The Relation Between Identity and Language

Language is directly influenced by the same factors that make up one’s identity. According to John Joseph, author of Language and Identity, “there are two aspects to a person’s identity; their name and the “intangible something that constitutes who one really is…” (Joseph, 2004, p. 2). That “intangible something” refers to age, gender, race, geography, one’s social class in society, and religious beliefs. These factors intertwine to shape the person in the present as well as in the future.

Identity is an equation true for all its variables. The list of variables that goes into creating an identity is endless. The definition of identity is the set of characteristics that somebody recognizes as belonging uniquely to one’s self and constituting their individual personality for life. The variables that will be discussed are gender, age, race, geography, social class, and religious beliefs. All of these factors will affect individuals in different ways and will be the makeup to one’s overall identity.

The First and most obvious physical blueprint to one’s identity are their age and gender. Gender makes up identity not only in physical appearance, but behavior as well. Believe it or not, gender also influences on speech. As author Jennifer Coates simply puts it, “Men speak one way, women speak another” (Coates, 1998, p. 1). Linguistic differences exist to keep social gender roles distinct. A study of Hungarian boys and girls concludes that females at the age of eight had more occurrences of bad grammar then boys. 42.8% of girls used wrong tense when speaking, whereas only 28.9% of boys used wrong tense. When the study took place again 2 years later the results changed dramatically. Older girls only had 28% of the pa...

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