The craft of reference: the Welsh language and the division of labor in nineteenth century slate quarries

Abstract

If non-quarriers in Wales came to see the Welsh language and slate-quarrying to be intrinsically, indeed ethnically, linked (Merfyn Jones, 1986, 1992), this was so only because the quarriers themselves had earlier on articulated a linguistic ideology that seemed to make their linguistic Welshness an integral ‘factor of production’ that confirmed them in their role as workers. However, the linguistic ideology was not one which presented linguistically different groups being differentially recruited to an autonomously existing division of labor by virtue of ethno-linguistic distinction, a colonial regime of ‘linguistic division of labor’ (adapted from Hechter’s ‘cultural division of labor’; Hechter, 1975, 1976). Rather, importantly, the quarriers themselves preferred to view their linguistic differences from the owners as being partially constitutive of the division of labor itself, a factor of production, so that Welshness was part of the ‘craft of reference’ that enabled aWelsh worker to properly assess slate rock referentially (which had crucial importance in wage negotations, as I will show below), part of a Putnamian ‘division of linguistic labor’. This paper seeks, by focussing in ethnographic detail on the speech genres that constituted the wage Language & Communication 21 (2001) 209–223 www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom