Maintaining Identities of Distinction in Taiwan through the Foregrounding of Linguistic Abilities

In his seminal work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates how the cultivation of taste serves to reproduce class differences. In this talk, I argue that class divisions are similarly being reproduced today based on proficiency in languages of wider communication – particularly English. After discussing the mechanisms by which identities of distinction (or any identities, for that matter) are produced in interaction, I will present interview data from a longitudinal multi-case study illustrating how this process of practices and performance indexing dominant ideologies plays out in Taiwanese society. The study’s multilingual Taiwanese participants repeatedly point out instances in which they have distinguished themselves from those around them through their use of and (relative) proficiency in English (and to a lesser degree, French). For these participants, images of themselves as more worldly and sophisticated than their peers started to be nurtured quite early in life through tuition classes and private tutoring, and from that point on, they continuously struggled to maintain these identities of distinction, often resorting to performativity to foreground their linguistic practices. These participants, however, viewed their differentiated status as somewhat precarious, for accompanying their repeated reports of attempting to stand out through English use was a frequently expressed anxiety about the fact that their English abilities alone might not continue to adequately differentiate them from others, particularly in the employment arena, as more and more Taiwanese gain English proficiency.