Authenticity in creole-speaking contexts: An Introduction

Abstract

A striving for authenticity figures prominently in people’s social behaviour, fulfilling a social-regulative function. Every individual member of a society may be authentic in a minimal sense to the different domains and levels of the collective social system – for instance to the web of cultural meanings (Geertz 1973), in which various forms of cultural learning and mimetic practices effect the conservation of traditional values and norms and make possible the prediction of the behaviour of social agents (Strathern 2004). Authenticity has also been associated with and explained in terms of “the social regulation of [a person’s] emotions” and “a personal ethical ideal” (Salmela and Mayer 2009, 2), which of course makes authenticity something which may be approached but hardly fully attained and/or sustained. Also, being authentic, as an assumed condition of autonomy, implies that a person can only be authentic, or autonomous if they “act for reasons that are truly [ their ] own ” (Betzler 2009, 51). Linguistically, the quest for authenticity expresses itself in discourse at all levels of formality and mediated indirectness, i.e. in what has been referred to as the discursive construction of authenticity and inauthenticity (Coupland 2001). Context, as an “interactively constituted mode of praxis” (Duranti and Goodwin 1992, 9), may be linguistic, social, cultural or stylistic in nature and plays an important part in producing or failing to produce authenticity. Different situational frameworks of linguistic authenticity may be distinguished, e.g. the traditional, local and supposedly “natural” environment of spontaneous face-to-face interaction, but also non-territorial spaces such as media platforms provided by local radio or online chat forums, to name but a few. As will be appreciated, the wide conception of linguistic authenticity which we are advocating here goes against both widespread folk notions of genuine dialect and the traditional consensus in variationist sociolinguistics, which both hold that the geographical or social context in which languages (or varieties) originated is where the most authentic speakers are to be found. In that respect, vernacular or basilectal Creole speakers – speakers whose speech is furthest removed from the standard form of a language – would therefore stand as the best representatives of linguistic authenticity. From the viewpoint of classic variationism, authenticity would tend to correlate with