- •Language And Culture By Clair Kramsch
- •Preface Purpose
- •Readings
- •References
- •Glossary
- •Author's acknowledgments
- •1. The relationship of language and culture
- •Nature, culture, language
- •Communities of language users
- •Imagined communities
- •Insiders/outsiders
- •Linguistic relativity
- •The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
- •Summary
- •2. Meaning as sign
- •The linguistic sign
- •The meaning of signs
- •Cultural Encodings
- •Semantic Cohesion
- •Symbols
- •Summary
- •3. Meaning as action
- •Context of situation, context of culture
- •Structures of Expectation
- •Contextualization Cues, Situated Inferences
- •Pragmatic Coherence
- •The Cooperative Principle
- •Participants' Roles and the Co-construction of Culture
- •Summary
- •4. Spoken language, oral culture
- •Speech and writing
- •Indicating status
- •Social positionings
- •Protecting Face
- •Conversational Style
- •Narrative Style
- •Summary
- •5. Print language, literate culture
- •Written language, textual culture
- •Print and power
- •Social construction of literacy
- •Text and discourse
- •Literacy event, prior text, point of view
- •Summary
- •6. Language and cultural identity
- •Cultural identity
- •Cultural stereotypes
- •Language crossing as act of identity
- •Linguistic nationism
- •Standard language, cultural totem
- •Linguistic and cultural imperialism
- •Summary
- •7. Current issues
- •Who is a native speaker?
- •Cultural authenticity
- •Cross-cultural, intercultural, multicultural
- •The politics of recognition
- •Are emotions universal or culture-specific?
- •Text 10
- •Text 11
- •Text l2
- •Text l3
- •Cultural notions of 'face'
- •Text 14
- •Text 15
- •Text 16
- •Text 17
- •Text 18
- •Text 19
- •Text 20
- •Text 21
- •Text 22
- •Text 23
- •Text 24
Text 21
Ben Rampton: Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. Longman 1995, pages 180, 313.
While code-switching is usually seen as a device used to affirm a speaker's claim to solidarity with members who belong to two different language groups, crossing is seen as temporarily borrowing a language that is not your own. Rampton describes the language crossing practices of multiracial urban youth in British schools from among Panjabi, Caribbean Creole, and Stylized Asian English (SAE) language varieties.
Crossing ... focuses on code alternation by people who are not accepted members of the group associated with the second language they employ. It is concerned with switching into languages that are not generally thought to belong to you. This kind of switching, in which there is a distinct sense of movement across social or ethnic boundaries, raises issues of social legitimacy that participants need to negotiate, and that analysts could usefully devote more attention to....
In Ashmead, crossing arose out of solidarities and allegiances that were grounded in a range of non-ethnic identities - identities of neighborhood, class, gender, age, sexual orientation, role, recreational interest and so on - and it was these that generated, among other things, the local multiracial vernacular. It was their base in these connections that allowed adolescents to explore the significance of ethnicity and race through language crossing. Indeed, crossing not only emerged from a plurality of identity relations: it also addressed a range of the meanings that ethnicity could have....
Panjabi crossing was more independent of the ways in which ethnic minorities were generally represented than either Creole or SAE. In informal recreation, it took shape within the relatively subterranean traditions of playground culture, and in the context of bhangra [music] ... Crossing in Creole tended to reproduce popular conceptions and to accept and embrace its stereotypic connotations of vernacular vitality, counterposed to the values of bourgeois respectability ... With SAE, practical reinterpretation of established ideology took its most complex form. With white adults, crossing into Asian English evoked racist images of Asian deference in a manner that could subvert the action of any interlocutor that entertained them. Of course this could be done playfully, but at the moment when it was performed, crossing of this kind constituted an act of minor resistance to the smooth flow of adult-dominated interaction.
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When an Anglo adolescent addresses a Bangladeshi fellow student with the Stylized Asian English (SAE) typical of Indian immigrants, what kind of 'social legitimacy' do you think needs to be negotiated?
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What factors, according to Rampton, allowed these adolescents to dare cross into languages that belonged to someone else and that they themselves didn't even fully master?
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Rampton's study shows how multiracial youth groups create for themselves a counter-culture through complex language crossings. What would you suppose are the characteristics of this counter-culture?