The Discursive Construction of Austrian National Identity - page 1
Keywords: German; Austrian; Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; discourse; identity; analysis
By sth202 on 25/09/2008
Level: Bachelor Honours Degree (BA, BEng, BSc etc)
Page Number: 1 of 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
The Discursive Construction of Austrian National Identity
January 2006
The Discursive Construction of Austrian National Identity
“Ways of talking, or ideological discourses, do not develop in social vacuums, but they are related to forms of life. In this respect, ‘identity,’ if it is to be understood as a form of talking, is also to be understood as a form of life” (Billig 1995: 60). It has never occurred to me to think about what identity is, that it is actually quite complex, and therefore nor how to define it or why it should be important to have a sense of belonging to a particular country and being a part of its culture. Billig (1995: 7) states that “it is seldom clear what an identity is,” in fact, and Meinhof and Galasiński claim that “questions of belonging, of cultural identities and identifications represent some of the most significant challenges to social life in our times” (2005: 1). It is for this reason that I am looking at what actually determines a person’s interpretation of nationality, based on my own interview with an Austrian female who has been living in Britain for five years but coupled with general observations. This essay attempts to address what national identity could be perceived as, as well as discovering what it means to be Austrian in this day and age. It also aims to discuss why identity is fluid, that is to say it has been described as “never signifying anything static, unchanging, or substantial, but rather always an element situated in the flow of time, ever changing, something involved in a process,” (Wodak et al 1999: 11), as being “a process, not a state” (Jaworski and Coupland 1999: 408), and “an ongoing process of becoming: always provisional, always subject to change” (Meinhof and Galasiński 2005: 8). Cameron (2001: 170) supports this assertion, in affirming that “a person’s identity is not something fixed, stable and unitary that they acquire early in life and possess for ever afterwards.” She continues this train of thought in stipulating that it is more readily “shifting and multiple,” something that people are frequently building up and rebuilding in their experiences with each other and their surroundings. We can therefore presume that it is affected by everything that happens around the individual concerned and so the identity one feels one has in one’s home country may not be the same as the sense of
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