Style: Language Variation and Identity by Nikolas Coupland (2007) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xiii + 206 pp. PDF

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Book Reviews jola_1037 326..339 Style: Language Variation and Identity. Nikolas Coupland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiii + 206 pp. LINDSAY A. BELL The University of Toronto Style: Language Variation and Identity maps out the main steps that sociolinguists have taken using the conc...

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Book Reviews

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326..339

Style: Language Variation and Identity. Nikolas Coupland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiii + 206 pp.

LINDSAY A. BELL The University of Toronto

Style: Language Variation and Identity maps out the main steps that sociolinguists have taken using the concept of style. For Coupland, style refers to how speakers use the resource of language variation to make meaning in social encounters. Constructed in part through a critical review of style’s roots in variationist sociolinguistics, the volume seeks to (re)define sociolinguistic understanding of style to enable the term to move beyond the description of linguistic variation, and toward the analysis of the complex discursive processes in which identities are negotiated. Such a goal requires far-reaching changes—Coupland argues that the survey-based research methods common in variationist approaches lack the flexibility and dynamism necessary to understand context-bound constructions of linguistic variation under “late modernity,” a term he takes from Anthony Giddens (The Consequences of Modernity, University of California Press, 1990). Style is a particularly important example for this project, and perhaps the key to a wide-ranging rethinking of the field: this emphasis is intended to afford priority to context and interaction and in turn achieve more active accounts of variation, which in turn underscore meaning-making through language. Toward this end, Coupland covers an impressive array of empirical works and theoretical points which outline the analytical shortcomings of variationist approaches, and against which he seeks to show the strength of his approach. Style, as such, is equally a future agenda for the sociolinguistic program and a critique of the current state of the art. Variationist sociolinguistics has traditionally tried to understand language systems and how they change by mapping variation or speech styles. Coupland, and others (e.g., Style and Social Identities, Peter Auer, ed., Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), on the other hand, are concerned with the social meanings that are made through the contextualized use of variation rather than simply mapping those variations across existing social categories like race, gender, or ethnicity. Instead, they are interested in identity constructions. The conceptual problem within variationist approaches, Coupland argues, starts with the term variation itself. Identifying variation (or styles) is a contrastive exercise—a linguistic unit (or sets of units) must be deemed “different” from another to merit the status of variation. In classic variationist studies this has meant that linguistic markers can easily be divided into categories of standard and nonstandard speech. Yet the structures created in this way are problematic. Through a revisiting of William Labov’s seminal studies from New York’s lower east side (The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Center for Applied Linguistics, 1966), Coupland shows how the implied duality and linearity of such classificatory schemes never hold. What’s more, studies of this genre have often assumed that linguistic markers of difference can then be linked to predetermined categories of social difference. This, of course, at once forecloses the range of social meanings indexed by these features of variation and overlooks the role context plays in guiding why speakers use the variations that they do. The point being that the scope of discursive goals met through speech styles in action cannot be accounted for in the distributional matrices common to variationist sociolinguistics (although Coupland does mention some work having greater success, e.g., Penelope Eckert’s Linguistic Variation as Social Practice, Blackwell, 2000). Yet style is not simply variation in motion or open to strategic deployment. It is also “difference” with an aesthetic dimension: distinctiveness which performs some kind of social Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 19, Issue 2, pp. 326–339, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2009.01037.x.

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role for speakers. Plainly, it means something, and for Coupland, neglecting to account for the aesthetic dimensions of differences limits the creative, design-oriented processes through which social styles are activated in talk. To underscore the importance of audiences and context in the “styling” of talk, Coupland draws on, yet is critical of, Allan Bell’s audience design (“Language style as audience design,” Language in Society, 1984: 145–204) and Howard Giles’ communication accommodation theory (“Accent mobility: A model and some data,” Anthropological Linguistics, 1973: 87–105). Chapter three argues both of these models overemphasized recipiency and thereby undervalued individual identity construction. The stress placed on identity and the activity of styling signals the author’s investment in speaker agency. In the second half of the volume, Coupland narrows in on the kinds of approaches that link identity and audience approaches. Here the concern for Coupland is finding a means to address the articulations between agency and structure, rather than adopting a model that favors either side of the coin. Chapter 4 argues that while language variation is rooted in structure and does constrain possibilities for social actors, linguistic styling plays a key role in speakers working free from these constraints (p. 84). In chapters 5 and 6 Coupland concentrates on qualitative and interactional approaches which also see identity as an active discursive process. “Styling Social Identities” (chapter 5) is a tour de force of the literature on language and various social groups. Place, ethnicity, and gender are all taken as variables which illustrate the ways in which linguistic variation appears in relation to, or in interaction with other speakers. The examples effectively sever any direct link between language use and social group membership, a theme that is carried further in “High Performance and Identity Stylisation” (chapter 6). Here Coupland reiterates the notion that speakers “perform” identities with some level of consciousness and with some level of autonomous control. In doing so, he draws a distinction between mundane and “high” performances, though what analytical purchase this distinction affords him is never made all that clear. The examples he uses (drag performances, political speeches) continue to underscore the importance of local contextual framings for understanding identity performances, but the reader remained unconvinced that high and low were insightful descriptors. Still, by the volume’s concluding chapter the central argument that “sociolinguistic style has outgrown its conceptual origins” (p. 177) has been firmly established, and variation is best treated as a resource that speakers mobilize in the making of meaning amid context dependent interactions. What remains unclear, or perhaps just underprioritized, in Coupland’s alternative model for the study of styles are the links between sense-making and social action—a problem common and largely unaddressed in the turn to practice and strategy in sociolinguistics more generally. After all, what is socially meaningful for individual speakers is not immediately interchangeable for that which is socially significant, creating a second level of dissonance after that between strategy and structure. Coupland seemed to be coming close to something like this in his insistence on an aesthetics of style, yet failing to see the aesthetic as a zone equally as fraught with conflict and contradiction as that between structure and practice, the present work never makes this step. As such, there is a fair amount of work that needs to be done to take a description of meaning in the making to an analysis of social organization. A second issue has to with the concept of identity, which plays a critical issue in Coupland’s analytical apparatus but which has come under fire from others. By now it is clear that “performances” of identity happen within the confines of discursive spaces which have their own sets of possibilities and limitations. While Coupland makes a strong case for the importance of context, the examples he cites lack the materialist historical details that make clear how some kinds of context count more than others, and thus fails to account for (1) the specific constructions of discursive spaces which makes particular performances possible, (2) how particular actors come to occupy and navigate those spaces, (3) what is at stake in each of the interactions, and (4) what consequences the “performance” has for both the individual and the broader identity categories which their styles index. Chapter 5 makes it clear that language plays a key role producing the kinds of cultural differences that legitimize social boundaries; nevertheless, the desire to drive the weight of each analysis from the taped interactions/ performances undermines the researcher’s ability to attend to the “boundary work,” that is, of significant material consequence. This leaves style (the term) stumbling analytically to make the leap from description to social theory. It may be worth considering in what ways the mobilization of “identity” as object of sociological interest contributes to the analytical limitations of the sociolinguistic program Coupland is advocating. Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker (“Identity” in Colonialism in Question, Frederick Cooper, ed., University of California Press, 2005:59–90) have argued that

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“identity is unable to serve well the demands of social analysis” (p. 60), and while they may be either right or wrong, the conceptual and intellectual work “identity” is meant to do is never fully articulated by Coupland. Unbundling the “thick tangle of meanings that have accumulated around the term identity and parceling out of the work to a number of less congested terms,” (p. 60), like identification, categorization, self-representation, groupness, may serve Coupland’s stated goals better than his continued reliance on the term itself. The concluding chapter provides promise in its discussion of speaker “authenticity” as that which is discursively earned rather than automatically credited. This assumption directs research attention to the politics that surround authenticity and place immediate focus on social action and consequence, and this might seem like the very place where Coupland starts with that project. Despite these two issues, the book is clear, erudite, and important. The chronology offered through its organization offers insight into the kinds of analytical impasses that key intellectual developments in sociolinguistics have attempted to overcome, and shows in what ways they were successful. This cements its utility as a course reader. Further, the references cited and the extracts used for analysis show a commitment to draw on two intellectual histories which are usually (albeit decreasingly) kept apart, viz. British Sociolinguistics and American Linguistic Anthropology, making it something of a consolidation of a range of past work, even as it attempts to go beyond. Sociology & Equity Studies in Education University of Toronto Toronto, ON M5S 1V6 [email protected] Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius. Patrick Eisenlohr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xi + 328pp.

SONIA NEELA DAS University of British Columbia

Eisenlohr’s monograph on Hindu Mauritians represents a critical departure from prior studies of South Asian diasporas, as well as from many existing studies of multiethnic societies. By looking at the different forms and processes of linguistic mediation through which Hindu Mauritians belong to shifting landscapes of time and space, the author convincingly demonstrates how situated linguistic practices and performances both presuppose and creatively entail the formation of “diasporic communities” (p. 267) in Mauritius. In doing so, Eisenlohr builds a strong case for privileging the “social semiotics of language” as an analytic methodology for use among ethnographers of diasporas (as well as other scales of belonging, such as nations) and particularly among those who seek to describe processes of “diasporization” (p. 232) as historically driven, ideologically regimented, and culturally emergent. Also, in analyzing how sociolinguistic hierarchies in Mauritius are reproduced and transformed through practices of diasporic belonging, this monograph necessarily foregrounds a highly multilingual cast of characters who speak languages ranging from Mauritian Creole, French, English, Hindi, and Mauritian Bhojpuri, as well as purist Bhojpuri and Creole fransise. Eisenlohr’s analysis of their multilingual speech events is ultimately the highlight of this book, as he identifies meaningful patterns in a wide variety of social interactions and metapragmatic discourses. At times, however, the complexity associated with this ethnographic, historical, and linguistic context destabilizes the narrative flow of the book, and it becomes the task of the reader to suture together elements of the author’s overarching themes of ancestral language, temporal plurality, and linguistic shift from each of the chapters. Even though this book is primarily focused on the contemporary experiences of majority Hindu Mauritians (who are of North Indian background), the author begins his narrative by suggesting that their present-day political and demographic dominance in Mauritius has been far from inevitable or uncontested. Eisenlohr’s analysis of competing discourses of nostalgia and progress in chapters 2 and 3, divergent models of Mauritian nationalism and nationness in chapter 1, and ongoing processes of linguistic shift from Mauritian Bhojpuri to Creole in chapters 2 and 5 reveals undercurrents of tension between and among Creole and Hindu Mauritians, North and South Indians, and Indian Hindus and Muslims, each of whom seek...