Language and Borders

Linguistic elements such as phonemes, lexemes, and syntactic or morphological rules cannot be taken for granted as the shape in which border-making elements come. From the actor’s viewpoint, border-making elements take on their social reality as “languages,” “accents,” “mixing,” or “words.” These terms emerge among the people to whom language identities matter, in relations shaped by the politics of ethnicity, race, and class within the nation and by the politics of ethnic nationalism.