Orlando Patterson LANGUAGE , ETHNICITY , AND CHANGE

My objectives are several: I want to clarify what ethnicity means and what it does not meancannot mean; I want to clarify the relationship, if any, between language and ethnicity, from the viewpoint of a sociologist who views language as a component of culture and not of a linguist or sociolinguist whose primary focus is language itself; and I want to consider how it is that bidialectism or bilingualism can be either a creative process or an impediment, the circumstances under which one or the other is likely, the way in which ethnicity relates to the outcome. I shall explore these issues by comparing the experience of Black Americans and Black Caribbean peoples, especially those in the Commonwealth Caribbean. I shall conclude with some remarks about the implications of what I have to say for what has been called a literate democracy. Few terms are subject to more confusion than the term "ethnicity." It is essentially a form of group consciousness in which the primary focus of one's identity is a group which is defined in a quite arbitrary way. The actual content of belief, the cultural or other basis of this identity, is secondary to the fact of having chos'!n it as the basis of identity. Ethnicity has three aspects: first , a belief dimension, the element of consciousness, of primary focus ; second, a group dimension, the group with which one identifies on the basis of this criterion; and third, a dimension often ignored, an ideological component, a commitment to the idea of ethnicity itself. The best way to illustrate this is to refer to religion where, similarly, there is a belief component, the theology or belief system; a group component, the church; but also, just as important, a commitment to the idea of religion itself; so much so that it is possible no longer to subscribe very much to the belief or to participate in the group, the church, but nonetheless to have a strong commitment to the idea of the thing itself. Every child who has been forced to go to church by parents who themselves never go knows the difference between the actuality of something and a