Language and Self-Identity

Q: Discuss the view that language is central to the construction of self-identity.

Answer: When we are born we do not have any sense of our selves. A baby does not think of itself as
apart from the world around it and itself. A baby thinks that the world revolves around him and will
not respond if you look at them or smile at them because they are not aware of the other person as
a separate entity. But as time passes, our behaviour shifts from passive to active. We start to
recognize the world around us and the objects and people in it. Children then slowly start to react to
the world around them and later imitate the behaviours they witness. That is limited to when they
have not acquired language. As children start to grasp onto language, they can truly start to think
and ponder over things. This leads to the discovery of their own selves along with the world around
them. As we acquire language, we become aware of certain aspects of our being, such as our name,
age, gender, religion etc. Then a person moves onto deeper understanding of their character. We
start to see ourselves in term of our unique habits and likes and dislikes. We start to understand
ourselves and our place in the world better.

Self-identity is an essential part of who we are and how we interact with others around us. The
sociologist Antony Giddens emphasized on the importance of self-identity as he asked the questions:
“What to do? How to act? Who to be? ” But what role does language play in the development of our
self? How does language relate to our realization of our genders, nationalities, religion; all in all our
identity? Our language and the way we speak entails our idiolect, it is directly related to our voice
and speech pattern and the form of language you speak which is characteristic of the geographical
region you live in is called your sociolect. So if someone hears you speaking, they can almost
instantly recognize what area you are from. Just by hearing you talk and that is a stern example of
how much we give away about our identities when we speak. Moreover, our gender, ethnicity, age,
religion, moralities, belief system, family, friends, education, and nationality; all of these have strong
influences on your language and consequently the way you live life and maintain yourself.

When we learn to converse, our caretakers encourage and discourage certain behaviours and rules
of language. Some call it ethics of conversation and some call it manners. But philosopher Paul Grice
in 1975 called them Conversational Maxims, although we don’t always follow them and these are
not rules but still it is worth mentioning because even today, we still follow them in day to day
conversations. These are called Grice’s Maxims: Maxims of Quality, Maxims of manner, Maxims of
relation and Maxims of quantity. These include points which are deemed as good conversational
practices such as be relevant, be brief-don’t ramble, do not say what you believe to be false and the
like.

Each speaker has a conversational face, an image of themselves; a sense of their own linguistic
worth. The theory of conversational face was developed by Erving Goffman, and then further
evolved by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson in 1987. We all live in a world where we interact
with many people and social groups. When we communicate with them, we define our self-identity
even further. This was discovered by early linguists that learning language did not only mean that
we learnt names of things and places but it also meant advancing our cognitive development.
Descartes put forward the theory of reasoning, B.F. Skinner put forward the theory of behaviourism,
Naom Chomsky put Nativism in prospect. These theories suggested different views as to how
language helped develop our sense of self. Descartes said that language was always a part of our
ability to learn, Chomsky said that every person had in innate and genetic ability to learn language
and acquire their self-identity and so on. But everyone agreed on one singular point. That language
played a huge role in the development of our self-identity.