In most cases the first wave of immigrants retained the language they had brought with them--Jews Yiddish, Italians Italian, Germans German, and so on--at least until their sons and daughters, born and educated in this country, grew up without fluency in the ancestral tongue. The life of the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the turn of the century was vibrant with newspapers, magazines, social clubs, and theaters in the foreign languages of the immigrants. German-language newspapers, German-medium schools, and German-language churches flourished in areas of heavy German immigration--Wisconsin and central Texas, for example--down to the First World War, when war with Germany made pro-German attitudes unpopular and even dangerous. Nonetheless, even into the 1960s one could hear German spoken in America by people who had never set foot in those German-speaking countries from which their grandparents and great-grandparents had emigrated.
America is often referred to as a “melting pot,” implying that different ethnicities merge into one uniform “American identity” after the first generation of immigrants has assimilated to American life. Most students of ethnicity now have reservations about the melting pot theory. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in their influential book Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), set the tone for contemporary views when they insisted that “the point about the melting pot is that it did not happen.” Ethnic minorities have proved to be far more tenacious in clinging to aspects of their Otherness--their ethnic identities--than the melting pot theory assumed. Some minorities, the Amish for example or Chasidic Jews, have successfully resisted any but superficial assimilation into mainstream American life.
However, to say that the melting pot is a faulty metaphor for the realities of American assimilation is less true of language than it is of such qualities of ethnicity as religion, cuisine, marriage patterns, and social customs. Foreign languages do not normally survive in America in the second generation except in areas where a large number of immigrants are concentrated, notably Spanish-speakers from many different Spanish-speaking countries in Miami, New York City, southern Texas, and southern California. There are pockets here and there in America where foreign languages defy the rule of second-generation loss, but there are always special circumstances at play in such cases. Examples are the preservation of the Basque language among sheepherders in northern California and Quebec French in northern Maine. The most common complaint of immigrants who remain in the United States is that their children lose the language; they learn English and rarely have native fluency in the language of their parents.
When the first language of immigration declines what is often left behind as a residue is an “ethnic accent”--a pattern of speech influenced by the immigrant language and noticeably different from standard American English. Thus, the pronunciation of Long Island, which in standard American pronunciation is [lø˜ ajl\nd] (without a [g]), is often pronounced [lø˜gajl\nd] (with a [g]) in the “Jewish-American accent” of the northeast. This is a stereotype of course since by no means do all or most “Jewish-Americans” even in the northeast have this pronunciation; but to the extent that it does occur it is a carry-over from the phonological patterns of the Yiddish language. Similarly dese [diz] and dose [doz] for these [∂iz] and those [∂oz] are found in many ethnic accents in which the source language does not have the fricatives [†] and [∂].
Not all immigrants who came to America were speakers of languages other than English. The Irish began coming to America in large numbers during the period of the Great Famine (1846-1851) when the Irish potato crop failed through disease, and going to America was often the only alternative to death by starvation. Relatively few of these immigrants were monolingual in the Irish language, the Celtic language indigenous to Ireland (sometimes called “Gaelic,” though “Irish” is now the preferred designation). Most spoke English, but the variety of English they brought with them was “Irish English,” which is different from more “standard” versions of British or American English.
Phonological characteristics of Irish English include: (1) retention of historical /r/ postvocalically (as in standard American but not standard British pronunciation); (2) the use of “clear” /l/ in all positions (the alveo-palatal [l] of leaf vs. the velar [˚] of full); (3) retention of the contrast between /w/ and /„/ (so that weather and whether, witch and which differ in their initial sound); (4) monophthongs /e: o:/ in place of diphthongs [ej ow] in the vowels of words like face, take and goat, soak; (5) replacement of the fricatives /† ∂/ by stops and affricates (thin [†in] pronounced as tin [tin] or tthin [t†in]); (6) retention of vowel distinctions before /r/ (so that the vocalic nuclei of words such as bird, learn, beard, turn, [|] in American English, are contrastive); (7) neutralization of the opposition between /´/ and /i/ before nasals (pin and pen are homonyms, as in much of southeastern American English). Syntactically there is the occurrence of reflexive pronouns in sentences such as: “And it’s himself that told me …” and “… they were paying no attention to anything at all as long as themselves were well.” Then there is the curious matter of the “after perfect”: “I’m after doing it already,” “She understands; she’s after havin’ children herself,” and “They seemed pretty cool, for what they were after goin’ through” (in place of standard “I’ve done it,” “She understands; she’s had children herself,” and “They seemed pretty cool after all they had gone through”).
As above in the case of the stereotypical “Jewish-American accent” most Americans of Irish descent have long since accommodated their speech to General American, and none of these Irish-English traits remain in the way they talk. But some of the “Irishness” would be apt to persist for several generations, especially in areas of big cities such as Boston, New York, and Chicago where the Irish have been resident for a long time and where in many cases the population has been steadily replenished by immigration from Ireland. To the extent that Irish-English speech patterns do persist they make for what can be called an “Irish ethnic accent.”
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been the most intensively studied ethnic dialect of English. (The terminology is not settled. What is here called AAVE is variously referred to as Black English, African-American English, and Ebonics.) AAVE is the dialect of English spoken by African-Americans living in the “inner city”--the ghetto--of large urban centers such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The sociolinguist William Labov, in pioneering research undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s, established that AAVE, far from being the “corrupt, degenerate, ungrammatical, bad” English that linguistically naïve observers had thought it to be, is as legitimate a dialect of ethnic English as any other. AAVE is rule-governed and has its own precepts of correctness and incorrectness--is therefore a language.
Some of the major phonological characteristics of AAVE are the following: (1) deletion of /r/ except before a vowel (dough and door rhyme); (2) simplification of final consonant clusters (he picks is he pick’, she found is she foun’); (3) interchange (metathesis) of consonants in words such as ask (aks); (4) neutralization of the contrast between [´] and [i] before nasal consonants (compare Irish English above); (5) replacement of postvocalic [†] and [∂] by [f] and [v] ([wif] for with, [br\v|] for brother). Syntactically a major systematic difference between AAVE and standard American English is the presence or absence of the verb be to distinguish between habitual and momentary state (compare Spanish ser and estar):
Lisa be sick. “Lisa is always sick.”
Joe sick. “Joe is sick at the moment.”
He be late. “He is chronically late.”
He late. “He’s late this time.”
There is scholarly dispute about the origins of AAVE. The leading opinion at present is that most of the “non-standard” features of AAVE can be traced back to the influence of the African languages spoken by the slaves, who were taken from many different tribes and languages of mostly western Africa and acquired English only after they were forced into slavery in America under English-speaking masters and overseers. According to this theory, AAVE arose as a pidgin language based on English in which slaves speaking different tribal languages could communicate. This pidgin language then became a creole language as the children of the slaves grew up speaking it, and from this creole AAVE of the present day has developed.
It must be emphasized that individual differences matter. African-Americans or members of any ethnic group who grow up in contact with standard American English will speak standard American English. A blindfolded listener could not distinguish their speech from anyone else’s. It is a matter of educational opportunities, mobility, and one’s language contacts.
Another ethnic dialect of English is Chicano English (ChE), the language of Mexican-Americans in the southwestern United States and in urban areas to which its speakers have migrated. Phonological characteristics of ChE are: (1) substitution of tense vowels for lax vowels (sit and seat are both pronounced as seat); (2) substitution of ch [ê] for sh [ß] (chew and shoe are both pronounced like chew [êu]) and vice-versa ([ß´k] for check); (3) consonant cluster simplification, as in par’ for part and He like’ her for He likes her); (4) non-standard patterns of stress and intonation.
A key ingredient of ethnicity is language. Language, that is to say, helps define our place in the world; it can serve either as a sign of membership in the community or as a reason for exclusion from the membership of that community. In many parts of the world ethnic unity and cultural identification often are defined by language rather than by geography or religion. This is notably true of Arabic, whose speakers--the Arabs--base their identity in large measure on the use of a common tongue. The locus of Bengali ethnic identity resides in language despite the division of the speakers of Bengali between two countries, India and Bangladesh, the number of speakers living in Bangladesh being about half again as large as those living in India. The Bengali language--a language with an ancient and much-revered literary history--is the principal basis of ethnic unity. This is clear from the name for itself taken by the new nation of former eastern Bengal following the 1971 war of secession from Pakistan. The noun Bangladesh is composed of bangla plus desa, the latter meaning “country.” The first part of the compound does not mean the Bengali people or the territory of Bengal; the term bangla refers specifically to the Bengali language: Bangladesh = “land of the Bengali speakers.”
The case of the French language in Quebec demonstrates a particularly strong association between ethnicity and language . Six million French-speakers, five million of them in Quebec, compose about one-quarter of the population of Canada. The Quebecois (speakers of French resident in the province of Quebec) regard themselves as a distinct island in a surrounding sea of anglophones (monolingual English-speakers). They resent the English language and fear its spread in Quebec; they resent the historical domination of their economy and culture by anglophones; and they resent immigrants who want their children to be educated in both English and French. Language is intimately tied to Quebecois ethnicity--to Quebecois identity. Worship of the French language is the almost sacral force that fortifies and unifies the movement for an independent Quebec.
Language is a major symbol of ethnicity, often the major and most tangible symbol. In this role language has always been a force both for unity and for division in the world. It has helped to unify countries--as English makes it possible for Indians from all parts and ethnicities of India to communicate--and it can be a force for the dissolution of a country. It remains to be seen whether Quebec will remain a part of Canada or secede. In Belgium a virtual language war between French and Flemish (similar to Dutch) threatens this country with its weakly-fused identity. Here, as always, ethnicity is bound up with language, economic grievances, and demands for power. The lines of guerilla warfare in Sri Lanka are drawn between Tamil Hindus and Sinhalese Buddhists--and between the Tamil and Sinhalese languages. The demands for independence of the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, formerly “republics” of the Soviet Union, were intimately bound up with fears for the future of their respective ethnicities--and languages--in a sea of Russianness.
One final aspect of the relationship between ethnicity and language deserves attention--the role of language in preserving ethnic identity, especially in diaspora settings. The world has seen countless instances of peoples forced from their homelands because of their ethnicity. In most cases, diaspora leads to loss of language and ultimately of ethnic identity. The celebrated counterexample to this is the role of the Hebrew language in the maintenance of Jewish ethnicity. Hebrew was traditionally the language of the Jewish people; however, it had become extinct as their spoken language by the beginning of the Common Era. It was maintained as the language of ritual, of prayer, and of disputation among rabbis. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE Jews were dispersed throughout the then-known world. Nevertheless, they preserved their identity, their Otherness, their distinctive ethnicity. The Hebrew language, which was reborn as a spoken language in Palestine in the nineteenth century, was part of the glue which held Jewish ethnicity together through almost 2,000 years of diaspora.
To paraphrase the great linguist Edward Sapir, we should never make the mistake of confusing a language with a dictionary and a grammar. Both the effect and the affect of language go well beyond words and rules of grammar. Language touches us in the deep places of our being--in our identity, in our sense of where we belong. One of the most sensitive of these places is our ethnicity. In ethnicity begins the true study of language as a badge of identity.
robert d. king
Further Reading
Chiswick, Barry R., editor. Immigration, Language and Ethnicity: Canada and the United States. Washington D.C.: AEI Press, 1992
Dow, James R., editor. Language and Ethnicity. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Publishers, 1991
Fishman, Joshua A. Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Clevedon, Avon, England; Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, Ltd., 1989
Gleason, Phillip. Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in
Twentieth Century America. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
Haarman, Harold. Language in Ethnicity: A View of Basic Ecological
Relations. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986
Lourie, Margaret A. and Nancy Faires Conklin, editors. A Pluralistic
Nation: The Language Issue in the United States. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury
House Publishers, 1978
Shukla, Hira Lal. Language, Ethnicity and History: Dimensions in
Anthropological Linguistics. New Delhi, India: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1985
Van Horne, Winston A., editor. Ethnicity and Language. Milwaukee:
University of Wisconsin System, Institute on Race and Ethnicity, 1987