Encyclopedia of Linguistics, ethnicity and language.

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                                                                                           Ethnicity and Language      

Robert D. King

Department of Linguistics

University of Texas

Austin, Texas 78712

Encyclopedia of Linguistics

(To be published on-line by Macmillan)

 ethnicity and language

The words “ethnicity” and “ethnic” were in common use at the end of the 20th century in contexts so widely disparate that no common definition will suffice to unite the variety of meanings. We speak of “ethnic studies,” of “ethnic groups” and “ethnic neighborhoods,” of “ethnic and racial groups,” of “ethnic revivals,” and of “ethnic cleansing”--a euphemism for genocide that came into use in the 1990s when certain countries tried to drive minority “ethnicities” from their territory through terror and murder. In the 2000 census of the United States, although the Census Bureau of the United States used traditional categories of “race” such as White, Black, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, Other, and Multiracial in gathering census data, any of these might equally well be regarded as “ethnic” classifications in today’s language  usage. It is unclear where ethnicity leaves off and race begins. “Hispanic,” in the 2000 census, was stipulated by the Census Bureau as “may be of any race”--which indicates the extent to which “race” and “ethnicity” overlap in contemporary discourse.

Ultimately, as we use the word today, ethnicity is not a matter of strict definition. It is a matter of identity: you are what you say you are and what other people think you are. We find it convenient in certain contexts to use the phrase “ethnic group” for a wide variety of minorities in America and other countries: Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Asian-Americans, immigrant South Asians and their children, Native Americans, African-Americans, Roma (Gypsies) in the many countries where they live, French-Canadians in Canada and in Maine, Kurds in Turkey, Basques in Spain and France. In recent years advocates of the interests of gay and Deaf communities in America have argued for the benefits of using the term “ethnic” in referring to these groups. “Ethnicity” in current usage is so elastic and so convenient a term of reference that it may perhaps most usefully be defined simply as the “Other”--a member of any minority group in a country who retains or is thought to retain the differences of that group.

Otherness links ethnicity and language. Language always has a setting. If that setting is the majority of a country’s population, then the language of that majority will be the “language of the country.” If that setting is an ethnic minority of a country’s population, then the language of that ethnicity will either be a different language from the language of the country or a dialect of the majority language that nevertheless differs significantly from it. Language does not exist apart from ethnicity; it is a visible badge of ethnicity. A different ethnicity therefore often implies a different language or at least a different variant of a majority language. (We sometimes refer to ethnic dialects as “ethnolects,” modeled after the pattern of “dialect” and “idiolect”--the speech of a single individual.)

From the end of the Civil War to the end of the First World War (1865-1918) the population of the United States grew rapidly through immigration. There were prejudice and laws against immigration of members of “races” thought to be inferior or “incompatible” with the majority population of America--against Asians and Africans for example--but for others gaining admittance to America was not difficult. This led to massive immigration from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, England, and other predominantly European countries. Jews, who had faced discrimination and pogroms in the old country, emigrated from eastern Europe in large numbers to America during this period.

Initially the new immigrants tended to settle where earlier immigrants from their country and family members had settled before them. The Lower East Side in Manhattan became a camp of crowded tenements divided along ethnic boundaries: Italian, Jewish, Irish, German. Every great city of the northeastern United States--Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston--had similar concentrations of immigrants joined by ethnicity.

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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, ...

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