 Okay, our next speaker of this panel is Laura Callahan, who is an associate professor of Hispanic linguistics at City College and Graduate Center. And Dr. Callahan's topic today is pre-constructed versus discursive negotiation of group and individual identities. So please welcome Dr. Callahan. Good morning, and I'd like to thank the organizers very much for inviting me to have this opportunity. I want to take this opportunity actually to really generate a discussion afterward because the topic I'm going to be speaking about is something that I am learning about and turning over in my mind. So two positions often arise in discussions of sociolinguistic research, and these positions each go by various names, but are often presented grosso moto as two opposing sides. Under the first position, groups and their members are categorized a priori, according to properties such as gender, race, ethnicity, native speaker. And this position is often referred to as essentialist or even positivist. Under the second position, which is most often put forward as the preferred one nowadays despite criticisms from some quarters that the methodology of such studies can lack rigor, properties such as the ones that I just mentioned cannot be imposed prior to an encounter because they are considered to be contextual, negotiable, subject to change within interactions between individual speakers. This position has been referred to as constructionist or sometimes constructivist. But even when the categories that I mentioned a minute ago are considered to have been imposed before an encounter takes place, there is recognition that they are still social constructs. So I'm not pitting essentialism against constructionism so much as I am asking when the construction is supposed to have taken place, strictly speaking. Pre-interaction at a more or less macro level or during each interaction at a more micro level. I'd like to give a brief overview of some of my research and how it might relate to this issue of the pre-imposition versus institute construction of group and individual identities. My project on Spanish and English in U.S. service encounters had three stages. There were interviews with service workers on their use of Spanish and English with customers followed by participant observation of in-person service encounters in which members of a research team entered businesses in the role of customer and addressed service workers in Spanish noting the language of response. And finally participant observation of service encounters over the telephone in which we called some businesses and initiated telephone conversations in Spanish. The interviews were all conducted in New York City, the service encounters both in-person and telephone took place both in New York City and in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the second stage the in-person service encounters which at over 700 encounters contributed the largest amount of data, a variationist analysis was performed on factors that we thought might influence workers language choice when addressed in Spanish by customers. Statistically the customers Latino or non-Latino ethnicity was found to be the most important factor in whether or not the worker reciprocated the customer's use of Spanish. The percentages of English language response to questions asked in Spanish were more than twice as high for the non-Latino field workers as for their Latino counterparts on the research team. Now non-reciprocal language choice which I would define here as the use of a language other than the one in which one's interlocutor has just spoken can be considered from several angles. It can be a way for speakers of a minority language to enhance group distinctiveness and a way for speakers of both minority and majority languages to exclude out-group members. It can actually be a form of accommodation to an interlocutor or it can be a form of non-accommodation. But regardless of the motives for any given speaker's non-reciprocal language choice it presents a challenge for language learners and second language users which is the business of at least some of us here. Many of us teach people to be second language users or we are in departments where that is one of the primary enterprises and many of us are second language users in our professional and personal lives. Now a report from a reader on my work on service encounters provided the major impetus for this morning's presentation for which I'm very grateful. The reader criticized its ratification of and I quote the concept of in-group, out-group that assumes sharp distinctions, non-porous boundaries between the supposedly separate and discreet social and linguistic groups, each with an essentialized and often racialized native language and native speaker identity, end quote. Now my response in my mind was that I believe that the concept of in-group, out-group is actually a useful one to explain what takes place when members of different groups encounter one another in public. At the risk of sounding circular, this model accounts for what people do when they're acting as group members. Use of the social, psychological, in-group, out-group construct is not mutually exclusive I believe with acknowledging the occasional porousness of boundaries. Now in regard to the racialization of a language and its speakers, Ercioli 1996, Sentea 97, 2003 have documented the racialization of Spanish in the U.S. and of U.S. Latinos. And the comments of people who participated in the interviews for my research also reflected this racialization. As Ercioli states, quote, racializing discourses speak of unindividuated populations where the emphasis is on natural ascribed attributes. On the other hand, ethnicity is more associated with cultural and natural origin as opposed to natural or biological attributes. The same reader criticized my characterization of, quote, language preference itself being based on an external ideology that dictates which language is to be spoken in a given speech situation stating that this points to a rather underdeveloped notion of ideology as somehow being external to the interaction. And still continue with the quote, a more nuanced and reflexive position consistent with much research into language ideologies might be that ideologies may be instantiated reconstructed and even contested in any given encounter such that ideologies are not external but central to and contextually shaped in talk, end quote. Language ideology may in some cases be created at the international level. I believe this does not mean that external ideologies cease to exist or to have influence. In my interviews with the service workers, repeated mention was made of workplace language ideologies that dictated the use of English in the presence of customers or dictated the accommodation to the customer's non-English language choice even when it was counterintuitive to the worker. For example, when the customer's language choice didn't match the customer's appearance and following from this didn't correspond to the worker's perhaps stereotypical association of one or the other language with that particular customer. In one instance in the interviews a person described how she would bring her own ideology to an interaction according to which she would accommodate to a Spanish speaker who were a customer at her workplace and again this was in New York City but not to strangers in other situations such as stores in which she herself were the customer and she expressed quite negative judgments about such individuals for their use of a non-English language in public. I think this gives support to the belief that ideology can be individual or societal but more important in either case it can be in existence prior to an interaction. So I wouldn't agree that it's accurate to say that ideologies are always contextually shaped in talk but my focus isn't mutually exclusive of that and I would, the word focus is key here, I would contend that this is somewhat of a question of focus. So language race and ethnicity have been rather central to my project on service encounters. Ethnicity of interlocutor as determined by physical appearance has been observed to influence which language is selected by adults and by children as young as age two. In many cases language choice is seen to be based on what knowledge the speaker has about the linguistic competence of the person to whom he or she is talking. Assumptions about linguistic competence similar to assumptions about ethnicity are often based on physical appearance. Now in cases where the address is known to have proficiency in more than one language the speaker is likely to select whichever language is supposed to be the address he's native one or the one that is most associated with his or her ethnic group and these things are not always synonymous depending on your definition of native language which I'll get back to in a minute. Now anecdotes about initiating an exchange in Spanish or in another language other than English in the US and being answered in English often involves speculation about the role of physical appearance. Now as we know Latinos as well as non-Latinos can be of any race and this is reflected on the census terminology. Nevertheless, popular stereotypes persist a fact which was borne out when participants were shown photographs of hypothetical customers during the interviews that I conducted and when they described how they decided which language to use to address customers in first time encounters and several individuals cited physical appearance as their main criterion. So in other words they were telling me what they had done in actual encounters in their workplace and what they would do in hypothetical situations. Anecdotally four native speakers of Spanish living in New York City these people were not members of the not part of the research per se reported to me encounters in which their use of Spanish had been received with surprise and which interlocutors in this case service workers and establishments that they had entered to transact some business had continued to address them in English. These four individuals were from Spain, Venezuela, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic. Each had the physical characteristics of a Western European phenotype. In other words they looked like me. So here we have a glimpse of the racialization of Spanish in the US that as I mentioned has been studied by researchers such as Anasella Sentea and Banior Ciolli. I mentioned that one's native language and the language associated with one's ethnic group are not always synonymous which I'm sure will not come as a surprise to anybody here. So far I've been using the terms native speaker and non-native speaker as based on language competence and order of acquisition. However problematic those criteria might be in their own right. But many of the interviewees in my study as well as indeed researchers in other studies that I've seen use the terms native speaker and non-native speaker as more or less synonymous with in group and out group member. In group member in this case means a person who acquires the label native speaker by way of inheritance in the sense that Rampton 1995 uses and I quote inheritance occurs within social boundaries while affiliation takes place across them end quote. So non-Latinos who learn Spanish like myself have a connection to the language by affiliation outside or across social boundaries whereas Latinos with various degrees of linguistic proficiency in Spanish including those who have none all have a connection to the language by inheritance inside social boundaries. Now at this point you might wonder why I would cite Rampton in a paper in which I appear to be defending essentialism but I do so because if you can cross a boundary there has to be one in the first place. So getting back to service encounters there is a substantial body of work on language choice in service encounters and I'd be happy to send a bibliography to anybody who might be interested. Today I'd like to mention just one case Bernstein 1994 reporting on her experience as a westerner speaking Shona in Harare the capital city of Zimbabwe and I'll read you a rather lengthy quote she reports after a month of going to the same market using Shona with the clerks and being answered in English I gave up. On the 31st day I walked in and said good morning. The clerk frowned and said but you are the lady who always speaks to us in Shona and I said yes and you always answer me in English and he said we do thus I discovered another reason for the difficulties that learners experience in trying to speak Shona with bilinguals. The clerks in the store had not been consciously choosing English but it had automatically been chosen as the appropriate language for a non Shona conversation partner end quote. Now this automatic choice is consonant with Bordeaux's view of habitus I think a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. Following from that Joseph 2004 highlights the shift from identity production speaker centered to identity reception stating that quote the identities others interpret onto us in other words our listeners will be shaped by their own habitus end quote and not necessarily by the identity that we ourselves wish to project or the identity that we consider to be our own true one. So these frameworks while not totally excluding the possibility of strictly discursive construction I believe also support preconceived and imposed identities categories. So as I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation this is somewhat of a new line of inquiry for me from strict sociolinguistic variationist work and the reason is to I'm hoping to spark a discussion on the dichotomous way in which essentialism and constructionism are often framed. As I noted my work was criticized by a reader based on what we're seen as essentialist notions of race, age, ethnicity and gender which were the variables in my study and it was proposed that discursive social constructionist theories of identity would have more validity and I don't disparage such frameworks I'm simply not convinced that essentialism if we want to call it that or if we want to invent some euphemism for it and social constructionism are mutually exclusive but I argue that if one's interlocutor is guided by a so-called essentialist definition of who or what one is then that has a certain force and social consequences that have to be acknowledged and I think that we can distinguish between believing ourselves on the one hand as academics in the inherent absolute existence of categories such as race, ethnicity, native language and on the other hand in recognizing that others do believe in their existence and just as an aside I wonder how much joint construction of identity there can be in brief one-time interactions not saying there can be none but I think this is an important question because it is this type of interaction these brief one-time interactions where both where the people are unknown to one another that can have very negative consequences if the participants approach the interaction with preconceived notions of of one another and so I'm looking forward to the discussion after the panel thank you