THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND THE CONCEPT OF LINGUISTIC IDENTITY

Linguistic identity is largely a political matter and languages are flags of allegiance. This means that the instrumental view of language is fundamen-tally flawed. If anything, it is the pre-theoretical sense that communication is possible or desirable in given contexts or, more technically, the presence of a relatively stable speech community, that makes us postúlate the existence of a common language. So too, it is the unwillingness to communicate or the unavailability of the means to do so that pavés the way for the sense that there are insuperable linguistic barriers to contend with. The immediate upshot of this line of reasoning is that there are no such things as languages, if by 'languages ' we mean natural objects that are "out there", waiting to be dis-covered, described, and catalogued by the linguist. What this means is that there is an urgent need to foreground the issue of the politics of language