Abstract
Explores the idiom-identity complex in Cuba in the first three decades of the twentieth century, concentrating on an emblematic catalog of the idiomatic raw material of the Cuban language community: Fernando Ortiz's vernacular dictionary, 'Un Catauro de cubanismos' from 1923. Author considers the critical complex of history, geography, and identity within Ortiz's dictionary.
Language and identity are irrevocably enmeshed. From within the infinitely complex quotidian chaos, language articulates, performs, and expresses experience. each moment’s mayhem is tamed by the narrative solace of “beginning,” “middle,” and “end” and it is through the articulation of solitary andegoistic experience that isolated “I” becomes known to, and part of, the collective “We.” For Roy Harris, “language-making is ... the essential process by which men construct a cultural identity for themselves, and for the communities to which they see themselves as belonging” (Harris 1980:Preface). This sense of “language community” inevitably displaces others beyond the borders of collective expression; shared readings of shared experiences are catalysts for community coalescence and narrative self-defense