CLS 35 Part 2: Papers from the Panels Language, Identity, & the Other ChiPhon ‘99 New Syntheses: uiteDisciplinary Approaches to Basic Units of Speech Theory & Linguistic Diversity April 22 - 24, 1999 Edited by: Sabrina J. Billings John P. Boyle Aaron M. Griffith University of Chicago CHICAGO LINGUISTIC SOCIETY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 14a4 NIMBY Goes Linguistie: Conflicted ‘Voicings’ from the Culture of Local Language Communities Michael Silverstein ‘The University of 180, {An essential aspect of how people recognize their owm ‘identity’ — briefly, 8 bundle of macrosociological atributes as subjectively recognized ~ is revealed through language. Though often overlooked or underanalyzed, it invelves attitudes evidenced toward standard vs. other registers of a language (ef. the immense body of Labovian variationist work), toward distinct norms of grammer (cf, the “code-switching” and “code-mixing” literatures [e ., Gal (1979, 1987, inti 1989), Kroskrity (1993, 2000), Urciuoli (1996), Woolard (1989, 1995, (2270). or toward particular languages within a complex speech community (ef the classic work of Lambert etal. e.g., (1966)). Without concurrent investigation of language atitudes, the value of any study of language-and-identty by stadying ‘variation in a population is, of course, vtiated, since one does not even know how. 10 code observational data without knowing scales of valued/devalued forms and usages in relation to people's membership in a social formation like a “speech Pommunity” or ‘language cotnmuunity”. ‘An especially vivid route into such identty-revealing attitudes is through the analysis of how people in certain social positions articulate their views of Usually, the figure NIMBY is inscribed as the image of the politically correct individual in relation to a social good about to happen ~ cf. the bumper sticker ~ in to0 close proximity: “Not In My Back Yard!” It is usually heard in discourse about waste dumps, half-way houses, and other good works of Contemporary politicoeconomic progressivism. More abstractly, NIMB Yiem is a Stance that wants to keep a valued social good at some remove from self, and tce-versa: it is verbally manifested in tropes of distance, Similar things seem to happen in realms of language, The ‘voice’ of NIMBY seems to emerge near politicoeconomic boundaries of what we can term, with Appadurai (1996), “local” Communities and the more global polities that circumscribe their existence in time and space, indeed that define sometimes fiete stratifictions of cultural “capital.” We demonstrate with metalinguistic texts the recurrence of such a NIMBYesque ‘voicing’ in several distinct language communities, each with its distinctive cultural discourse of NIMBYism. Speakers of local New York dialects and registers vs. national standard-register norms of English enroll in “accent sradication” programs; they articulate NIMBYesque views of standard vs nonstandard register all the while seeking standard. Elite leamers of Irish Gaclig102 MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN in Eire, already monolingual in (British) English, can fulfill hothouse (or boutique”) ethnic revivalism only by embracing the heritage language they do not speak (well or at all), yet find all sorts of reasons to hedge their bets by insisting on unachievable purity, deferring the goal indefinitely. Code-switching and -mixing Nahuatl (Mexicano)-Spanish speaking elites in the Malinche volcano area of Mexico insist on “pure” Nahuatl for everyone but ttemselves, whose mixed “power code” (J. Hill [1998]) puts them at the boundary of the two stratified language communities. Bae Indeed, ideologies of *locality’ - and hence of self-ocation ~ increasingly dominate complex, plurilingual speech communities everywhere in the contemporary world, so as to (re)energize language communities that may be in various stages of subordination and/or moribundity. Anthropolcgical linguists are drawn into these processes as ideological actors no less than ethnolinguistically identifying ‘locals’, of course. Introducing NIMBY ‘There is Nimby. of course, known to parents as the cute little cloud blown across the sea in an eponymous children's Bildungsroman, @ novel of growing up. But there is NIMB Yism, the characteristic stance on political issues that is named for the aeronymic rendering of the phrase, “Not In My Back Yard!” When someone decidedly “green” of political coloration does everything possible so that a recycling plant is not located down the road from his or her house; when someone extraordinarily supportive of scattered-site low-income housing does everything possible so that none of such folks are moved into his or her neighborhood; when, in other words, there is a decidedly negative shuffling away from willingly carrying forward with exemplary social good things ~ in a well understood and shared conceptuaization of what is the social good ~ this metaphorically is “Not In My Back Yard!” or NIMBY behavior. The more cynical and knowing among tus (Chicago School economists? Pierre Bourdieu? self-styled “political economists of the sign?”) see a straightforward conflict between, say, greater abstract well-being of mother earth, greater social justice, etc., on the one hand, and greater wealth of the NIMBY, on the other ~ or atleast absence of threats to such things as the NIMBY’s real estate values or neighborhcod placidity. So there is a kind of conflict, in which our NIMBY holds that good things need to be accomplished, but notin his or her back yard ~ not close to him or her. Rendered in a somewhat more abstract geometry or topological conceptualization, a NIMBY favors amelioration-at-a-distance from the interested indexical origo; NIMBYism is a Bakhtinian “voicing” of interests, in fact, from a particular societal positionalty, the particular ~ and interested ~ subjectivity of a social identity (in these examples, we might imagine a bourgeois, though leftliberal owner in American society). rere tis paper, thet. I wan o connect two fumeworks The fist is the framework of how language exists in society. Part of that existence is how speakers of a language conceptualize their language. It is the reflexivity of NIMBY GOES LINGUISTIC 103 cultural consciousness. | am going to make claims about the phenomenon of what {call “linguistic (and cultural) NIMBYism.” This is a way of conceptualizing linguistic and/or cultural space in which one lives, and about which one speaks in 4 characteristically ambivalent and removed way. 1 explore some examples of linguistic NIMBYism and try to generalize about the social condition of languages, of cultures, of theit NIMBYesque spokespersons, in which such « reflective stance is likely to emerge. In this way we are tying to understand the fate of “small” languages and dialects and sociolects in the contemporary world. The second framework concems the analysis of text more generally, and how we understand the cultural values expressed in discourse. This exploration of linguistic NIMBYism is put forward to show how the concept of ‘voicing’ is a powerful entrée into the analysis of complex, large-scale, mass sociocultural Phenomena in the contemporary world as they are revealed in discourse. As a ‘concept, ‘voicing’ was originally expounded in the writings of the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), who was concerned with typologizing the nature of " novels. Of course, the narrated worlds of such works are as complex as the worlds of the authors and readers: the characters in the narrated world explicitly or implicitly move through many sites of social action relative to one another. In each such site, certain aspects oftheir macrosociological identities are brought to bear on how they relate to others, how theie context-epecifie roles are manifested, generally in talk and its equivalent, Hence ‘voicing’, the way the author in the World of narrating relates to the characters of the narrated world, as evidenced by the way the narrational text tells its story, is the bridge that aligns the identities and interests of the inhabitants of these two worlds. So the social life of our complex world can be seen as an implicit Bakhtinian novel. In other ‘words, as discursive condition where the “narrated world” is the world of cultural values, and the “narrating world” is inhabited by us ourselves, engaging in our usual kinds of verbal interaction with respect to its situations, objects and people. Ethnography in the complex contemporary condition is the mapping out of the voicing structure of a social universe. It reveals how identities and interests variously come together at different institutional sites of social interaction around various issues, in plot-like conditions of potential transformation. Through the ‘careful location of by degrees and flavors “normative” voicings we gain insights into deep cultural values that are only symbolically and contextually manifested by usin the day-to-day life of engaging with each other in myriad ways From Bach to Bakhtin the first piece of theoretical or conceptual machinery we nced for our (Bakhtinian) voicing. You will recall from such works as “Discourse in the novel” that the term ‘voice’ in Bakhtin’s original Russian, golos, is a musicological term and applies to the voicing structure of musical composition, A voice in music is not a single instrument playing solo; a voice is a compositional fraction that articulates a relatively isolable musical syntagm Contributing to the whole, to the entire metricalized poetic effect of the musical