Blog 10/22: Gained in Translation?

This weeks’ readings discussed Chicago’s history as a complexly multilingual city and outlined strategies for developing disciplinary literacy with English language learners. I’d like to focus on the former, because I’m fascinated by multilingualism in society and its implications for schools, and I’d love to get a conversation going about it with you guys.

While we hear a lot about the effects of increasing globalism, it’s important to remember that the multicultural and multilingual identity of Chicago is not a recent thing. As Marcia Farr points out, even from its beginning as a crossroad of Miami and Illinois indigenous populations, it has been marked by the convergence and blending of languages. Something that I found particularly valuable about Farr’s piece is her embrace of the layers of complexity that are lost in the labels frequently assigned to ethnic and racial identity. While the demographic data we’re used to seeing may tell us that Chicago’s racial composition is 5.5% “Asian,” that gives an incredibly vague picture until it’s broken down into more detail, such as country of origin, and then into several more subgroups.

Just like these cultures don’t fall into neat buckets, neither do their languages. Farr explains that the standardized versions of languages have rarely been used by immigrants to Chicago (Farr, 272), leading to unique blends of multiple dialects of the same language family as well as these new blends meeting other languages. The map below shows census blocks color-coded by most-spoken language beside Spanish or English. Even this simplified (I say simplified because Chinese is not broken down into dialects, and some categories remain as wide as “Scandinavian languages”) graphic is busy and complex. You can read about the methods used to create this map at this blog: http://nihilnovijournal.org/post/87980253531/minority-languages-in-chicago

This identity building of languages (and vice versa) is where I’d like to focus our discussion and get your input.

While right-wing politicians have for decades used scare tactics of “foreign” language, frightening white suburban voters with thoughts of their children having to hear *gasp* Spanish in their school, this tactic hilariously backfired when co-founder of Latinos for Trump, Marco Gutierrez, warned that continued immigration from Mexico would lead to taco trucks on every corner. The hashtag #TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner exploded with people who all seemed to agree that it sounded like a utopia, and “Taco trucks on every corner” briefly became the closest thing that the Democratic Party had to a rallying cry.

Parents would be thrilled if their child excelled at tap dancing, but might not be quite so excited if they came home speaking a blend of the Igbo and Irish languages. We seem to have no problem embracing the meeting of cultures when it comes to things like music, food, and dance, so why are new languages met with such a different level of resistance? What is it that makes people so nervous about the introduction of a new language?

From these examples, we might wonder if language is the most deeply tied of all cultural facets to identity. Sure enough, a quick look at history can tell us that colonizing forces first try to stamp out a language to eliminate a culture. The US government forced many Native American children (including, ironically, most of the children who would go on to become military Code Talkers as adults) to attend boarding schools where they were forced to speak only English.

I’ll reference the Irish language again, not because I think there’s anything special about it, but because I can speak of its case with more confidence than other language histories. During England’s colonization in Ireland during the 1700s, laws were passed prohibiting the speaking of Irish in schools and other settings. Some regions that were too inhospitable to be colonizable retained the language, but it basically died out everywhere else in favor of English, until a revival movement in the late 1800s. At that point, as an assertion of cultural identity, adults were hitting the books to try to learn the native language of their own country in which they had lived their whole lives.

Today, people in the Republic of Ireland are able to agree on what their culture should look like; aside from small regional variations in food and music, the Irish-Catholic majority is overwhelmingly homogenous. But when the issue of language is introduced, as we’ve seen with other discussions of multilingual cultures, things get much more complicated. The sign below might look normal at first glance, but look closer and you’ll see that the word “Dingle” has been spray-painted on. Several years ago, a law was passed requiring that roadsigns for Gaeltachtaí (regions in which Irish is dominantly spoken) towns could only display the town’s name in Irish, even if the sign is located in an English-speaking area. Seemingly overnight, green tapes plastered over the English names for Gaeltacht towns. In the case of towns such as An Daingean (which has already been simplified from its full name, Daingean Uí Chúis) , the English name was subsequently spray-painted back on. In some parts of the countryside, you can find signs that have undergone hundreds of rounds of this cycle. 

For a closer-to-home example of identity ascribed through language, we can listen to Chicago’s own Gina Rodriguez, star of Jane the Virgin, talk about her self-described “Selena moment.” Much like Selena did, she faces criticism from people who claim she isn’t really Latina because she doesn’t speak Spanish fluently. About the use of language as the ultimate identity signifier, she says, “It’s like telling me I’m not a woman enough because my breasts aren’t a certain size… I am as Latina as they come, and I am not defined by anybody’s definition of Latina. I don’t sit in a definition. I walk in my world, happily and confidently.”

So, what’s the point of all this? As future educators, we should strive to understand as much as we can about the rich intersections of culture and language our students bring to the classroom, as well as the way those intersections might make their identities vulnerable to attacks. I’m interested in hearing from you about why you think language is held up as the most important pillar of cultural identity. 

Furthermore, given our exploration into the way a threat to language is a threat to culture, are right-wing “patriots” coming from a place of genuine concern when they defend the supremacy of English in American schools? In Suzanne Talhouk’s TEDx talk, “Don’t Kill Your Language” (watch here: https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_talhouk_don_t_kill_your_language/discussion), she discusses the importance of protecting her language (Arabic) from dying out. Here are her words: “It’s often said that if you want to kill a nation, the only way to kill a nation, is to kill its language. This is a reality that developed societies are aware of. The Germans, French, Japanese and Chinese, all these nations are aware of this. That’s why they legislate to protect their language. They make it sacred.”

I don’t have answers to the questions I’ve raised, but I’d love to start a conversation about them.