Spek Engilsh, dameit!
It really bugs me when Americans get all righteous about people coming here to visit or people who live here and do not speak English or speak it poorly.
• If we're going by first rights, then we should ALL be speaking one of the many indigenous languages of America - I'd be speaking Dena'ina right now, how about my other North-American LJ friends?
• Unless your ancestors came from an English speaking country, I wouldn't whine about it, either - your great-great grandma probably didn't have the easiest time, either. In my case, it would be Swedish, Lithuanian, and German.
• America has been dubbed the "great melting pot". And while this has negative connotations of diluting culture, the flip side of it is that we SHOULD be sharing amongst our varied backgrounds - it's a place we're supposed to be free to BE ourselves, and that includes language, I should think.
• And the big So what? The number 1 thing that pisses me off about people whining that everyone should speak English here in the U.S.? The United States HAS no official language! English is only the de facto language for the country but it is not written in law that everyone must speak it. Apparently this is the same for the UK, Australia, and New Zealand (not Canada). see the list of officially English-speaking nations here. A very slight differentiation but hey.
[the following is totally off-the-cuff and was not thought out very well:]
I don't know how this even came up. I hadn't known before today that the U.S. had no official language. ;) But also, a few weeks ago on the alaskans community, someone asked for opinions on an attempt to get Yup'ik put on ballots. There are still native people living here in AK for whom English is not a first language. Some felt that putting Yup'ik and other indigenous languages on the ballot would be just another way of "pandering to the natives who were here before us, because we DID take their land" sort of can of worms - which led to arguments of why everyone should be learning English because THAT'S the major language we all speak here, and that we should have native languages on the ballots only until the people who speak it as a first language die out. o_O; So much for preserving culture.
My argument was geared more toward reviving culture than the practicality of multiple languages being on a ballot. First, let me start here: it is true that the native peoples of America have been totally fucked over by invading governments. You cannot argue with that. It doesn't help that these same governments came in with boarding schools and other horrors to force biased, Christian, white education on native people and made them feel ashamed of their own heritage. This shame creates a self-destructive cycle of abuse of all kinds - this is documented and something that Vivian is asked to speak about, literally around the globe ("the Multi-generational Affects of Trauma from Boarding Schools on Indigenous Peoples" is her specialty). To speak a native language was a shameful thing to many traumatized families. It's been found that relearning ones culture - especially language - is a very good way to heal.
Second, There are lots of ways to go about rescuing a culture but language is an interesting intrinsic thread that holds cultural elements together stronger than most other things. The very vocabularies and grammatical structure shows a great deal about what is important to a people - some stories simply cannot be properly translated because foreign languages simply do not have the descriptive capabilities to convey the true meaning the story holds in its own language. This is especially true for more isolated languages with fewer cognates than more prominent languages like German, Japanese, French, or Spanish. To really save a culture, its language has to remain a living element.
So why would it be helpful to stick these languages on ballots? It's one thing to have your kids go learn a language at some camp but another to keep them practicing it outside of class. Maybe its a utopian idea but it would be really helpful to just start putting these other languages onto everything - not in a haphazard or messy way, of course, but if its there, it will be read. Of course, ballots aren't read by EVERYONE, so the ballot thing is a weak place to start the language arggument. But for instance, I only took 3 and a half years of French and I don't recall much but to this day I can pick up a multi-language box or instruction manual, accidentally flip to the French bit and start reading along for a few sentences without knowing it. It's not much but it keeps those linguistic neurons firing. Point being, people are more likely to remember a language even if its only accidental that they keep reading it everywhere.
And it's totally possible. Wales did it, as I am told. The Maori are borrowing from the Welsh and using the same methods to revive their language - put the language on everything! Teach it and use it in schools! And now people like Vivian are trying to get those same methods implemented in their own areas to resuscitate their own languages. Who knew the toughest place to do it would be the country with one of the greatest amalgams of cultures? Argh!
[/random rant]
• If we're going by first rights, then we should ALL be speaking one of the many indigenous languages of America - I'd be speaking Dena'ina right now, how about my other North-American LJ friends?
• Unless your ancestors came from an English speaking country, I wouldn't whine about it, either - your great-great grandma probably didn't have the easiest time, either. In my case, it would be Swedish, Lithuanian, and German.
• America has been dubbed the "great melting pot". And while this has negative connotations of diluting culture, the flip side of it is that we SHOULD be sharing amongst our varied backgrounds - it's a place we're supposed to be free to BE ourselves, and that includes language, I should think.
• And the big So what? The number 1 thing that pisses me off about people whining that everyone should speak English here in the U.S.? The United States HAS no official language! English is only the de facto language for the country but it is not written in law that everyone must speak it. Apparently this is the same for the UK, Australia, and New Zealand (not Canada). see the list of officially English-speaking nations here. A very slight differentiation but hey.
[the following is totally off-the-cuff and was not thought out very well:]
I don't know how this even came up. I hadn't known before today that the U.S. had no official language. ;) But also, a few weeks ago on the alaskans community, someone asked for opinions on an attempt to get Yup'ik put on ballots. There are still native people living here in AK for whom English is not a first language. Some felt that putting Yup'ik and other indigenous languages on the ballot would be just another way of "pandering to the natives who were here before us, because we DID take their land" sort of can of worms - which led to arguments of why everyone should be learning English because THAT'S the major language we all speak here, and that we should have native languages on the ballots only until the people who speak it as a first language die out. o_O; So much for preserving culture.
My argument was geared more toward reviving culture than the practicality of multiple languages being on a ballot. First, let me start here: it is true that the native peoples of America have been totally fucked over by invading governments. You cannot argue with that. It doesn't help that these same governments came in with boarding schools and other horrors to force biased, Christian, white education on native people and made them feel ashamed of their own heritage. This shame creates a self-destructive cycle of abuse of all kinds - this is documented and something that Vivian is asked to speak about, literally around the globe ("the Multi-generational Affects of Trauma from Boarding Schools on Indigenous Peoples" is her specialty). To speak a native language was a shameful thing to many traumatized families. It's been found that relearning ones culture - especially language - is a very good way to heal.
Second, There are lots of ways to go about rescuing a culture but language is an interesting intrinsic thread that holds cultural elements together stronger than most other things. The very vocabularies and grammatical structure shows a great deal about what is important to a people - some stories simply cannot be properly translated because foreign languages simply do not have the descriptive capabilities to convey the true meaning the story holds in its own language. This is especially true for more isolated languages with fewer cognates than more prominent languages like German, Japanese, French, or Spanish. To really save a culture, its language has to remain a living element.
So why would it be helpful to stick these languages on ballots? It's one thing to have your kids go learn a language at some camp but another to keep them practicing it outside of class. Maybe its a utopian idea but it would be really helpful to just start putting these other languages onto everything - not in a haphazard or messy way, of course, but if its there, it will be read. Of course, ballots aren't read by EVERYONE, so the ballot thing is a weak place to start the language arggument. But for instance, I only took 3 and a half years of French and I don't recall much but to this day I can pick up a multi-language box or instruction manual, accidentally flip to the French bit and start reading along for a few sentences without knowing it. It's not much but it keeps those linguistic neurons firing. Point being, people are more likely to remember a language even if its only accidental that they keep reading it everywhere.
And it's totally possible. Wales did it, as I am told. The Maori are borrowing from the Welsh and using the same methods to revive their language - put the language on everything! Teach it and use it in schools! And now people like Vivian are trying to get those same methods implemented in their own areas to resuscitate their own languages. Who knew the toughest place to do it would be the country with one of the greatest amalgams of cultures? Argh!
[/random rant]