Language display: Authenticating claims to social identity

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Abstract
Language display is a language‐use strategy whereby members of one group lay claims to attributes associated with another, conveying messages of social, professional, and ethnic identity. Examples from academia, politics, business and advertising reveal that language display functions as an artifact of crossing linguistic boundaries without threatening social boundaries or as a reaction to social boundaries which cannot be crossed. Via language display, people may either expand their social identity within a linguistic territory or make a sign of resistance where such expansion is unlikely. Whether invoking another language is interpreted favourably or not depends on the power relations between speaker(s) and hearer(s).

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