The language of belonging and otherness in a Diachronic Corpus of Indian English (DICIE)

Abstract

The study explores how individual and collective identity(ies) can be constructed and conveyed by language in communicative contexts taking place in language contact situations. Crucial to this concept is the notion of social identity and its construction by means of linguistic devices that sometimes show great variability. Identity as ‘representation and negotiation of social roles’ (De Fina, 2003, p. 51) can be seen therefore as intrinsically related to specific linguistic choices and strategies at both community and individual levels. In order to study the effects of such processes on the emergence of a ‘grammar of identity’ in contact situations, a comparative study of data collected in a Diachronic Corpus of Indian English (dicie) has been conducted as part of a broader project which is being carried out at the University of Salerno. Following a similar procedure adopted in studies on the automatic detection and extraction of semantically and grammatically annotated data, corpus-based evidence was matched with a linguistic matrix adapted from Wodak et al. (2009, p. 35) to identify the systematic use of linguistic forms which might constitute those ‘core’ and salient features contributing to the discursive construction of speakers’ identities in language contact situations.