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2 Discourses and social
languages

2.1 Building things through language

Language has a magical property: when we speak or write we craft what we have to
say to fit the situation or context in which we are communicating. But, at the same
time, how we speak or write creates that very situation or context. It seems, then,
that we fit our language to a situation or context that our language, in turn, helped
to create in the first place.

This is rather like the “chicken and egg” question: Which comes first? The
situation we’re in (e.g. a committee meeting)? Or the language we use (our committee
ways of talking and interacting)? Is this a “committee meeting” because we are
speaking and acting this way, or are we speaking and acting this way because this
is a committee meeting? After all, if we did not speak and act in certain ways,
committees could not exist; but then, if institutions, committees, and committee
meetings didn’t already exist, speaking and acting this way would be nonsense.
The answer here is that this magical property is real and language and institutions
“boot strap” each other into existence in a reciprocal process through time.

Another way to look at the matter is this: we always actively use spoken and
written language to create or build the world of activities (e.g. committee meetings)
and institutions (committees) around us. However, thanks to the workings of history
and culture, we often do this in more or less routine ways. These routines make
activities and institutions, like committees and committee meetings, seem to (and, in
that sense, actually) exist apart from language and action in the here and now. None
the less, these activities and institutions have to be continuously and actively
rebuilt in the here and now. This is what accounts for change, transformation, and
the power of language-in-action in the world.

We continually and actively build and rebuild our worlds not just through
language, but through language used in tandem with actions, interactions, non-
linguistic symbol systems, objects, tools, technologies, and distinctive ways of
thinking, valuing, feeling, and believing. Sometimes what we build is quite similar to
what we have built before; sometimes it is not. But language-in-action is always
and everywhere an active building process.

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Whenever we speak or write, we always and simultaneously construct or build
six things or six areas of “reality”:

1. The meaning and value of aspects of the material world: I enter a plain,
square room, and speak and act in a certain way (e.g. like someone about to
run a meeting), and, low and behold, where I sit becomes the “front” of the
room.

2. Activities: We talk and act in one way and we are engaged in formally opening
a committee meeting; we talk and act in another way and we are engaged in
“chit-chat” before the official start of the meeting.

3. Identities and relationships: I talk and act in one way one moment and I am
speaking and acting as “chair” of the committee; the next moment I speak and
talk in a different way and I am speaking and acting as one peer/colleague
speaking to another.

4. Politics (the distribution of social goods): I talk and act in such a way that
a visibly angry male in a committee meeting (perhaps it’s me!) is “standing his
ground on principle,” but a visibly angry female is “hysterical.”

5. Connections: I talk and act so as to make what I am saying here and now in
this committee meeting about whether we should admit more minority students
connected to or relevant to (or, on the other hand, not connected to or relevant
to) what I said last week about my fears of losing my job given the new
government’s turn to the right.

6. Semiotics (what and how different symbol systems and different forms of
knowledge “count”): I talk and act so as to make the knowledge and language
of lawyers relevant (privileged), or not, over “everyday language” or over
“non-lawyerly academic language” in our committee discussion of facilitating
the admission of more minority students.

In Chapter 5 I will elaborate these “building tasks” and their relevance for
discourse analysis. But in the next three chapters, I want to develop several “tools
of inquiry” (ways of looking at the world of talk and interaction) that will help us
study how these building tasks are carried out and with what social and political
consequences. The tools of inquiry I will introduce in this chapter are primarily
relevant to how we (together with others) build identities and activities and recognize
the identities and activities that are being built around us. However, the tools of
inquiry introduced here are most certainly caught up with all the other building
tasks above, as well, as we will see progressively in this book. The tools to be
discussed in this chapter are:

a. “Situated identities,” that is, different identities or social positions we enact
and recognize in different settings.

b. “Social languages,” that is, different styles of language that we use to enact
and recognize different identities in different settings; different social languages

13Discourses and social languages

also allow us to engage in all the other building tasks above (in different ways,
building different sorts of things).

c. “Discourses” with a capital “D,” that is, different ways in which we humans
integrate language with non-language “stuff,” such as different ways of
thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, believing, and using symbols,
tools, and objects in the right places and at the right times so as to enact and
recognize different identities and activities, give the material world certain
meanings, distribute social goods in a certain way, make certain sorts of
meaningful connections in our experience, and privilege certain symbol systems
and ways of knowing over others (i.e. carry out all the building tasks above).

d. “Conversations” with a capital “C,” that is, long-running and important themes
or motifs that have been the focus of a variety of different texts and interactions
(in different social languages and Discourses) through a significant stretch of
time and across an array of institutions.

2.2 Whos and whats

When you speak or write anything, you use the resources of English to project
yourself as a certain kind of person, a different kind in different circumstances. You
also project yourself as engaged in a certain kind of activity, a different kind in
different circumstances. If I have no idea who you are and what you are doing, then
I cannot make sense of what you have said, written, or done.

You project a different identity at a formal dinner party than you do at the family
dinner table. And, though these are both dinner, they are none the less different
activities. The fact that people have differential access to different identities and
activities, connected to different sorts of status and social goods, is a root source
of inequality in society. Intervening in such matters can be a contribution to social
justice. Since different identities and activities are enacted in and through language,
the study of language is integrally connected to matters of equity and justice.

An oral or written “utterance” has meaning, then, only if and when it
communicates a who and a what (Wieder and Pratt 1990a). What I mean by a “who”
is a socially-situated identity, the “kind of person” one is seeking to be and enact
here and now. What I mean by a “what” is a socially-situated activity that the
utterance helps to constitute.

Lots of interesting complications can set in when we think about identity enacted
in and through language. Whos can be multiple and they need not always be people.
The President’s Press Secretary can issue an utterance that is, in fact, authored by
a speech writer and authorized (and even claimed) by the President. In this case, the
utterance communicates a sort of overlapping and compound who. The Press
Secretary, even if she is directly quoting the speech writer, must inflect the remark

2 Discourses and social languages