Language crossing and the problematisation of ethnicity and socialisation

Abstract

Language crossing involves code alternation by people who are not accepted members of the group associated with the second language that they are using. This chapter begins by noting two processes that have been generally overlooked in sociolinguistics. Firstly, the prevailing approaches to ethnicity have tended to neglect the processes through which individuals can either adopt someone else’s ethnicity, or get together with them and create a new one. Secondly, socialisation in sociolinguistics is most commonly seen as enculturation into an ingroup, not as a process of learning to like and live with social and ethnic difference. The chapter aims to try to throw some light on the ‘new ethnicities’ and their implications for socialisation by referring to some sociolinguistic research on multiracial friendship groups in Britain. It suggests that at the level of behavioural ideology, there was an unsettled debate about group-membership-as-acquired-disposition and group-membership-as-situated-performance being conducted in the code crossing practices of a multiracial adolescent peergroup.