Identity and Urbanity in Defining the Multilingual Speech Community

Tara Sanchez (New York University)

Email: tss5@nyu.edu or sanch131@yahoo.com

 

ABSTRACT:

Patrick (2001) critically traces the development of the concept of the speech community in sociolinguistic research, identifying agreement and points of contention among scholars. He supports a view of the speech community as a “socially-based unit of linguistic analysis” (2001:9), but maintains that there are still many issues to be dealt with. In this paper, I explore and theorize one of these ‘remaining issues’ — the multilingual speech community, or what Patrick terms the ‘multivariety situation’. In doing so, I crucially invoke the concepts of identity and urbanity.

The theoretical proposals are based on ethnographic observations and linguistic data (129 sociolinguistic interviews, as well as a diachronic corpus of written texts) collected by this author in 2003 on the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao (Dutch Caribbean). On all three islands, four languages are in daily use: Papiamentu (Iberian creole; first language of about 80% of islanders), Dutch (official language), Spanish (regionally dominant), and English (used in commerce and tourism). The focus is on dialect divisions within Papiamentu, but these cannot be understood without reference to the other languages with which Papiamentu is in contact.

I show that Aruba comprises one speech community and Curaçao and Bonaire another. Within each speech community are subgroups of speakers based on their first language (L1) and their particular multilingual repertoires (MRep). L1 and MRep partially determine linguistic norms and patterns of linguistic variation, which in turn are used to define each speech community. Identity and urbanity are also involved in the creation of linguistic norms and patterns of variation. In particular, I discuss the almost palpable social and political distance between Aruba on the one hand, and Curaçao and Bonaire on the other, and the ensuing social identities. Further, I show the role of urbanity via its effect on linguistic variation within the Curaçao-Bonaire community.