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UCL Mellon Programme: Identities and Culture in Europe since 1945

Seminar: 1 March 2006

Dr Roger Baines Ethnicity, identity and perceptions of the insult in contemporary adolescent French

Abstract

This socio-linguistics paper is the result of a fieldwork project on the insult in contemporary adolescent French which collected information on the variables of gender, age, ethnicity, status and location. It is survey-based and thus essentially empirical.

The insult is generally divided into what can be termed the ritual insult and the real (or personal) insult, a distinction first made by Labov in 1972; with a ritual insult the charge must be patently false, its implausibility obvious to the insulted party and it must be responded to by another insult in the same vein. Meanwhile, the personal insult is taken as plausible and (mostly) unambiguous and the appropriate response is to fight or flee. This paper concentrates on the personal insult, in particular three personal insults in non-standard contemporary adolescent French: kehba, ta mère, and mytho.

There have been shifts in social identity theory and consequent shifts in sociolinguistics which raise questions about work which considers variables such as ethnicity or gender in isolation, and which is essentially quantitative. In social identity theory, the principal development has been towards the view that identity, whether it be gender, ethnicity, status or sexuality, is not isolated from other identities, that identity is constantly being performed and constructed. If identity is constructed then, in great part, this is achieved through interaction, the vast majority of which is polite. This study of recognition and perceptions of insult performance in the speech community of adolescent schoolchildren in a number of schools in France and in French Guyana provides us with a (perceived) performance framework to help inform general theories about language use and ethnicity and identity. As far as definitions of ethnicity are concerned, I use Ben Rampton's work Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents (Manchester: St Jerome, 1995/2005) in particular because of what he defines as language crossing between ethnic groups. This is because it seems that my data reveals some evidence of such crossing in the use of insults. However, it is clear that the results that my data indicate in terms of perceived insult use and ethnic identity are indeed not restricted to the influence of ethnicity but are also influenced by both location and socio-economic status.

 

This page last modified 8 February, 2012 by UCL Mellon Admin