Introduction

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the number of publications using identity as a key word is now in the tens of thousands per decade" (2006, p. 4).Interest in identity by scholars in the humanities is no different.According to Fearon (1999, p. 1, n. 1), in the areas of history, literature, and culture studies, "The number of dissertation abstracts using the word identity has been growing almost three times faster than the rate for all abstracted dissertations" from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.In the general area of linguistics and language studies, the fascination with identity is no exception.At the time of writing (December 2019), a search for the word identity in Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstract -a comprehensive and popular research database -turned up 20,986 results (which include journal publications, PhD dissertations, papers or chapters in edited volumes as well as authored books).To put that number into perspective, we searched other popular topics in linguistics and language studies in the same database, and none came close to the literature on identity: politeness, 3,974; speech acts, 8950; and ideology, 6967.The only other term that generated slightly more hits was culture studies, 22,092; however, culture studies is appar-

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