Regional Identity

Regional identity

London – posh, rich or chavy, rough

Essex – orange, stupid, fake, tarty

Scotland – haggis, kilts. Ginger, drink irn bru, beards

France – snails, frogs, mime, Paris, romance

Wales – mate with sheep, rugby

Cornwall – farmers, inbred, countryside

Andrew Higson  (1998)

“Identity is generally understood to be the shared identity of naturalized inhabitants of a particular political – geographic space- this can be a particular nation or region.”

“Representations of natural/regional identity are constructed as the narrative of the text unfolds, as characters are pitted against one another, so a sense of identity emerges, but at the same producers often resort to stereotyping as a mean of establishing character and identity”

“Stereotyping is a form of shorthand, a way of establishing character by adopting recognisable and well established conventions of representation… the stereotype reduce characters to the most basic form and attempts to naturalise them and the more widely recognisable they become the more readily they are accepted. Except that if a stereotype becomes more widely recognisable it becomes comic.”

“As Britain becomes visibly multicultural. So the makers of media texts have attempted to deal with plurality, to find space in representation for cultural minorities, ethnic or otherwise. In doing so, the cultural boundaries of the nation have been redefined, and a wider, more extended and hybrid national ‘community’ imagined.”

Benedict Anderson (1983) 

“The unification of people in the modern world is achieved not by military but by the cultural means, in particular the media system enables people (of a nation or region) to feel part of a coherent, meaningful and homogenous community.”

Corrigan (1992)

“Identity is fluid, unstable and contingent on circumstances.”

Medhurst (1997)

“Awful because they aren’t like us” anyone who is not a white British middle class, straight male gets slated.

Colloquial Dialect – words you would expect to hear said in a certain region

Semantic field