Law language and hyperformalism

Been corresponding with colleagues in the Law School, who are wondering whether …

there is a special word for talking about hyperformalism in law .... you know, where the law gets so technical that it is actually undoing what it was put in place to do.

I don't know the answer, but I bet our readers (1) will and (2) can invent better answers.

Let the games begin!

The government and African-American English: language ideology and practice

The Guardian is running this piece by Chris McGreal, called:

US drug agency recruits speakers of 'street slang'
DEA seeks people who understand black vernacular English to translate wiretaps and stand up evidence in court

It's getting a lot of attention, and much of it along this kind of lines from what I've seen. (Yes, there had to be the Airplane video clip.) But there's a big, even massive, point about language in America in this story. The core of it is laid out in this quote from the article:

"It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognised the legitimacy of this language," said H Samy Alim, a Stanford linguistics professor. "Yet the authorities and the police are recognising that this is a language that they don't understand. It tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognising African-American speech."

Yes, and the government's de facto recognition that (most of) their employees can't understand some kinds of African-American speech makes a powerful point that should be used in future discussions about language and education.

US English ... "The battle for our way of life in America"

An occasional reader of this little blog just passed on a 'survey' he'd gotten from US English, one of the major English Only groups. Survey needs scare quotes here because it's precisely the kind of push-poll approach you would expect from these folks. Questions start off pretty innocent, with the first just being whether you've "noticed an increased use of foreign language in your community over the past few years". But we soon get to the meat of the matter:

I wonder how many Americans actually are "made to adapt" to foreign languages in any way more significant than pressing 1 for English.

And of course this isn't about new arrivals or anything, it's about people who refuse to learn English:
I know a lot of immigrants and I'm pretty sure I've never met one who refused to learn English.

Finally, with the plea for money, we get just how big the stakes are in this:

What can you say to that?!?!?

"Language Freedom"

California maybe about to get a "Language Freedom" law, if Arnold Schwarzenegger signs it, as laid out here. Jesse Choper, Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at Cal's Boalt Hall, is attributed with what we'll declare the understatement of the week:

the protection is "not off the wall by any means" … language can be a source of discrimination that people have limited control over.

Image from here.

"Grammar police": law and peevology update

By this point, people regularly pass along their favorite or least favorite examples of peevology. The latest, which has been sitting untouched around the house for a week, is the University of Alabama's Law School publication, Capstone Lawyer 2009 edition. It includes some pretty interesting and very positive stuff, like Bama's programs in Ethiopia. But it also has this:

Meet the Grammar Police

It's your standard peevologist thing, about law student Sharon Eliza Nichols (I use no first name, and she needs two?) ranting about not grammar but spelling errors — misuse of apostrophes and your ≠ you're are the only two examples given. If you're bitching about grammar, you should be able to distinguish it from spelling. This problem has been endlessly pointed out here and on the Log, and elsewhere, of course ... the memo isn't getting around to some folks, I guess.

The piece points out that Nichols founded an fb group called "I judge you when you use poor grammar", which "boasts more than 350,000 members and 7,000 signs". If you search that string on Facebook, you don't get anything nearly that big (maybe my patience wore thin too fast?) but there are lots of groups with that and similar names. She is in fact listed as admin on one such group, with a mere 1,672 members and 1,226 pictures when I checked it. Here's the shpiel:

ASSIGNMENT:
If we are going to win the War on Poor Grammar, we have to seek out the infidels (grammar offenders) and hold them accountable. Under our watch, justice will indeed prevail.

Your assignment is to seek out the infidels and document their acts of terror. Take pictures and post them in this group to serve as examples to all. Our condescension and their humiliation will eventually cause them to change their wicked ways.

Good luck, and God bless you all.

Seems a little over the top to me, with the whole jihad thing. In fact, especially since the image top left above is on the site, I would think it was ironic if I hadn't read the article and some of the surrounding stuff.

More interesting is the proliferation of groups like these:

I judge you when you judge me for using poor grammar.

I will NOT judge you when you use poor grammar

Yes! Role Tied!

Update, 11 am: As was quipped this morning on this topic: This is the kind of stuff that would give grammar a bad name if it had anything to do with grammar.

Image from here.

Language and immigration in the courts

Kudos to Judge Richard S. Brown, a state appellate judge here in Wisconsin. The NYT last week did a long piece called:

Study Finds Gaps in Aid for Non-English Speakers in State Civil Courts

Here are the key quotes from Brown:

“If a person cannot understand what is happening in the courtroom proceeding, an unfair result might occur. And that is contradictory to what we want our courts to do: administer justice, fairly and impartially.”

“I wonder aloud how many immigrants from the 1840s through the 1920s lost their liberty, lost their property, lost their homes, their livelihood, all because they could not yet understand the English language to the fullest,” he said in an e-mail interview.

Judge Brown, who is deaf, said, “I think we are a better country because we are now acknowledging what we did not acknowledge in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

A couple of posts on this blog have talked about recent (and apparently ongoing) work by Wilkerson & Salmons showing that German-speaking immigrants did not learn English for generations in many cases. They draw, as it happens, on evidence including Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions involving Yankees who swindled immigrants who didn't speak English. They also tell me that there are newspaper reports on court cases where Wisconsin-born citizens could not respond to simple questions in English.

So, yes, Judge Brown, the historical record bears you out. Thank you.

Language in the courts

Thanks to a post on ads-l, I saw this story from the LA Times. It lays out the difficulties of a California court in finding an interpreter for a Mixe speaker who was on trial.

It's worth reading, but note that this is a pervasive problem and one that has been dealt with horribly many times in the past. The most egregious case I know of is this one, of Santiago Ventura, a Mixtec speaker convicted of murder without the benefit of interpreters who spoke his language. He spent years in jail before it was sorted out. As it happens, both these languages are spoken in Oaxaca and a little info on the major languages of the region is here, and it's the source of this map, although as the Times story makes

clear, these labels are in some cases for families rather than languages.

Court interpreters

Our new contributor Monica debuted yesterday with something on drunk driving and I posted this morning on plagiarism. Let's get back to linguistics, if not yet to happier subject matter: The news has been filled recently with one of those stories of outrage at the judicial system: A young man accused of raping a child was freed after a judge ruled that he'd been denied a speedy trial because of the failure to find an interpreter for his native language, Vai. (It's a Mandé language of West Africa —Liberia and Sierra Leone, spoken by something like 100,000 people, according to various sources.)

There are various issues here, including how badly he needed an interpreter: He apparently was enrolled in ordinary classes (not ESL) in high school and gave an interview in English to a reporter. But whatever the facts, the coverage is pretty flawed … A TV report I caught part of earlier today raised the question of how difficult it was to get an interpreter, going for a kind of gotcha moment: They interviewed a man who speaks Vai and asked him if he'd be willing to serve. He said more or less "yes, of course". This creates the impression that anybody with good basic knowledge of two languages is competent to serve as an interpreter in court. Not so, of course.

I hope that Roger Shuy at Language Log or somebody else who understands issues of language and the judicial system will give some expert commentary here.