The construction of canarian identity in the first 'Telenovela' on canarian television

Abstract

As Swann et al. (2004: 140) explain, the identity of a person or a group can be expressed in several ways, by taking into account their ‘nationality, geographical location, ethnicity, gender, social class, occupation, etc.’ However one approaches the question of identity construction, it is generally accepted that it is ‘in large part established and maintained through language’ (Gumperz 1982a: 7). From a psycholinguistic perspective, Kachru (1992) argues that social identity is acquired together with the mother tongue and that, along with this social identity, a personal or individual identity is also forged. Sociolinguistic research, in turn, shows that ‘language can act as a vehicle for conveying important social information about the speaker’ and that ‘certain linguistic features come to be associated with particular local characteristics’ (Dyer 2007: 101). In fact, the identity-language link is often so strong that ‘a single feature of language use suffices to identify someone’s membership in a given group’ (Tabouret-Keller 1997: 317). A speaker’s phonetic, lexical and syntactic features frequently lead us to identify their geographical origin and, in the words of Lamíquiz (2001: 17, our translation)

We tend to attribute to each speaker a specific social behaviour, a series of life preferences, certain habitual customs, a distinctive attitude towards events, especially those concerning the communicative setting, a specific viewpoint on reality […] in summary, a hierarchy of values that we extend to a whole social group or subgroup.