Page 448 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

426 Janet Spreckels and Helga Kotthoff

not a matter of studying who conversational partners are in terms of their demo-
graphic data, but rather of studying locally identifiable, discursively produced
identities which interactants select from a broad spectrum of possibilities and
set as relevant. At the center of this new concept of identity is who or what con-
versational participants locally identify each other as being in the microcosm of
the interaction, why and in what manner (with what linguistic means) they do
this. Identity is thereby “regarded as an everyday world resource with which so-
cietal members themselves perform identity work, categorize and interpret their
social world and thereby also construct their own identity” (Deppermann and
Schmidt 2003: 28).
A source of orientation for identity research from a linguistic viewpoint is in
addition the concept of ‘acts of identity’ of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985),
which up to the present has been widely received. This approach, developed in
the frame of (socio-linguistic) Creole research, regards linguistic practice as
‘acts of identity’ and thereby produces the important connection between
speech variation and identity (P. Eckert 2000). According to this, individuals
adopt linguistic patterns as an expression of their identification with specific ref-
erence groups. Youths can thus express their membership in specific youth cul-
tural groups and scenes by employing the appropriate vocabulary. In a newer
study, Auer and Dirim (2003) show how non-Turkish youth perform various
‘acts of identity’ by acquiring Turkish.

2. Communicating identity in intercultural encounters

Intercultural scenarios have a variety of effects on the communication of iden-
tity. Ethnic and national identities can be set as relevant simply because the way
a behavioral mode is marked by culture first becomes clear in a foreign culture.
Whereas, for example, for many Germans punctuality represents an inconspi-
cuous aspect of normality, in a foreign cultural context it suddenly becomes a
characteristic of one’s own ‘being German’. Besides that, there is the influence
of specific national stereotypes that belong to active knowledge stocks. The
ethno-comedies that are currently popular in some Western countries play with
the knowledge of such stereotypes by humorously exaggerating them (Kotthoff
2004).
Many identity categories are interwoven in their cultural typification.
Thereby the space-time scope of the categories is in each case hard to determine.
What is regarded today as the typical manner of a young woman lawyer from
Munich will not differ in many contexts from that of a woman lawyer in Lon-
don, Stockholm or Chicago. Gender, class, profession, age, and style influence
each other and together with nationality and ethnicity produce a context-de-
pendent type. The young urban professionals who serve as an example here can