Language, Culture and Identity

Book excerpt: Are people's identities an effect of their membership of linguistic, national regional and ethnic groups, and does such group membership create problems for "inter-cultural communication"? These questions are addressed in this collection of nine papers from the Third Annual Conference of the Nordic Network for Intercultural Communications. Answers are drawn from general, theoretical, pedagogical and empirical points of view. They agree on one fundamental issue: the language-identity-cutlure complex, dynamic and overlapping rather than static and isomorphic. This leads the contributions to touch upon the political implications of a relational and dynamic view on language, culture, human rights and regional identities in a Europe with crumbling national boundaries. Among the topics are whether a person's identity is bound to a certain place and whether it is constant. Others discuss cross-cultural communication, a post-structuralist stance, different values ascribed to words and actions; the ability of people to interact with different cultures; the cross-cultural language link in language teaching; what language choice says about people and their attitudes towards each other when more than one language is available; and a recognition that most of us are members of several cultural groups, which can create incompatible values and attitudes.