Delicacies

The papers in the second half of this volume all testify to the way in which the study of identity has moved from categorial (yes/no) distinctions towards the delicacies of social and cultural positions in discourse. They also show that in order for such finer distinctions to take shape in analysis, attention needs to be given to details of the deployment of specific discourse and semiotic resources. None of the analyses falls into the wide-open trap of equating ‘language’ with identity; they all focus on connections between actual discourse and semiosis, and subject/speaker positions, inhabited and ascribed micro-identities, and features of the social and cultural imagination that determine available identity repertoires. They represent, thus, a stage in a paradigm shift that has been underway for a couple of decades now, in which scholars abandon homogenizing and static categorial notions of identity (as in ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ identity) and develop performative, inter-subjective and pragmatic/metapragmatic models of identity. In sociolinguistics, the paradigm shift is one that takes us from a sociolinguistics of static and immobile languages associated with ‘communities’ to a sociolinguistics of mobile resources and speech associated with flexible networks of language participants. This process is not complete and steps in it, consequently, bear the traces of the older paradigm. Thus, Tsitsipis and Georgeakopoulou & Finnis start their analysis from within a ‘community’, rather traditionally defined. In Tsitsipis’ case, the community is defined as a ‘national minority’ of Arvanitika speakers – a definition that incorporates both a state categorisation device of ‘minorities’ and an older ethnolinguistic-identity diacritic, and both are of questionable validity in empirical terms. In the case of Georgakopoulou & Finnis, the national paradigm also emerges, diasporically this time, in defining the community as ‘Greek Cypriots in London’, and the same restrictions apply here. In both papers, there is a tension between the flexible and constantly shifting microscopic identity patterns (or ‘positioning’ patterns) that are analytically demonstrated, and the a priori and conservative categorisation of the research target groups that forms the point of departure of the research. The tension occurs whenever the ‘community’ is described as ‘changing’: Undoubtedly such changes occur, and some of these changes (e.g. the alternated or ‘confused’ use of ‘Greek’ and ‘Cypriot’ by Georgakopoulou & Finnis’ respondents) may call into question the foundations of the community. The reference point for such changes, we can see from such examples, need not be a traditional conception of national, ethnic or ethnolinguistic communities, because all of these categories are products of particular (‘modernist’) paradigms of scholarship, and features of the ‘modern’ nation-state apparatuses for distinguishing people. We see such apparatuses at work in Giaxoglou’s data, where an early (‘modernist’) philologist deploys particular orthographic tactics in the representations of