Martin Gill

'Just common sense': Authenticating British identity in popular on-line debate

Authenticity has only recently become a key term in sociolinguistics. Its emergence belongs to a wider critique aimed at differentiating the post-Romantic myths of origin and value that often formed a background to earlier studies, notably the view that primary sources of identification are organic, local, vernacular, from those of late modernity, in which identities are dynamic, performed, often ironic. This is partly a response to social change: communities and vernaculars have been dislocated and recontextualized by migration, global markets, media, the internet; speech styles and other expressive resources are seldom directly indexical of ‘traditional’ identities. But partly it is a consequence of a realignment of interests within the field. 

As Coupland (2010) warns, in rejecting past essentialism we may miss the subjective value still attached to authenticity, not merely as a discursive strategy, but absolutely and non-negotiably. Claiming authenticity for oneself, or denying it to others, is often central to the process of defining one’s (true) identity, and that of one’s community, the moral and epistemic space within which its practices are taken to be ‘common sense’, and the norms by which they are evaluated. As such, it forms a basis for deeply held convictions and focus for ideological debate. 

This paper will consider the implications of one example: popular debate about language requirements for migrants to Britain prompted by recent legislation. Drawing on a corpus of contributions to a BBC online discussion forum, it examines the construction of ‘authentic’ Britishness in relation to the imagined native / non-native linguistic boundary, and the extent to which the indexical resources of ‘nativeness’ are seen as extendable to others. While crossing this boundary is repeatedly taken to be the only legitimate aim for incomers, a major function of the discourse is to reinforce the boundary, hence to preserve Britishness as an exclusive category.

References

Coupland, N. 2010. The authentic speaker and the speech community. In C. Llamas and D. Watt (eds) Languages and Identities (pp. 99–112). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.