Bucholtz And Hall's Identity And Interaction: A Sociocultural Approach

My point of departure is Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) article titled Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Approach. They propose five principles important to the study of language identity. These principles are emergence, positionality, indexicality, relationality and partialness. I draw on the “tactics of intersubjectivity’ to better understand the relationship between language and identity formation for male youth, and how it is performed in their social spaces. Bucholtz and Hall (2005:587) suggest identities should be seen as socially structured and “the only way that such self-conceptions enter the social world is via some form of discourse.” Their work adds a new perspective to a long-standing body of work on language and identity, starting with traditional sociolinguistic approaches. Sociolinguistics seeks to observe relationships between language and society. The variationist view illustrates correlations of linguistic and social variables.

The macro looks at broader categories such as society, structure and social categories, while the micro focuses on the individual and personal acts. The two are mutually determined and cannot be studied independently of each other (Bayley 2008). Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003:5) suggest sociolinguists in the past have

Gumperz and Gumperz (1982) argue that communication cannot be studied in isolation. Its effects on people’s lives should also be analysed thus creating a holistic approach in detailing observations and findings of social interaction. Through communicative interaction, a speaker is constantly organising and reorganising who they are and how they relate to the social world (Norton 1997). In other words, speakers demonstrate their “linguistic features and communicative functions and social distribution” (Androutsopoulos & Georgakopoulou