Are Some Languages Dangerous?
Jesse:
Yes, it's ironic, but predictable, that people express
ambivalence toward second or heritage languages: They attack languages such as
Spanish that they perceive as a threat, while defending "cute" languages like
Boontling (you and I are may be the only ones in the audience who know what
that is) or "antique" languages like Cornish.
Yet even that picture is not so clear: If Anglo parents
in New York are choosing to have their very young children begin the study of
Spanish, as the article in today's New York Times
indicates, does this mean, as the Times suggests, that they have come
to value multilingualism, or does it mean they are just being practical? And
how does that stack up against research indicating that second-generation
Latinos and Latinas are often monolingual English speakers? I've collected lots
of anecdotal newspaper stories in which employers in Miami, for example, claim
they can't find Spanish speakers, let alone bilinguals, to hire to deal with
their Spanish-speaking clientele.
Navajo has long been touted by sociolinguists as a
language whose speakers maintain a great deal of language loyalty, that is, the
Navajo are reluctant to give up their heritage language. Yet the need to
establish a high-school Navajo class suggests that off the reservation, that is
exactly what young Navajo speakers are doing. The Hasidim of New York and the
Amish are two other groups known for preserving their speech--when, that is,
they maintain their social isolation from the mainstream. But once that
isolation is gone, language may soon follow.
Cultural-loyalty movements like the class in Navajo
tend to spring up when cultural preservation is in danger, and their record of
success is not impressive. Here at the University of Illinois, we run special
sections of first- and second-year Spanish for Spanish-heritage students, and
the reason is that their Spanish is too weak to meet academic requirements.
That in turn means they may be able to speak Spanish (even that is often not
the case); but they can't read it well or write it fluently, and their grasp of
its grammar may be weak, since they haven't actually studied it as a language.
They may speak some Spanish, but they can't pass a test in it. Students also
use college language classrooms to try to recapture the heritage languages they
may have lost (for example, Hindi or Urdu), or ones they may never have
acquired (Yiddish).
What interests me about these minority language and
dialect matters is why ebonics was perceived as so great a threat when the
whole issue arose in late 1996 in Oakland, Calif. We are living in a time when
English serves as an international language. Furthermore, living as we do in a
(largely) postcolonial world, we tend to recognize that each national variety
of English, that of the United States, of Canada, of Australia, of India, of
Nigeria, of Ireland, has its own local standards, and we (that is, linguists)
have begun talking about world Englishes, not simply world English, to
emphasize this fact. Yet within a community, group variation in standards still
tends to be rejected or regarded with suspicion. Hence ebonics was seen by the
American public at large as a declaration of independence in need of quashing,
an internal threat, a wild mistake, while American English, itself a partly
revolutionary, postcolonial product, is seen as simply "the way things are"
(that is, unless you're Prince Charles).
Someone posted an e-mail response to your morning essay
asking whether it's true that ebonics speakers can't do math because their
language isn't capable of rendering the subtleties of math. Sometimes it seems
to me that every language except my own is capable of rendering those
mathematic subtleties, and my colleagues in math sometimes insist that the
subtleties of math cannot be rendered into English, or at least English that is
understandable by anyone unfamiliar with math. A high-energy physicist once
told me, when I asked her what she was working on, "I couldn't possibly put it
into words"--yet she continues to receive NSF funding, which suggests someone
understands what she is up to on her grant applications. The math case may
really be what the computer folks call COIK, "clear only if known." But this is
the kind of thinking about language that pervades our society. How would you
answer that question about ebonics and math? Language varieties are flexible
and adaptable. But they also exist in contexts, and while these contexts don't
necessarily bind them, they do affect them. So if the context that some ebonics
speakers exist in is one that does not bring them up against the differential
calculus, what follows? Low math scores, for one thing. But that's not the same
as saying ebonics speakers can't do math because they can't speak math.
Dennis
