Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity

Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity 1 Mary Bucholtz University of California, Santa Barbara INTRODUCTION Although sociolinguistics has become a fragmented ®eld since its initial broad conceptualization in the 1960s (e.g. Bright 1966; Gumperz and Hymes 1972), the now-divergent strands of sociolinguistic research continue to share a concern with something that has been called `real language.' Against the idealism of the Chomskyan paradigm, sociolinguistics positioned itself as an empirical discipline in which language was taken to mean the systematic use of language by social actors in social situations. I employ the term sociolinguistics here in its original wide reference to include not only the disparate quantitative and qualitative approaches that claim this name but also linguistic anthropo- logy, conversation analysis, and other socially and culturally oriented forms of discourse analysis. For despite the many di€erences that divided these research traditions, `real language' remains central to each. And although methods of data collection and analysis vary widely across these approaches, what is meant by real language (or by some more theoretically elaborated equivalent term) has remained for the most part remarkably consistent: real language ± that is, authentic language ± is language produced in authentic contexts by authentic speakers. For this reason, authenticity underwrites nearly every aspect of sociolinguis- tics, from our identi®cation of socially meaningful linguistic phenomena, to the de®nition of the social groups we study, to the methods we use to collect our data, to the theories we draw on in our analysis. Yet despite its pervasiveness in the ®eld, this pivotal concept is rarely a topic of investigation in its own right. In addition, because researchers frequently assume some notion of authenticity in the sociolinguistic study of identity, the latter concept too remains theoretically underdeveloped within sociolinguistics. In the following discussion, I consider the sociolinguistic investment in authenticity as an implicit theory of identity. I then explore the original reasons for this investment and discuss some of the problems and limitations associated with it in the current context of socio- linguistic research. Finally, I o€er an alternative vision for the sociolinguistic study of authenticity ± one that, rather than presupposing the authentic as an # Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003