Read Languages In the World Online
Authors: Julie Tetel Andresen,Phillip M. Carter
Nations are imagined to be culturally and linguistically homogeneous, and so too must the standard national languages appear to be culturally neutral. While the nation is imagined but not imaginary, the standard language is an illusion of neutrality because it is always necessarily constructed out of one or more regional varieties. The quintessential example is Standard Italian, which is based on the Tuscan dialect that gained political and cultural cachet as early as the thirteenth century when it was used in the literature of authors such as Dante and Petrarch. Before the process of standardization, language in Italy could best be thought of as a long dialect chain running from south to north. To this day, some Italian dialects, such as the variety spoken in Sicily, are thought of as separate languages, given their low mutual intelligibility with Standard Italian.
The standardization of national languages took place in the context of state formation across Europe. For example, during the development of Hungarian state formation in the nineteenth century, Standard Hungarian was constructed based on the varieties of Northeast Hungary, and language planners were careful to avoid borrowings from other languages, including Latin, but especially German.
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Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, European nations constructed national standards as a part of their nation-building efforts. When standardizing a language, the first questions to ask are: Which variety will be the basis? and Which language variety will symbolize the whole? In other words, standardized varieties of languages in most cases attended, not preceded, the rise of nation-states in Europe. This is to say that whether or not Czech is a separate language from Slovak has not always been a relevant question. The rise of nationalism, though, required that Czech and Slovak be contrasted as much as possible in order to justify separate nations, and this effort required that some variety of Czech and some variety of Slovak be selected as
the
national language.
We will now give a point we have made several times final emphasis: many people assume dialects are derived, or degenerated, from a core, underlying, or somehow correct language. As a matter of historical fact, however, it is often the other way around, as the above examples illustrate. In the case of Hungarian, the standardized national language derived from a local variety. In the case of French, it derived from the group who once had the most social power. Here you can see how the notion of one nation, one language and then even one people works in tandem with the standard language ideology. Once French was articulated as the one and only language of the French Republic, standardized French, based on the speech of the elite classes in Paris, could be promoted as the so-called best French. We can now see that
la vergonha
is not only the shame of the need to disconnect from your native language but also the shame that you cannot fully connect to the standard language. Now even native French speakers who do not speak Parisian French can experience
la vergonha
.
In France, where there was once an unbroken dialect chain running from the
langue d'oc
in the south to the
langue d'oïl
in the north,
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today there is only French, with vestiges of the old dialect chain still present in the rural areas. As successful as the project of consolidating France through the French language has been â both as an idea and as a set of policies â French speakers nevertheless still sound differently from one to the next. The differences are due in part to the fact that different regional varieties are spoken in cities such as Lille, Lyon, and Toulouse. But even within a city such as Paris, linguistic difference moves outward from center to periphery, such that residents in the city center sound differently from the residents in the
banlieue
, or suburbs. These differences in speech â from neighborhood to neighborhood and person to person â owe largely to a corresponding set of differences, namely, those having to do with the group and individual identities of the speakers themselves.
In this book, we understand speaker identity to be the result of the always incomplete interplay between a speaker's choice, what we call
agency
, and the limitations on those choices, what we call
identity constraints
. No identity is fully chosen by the individual, just as no identity is fully determined by forces external to the individual. This endless interplay between constraint and choice means that identities are necessarily dynamic, emergent, and contextual rather than static, predetermined, and immutable.
Speakers' identities are first always constrained by the speech communities into which they are born. A baby born into the
banlieue
surrounding Paris will by the contingency of birth end up speaking a noticeably different variety of French from the baby born into
le 16e arrondissement
, an area of Paris associated with great wealth. If the baby is born a girl, she will likely be socialized with other girls, thus reinforcing gendered language practices, and perhaps may even be instructed from a young age to speak in a way that adheres to cultural prescriptions for normative gendered behavior. If the child is born a boy, he will likely be socialized differently and coached in the ways of sounding like a boy.
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Should the child be born into the
banlieue
, there is a good chance she will be of Moroccan, Algerian, or Libyan descent, which means that in the French national context, she may be understood to be
Magrébine
, or French North African.
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She may also be born into a French Arabic bilingual household. We call these dimensions of her identity â gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and home language group â
assigned identities
, in the sense that they come with birth and are not chosen. Assigned identities are not fully deterministic of a speaker's linguistic behavior, but they nevertheless shape the contours of what is possible.
Although the speaker born in the Parisian
banlieue
is tied to categories such as
female
and
North African
, and although she alone does not determine the social meanings of those categories, she can nevertheless exercise some degree of choice concerning her identity and corresponding language behavior. As she matures, she will inhabit various communities that will likely shape her use of language. As a teenager, she may enjoy listening to Arabic French hip-hop, and she may therefore link up with others who share that interest. Together they may develop a style of speech characterized by the sound patterns and grammatical structures associated with vernacular varieties of French, Arabic French code switching, and even the occasional expression associated with hip-hop culture in the English-speaking world. She may alternatively become involved in a young women's group at a local mosque, identify strongly as Muslim, and over time become well versed in Qur'Änic Arabic.
Her social-psychological experiences will also affect her language and identity decisions. For example, she may have experiences as a child that made her feel shame for being poor, an immigrant's child, or knowing Arabic, and may develop an uncomfortable or even hostile posture to her parents' language. She may try and contain her shame by consciously giving up Arabic and attempting to speak the variety of French she hears on the evening news. However, these very same experiences could make her feel immense pride for being North African, and she may therefore prefer to share the company of other Arabic French bilinguals.
The ability of an individual to actively highlight or dampen an ethnic identity may be constrained by the perceptions in the ambient society and stereotypes projected upon them. Certain ethnic groups have more or less freedom in making these identity choices than other groups. A third-generation Polish American living in Chicago may
identify strongly as an ethnic Pole and may highlight her ethnic Polishness by living in a Polish neighborhood, by introducing herself as MaÅgorzata rather than Maggie, and by celebrating her
imieniny
, or name day. Her younger brother may have no interest in being ethnically Polish and so does not engage in these practices, may just want to be American, and may find himself easily identified as such. In contrast, a third-generation Korean American from Los Angeles may feel American and have no interest in identifying as ethnically Korean. It may well be the case that it is more difficult for him to make the identity choices he would prefer on account of others who assign him to the category
Asian
.
Children develop a sense of their own identities at the same time as they develop language. Language is thus tied to identity from the first words uttered. This mutual development â learning how to speak and learning how to
be
â is called language socialization, and it necessarily occurs in local communities. While local communities are at the crux of the relationship between language and identity, for most of the world's speakers, the interplay between identity choice and identity constraint now also takes place within national contexts. National language policies and ideologies linking certain languages to certain nations influence who speakers are and how they speak.
Everything. And, in the end, nothing.
Scholars, such as sociologists and anthropologists, among others, who study race often remark that “Race isn't rocket science â it's harder!” The difficulty arises from the fact that the term
race
is not a biologically coherent category. Population geneticist, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, notes that the measurable genetic distance between two populations generally increases in direct correlation with the geographic distance separating them. However, regardless of type of genetic marker used â and these can be selected from a very wide range â the variation between two individuals chosen at random from within any population is 85% as large as that between two individual selected at random from the world's population (Cavalli-Sforza 2000:29). We will return to the biological problems with this nonbiological category in Chapter 10.
The difficulty surrounding the term
race
is compounded by the fact that it swirls through so many popular discourses and that it seems somehow important as a way to classify people. In this book, we understand race to be a socially constructed category, rather than a biological reality, and since it is one that has structured and continues to structure our society, it has had and continues to have consequences. Many members of a society in which the term
race
has traction have tended to think of it as real, and some of these people not only organize their own identities around the category but also organize the identities of others.
For much of the history of the United States, a person was classified as
Negro
under the so-called one-drop rule if it could be determined that they had a drop â whatever that meant â of African blood. Yet, many people who fit that classification could pass as White, and, indeed, many people who never thought twice about being White
technically fit the definition of Negro. In the 1820s, freed, English-speaking slaves from the United States established the West African nation of Liberia. Although these slaves were assigned the racial identity Negro or Black in the context of the United States and although they were the direct descendants of Africans, they were considered by their new African neighbors to belong to a different ethnic group on the basis of ostensible differences in language, dress, and experience. They were called Americo-Liberians.
We now define an
ethnogroup
as a group identifiable by an assemblage of markers, including dress, diet, belief systems, rites and rituals, kinship organization, and of course language. In this book, if we need to identify a group, we will do so by the term
ethnogroup
. We use the term
race
in the next subsection only to show the incoherent nature of its use, after which we eliminate it.
A third term has been lurking at the edges of the nation-language intersection, and it is
race
. The link between race, nation, and language is problematic because it is both historically variable and geographically variable. For example, when Irish Catholics first immigrated to the United States en masse in the midnineteenth century, they were considered racially different from White Protestants, in part because of their association with African Americans in the labor sector. Today in the United States, no one would consider John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, any race other than White. In the 100 years separating the height of Irish immigration in the 1860s and the election of Kennedy as the President of the United States in 1960, the identification of the racial identity of the Irish had changed. It is difficult to know if this change could have happened so easily had the Irish maintained rather than lost Irish Gaelic during those years. However, it is not difficult to imagine that Kennedy would not have been elected if his first or primary language was Irish rather than English.
Just as race is not historically stable, neither is it geographically stable. Immigrants are often surprised to discover that their race has changed overnight as they move from one country to another. This is the case with Latino/as in the United States. A man moving from Buenos Aires to Miami may find he went from being White in Argentina to Latino in the United States. Similarly, a woman moving from Santo Domingo to New York City may have thought herself to be
india clara
âlight Indian' in the Dominican Republic but may be assumed to be Black in the United States. Her racial identity may change again if she were overheard speaking Spanish, in which case she may then be considered to be Latina.
As unstable and ever changing as the raceânationâlanguage triad is, it has been central in the development of the European nationalisms. When Herder imagined
one nation, one language, one people
, the people he had in mind belonged to the race
German
, defined by the biology of blood. Until 1999, German citizenship was predicated on the principle of
jus sanguinis
âright of blood,' in contrast to
jus soli
âright of soil,' which meant German citizenship was available to anyone able to prove German descent but not to immigrants and their children born in Germany. This
definition of citizenship created problems for the
Gastarbeiter
âguest workers,' mostly Turks, who lived in Germany, who learned German and took jobs considered undesirable for German citizens, yet until 1999 could not enjoy the benefits of full German citizenship.
The problematic raceânationâlanguage nexus plays itself out in different ways in different nations and places. We review the story of this nexus in Japan, Brazil, and North Carolina.
Some nationalist ideologies rely more heavily on explicit notions of race than others. In Japan, ideas about national identity exist within an ideology of racial homogeneity in which the Japanese are constructed in opposition to the other known as
uchi
. In popular discourses, Japanese national identity is seen as comprising an extended family of citizens related by blood. As such, racial others can be discursively excluded from national identity by being constructed as unrelated to the national family. The nationalist ideology of racial homogeneity is linked to language in the sense that the Japanese language is considered the first language of the Japanese, and therefore languages other than Japanese spoken in Japan are taken as signs of ethnic otherness, or they are said not to exist in Japan in the first place.
In 1894, prominent Japanese linguist Ueda Kazutoshi is said to have proclaimed his gratitude for the fact that Japan was not a multilingual nation, which meant that there was no need to deal with minority languages that would detract from creating national cohesion through Japanese. This was the heyday of the German university, and Kazutoshi had just returned from a year-long postdoctoral study program in Germany, one of the incubators of the one nation, one language, one people ideology. The denial of racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity within Japan remained publically evident nearly a century later, when Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro declared Japan to be a
tan'itsu minzoku
, or âmono-ethnic nation' (Gottlieb 2006:74â75).
In empirical reality, Japan is not an ethnically homogeneous nation, although the presence of minority populations is denied in popular discourses. In addition to a sizable Korean immigrant population, several large indigenous groups reside within Japan, including the Okinawans and the Ainu. The Okinawans are one of several groups of ethnic Ryukyuan people who inhabit the Ryukyu Islands in Okinawa Prefecture. Ryukyu languages, including Okinawan, in the Japonic family, were thriving until the end of the nineteenth century when the Ryukyu Kingdom was abolished by the Japanese government and incorporated into the Japanese state. The number of Okinawan speakers has severely declined throughout the twentieth century. Today, most Okinawans speak a local variety of Japanese.
When it comes to the Ainu, they are constructed as extinct or already assimilated into Japanese society and therefore do not contradict national ideology of racial homogeneity. The Ainu were not even recognized officially by the Japanese government as a legitimate indigenous group with a language and culture distinct from that of mainstream Japanese until 2008. Over a century of denying the existence of the Ainu people has had devastating effects on the Ainu language, a language isolate, which
today is extremely endangered and is spoken as a first language by only a handful of elderly speakers on the northern island of HokkaidÅ. As in Europe, the process of state formation in Japan resulted in the consolidation of ethnolinguistic difference, which had the effect of reducing the overall visibility of ethnic groups and setting in motion the loss of minority indigenous languages. These losses took place through a specific form of nationalism that imagined ethnic Japanese as an extended family who shared the same blood and the same language.
An interesting challenge to the raceânationâlanguage triad in the Japanese context are the
Nikkeijin
, ethnic Japanese living abroad who have returned to Japan. Of the 2.6 million ethnic Japanese residing outside of Japan, the largest population is by far in Brazil (1.5 million). At the end of the nineteenth century, when the feudal system was waning, and Japan was consolidating itself as a nation-state, Brazil was transitioning from an empire into a constitutional republic and in 1888 finally outlawed the slave trade.
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The abolition of slavery in Brazil resulted in labor shortages in its booming coffee industry. As a result, the Brazilian government sought nonslave labor from other parts of the world, and Japanese migrants went to Brazil en masse to work on coffee plantations. When Japan's economy soared in the 1980s, the Japanese government provided visas to ethnic Japanese in South America, the descendants of those who had left Japan, so that they could return to Japan to work in factories.
How did the return migration fit within Japan's self-image of racial homogeneity? The Nikkeijin are Japanese by lineage, but in most cases they are Portuguese speakers rather than speakers of Japanese. On account of this difference, they are seen as not fully Japanese and have experienced discrimination in Japan, despite the importance placed on racial homogeneity in the narrative of Japanese national identity. The situation of return migration to Japan illustrates the constructed and unstable relationship among race, nation, and language. If Japanese citizenship and national identity were truly predicated on biology, as the national narrative suggests, Japanese born elsewhere would not be seen as others. However, race is a cultural construct, not a biological one, and therefore questions of language, place of birth, and cultural orientation bear upon determinations of group membership. By 2009, the Japanese economy had sunk into a prolonged recession, and the Japanese government offered unemployed Nikkeijin from Brazil and other countries in South America a stipend for repatriation to their home countries.
While Japan's national identity developed around the myth of racial homogeneity, Brazil's national identity developed, in contrast, around discourses of racial democracy. The term
mestiçagem
in Portuguese refers to the high degree of ethnic mixing that resulted from the history of colonialism, slavery, and immigration, and it is this high degree of mixing that is supposed to make Brazilians tolerant of racial difference. National narratives suggesting that Brazil is a racial utopia without racial conflict obscure the sociological realities of social stratification and inequality based on difference in contemporary Brazilian society. Brazilians of African heritage experience racial
discrimination, income inequality, and fewer and more negative media depictions than Brazilians of European heritage.
Once again, the ideology of racial democracy is interwoven with differences in language. While differences in race are acknowledged and supposedly celebrated, differences in language are denied in popular discourses, including in popular media (Massani-Cagliari 2004:19). This supposed linguistic homogeneity denies both variation within Brazilian Portuguese and the existence of languages other than Portuguese, both immigrant and indigenous. While denial of linguistic difference supports the Brazilian ideology of a racially diverse monolingual nation, the reality is that Portuguese has many regional varieties. The speech of the Paulistas in São Paulo differs from that of the Cariocas in Rio de Janeiro and the Gaúcha variety in Rio Grande do Sul. The variety of Portuguese spoken in Bahia is replete with borrowings from African languages such as Yoruba (Byrd 2012) and Bantu languages such as Kimbundu and Kikongo (Castro 2002:198). To the extent that regional varieties in Brazil reflect differences in immigration and contact, they can be said to be racialized. However, as linguist Massani-Cagliari notes, “Differences between Brazilians who speak differently and who mark their different identity precisely in the way they speak are simply erased” (Massani-Cagliari 2004:15). And the differences among Brazilian Portuguese varieties are dwarfed in comparison with 170 indigenous languages spoken by about 345,000 people, mostly in the Amazon.
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In Japan, a discourse of racial homogeneity downplaying ethnic difference occults the empirical reality of Japan's ethnolinguistic minority groups. In Brazil, an opposing discourse of racial democracy highlighting the country's ethnic diversity erases linguistic difference. In both cases, popular discourses weave ideas about race through ideas about language in the production of an identity that is
national
in nature.
In the United States, the legacy of one Native American group, the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina, provides a noteworthy counterpoint to the raceânationâlanguage triad in Japan and Brazil. With a population of around 50,000, the Lumbee are the largest Native American group in the United States east of the Mississippi River, although chances are you have never heard of them unless you happen to live in or around Robeson County, North Carolina. How could it be that the ninth largest Native American tribe in the United States could be both so absent from American awareness and, furthermore, ineligible for the benefits full federal recognition bestows?
The answer issues forth from the answer to a prior question: What does it mean to be Native American? The answer involves, as you might guess, race, nation, and language. While the Lumbee are themselves unambiguous in their self-identification as Native Americans, outsiders ranging from nonnative community members to governmental agencies have been reluctant to accept Lumbee identity claims. This reluctance has resulted in over 200 years of changing racial classifications of this group. Although the Lumbee were once considered to be White, they were grouped with African Americans as Free Persons of Color in revisions made to North Carolina's Constitution
in 1835. Exactly 50 years later, their status changed again, when the state government passed legislation recognizing them as Indians. The instability in racial classification is evidenced by the long list of labels used to name the group: Croatan Indians, Indians of Robeson County, Cherokee Indians of Robeson County, Siouan Indians of the Lumber River, and, since 1953, Lumbee Indians. Each of the names situated the Lumbee differently with respect to other Native American groups, popular understandings of race, and government policy.
The Cherokee of Western North Carolina objected to the adoption of the name Cherokee Indians of Robeson County, fearing a reduction in their own tribal benefits should the federal government recognize the Lumbee as Cherokee and then split the allocated funds between the two groups. As the Lumbee shifted through ethnic categories (White, Black, Indian) and tribal names (Croatan, Cherokee, Sioux, Lumbee), scientists representing the state sought to define the Lumbee in terms of physical characteristics thought to index so-called authentic Indian-ness. In the 1930s, physical anthropologists were hired by the federal government to scientifically investigate physical features of the Lumbee. Blood samples were taken to ascertain if the Lumbee had Indian blood, or enough of it, cranial measurements were recorded, and Lumbee hair was even subjected to a thinness test, as thin hair was thought to be a physical trait of Native Americans. This test worked by inserting a pencil into a test subject's hair. If the pencil stayed in place after vigorous hair shaking, the hair was deemed too thick to be authentically Indian; if it fell, the opposite was true. In certain cases, this test placed siblings into separate categories, Indian and non-Indian.
In the twentieth century, the state of North Carolina recognized the Lumbee as Lumbee Indians in 1953. However, when a congressional act was passed in 1956 to officially recognize the Lumbee at the federal level, it stipulated that “nothing in this Act shall make such Indians eligible for any services performed by the United States for Indians because of their status as Indians.” Thus, federal recognition not only as Indians but also as a specific tribe, Lumbee, was still not enough to earn tribal benefits. As ever, the question of authentic ethnicity is related to language. If the Lumbee still spoke a Native American language, their argument for full federal recognition would have been settled in their favor long ago.
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The Lumbee can, however, lay claim to linguistic distinctiveness. The Lumbee speak a variety of English, which shares features in common with the contiguous White and African American communities but which is also characterized by unique lexical, phonological, and grammatical features. Two examples of grammatical structures that distinguish Lumbee English from contiguous varieties are the use of perfective
I'm
(“I'm been there before”) and finite
bes
(“That's how it bes sometimes”). These structures combine with features shared by other local language varieties, including the regularized past tense use of
weren't
in negative constructions (“I weren't there/she weren't there”) and unique phonological patterns (
hit
for
it
and
hain't
for
ain't
) to create a variety that sets the Lumbees apart from other language groups in the region. The presence of a distinctive variety of English, however, has not proven to be convincing evidence of Lumbee nationhood first to North Carolina state officials and then to federal officials who subscribe â consciously or not â to the ideology in which so-called dialects are deemed to be illegitimate derivatives of real languages.
The situation with the Lumbee underscores how questions of language and ethnic identification have political and economic consequences. In the Lumbee case, local, state, and federal governments have great stakes in the outcome. Are the Lumbee eligible for tribal sovereignty? Are they eligible for federal assistance? The language of the Lumbee today is a unique variety of English, which developed like all language varieties, through the historical conditions of its speakers, and in this respect is no different from a hypothetical tribal language the Lumbee may have once spoken. Because of this linguistic distinctiveness, we, the authors, believe the Lumbee deserve the same state and federal rights enjoyed by other recognized Native American ethnogroups.
It is fairly easy to see how contemporary Lumbee identity has been shaped out of its relationship with the state, which has explicitly involved questions of race and more implicitly involved questions of language. We would like to suggest that all group identities are defined at least in part through some relationship with the states they inhabit, and in turn, these groups shape the social meanings of national identity. Language is often the crux of the interplay between the state and the groups. It is on linguistic terrain that certain groups make claims to statehood, and language is a valuable tool with which already-formed states maintain social control, as we will see in Chapter 6.
In this section, we have seen that the workings of the raceânationâlanguage triad vary from place to place. In Japan, national identity was imagined in terms of racial homogeneity, but when for economic reasons Japanese from South America were repatriated in the 1980s and did not speak Japanese, they soon became unwelcome when the economy faltered. In contrast, Brazilian nationalism is imagined to be a racially heterogeneous democracy through
mestiçagem
(mixing), but the unity comes at the cost of denying all linguistic difference. In the United States, the Lumbee have experienced and continue to experience double jeopardy. First, they were denied recognition as Native Americans in the absence of a tribal language. Now they have been given recognition as Native Americans, but their distinctive variety of English is denied. In all three cases, the issue of language is key.
A final point to make is this: the above examples illustrate how the term
race
carries the self-important claim of a relationship to reality, since it figures so prominently in certain political discourses. However, since the term has never been and cannot be applied in any consistent way, it has no more descriptive utility to the perspective taken on language in this book than the term
dialect
does to sociolinguistics, and we eliminate it from further discussion.