Multiple Indices in Social Identity Indexicality

Multiple non-referential indices can be employed to index the social identity of a speaker. An example of how multiple indexes can constitute social identity is exemplified by Elinor Ochs discussion of copula deletion: “That Bad” in American English can index a speaker to be a child, foreigner, medical patient, or elderly person. Use of multiple non-referential indices at once (for example copula deletion and raising intonation), helps further index the social identity of the speaker as that of a child [6].

Linguistic and non-linguistic indices are also an important ways of indexing social identity. For example, the Japanese utterance -wa in conjunction with raising intonation (indexical of increasing affect) by one person who “looks like a woman” and another who looks “like a man” may index different affective dispositions which, in turn, can index gender difference. Ochs and Schieffilen also claim that facial features, gestures, as well as other non-linguistic indices may actually help specify the general information provided by the linguistic features and augment the pragmatic meaning of the utterance [7].

Oinoglossia (‘Wine Talk’)

For demonstrations of higher (or rarefied) indexical orders, Michael Silverstein discusses the particularities of “life-style emblematization” or “convention-dependent-indexical iconicity” which, as he claims, is prototypical of a phenomenon he dubs “wine talk.” Professional wine critics use a certain “technical vocabulary” that are “metaphorical of prestige realms of traditional English gentlemanly horticulture” [8]. Thus, a certain “lingo” is created for this wine that indexically entails certain notions of prestigious social classes or genres. When “yuppies” use the lingo for wine flavors created by the these critics in the actual context of drinking wine, Silverstein argues that they become the “well-bred, interesting (subtle, balanced, intriguing, winning, etc.) person” that is iconic of the metaphorical “fashion of speaking” employed by people of higher social registers, demanding notoriety as a result of this high level of connoisseurship [8]. In other words, the wine drinker becomes a refined, gentlemanly critic and, in doing so, adopts a smiliar level of connoisseurship and social refinement. Silverstein defines this as an example of higher-order indexical "authorization" in which the indexical order of this “wine talk” exists in a “complex, interlocking set of institutionally formed macro-sociological interests” [8]. A speaker of English metaphorically transfers him- or herself into the social structure of the “wine world” that is encoded by the oinoglossia of elite critics using a very particular “technical” terminology.

The use of “wine talk” or similar “fine-cheeses talk”, “perfume talk”, etc. confers upon an individual an identity-by-visible-consumption indexical of a certain macro-sociological elite identity and is, as such, an instance of higher-order indexicality.