest and acceptable: you don' t give up the personal pride in your own
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Language and Identity
idiolect, you don' t turn your back on the language of home and local community:
but you work hard to extend your linguistic repertoire by mastering the Standard
language which is the common currency of the wider soccer player who has j ust
scored, you combine personal pride with pride in what the t eam as a whole can
achieve. As Gabriele Stein and I have said in our English in Use (1993) book: ' I t
may be comfort i ng to speak in your own way with your personal acquaintances and
to recognise a typical and personal tone in a letter from your sister. But it is also
comforting to know you can speak to a stranger from far away or read with
understanding Tom Sawyer and Donne' s Devotions' . Indeed, i f ' Know t hysel f
sums up the one kind of identity, Donne' s phrase ' i nvol ved in manki nd' is a good
embl em of the other.
The ' wi der communi t y' beyond family and neighbourhood extends, in other
words, not merel y in geographical space but in social space and t emporal space. It
seems perfectly natural for peopl e to identify with fellow Glaswegians as wel l as
with fellow anglers, with fellow teachers as well as with fellow Christians. To
j udge from current tensions, however, it does not seem to be so easy to feel identity
with fellow Europeans as with, say, fellow Britons. In other words, for many
people - and the relevance of language is obvious - the limits of the ' wi der
communi t y' are set at the nation.
Yet here we have a unit that is relatively new. Traditionally we had (beside the
blood-based trl~be) power units such as kingdoms and empires whose bounds were
determined by force with more concern for strategic frontiers and mat eri al weal t h
than for population homogeneity. In so far as the word nation was used in the west
during the Middle Ages, it essentially connoted race: ' t he nation of Engl and' , we
read in the Cursor Mundi of 1300, ' i s English' : meaning roughly that the peopl e
occupying this territory are English by race. But increasingly from the 18 th century
the word came to mean a political unit, and the formation of independent nation
states (such as above all the USA in 1776) firmly indicated that peopl e of many
different races could unite under one flag and develop a sense of patriotic identity
in respect of the nation.
From then on we have of course lived through two hundred years in which
nationalism has been one of the most potent political forces. The first parliament
set up by the French revolutionaries in 1789 was called the ' national assembl y' ,
and throughout the next century we saw over and over again the rejection of loyalty
to a person (a duke, a prince, a margrave, a king, an emperor) and its replacement
by loyalty to the nation and the emergence of new independent nation-states. The
process that produced Rumania and Finland in nineteenth-century Europe went on
with redoubled vigour to produce Ghana and Bangladesh and scores of others, not
to mention what lies ahead in the new Russia or the turmoil of what was
Yugoslavia or what is Rwanda.
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Randolph Quirk
This is what I meant by calling the nation ' relatively new' as an identity unit.
But it is not new in all respects: the bases for seeking identity are often very old
and very powerful. Race and ethnicity, though downgraded from their medieval
supremacy, are usually still extremely important; but the concept of ' nation' has
enabled groups of people to extend the horizon of what they conceived of as
identity, and, in this, other features held in common could supplement or even
supplant the primacy of race. Religion is one such feature; a sense of common
cultural heritage is another; a political philosophy such as socialism can be another;
geographical cohesion another. But, given the importance of communication in
fostering links between people, it is not surprising that language is high on the list.
It is not merely the audible and recognisable evidence of common ground, but it
can itself be used to propagate the very identity it demonstrates. This is well
evidenced in Europe with the use of the Finnish language to arouse a sense of
Finnish identity within Czarist Russia, the use of Hungarian to establish Hungarian
identity within the Austrian empire, and perhaps most strikingly the use of German
to call together the people in that myriad of separate principalities that constituted
what we have recognised as Germany for the past 100 years or so.
I call this example most striking but it is also of particular relevance to my
theme. The use of German helped Bavarians and Saxons and Wtlrttembergers to
see themselves as Germans and to identify one with another at a higher level of
identity - this without of course giving up the more private identity as a Bavarian;
as a citizen of Regensburg where he or she is known by name; as a member of a
family where he or she is known by first name.
BUt in order to achieve the higher identity with the German nation through the
German language, there had to be a consensus as to what constituted that German
language. And we notice three aspects to this: first, the selection of one among
several competing dialects - and one likely to be least generally opposed; second,
the regularisation and institutionalisation of this as the standard language,
Hochdeutsch, promoted by education, the press, etc.; third, its indigenisation -
especially by replacing recoguisably foreign loan words (in this case chiefly French
words) by recognisably German words with which therefore the members of this
new community, the German nation, could the more enthusiastically and proudly
identify. A language, as cynics have said, is j ust a dialect with an army.
In Romania, where a sense of identity was difficult to establish when
Romanians were part of the vast Ottoman Empire, the story is similar. National
identity was established not just on ethnic and cultural and religious grounds but on
a linguistic basis made the firmer by standardising and institutionalising the
Romanian language - basically a Romance language forming an island with
Hungarian to one side and Slavic languages on the other three. But as a result of
the history and the location of its people, the language had absorbed many Slavic,
Turkish and Greek elements. Part therefore of the process of making the language a
fit symbol for Romanian identity was ' re-latinization' : the replacement of many
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Language and Identity
words by synonyms with Romance bases. There was even some modification of the
grammar.
Another European example following the same course but with a somewhat
more difficult problem. Norwegians and Danes and Swedes are racially cognate
sharing Scandinavian languages that are mutually comprehensible. But in
extracting itself from Danish and Swedish domination to become an independent
country in 1905, many in Norway felt the need to assert Norwegian identity by
developing a new Scandinavian language - clearly distinct from both Danish and
Swedish. To this end they went to the farmers and away from cities like Oslo: they
looked for language roots with which they hoped ordinary people could readily
identify, appealing at the same time to the historical saga tradition of literature
more than 500 years earlier to endow these roots with a cultural blessing.
Let me just mention two similar but far vaster examples outside Europe. In
promoting national languages in India and Pakistan after 1947, an analogous
problem to that in Norway was encountered. From the language Hindustani that
had been the common currency throughout the whole northern part of the sub-
continent during the British raj, two new nations Pakistan and India felt the need to
cultivate their separate national identities with separate national languages. So in
Pakistan, Hindustani yielded to Urdu with much relexicalisation to incorporate the
traditions of Islam, with a script (Arabic based) to match; and in India, Hindustani
yielded to Hindi, again with much relexicalisation (in this case, from the ancient
Sanskrit in which the sacred Hindu texts were written), and with the devanagari
script to match. Here then we have the conscious dissimilation of languages to help
create national identities by appeal to precious cultural and religious heritages.
Now so far in this discussion of language and national identity, I have taken
examples from only one model, the one widely believed to be the ideal model,
which implies ' one nation - one language' . The language of Germany is German,
of Norway Norwegian, of Romania Romanian along with a matching geographical,
cultural and ethnic unity. It is the model of which in fact you have to go to Japan
for a really clear and convincing example of the type in the whole world.
For of course the ' one nation - one language' model is far from being the norm.
National identity can be realised without there being a single language to express
and represent that identity. Switzerland has been a successful demonstration for
500 years of the ' one nation - several languages' model: there is a Swiss nation
but no Swiss language - instead it uses four (three of them shared with their
neighbours in Germany, France and Italy, whose standards for these languages it
broadly accepts: an important lesson for us here in institutional linguistics).
Similarly there is no Belgian language: Belgium uses Dutch and French, again
officially observing the standards for these languages as they obtain beyond the
Belgian frontier. Switzerland is an old example of this model. South Africa is a
very new example of it, forging nationhood with no fewer than eleven official
languages.
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Randolph Quirk
Belgium is not in some ways as successful a model of national unity as
Switzerland, but the reason does not lie in seeking language standards abroad,
beyond its own frontiers - in the Netherlands and France respectively. Rather, it
exemplifies a counter-tendency to what I ' ve been discussing so far: the role of
language in creating national identity. Clearly, as Belgium shows, language can
also operate to replace national identity by a sub-identity within the nation-state.
Language is similarly used as a political as well as a social index by the Basques
and Catalonians in Spain. We note also, within the United States, a growing
insistence on the right to use Spanish as a reactive claim to identity for the many
millions of ethnic Hispanics within the United States. Indeed, it could be said that,
where it is available, language is the most potent force world-wide in separatist
movement s within nation-states: as it was in liberation movement s within empires.
We might note that the present European Union enjoys not only its nine ' wor ki ng'
languages, but a further three dozen officially designated as ' l esser used' . Well,
time will tell.
But let me turn now to a third model that is different again from the classic:
' one nation - one language' type where there is two-way identity: i f you are
Japanese, then Japanese is almost certainly your language; and i f you are a native
speaker of Japanese, then you are almost certainly a citizen of Japan. The third
model I now want to focus on is where nationality may predict the language but the
language will not predict the nationality. In other words, the identity is onl y one
way. There are many examples. I f you are an Iraqi, you are likely to speak Arabic.
But i f you speak Arabic, it is unlikely that you are an Iraqi: there are for example
more Egyptians than Iraqis in the world. I f you are Portuguese, you are likely to
speak Portuguese; but i f you speak Portuguese, it is more likely that you are a
Brazilian. I f you are a native speaker of Spanish, your nation may be any one of
twenty countries - including (as we have j ust seen) the United States. I f your
language is Chinese, you are more likely than not a citizen of the Peopl e' s
Republic: but you may be among the millions who are citizens of Taiwan or
Malaysia or Indonesia or Singapore. Here then is a language-based identity wider
than the nation. A Taiwanese is bot h Chinese and a citizen of Taiwan; an Iraqi is
both an Arab and a citizen of Iraq; a Mexican is both Hispanic and a citizen of
Mexico.
And of course there are the identities achieved through English, at least as
striking. I f you are a native speaker of English, the chances are four to one that
you' r e an American, but we might be wrong and find that you' r e an Australian or a
Canadian or a citizen of one among a further hal f dozen countries: for exampl e
South Africa. You could even be among the fifty million native speakers of
English in England, whence the language derives its name.
This one-way model can work against a sense of national identity, so powerful
is the incentive to have one' s unique national identity endorsed by a unique
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Language and Identity
linguistic identity. It is for this reason that strong attempts were made to replace
English by Irish in establishing the republic of Ireland. Again to many of those
guiding the early steps of the young United States, it similarly seemed a serious
obstacle to the establishment of national identity that they should continue to use
English, the language then chiefly associated with the British whose yoke they had
just thrown off. I have no doubt that such feelings caused the rapid promotion of a
formally institutionalised variant (with the help especially of the lexicographer
Noah Webster), variously known as the ' English language in America' or even
' American' , now more usually ' American English' , or - more usually still - j u s t
' English' : in recognition no doubt of the trifling differences involved and the
readiness with which they can be ignored in ' global - village' interaction. A
striking example of the ' wider community' .
There are examples of unease amounting to an ' identity crisis' where the
language in daily use cannot by itself represent national identity, but on the whole
they are exceptional. It is more usual for nations to take in their stride the fact that
they share a language with one or more other nations. Mexicans and Argentinians
feel no less Mexican or Argentinian in using Spanish; Austrians no less Austrian in
using German; Moroccans no less Moroccan in using Arabic.
Rather, there is I believe a widespread and increasing sense of gain in sharing a
language, whereby people can perceive - to quote Edmund Burke again - ' an
enlightened self-interest' which is willing to ' identify with an interest more
enlarged and publick' . In other words, just as we have seen language as the means
of extending identity beyond the family, the locality, the region to the whole nation,
so the ' one language - several nations' model of language use enables the speakers
of that language to extend their interest in identity far beyond the confines of their
particular national state. A well-known example is the special relation that has
flourished for a century or more between the United States and Britain, each
regarding the other as in some sense an extension of itself with a community of
knowledge and sympathy far greater than between either and any neighbouring
state speaking a different language. Another example is the sense of identity
shared by the Arabic-speaking countries all the way from Morocco on the Atlantic
to Oman, virtually on the Indian Ocean; 8000 km eastward. Yet a third most
outstanding example of language as an instrument of identity and one where this
role has been resoundingly endorsed by powerful voices is the case of Chinese.
Thus despite there being a sharply different socio-political ethos in the People' s
Republic from that in either Taiwan or Singapore, there is agreement on promoting
a single standard Chinese for use in all three (though in Taiwan and Singapore it is
called Mandarin not Pudonghua).
As Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew repeatedly expounded the
intellectual theory informing this thrust - and it is of course more remarkable in his
country than in the other two, since traditionally Mandarin has been native to only
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a tiny minority of the Chinese population in Singapore. Mandarin is promot ed not
only to assist the development of a Singaporean identity across the dialect
boundaries of Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese, and the et hni c boundaries of
Chinese, Mal ay and Tamil, but also to foster - especially for the Chinese majority
in Singapore - a supranational identity with those who share the Confucian culture
and who constitute a fifth or sixth of the worl d' s entire population.
With this example of language as the instrument of a breathtakingly ' enl arged
and publ i ck' interest, we can turn back again to English. This is the language of
perhaps greatest current interest among those of the ' one language - several
nations' model. The sense of wider identity felt between the UK and the USA
extends to Australians, Canadians, and many others. We read the same books,
regardless of aut hor' s nationality or citizenship: John Updike, V.S. Naipaul, Beryl
Bainbridge, Salman Rushdie, Ti mot hy Mo, Upamanyu Chatterjee. We watch the
same TV shows from Morse to NYPD Blue, from Neighbours to East Enders. We
sing the same nursery rhymes to our children, crack the same j okes, groan over the
same puns, react to the same stereotypes, share the same folklore, spike our talk
with the same Shakespearian fragments.
We saw a moment ago, that in the proposition ' I f your mot her tongue is
English, you are a citizen of X' , it is by no means easy to predict the value of X. It
might be America, Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand .... But when we re-
phrase the proposition to read ' I f you make daily use of English in the course of
your work, you are a citizen of X' , the difficulty of predicting the value of X
increases dramatically. It is probabl e that in every country on earth there are some
of its peopl e who use English in the course of every day. In consequence, the value
of X is quite likely to be a country where English it not a native language. In other
words, there are more speakers and users of English for whom it is not their home
language than the world-wide total of native speakers. We may reflect on the role
of English as one of South Afri ca' s official languages - and the chi ef one of
Nigeria.
Bringing these non-native users of English together with the native speakers
gives us not j ust a very l arge communi t y but obviously a very het erogeneous one.
There is clearly no et hni c common bond nor a religious one nor often any historical
one, and the situation is very different from the sense of widened identity that we
discussed with respect to Arabic or Chinese or indeed Spanish.
Rather, within the total communi t y of English speakers, the language helps to
articulate cross-national identities that would otherwise be difficult to sustain. The
use of English at international conferences of doctors or engineers illustrates this.
Russian scientists adequately realise their Russian identity in Russian, but they feel
an identity also with fellow scientists - be they Germans or Japanese or Americans;
and at the present time this identity is chiefly realised in English. So too, peopl e
engaged throughout the world in such fields as aid organisations like the Red Cross
or Amnesty Intemational need a common language to achieve and maintain their
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identity in these roles; and that common language is again more usually English
than any other. And we should not forget that we have a cross-national youth
culture (manifest for example in pop music) where again the identity is commonly
realised in English.
It is because of its potentiality to establish identities that have nothing to do
with local self, the family self, the national self, that I regard the ' one language -
many nations' model of language use as the most promising for the future. Even in
centuries past, it, it was recognised that, for some people in some roles, a widened
identity must subsist and that this required more than a local language. Only
consider the role of Chinese in linking scholars in the Far East, or the role of Latin
in linking folk like Copernicus and Newton for a thousand years in the west. We
are no longer in the age when a Latin could satisfy the needs of a few; our needs
now are for a language providing links between the massive numbers of people in
every country, boundless in their demand as they are boundless politically.
There are of course dangers of resentment in the use of a lingua franca. People
who possess no mastery of it may be deeply suspicious of the identities assumed by
those who do. Common people often feared those around them who used Latin in
medicine or law and who seemed thereby to cut themselves of f in a higher and
more privileged realm from their humbler fellow citizens who had no Latin. Such
resentments are not unknown in recently independent countries where English can
be viewed as merely surviving from the colonial era, useful in providing
international links of course, useful ot~en in being a relatively neutral intra-national
link in a multi-lingual country such as Nigeria or the Philippines. But since the
people so linked are inevitably the relatively well-educated and affluent, the use of
English is sometimes attacked (by those without such advantages) as the language
of privilege. English can be represented as intrusive and as dangerously divisive in
favouring - in South Africa, for example - any powerful minority of native English
speakers. There was a period in 1988 when Ngugi wa Thi ongo' o felt this so
strongly that he vehemently attacked the practice of black Africans writing in
English. That way, he said, your readership is not just very small: it' s the wrong
readership.
It is perhaps somewhat analogous sentiments that prompt some educationists in
Britain and America to be suspicious of (or even hostile to) Standard English.
Others, however, would see this as overvaluing a local and rather narrow identity
and prejudicing the opportunity our children have to achieve Burke' s ' much
enlarged' identity, transcending the bounds of locality, class, even nation itself. A
prize within our children' s reach of inestimable value for their future careers, their
geographical and social mobility, and their cultural fulfilment.
University College London
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Randolph Quirk
Notes
1. This is the original version of a paper delivered as a plenary talk at the 1995 English
Academy Conference in Grahamstown.
Ref erences
Hume, David. t966. Treatise of Human Nature. Dent.
Burke, Edmund. 1964. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Dent.
Quirk, R. and G. Stein. 1993. English in Use. Harlow: Longman.
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