Language Capital Project

Some of the Wisconsin Englishes folks have talked off and on about doing maps of 'linguistic resources' in communities, figuring out where different languages are used in businesses and community organizations, for instance. Turns out that Tucson is ahead of Wisconsin ... the Language Capital Project has started mapping businesses where various languages from all around the world are spoken. Tucson is a great place to do this since it is not just a university town and a place with a large immigrant population, but it's also a place that has become home to significant numbers of refugees.

Wonderful project and, I trust, an inspiration and a model to the Wisconsin Englishes folks!

Wisconsin Talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival …

And here's the actual link, with location, etc. Be there or be square.

Immigrants learning English

Just passed on by a member of Team Verb. We have mountains of evidence that immigrants to this country are doing everything they can to learn English, and here's yet more evidence for the point:

4th Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas

Had never actually been to Iceland (beyond the airport) but am here now for the 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics in Reykjavík. Amazing in every way ... and the weather has been mostly better than in Madison. I can't believe I'd never been to Iceland before.

In September, there will be another chance for some readers of this blog to come to this amazing place, namely the 4th Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas. The deadline for abstracts is coming up (May 31st), but it's a reasonably low-key event and lots of cool stuff was presented at all three of the previous ones. It'll be in the building pictured below, which really does look like that.

Be there or be square.

Language and immigration

The most recent round of talk about immigration reform has again brought language and immigration to the fore, and Chris Hayes has posted an important point, here (and graphic from there, from the Migration Policy Institute and you can click to embiggen):

Most proposals would require some level of English proficiency in order to qualify for naturalization. But as the Migration Policy Institute found in a 2011 report, even seemingly small differences in the level of English proficiency required for naturalization could determine whether millions of people qualify or are left out.

At the end of 2012, Miranda Wilkerson & Joseph Salmons (the latter a member of Team Verb) published "Linguistic Marginalities: Becoming American without Learning English" in the Journal of Transnational American Studies 4.2 (available here). They show that into the 20th century, German monolinguals in Wisconsin weren't marginal in some of the obvious ways people today expect or assume. Lots of evidence shows that the people in these communities considered themselves and were American, and they conclude that "an ability to speak English has never characterized an American identity".

They're building on earlier work where they showed that up to a quarter of some communities were monolingual in 1910, a third of those people born here. And the word on the street is that there's a diss coming that shows considerably higher numbers for at least one community in eastern Wisconsin. 

Sure would be nice if people making policy got a little historical perspective on some of these issues.

Immigration Canadian style?

This has been floating on fb ... from cheezburger.com ... 

Bad verbing, worse human: 'to euthanisia'

Wonkette brings us this photo:

Wonkette indicates that the photo is from the Austin airport garage. Pretty complex paint job -- two color! And pretty steady lettering. (You ever tried writing this kind of stuff on this kind of surface? Ain't easy.) But then 'to euthanasia' for 'to euthanize' and 'whom' for 'who', in the span of nine words. Almost makes you wonder if it's real, in the relevant sense ... . Hey, maybe it's more brilliance from the Arizona Department of Education.

Language, immigration and racism

A year and a half ago, we first got to know Arizona politician Russell Pearce when he accused one of our contributors and a co-author of having "fabricated" the results of a study showing that 19th c. immigrants did not instantly learn English, while evidence suggests that new immigrants learn English very quickly. Yup, he did that in print, in the Arizona Republic.

Pearce is now nationally famous as one of the people behind Arizona's anti-immigration law. Now the summer issue of the SPLC Report (that's the Southern Poverty Law Center, here) lays out some background on Pearce and the law. Turns out, old Russell is tight with Nazis. I don't mean 'soup nazi' nazis, but Nazi Nazis — like the National Alliance and the National Socialist Movement. (And when you're photographed hugging one of them, the word 'tight' can be taken pretty literally.) More directly, they report that a lawyer who helped draft the law is ultimately tied to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, another group closely associated with racists.


The language tie here is pretty indirect and this isn't exactly breaking news at this point, but it's important to peek at what's behind the very thin veil of legitimacy and respectability these people try to project. This is of course a small example of a much broader pattern, and this piece underscores from a different perspective.

Image from here, where you can read more about Pearce, if you'd like.

Spanish speakers learning English in the US

We've been through this topic before, but here's more on just how fast Spanish speakers in this country are learning English, based on work from the Pew Hispanic Center. (Note that there's a menu bar across the top, where you can get different sub-stories.) The key info is captured in the graphic:

Even the BBC gets part of a language story right! (If you don't get why that's shocking, click here and search 'BBC'.) But of course I have a quibble:

Very often [Hispanics] switch between languages within a single sentence, or borrow English words and put them into Spanish, making a hybrid known as Spanglish.

Every language borrows from others, and English is vastly more hybrid on that count than most 'Spanglish' I've heard. Codeswitching is another game -- it's real and it's important and striking linguistic behavior. For example, you can only really do it appropriately if you're really solid in both languages. But getting at that behavior is just not something you can usually ask people. Bilinguals are often aware that they codeswitch and may report it, but what the label means varies -- I've heard people who use an occasional English word consider that 'Spanglish', and everybody in this country does that, pretty much. In fact, I'll bet you $20 that there are systematic differences in what people mean by the term across generations.

Anyway, more information in easy-to-present form for how fast immigrants are learning English today.

Who doesn't speak English in the US?

I've been waiting for early news from the US Census on language. And here's some. It's not actually the current Census, of course, but the American Community Survey. (The little article in the link is mostly valuable for the link to the Census report.)

There's plenty of interesting information in the report (check out Appendix A for the history of language questions on earlier censuses), but note for the moment that it gives pretty detailed information on people who don't speak English very well.

One of the most bizarre memes out there among the anti-immigration folks is that Spanish is overrunning English — that English is endangered in parts of this country. If you have heard such stuff, just consider the number of people who report knowing English 'not well' or 'not at all'. Out of 280 million people, 4.5 million report not speaking English at all. (Click on the graphic to see a good version of it.)

Language and immigration in Germany: Kiezdeutsch (guest post)

Below is an invited guest post from Flo, who blogs at CounterCloset.

Political placards of the conservative CSU party dotting Bavaria this summer call for integration. Integration through German language ability and more language courses — a public appeal to the apparent German language “deficiency” among some of Germany’s foreign residents. But can the daunting chasm between the German host and the foreign guest(worker) really be resolved through language? It seems here that the conflation of unity and uniformity only masks the larger historical and societal struggles between Germans, Turkish-Germans, Afro-Germans, Roma, Sinti, and others that have yet to be brought into genuine conversation at national, local, and individual levels.

Ischwör, lan, is so.

“I swear, dude, that’s how it is” ... a simple phrase heard in many of Germany’s multiethnic neighborhoods, or perhaps better ‘hoods’ (German Kiez). Walking through the Kiez, a trained ear (or even an open ear) can hear a German that is not only unlike the Standard, but also unlike what was once (very controversially) described as the “pidgin German” of the early guest workers. This Kiezdeutsch, the German of the ‘hood', is a current contact language spoken among Germany’s youth in multiethnic neighborhoods. As these kids come from diverse language backgrounds, so too comes diversity in their language. Indeed lan, in the example above, is a borrowing from Turkish, set within a German frame. And so linguists have their work cut out for them, describing this new contact language structurally, while also informing the populous that it is not simply simplified or broken German, but rich with complexity.

Sociolinguistically, Kiezdeutsch is so much unlike their parents’ “Gastarbeiterdeutsch” affected by social distancing from native German speakers (Meisel, Clahsen, & Piennemann’s ZISA, Klein & Dittmar’s Heidelberg Pidgin-Deutsch, and Gilbert & Pavlou’s Gastarbeiterdeutsch analysis). In fact one of the most intriguing aspects of Kiezdeutsch is its social attraction to native German speakers. While we provide a structural linguistic nod to the contact nature of Kiezdeutsch, we cannot ignore the agentive nature of younger ethnic Germans in learning Kiezdeutsch (similar to Mary Bucholtz’s findings in her cross-racial AAVE studies). In styling their language and separating themselves from older Germans, ethnic German youths are shaping their own social and linguistic territory. How’s that for integration! Indeed “sounding cool” in one’s formative years may provide better future dialogs on mutual respect and acceptance, yet unfortunately for the CSU that may be not via Hochdeutsch, but via Kiezdeutsch.

For more info, including video, audio and teaching materials, go 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.

Mixtec Radio

As a former Mixtecanist (or is it 'once a Mixtecanist, always a Mixtecanist'?), I was happy to read the article in the NYT yesterday on a radio station in Fresno that has started a show called "La Hora Mixteca" ("the Mixtec Hour").  Many things made me happy - just that there is such a show, for one.  I was also happy to read this:  "pronounced MEESE-teck" - I have been on a one-woman crusade for almost three decades now to get English speakers to say it that way instead of the hyper-foreign MEESH-teck.  (Quick explanation:  many placenames in Mexico that have an "x" in them are in fact pronounced with "sh," but this is due to the Nahuatl origin of such words, and since Mixtec isn't Nahuatl, it doesn't make sense to do the same.  Plus in Spanish the "x" in this word is an [s] - you say "mees-TECK-o" for Mixteco, so why palatalize the [s] in English???)  Well, it's been a losing battle among linguists, but it's fun to see the NYT get something right for a change.

The article did leave me wondering about one thing - Mixtec is one of those "languages" that is really a giant language family, filled with mutually unintelligble varieties misleadingly called "dialects."  It's the classic dialect continuum problem, though - there's no answer for where to draw the line for where one dialect stops and another starts.  Oh, instead of plagiarizing from my grammar of Chalcatongo Mixtec, I'll just quote:  

Ravicz (1965:40) proposes one interesting way to measure dialect boundaries in the area, días de distancia ('days of distance'):  "... A person who is two days' walk from their town can communicate easily; however, a distance of three days will hinder understanding to a certain extent.  If this person is four or five days from their town, they can hardly depend on sufficient common elements to establish communication, and Spanish will serve them better" [my translation].

So, having said all that, I wonder what dialect of Mixtec they use on la Hora Mixteca?  Are the listeners in the Fresno area from the same dialect area, so that they can just use one and be understood by everybody?  Or is a sort of standard developing that many can understand, even if it's not their native dialect?

Will keep you posted if I find out any answers.

Spanish in southern California

Nice post about language and immigration here on one of the LA Times blogs, image from the article as you'll see when you read it — and you should read it, especially if you don't get the text.

The journalist, Hector Tobar, talks to a leading sociolinguist who has written a ton about Spanish-English contact and related matters. Here's a key chunk or two:

In the end, English remains the dominant tongue of Southern California. "In the long run, Spanish is really the threatened language here," said Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College.

The effect of Spanish speakers on the Southern California linguistic universe is heard mostly in new words and phrases constantly being added to the local English lexicon -- like "no mas" and "carne asada." In this sense, Spanish is merely adding a little flavor to American English, as German, Yiddish and other languages have before it.

…

Still, the underlying structure of California English has not changed, Fought said.

Hurrah, more clear reporting on a pressing issue concerning language.

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.

Accusations of misconduct: Language and immigration

A while back, Mr. Verb mentioned an article that Miranda Wilkerson and I recently had in American Speech. We show that, contrary to myth, German-speaking immigrants to 19th c. Wisconsin didn't wake up the morning after arrival as monolingual English speakers. In fact, almost a half century after really major immigration had ended in some communities, 20% or more of the community was still monolingual in German, according to the 1910 Census. In some communities, not far from half of those people were American-born. And monolinguals were hardly stuck on the edges of community life; their ranks included lots of crafts- and tradespeople, even some professionals, like teachers and clergy.

That piece has been talked about a surprising amount in the press, and the coverage by professional journalists has been very thoughtful and smart. The best part is that some have taken our historical data and compared it directly to the contemporary situations of immigrants in their communities — in Milwaukee, Toronto, Phoenix. That last-mentioned article, here, was particularly good, by Daniel Gonzalez in the Arizona Republic. But there's one unsettling bit:

Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, doubts the validity of [the] study.

"I think it's a fabrication," he said.

Merriam-Webster's 11th defines 'fabrication' this way – this is the complete definition, emphasis in the original:

1 : the act or process of fabricating
2 : a product of fabrication; especially: LIE, FALSEHOOD

The second is the relevant meaning here, so this is a serious charge. If it were true, I'd be in trouble for violating academic standards. Just for the record, the results are real; the key data are drawn from the 1910 US Census, which is readily available for now-State-Senator-elect Pearce (pictured above) to review for himself. My guess is that he simply suggested we were engaging in academic misconduct without looking at the paper. To give him a chance, I sent Pearce a copy of our paper, but haven't heard back.

It makes you wonder what standards lawmakers are held to in their public pronouncements. Oh wait, we KNOW the answer to that.

Image from here.

Immigrants learning English

Miranda Wilkerson (a recent Wisconsin Ph.D. who does second language acquisition) and our contributor Joe just had a piece in American Speech showing that German-speaking immigrants to Wisconsin didn't learn English quickly, in fact even for two or three generations in many cases. It's called "'Good old immigrants of yesteryear' who didn't learn English" and appears in vol. 83, pp. 259-283. They note that scholars like Calvin Veltman show that contemporary immigrants, in contrast, are learning English as fast as they can.

The local paper has picked up the story, here. The 'community comments' section after on-line articles is pretty consistently a forum for screaming wingnuts. It's kinda of like a Palin rally in cyberspace in terms of the attitude toward the media and the racism. It's interesting in this case that a lot of people are actually speaking up showing some knowledge of family, local and state history.

Language and immigration: German-style

Not only in the U.S. are language and immigration a hot issue — something Mr. V has occasionally noted. In Germany, there's a lot of negative reaction to English loanwords from prescriptivists (and the American pinheads have nothing on these guys), as well as to the presence of languages other than German in contemporary Germany. But other currents are running right now …

First, it's nice to see some positive attention coming to loanwords from powerful groups in Germany. Check out this initiative (graphic from there):

"Wörter mit Migrationshintergrund"
Wir suchen das beste eingewanderte Wort.

That's basically 'immigrant words' or "words with a migration background", more stiffly translated, and "we're looking for the best immigrant word". This is being supported by the Goethe Institut, Deutscher Sprachrat, Duden, and others. If you read the materials, it's aimed at celebrating immigration, and lexical borrowing.

Second, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (Society for the German Language) publishes a little journal called Der Sprachdienst. In the last 2007 issue, they ran a piece by Dennis Scheller-Boltz called:

McDonald's – McAnwalt* – McFit – McFlight.

The piece gives a pile of interesting data on how productive the Mc- prefix is in German right now, especially in company names. Amazingly, at least from my perspective, is that it means not only that a product is cheap and fast, but also that it's of good quality.

*Anwalt = attorney

The logic of non-standard German

… or maybe "The 'deficit hypothesis' never dies".

A couple of days ago, NPR ran a piece on Seyran Ateş and her new book, The Multicultural Mistake (originally Der Multikulti-Irrtum). She's a very famous women's rights lawyer, former Woman of the Year in Germany, etc., and one of the most visible members of the Turkish community in Germany and in Europe beyond. She's a formidable figure in current German and European culture, and I'll sidestep all the rich controversy about the book to simply note that the interview includes this:

We have in the third generation children who do not speak very well German," Ates says. "They cannot speak very well their own language — they are not integrated in the culture, they do not even know how big is the city in which they live in."

One on-line review of the book has a closely related German version:

Dass damit Jugendliche heranwachsen, die sich „irgendwie“ einer idealisierten Türkei zugehörig fühlen, gleichzeitig aber übersehen, dass gerade in der Türkei jemandem, der gut Deutsch und Türkisch spricht, alle Türen offen stehen, denen aber, die weder die eine noch die andere Sprache richtig beherrschen gar nichts.

I can't comment on knowledge of city populations, and don't quite know what it means to be integrated into a given culture, but I'd be truly stunned if it turned out that any child in any Turkish-German community really did not control at least one language natively. Many of them, from what little I know about it, speak regional dialects of one or both languages, and of course there will be contact effects — borrowings, maybe some interference, whatever. Written standard languages are naturally learned in school and many kids in Germany don't have textbook control of the written prescribed standard. The German quote in particular makes it sound like this is about investment in that particular variety of language, not language generally.

Looks like another case where the rhetoric should be turned down a couple of notches unless somebody has the data to back this up. And, of course, another case where people are apparently willing to make big claims about language without any knowledge or evidence.

New report: English Usage Among Hispanics in the United States

The Pew Hispanic Center has just released a report on the knowledge and use of English among Latinos in the United States. Check it out here.

If you have paid attention to the considerable body of scholarly literature on this subject, and if you know Spanish-speaking immigrant communities, the results are utterly unsurprising. But then if you rely on Lou Dobbs, Fox Noise and such for news on immigration, you'll be shocked.

They find "a dramatic increase in English-language ability" across generations, with English used especially at work, while Spanish fares better as home language. This survey and others, taken together,

provide a clear measure of how Hispanics believe that insufficient English language skill is an obstacle to their acceptance in the U.S.

So, new immigrants — and most other groups follow a similar pattern, from what little I know about it — are learning English as fast as they can, and they understand the value of it.

How is the learning of English today even an issue? Sadly, it still is, as confirmed by a recent Michael Reagan column, here.