Jennifer Garland, University California, Santa Barbara

'That's a great expression':
Authenticity, purism, and the construction of linguistic souvenirs in Ireland

Externally imposed standards of authenticity have been challenged by sociolinguists, but authenticity as an ideological construct remains important to speakers. Of particular interest for the purposes of this talk are the ways in which tourism foregrounds issues of consumption as well as authenticity, in particular, the desire on the part of the tourist to consume an 'authentic' experience.

Based on an ethnographic study of a summer language school that attracts approximately half its students from within Ireland and the other half from 30 other countries, this paper presents a detailed analysis of classroom
interaction, showing how issues of authenticity are negotiated among the participants and how the presence of a tourism frame affects the interaction. In the data, the construction of particular utterances in Irish as more or less authentic than others is based on associations with certain kinds of speakers as well as on linguistic features of the utterance itself. The authentication of utterances in classroom interaction can involve a 'provenance' by which the teacher explicates where and by whom an expression has been previously uttered. Moreover, expressions containing salient features of Irish grammar and phonology are recognized by participants as especially authentic, while expressions that exhibit influence from English are de-authenticated. The idea that linguistic forms can have degrees of "Irishness" is part of an ideology of linguistic purism that is found to be prominent in the construction of authenticity at the school. I also argue that the authentication of utterances in this manner forms part of a commodified approach to language, in which the most highly authenticated expressions are valued as 'linguistic souvenirs.'