Ethnic and linguistic identity: present and past.

The author reflects on the different ways of understanding the concept of identity and the relationships that identity has with the different language paradigms (structuralism and chomskyan formalism versus the approach of those who consider language as inseparable from the speakers and their agencies). In the light of the initial theoretical considerations, the author evaluates how the sense of ethnic belonging has been used in different historical moments to reinforce linguistic groups’ identity function. In fact, the ethnic arguments of authors of the archaic and classical Greece, as, e.g., Herodotus, were then taken over the course of history up to the time of modern nationalisms. Language attitudes brought on the scene by Aristophanes in some comedies are analyzed as a case study suitable to show the linguistic means employed to represent the Athenian identity on the scene at the end of the 5th century BC. Finally, the author draws on the results of an international survey just ended to show the means most frequently used to represent the personal identity in discourse level.