Social Etiquette Bound by Language? (doesn't really relate to what we've been discussing in class...)

This weekend while I was dancing in Florida, I spent a day at home because my grandparents had come to visit from China and I would not have been able to see them otherwise. However, they only speak Chinese and while I can understand some Chinese, I cannot speak it, so communication with my Chinese relatives is usually very difficult. It was even more difficult because they do not speak Mandarin Chinese (which is what I can understand), but instead speak a rare rural dialect, so only my dad could understand and speak to them, and had to translate for the whole family. Sometimes I noticed that he would be uncomfortable translating certain things that they would say or that my mom and sister and I would say because “they were not appropriate things to say” in the other language. This was especially interesting to me because for my younger sister and me, he would translate into English and back from English, but for my mom, he would translate into and from Mandarin Chinese, and even in the different dialects of Chinese, there were things that he deemed “inappropriate” to translate.

For example, in Mandarin Chinese it is normal for people to tell each other that they look very fat or very skinny when greeting each other, especially within families- and not always as a signal of how wealthy or well-fed you are, but a simply judgment that outright means “you should lose some weight” or “you need to put on some pounds.” While this was also ok in my grandparents’ dialect of Chinese, this is obviously not ok in English. In English, when one asks “how are you?” one expects to hear back “good” or even “tired but happy” but in Chinese a correct response focuses not so much on the self but on how one feels about being around the people or places around them, so a Chinese person would answer something like “happy that you are here-” my dad told me this is what he told my grandparents that I said, even though I actually just said “Good, how are you?” Also, in Mandarin Chinese, as in English, there are certain social boundaries to what you tell people of your opinion- you don’t tell someone if you don’t like their shirt or shoes. But in my grandparents’ dialect, apparently (or maybe just people from their region, which comprises all the people who speak their dialect anyway since it is so rare and rural), you are looked down upon for not being honest and telling people that their shirt makes them look fat and they shouldn’t wear it out.

I thought it was interesting how specific spoken elements of social etiquette seem so bound by the language they are spoken in. Thoughts?

Language and Racism

Let me start by trying to put my soapbox away...


I decided to look at the US English Facebook page in order to understand a perspective different than my own.  The US English website makes some (relatively) fair and honest arguments about the history of English in the US, but what do its supporters say? Surely they have logical, sound arguments as well.


The first post I read: "US law has to be clear to all citizens, therefore all citizens need to know one language."


Oh dear.  There are too many assumptions and logical fallacies for me to describe here...


Further down the page: this picture.


Surely that picture comments on that man's impolite gesture in relation to his language of choice and not the color of his skin, right?


Another gentleman: "I will work hard to recruit members as well as work to make English the Official language of the United States."


He must've accidentally hit shift on that one.  Forgivable mistake.  He's still in high school...


On the topic of Puerto Rico's commonwealth status: "all leeches..."


Or another poster: "If they become a state, they lose their "nationality" and become Americans.... therefore, welcome to hard work and speaking English! You will no longer be able to refer to your heritage as "Puerto Rican" -- that will be gone, because you will be Americans and salute the Stars & Stripes! (BTW, our National Anthem is in English too!)"


And another: "Down here in Texas if two people looking at same job the one that speaks english & spanish will get the job even if he is not as qualified for it.This is why the White male is the one being discriminated against the most. All over the USA."


There we have it.  Finally.  Language and race, intertwined and interconnected.  See, I am not trying to say that the two are always one and the same.  Instead, I am arguing that there is an undercurrent of racism hidden in the "English Only" movement.  Just looking at some of the lovely quotations above, we can see how people connect language to race, to the idea that Puerto Ricans (and possibly all immigrants?) are welcome to learn "hard work" upon achieving statehood, and that non-white, non-English speakers corrupt the moral and/or social framework of the country.  How can you tell that the guy in the picture doesn't speak? Because his skin is darker? How do you know he wasn't born and raised with the English language? Because he makes a vulgar, un-American gesture?


Unfortunately, this is one of the many reasons I cannot support any push for English to be the official language of the US.  I also disagree with the idea that one language equals one nation or vice versa, and that the "White male is the one being discriminated against the most," and that the cost would be too great for the government to bear.  But most of all, I cannot stand by a movement with such racist sentiment lurking below the surface of its arguments.


Oops, did my soapbox sneak out again?

Language policy and migration (Tollefson)

The chapter by Tollefson entitled “Language Policy and Migration” brings up some rather provocative points about language policies vis-à-vis migration. In particular, Tollefson argues that special educational provisions for immigrants, migrants and refugees are inadequate because they are “designed to channel learners into particular kinds of jobs” (104). The kinds of jobs Tollefson talks about are menial labor jobs that essentially no one else wants to do. They are also the jobs that are most vulnerable to shifts in the economy; therefore, these migrants have become welcome buffers to the volatile economy (Tollefson quotes Marshall in this on page 112). Personally, I think federally funded ESL courses structured to teach “survival English” make a lot of sense. To fund full advanced degrees or specialized English training specific to a certain industry would be far too costly. Instead, I think the approach our government should take is to move towards recognizing advanced degrees/professional certification from more countries. I think the governmet should fund booster courses that teach rules and regulations specific to the United States. Some professions are not transferable across nations—lawyers, for example. Another important point Tollefson makes is that fact that restrictive language policy will almost certainly NOT aid in unifying a nation. Rather, it will alienate minority-language communities into insular communities, which will establish the breeding ground for intense discontent. We have read many papers that point to the failures of language policy to truly weed languages out of existence, even under relatively oppressive regimes (as observed with the KMT’s Mandarin-only policies in Taiwan).

After our discussions on immigrants in both the United States and in Europe, I decided to take a quick look for research on Turkish immigrants in Germany. I came across a dissertation entitled “Turkish Language Provisions in Berlin” by Lucy Hottman from the University of Manchester. Hottman states in her abstract that she looked beyond the Turkish community to the Berlin public sector to ascertain if Turkish, and therefore multilingualism, was institutionally promoted in Germany. Her conclusion?

“The observations reveal a clear lack of any linguistic policy at state or federal level other than that of ignoring languages other than German. A host of provisions can be observed but these are rather random measures often initiated by individuals. They are not aimed at promoting multilingualism but rather at facilitating communication for citizens who do not speak German. Furthermore minimal provisions in the area of education appear to be more decorative than substantial. Clearly Berlin's increasing multilingualism is not recognised as something to be protected. On the contrary, in spite of the fact that Germany is obviously an immigration nation, public services reflect the still prevalent monolingual ideology: In Germany we speak German” (Hottman 7).

http://languagecontact.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/McrLC/casestudies/LH.html.

Accessed March 20th, 2011

This echoes the article about whether the U.S. has a language policy, or just civil rights. Essentially, even in the U.S. we don’t have an official policy, and even the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 (and now expired) was instituted “to teach English to children from non-English speaking backgrounds” (Spolsky 100). Thus, in Germany and the U.S., German and English respectively are seen as the languages of success, and while both are multicultural states, the unofficial policy is assimilation through lack of support for foreign/migrant language teaching.

This brings us back to the question of whether or not the state has a responsibility to provide bilingual education. Another complication is at what level? Education in both German and the United States is under jurisdiction of the states. Should the United States and Germany issue federal policies on bilingual education? What would be the pros and cons of such a policy?

Very cool video

I was thinking of something to post then I came about this marvelous video

Minority Language Rights

I think one of the biggest things that we have assumed in this class, and that linguists seem to assume in general, is that everyone has an inherent right to learn and use their language and that every language and thus, language speaker, is equal. Therefore, we shouldn't discriminate against someone just because they speak a different language or especially because they speak a minority language.

But why is this true? I am not contesting that it is true or not- just asking why we assume it to be so. In my view, the reason it's wrong to discriminate against gender or race or sexual orientation is because they aren't conscious choices that people make. They are born with their gender or race or sexual orientation and cannot change it because they are biological features. However, language is not the same deal. People are not born with a certain language, though to some extent it is determined by the family they are born into and where they are born. Also, people have the ability to learn new languages throughout their lives. You do not have to be a baby, learning in an immersive environment, in order to pick up a new language. Therefore, is it really discrimination if employers don't want to hire people who don't speak the same language as the rest of their employees? Or if they can't receive certain political benefits because they cannot understand the language that political documents are written in? After all, they do have the choice to learn that language if they want to.

The universality of language rights, and some other considerations

In thinking about the language rights that ought to be guaranteed, it is important to consider a couple things. First, what rights actually fall under the umbrella of language rights? Is it simply the legal right to speak one’s own language? Or does it extend to the right to be understood? One might equate language rights with the freedom of speech. But really, the freedom of speech doesn’t require that others understand you. The right to use your language, on the other hand, requires help from those on the receiving end. In other words, guaranteeing language right might require that the State and civil servants to use the language and understand it. Second, would language rights be able to address the distributive inequalities that currently exist with official languages? What kind of equitable solution would give people the right to use their own language but not trade of things like efficiency and practicality? Third, do different political systems require different language rights? Certainly, the right to use one’s own language and be understood is more essential in a democratic state than in a totalitarian state. A democracy involves more than just a ballot and the formal right to cast a vote. It is about participating in democratic discussions. Yet to do that, one must have a strong grasp on the language used in the political sphere. Therefore, I think advancing democracy requires us to think deeply about language policy and language rights. Different political systems have different needs for language rights, which makes me think that language rights are perhaps universal human rights.

The Definition of a Minority Language

I think it would be interesting to determine a working definition for a minority language in our class. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages defines a “regional or minority language” as “traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State’s population; and different from the official language(s) of that State” (2). I highlight the emphasis on numerical here because Stephen May, in Language Policy and Minority Rights, states that a minority group “is based not on numerical size, but on clearly observable differences among groups in relation to power, status, and entitlement” (255). He doesn’t offer any further definition of a minority language, but continues to expand on the theme of socio-political power differentials between minority and majority languages.

Let’s focus for a second on the concept of whether or not a minority language can be numerically defined. It seems practical to say that if only a small part of the population, or a less than majority amount, speak a language, than that could be a minority language. However, it is possible for a powerful minority to impose their language on the majority of the populace. The charter takes this into consideration, though, by stating that a minority language must be different than the official language. I agree with May in that many other factors such as power and status need to be observed, but I think that for practical purposes numbers can be used to define a minority language in a state. This runs into problems with how people will be counted – what if there is no census in the country?

The second part of the Charter’s definition is more problematic. It states that a minority language “does not include other dialects of the official languages of the State or the languages of migrants.” Who defines what is a dialect or not? What happens if they are mutually unintelligible? Turkey used to say Kurdish was “Mountain Turkish” even though it is linguistically very distinct. Furthermore, I find the qualification about the language of migrants disturbing. Is this position altered when many of the migrants become nationalized, such as with Hispanics in the United States? Obviously a state cannot make provisions for language instruction and education for all of the different migrants with the nation, but I certainly think that translation services need to be offered for many of them.

Ultimately, I think the definition of a minority language should be any language that is not the official language of the state, but this runs into major problems of practical implication. No state has the money to provide services in all of the different languages there are present. There must be a numerical cut off somewhere, by someone. This is where we sink into arbitrary decisions and questions of political, social and cultural capital.

Why I Like May

I was a huge fan of the reading from Stephen May because, unlike other selections we've seen, he finds a way to incorporate idealism, realism, and language all into one coherent argument.  While the second reading was emotional and intentionally provocative, I felt that May instead chose to follow the rational route.  He focuses on creating language education programs and using language in the civic realm in hopes that this will allow for greater tolerance of LHR.  While we can certainly argue with him about whatever "sufficient number of other-language speakers" may mean, I feel that any solution is a positive one.  Even if he makes an arbitrary choice that 20% of the nation must speak a language for it to be used on a driver's test, it would be the "least-bad" solution for protecting LHRs.  While, unfortunately, not everyone's language can be accommodated in this solution, the fact of the matter is that most languages will be.

The biggest problem I see with implementing this strategy in the United States is that it is incredibly difficult for the federal government to handle all of this.  Individual polling places in California may require Vietnamese, while one county over the voters may need information in Spanish.  In the US, at least, where there is so much linguistic diversity, the problem them becomes how to best implement the solution.  With so much access to the internet, though, I feel like it should be surprisingly easy to have an online database for multi-lingual government documents.  When someone requests, as per my last example, a voter registration form in Vietnamese, then a civil servant should easily be able to find it, print it, and expedite the process....which leads to another problem: how does that civil servant then register the voter if they can't read the voter registration form?

language death - not so bad? (please don't ostracize me linguistic community)

I think that the negative effects of language death are overstated, and due at least four factors.
The first is presentism: we take a "snapshot" of the world as it appears now and assume that it is the natural, permanent order and the status quo must be preserved. When one reads documents like the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, it is clear that some non-majority or non-official languages are perceived to belong, whereas others are not. The reasons are normative and seem to relate to the concept I brought up in class of "squatters rights". English "belongs" in the United Kingdom because it has been there for hundreds of years, whereas Hindi has only been spoken in the UK for perhaps half a century, so it is not afforded any sort of protections. While this case may seem clear-cut, in other areas, it is highly prone to political manipulation. Based on history, should Turkish be a protected minority language in the Balkans or should Arabic be a protected minority language in Southern Spain? Obviously political contingents in both these settings would disagree. What about Romani? Do the Ronani people "belong" in Europe, given their long history but ultimately non-European origins? Should Tahitian be protected in Europe because it is spoken in French Polynesia?
The second factor, as I see it, is due to attributional biases. Due to technology, global scholarship, and a variety of other influences that make global communication possible, we are able to see linguistic shift as never before. Because we can observe it, we assume that we are in some way responsible. An environmental analogy may help here, borrowing from the discourse of ecolinguistics. Yes, in some cases, a species may go extinct due to explicit human interaction. The tree frog dies because its environment was destroyed, an artificial constraint on the species not due to natural selection. Yet the tree frog could just as easily go extinct because of a change in weather or other animals predation patterns, for instance. Or, it could evolve over generations (while we generally think of evolution as occurring over millions of years, if you go back and think about Darwin's finches it can occur over a much shorter time frame as well) to be the point where its evolutionary line may split or it may not even be considered the same species. It is perhaps worthwhile to note that scientific classifications of animals are also somewhat normative just like linguistic distinctions (though perhaps more grounded in hard science, i.e. DNA than linguistic distinctions). The difference between the moose and the elk has less to do with genetic differences than whether it resides in America or Europe. Similarly, whether one speaks Moldovan or Romanian has to do with what side of the border one lives on.
Ultimately, though, the ecological comparison fails. Language is a purely human phenomenon, so any human influence on language is not artificial in the same way as, say, a bulldozer in the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, this distinction between "human" and "natural" is a bit fuzzy. If we were to nuke the Yucatan peninsula and cause the extinction of an entire class of animals, we would say it was an artificial human occurrence. Yet that is effectively what happened 65 million years ago, killing the dinosaurs.
The third factor is a bias among linguistics to assume that language death is bad. Given what linguistics do, obviously language death is something to be feared. A linguist is no more likely to accept the fact that some languages should be allowed to die than a doctor is likely to accept the proposition that a patient with cancer should be refused treatment. Yet ultimately, the patient will die. Similarly, although linguistics can protect languages, language shift is inevitable.
Finally, the language that we use to describe language shifts has clearly negative connotations. "Language death," "linguistic genocide," and "linguistic social Darwinism" all have more-or-less unpleasant connotations. "Language extinction" is more clinical but still negative. I use the term "language shift" to reflect the fact that languages evolve over time, but this term fails to capture the fact that sometimes languages do abruptly seek to exist when the last speaker dies.
Another thing worth considering is the relationship between "language" as a living phenomenon - continuing an ecological metaphor - and language as a static concept - i.e. English, with a dictionary and a uniform set of rules. Codifying a language in essence removes it from its competitive environment of natural selection, akin to raising and animal in captivity. How does this relate to language shift? Does a language that is no longer spoken but still written down - for example Latin or Sanskrit - "die"? Is it still "alive"? Are we looking at the unliving skeletons of the Latin language, codified and preserved in museums, or is its essence still around?

Whose fault is it if a language dies?

I thought it was interesting when we were talking about language death that usually it is spoken of in a passive term- i.e. "it died." However, I can see the reason why this is done- removing the agency from this sentence avoids the touchy subject of whose fault it is that the language died. Is it the policy makers' fault for not allowing for the minority languages to be as important as the majority ones? Or the minority speakers' fault for not choosing to speak their native language in every day life and not teaching it to their children?

Someone walks up to you and asks, "What is your ethnicity?"

Defining ethnicity is a really difficult task, as evidenced by our discussion on Thursday. Also, have you seen Wikipedia’s list of ethnic groups? It’s ridiculous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ethnic_groups. I’d like to try to propose a working definition though.

An ethnic group can be defined by more than one element of a complex matrix, including language, race, religion, ideology, shared history or experience (heritage), geographic proximity, among others. I think ethnicity is kind of a grab bag word used to explain why any group of people identifies with each other. For the most part, I think the word has been associated with characteristics of people that seem immutable, or are assigned to them. For instance, I consider my ethnic identity to be Hoklo Taiwanese because my ancestors are from the Fujian and we speak Taiwanese. These identifiers are things that I could not voluntarily change if I wanted to. That said, I think the way ethnicity is used and can be used in the modern context is changing. In many parts of the globalized world, there are more and more interracial marriages, mixed ethnicities (often due to migration), and individuals who find themselves checking the “other” box under ethnicity on censuses. Ideology has become the more dominant catalyst for group formation—this seems to be the case in the Arab world.

I have a question for you guys: how do you think globalization has changed our definition of ethnicity? If things like race become deemphasized, will people start associating sports team loyalties with ethnicity? How about language? How crucial do you think language will remain as an ethnic delimiter?

Language Policy in State-Nations

Since we have clarified this distinction between nation-states and state-nations in a way that I think makes a lot of sense, I wonder how official language policy is set in state-nations. In trying to connect disjointed states, like African tribes, into one single nation, which language of the many is used as the state’s official language? And how is this language chosen? If the language of the elite is chosen, I think there would be considerable backlash amongst speakers of the less powerful languages, but were an ambiguous local language chose, I could envision similar levels of anger among both the elites and the other language speakers.

A large majority of the readings so far have hit upon the idea that a unified language is often key to national identity, and that language planning and language policy are the means to achieve those ends. Yet it is still not clear, to me at least, how those languages are really chosen, and how effective the chosen languages are. Maybe a few case studies would shed some light on this?

Language Glory and Language Domains

I wanted to respond to your attempt to divide up the glorification of language, Jo. It seems that you put Languages A, B and C into different domains, (literary, political, media, etc.) but that you thought this would all be very problematic unless the languages were mutually intelligible. Blommaert actually comments upon the concept of linguistic domains in the case of Tanzania. Politics was the domain in which Swahili was dominant, and “for other domains people continued to use local languages or other newly emerged forms of communication” (248-249). This was a failure of Tanzanian policy that envisioned one national identity and thus the ideology of an ideal citizen who is a monoglot, a speaker of the national language Swahili. Thus, as Blommaert asserts if this (monoglot nationalism) is your aim then language glory cannot be divided. Your model of different domains, Jo, is most certainly not the single-identity asserted by most nationalist movements. Perhaps there could be a model of nationalism that promotes a “repertoire of (domain-bound) identities” (Blommaert 249). The different languages for each domain might not even have to be mutually intelligible as long as children are taught them all at an early age through the education system. However, once again the danger lies if one domain is perceived as more dominant than the other. The political, literary and other domains would have to be perceived as equal. Therefore I don’t see the problem to be which languages are used and whether they are mutually intelligible, but the beliefs people have about different domains and their inherent prestige.