American English and the politics of place: new and old dilemmas, ambiguities and directions

From a socio-linguistic point of view, spatial descriptions, like most discourse, occur in a social context, with real addressees or implicit ones. The way people shape the places they live in or the places they encounter in their social interactions, in private and public settings, acquires great relevance in socio-linguistic research. This type of research becomes interesting from a multi-ethnic point of view especially when such shaping and construction is carried out through discourses of identity. Members of all communities, of all national and ethnic backgrounds use language to “negotiate conflicting ethnic and gender perspectives, class alignments, and hopes and fears for their neighbourhood” (Modan G.G. 2007: 6). This is one of the many reasons why the language of space, even in a socio-linguistic analysis, becomes a way of describing society not only from a socio-linguistic perspective, but also from a political one. One way of observing such an analysis could be through “the politics of place”, through how members of a set community define the place they live and are familiar with through discourses of identity. And we cannot but stress once more how the common definition of discourse never detaches language from context.