American Voices How Dialects Differ from coast to coast_09 doc

232 When Linguistic Worlds Collide Acknowledgment North Carolina. National Science Foundation grants BCS 9910224 and 0236838 supported the research reported here. Further Reading Even the most restricted list of the articles and books on African American English would be excessive to cite here. The Substrate Hypothesis is presented in great technical detail in Walt Wolfram and Erik Thomas, The Development of African American English (Blackwell, 2002). Shana Poplack and Sali Tagliamonte, in African American English in the Diaspora (Blackwell, 2001), set forth the Neo- Anglicist position in equal technical detail. A more accessible description of the history and development of AAE is John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford’s book, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (Wiley, 2000). AVC35 21/7/05, 10:54 AM232 Carmen Fought 233 36 Talkin’ with mi Gente (Chicano English) Carmen Fought A coworker of mine asked me recently, “Why do so many Mexican Amer- ican students seem to have such a hard time speaking English, even if they were born here in the US?” I realized that her comment was based on a mistaken impression. She heard some students speaking English with what sounded like a Spanish accent, and assumed that Spanish was their first 36 Time out on the railroad tracks. © by Jamison Boyer. AVC36 21/7/05, 10:54 AM233 234 Talkin’ with mi Gente language. Instead, what she was hearing was probably Chicano English. Chicano English is a dialect spoken mainly by people of Mexican ethnic origin in California and the Southwest. There are other varieties associated with Latino communities as well. In New York City, for example, one finds Puerto Rican English, which shares some properties with Chicano English, but is different in other ways. Why Study Chicano English? One of the factors that makes Chicano English worth a long linguistic look is the fact that it “grew up” in a bilingual setting. As immigrants from Mexico came to California and other parts of the Southwest, communities developed which included many people who spoke only Spanish. Many of these speakers began to learn English and, like other learners of a language, they spoke a non-native variety which included sounds and grammatical constructions from their first language, Spanish. But the children of these immigrants grew up using both English and Spanish, and as the communities began to stabilize, so did a new dialect of English. Because of its origins, Chicano English does have many features, especially in the phonology, that show the influence of Spanish. For example, the a sound in words like pasta or saw sounds much more like the Spanish a than in other dialects of English. In the ending on words like going or talking, Chicano English speakers tend to have a higher vowel, more like the i of Spanish (as in sí), so that the words end up sounding more like goween and talkeen. There is also a special use of the word barely in Chicano English to mean ‘had just recently’ as in These were expensive when they barely came out. (In my dialect, this would be translated as These were expensive at the beginning, when they had just come out.) This may come from the Spanish adverb apenas, which can mean that something almost did not happen but then it did (which is what barely means in many English dialects), or it can mean that something happened just recently. This latter meaning can some- times be attached to barely in other dialects of English (Don’t leave; you barely got here!) but not always (e.g., I barely broke my leg, which speakers of most other dialects don’t say, but which is acceptable in Chicano English). AVC36 21/7/05, 10:54 AM234 Carmen Fought 235 Is Chicano English Just the Non-native English of Spanish Speakers? It would be a mistake to characterize Chicano English as “learner English,” somehow imperfect and non-native. Chicano English is a stable and fully formed dialect, linguistically and structurally equivalent to other dialects of English, such as the varieties spoken by Anglos in the same regions. Like the coworker I mentioned earlier, many people hear Chicano English and assume that what they are hearing is the “accent” of someone whose first language is Spanish. The problem with this theory is that many speakers of Chicano English are not bilingual; they may not know any Spanish at all. Despite the mistaken impression that many people have, these Mexican American speakers have in fact learned English natively and fluently, like most children growing up in the US. They just happened to have learned a non-standard variety that retains indicators of contact with Spanish. My students often insist that they can tell whether someone is bilingual or not from their English. To test this, I have made up a tape of short segments (in English) spoken by four Chicano English speakers from my fieldwork in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s. Two of the speakers are bilin- gual, and two speak only English. I play this tape for the students and ask them to identify each speaker as bilingual or monolingual. In every class where I have done this test, the students are unable to classify the speakers correctly. The most non-standard sounding speaker, for example, is usually labeled by a majority of the class as bilingual, yet I discovered in the interview that the most he can do in Spanish is count to ten. The truth is that you don’t need to know any Spanish to speak Chicano English. Chicano English also includes features that are not clearly attributable to Spanish. An example is multiple negation (She didn’t tell me nothing about it) which could be related to Spanish, but could just as easily have come from other non-standard dialects spoken by working-class African Americans or Anglos, for example. More recently, it has been discovered that some Chicano English speakers also incorporate features from the local Anglo dialect, a Cali- fornia variety known colloquially as the “Valley Girl” dialect. Additionally, some speakers use features from African American English. Of course, not everyone in a particular Mexican American community speaks Chicano English, and there is also a wide range of styles encom- passed by this label, as is the case with other dialects, including standard AVC36 21/7/05, 10:54 AM235 236 Talkin’ with mi Gente ones. Some middle-class speakers in a Mexican American community may speak a variety that is grammatically fairly similar to more standard dialects, but retains a special phonology, while other middle-class speakers might not speak Chicano English at all. Women, in general, speak Chicano English a bit differently than men. The language used by young speakers who are gang members includes terms that other members of the com- munity do not use. What is “Spanglish”? Also characteristic of Chicano English is the use of Spanish lexical items. Even speakers who do not know much Spanish will occasionally throw in a word or phrase like ándale or hasta la vista as a kind of identity marker. This occasional use of a Spanish word is different from code-switching – the more complex mixing of lexical items and structures from English and Spanish in a single sentence. An example of code-switching would be Es un little boy (It’s a little boy). This pattern is most common among speakers who are highly fluent in both languages. It can also occur among Chicano speakers who don’t speak Chicano English, but mix Spanish with some other dialect of English. Linguists have discovered that there is code-switching in most com- munities where two languages are spoken on a regular basis. It seems to be a basic human reaction to the everyday use of two languages in a society, and is subject to rules and norms just like any other part of language. Nonetheless, people often have a negative reaction to it, and assign it a negative label. In the communities where Chicano English is spoken, the term used for code-switching is usually “Spanglish.” I think of this term as a somewhat negative one. However, I was surprised to find that the attitude toward Spanglish among the young adult speakers I talked to in Los Angeles was very positive. David, 17, for example, told me, “Two languages sounds better for us Mexicans.” Jorge, 18, told me he liked code-switching, and explained to me that it is what distinguishes Chicanos or Mexican Americans from people actually living in Mexico. He referred to code-switching as “Chicano language.” Several other young Chicano speakers described this way of talking as “cool.” So in some sense, one might say that fluency in Chicano English includes the acceptance of using Spanish and English in the same sentence, whether or not one does it. AVC36 21/7/05, 10:54 AM236 Carmen Fought 237 Is Chicano English Influencing Other Dialects? We know that Chicano English has been influenced by other dialects, such as Valley Girl English or African American English. An interesting question is to what extent that influence has gone in the other direction. The pronunciation of going as goween, for example, is something that I hear increasingly among California Anglo students. Did this come from Chicano English? I don’t know the answer to this question, but in the meantime, I will keep a sharp eye on barely to see what happens in the future. AVC36 21/7/05, 10:54 AM237 238 Stirring the Linguistic Gumbo 37 Stirring the Linguistic Gumbo (Cajun English) Megan E. Melançon 37 Boaters at the mouth of Bayou Cane, Louisiana. © by Darryl Lodato. “Get down out dat car and come have a coffee” Cajun English speaker The ingredients in the gumbo that is southern Louisiana’s linguistic heritage include several varieties of French (seventeenth-century, Cajun, and Creole), Canary Island Spanish, German, and, the most recent addition to the dish, English. All of these ingredients have flavored the speech of AVC37 21/7/05, 10:54 AM238 Megan E. Melançon 239 French Louisiana, yielding a unique dialect called Cajun English. The dialect is spoken mainly in southern Louisiana, although migrations to southern Texas and southern Mississippi have resulted in pockets of Cajuns living in those areas. The Cajuns have been called a “linguistic curiosity,” and, in fact, their versions of English and French differ from American English and the French spoken in France. So, who are the Cajuns, and where did they come from? History of the Cajuns Cajuns are descendants of French settlers who moved into the area of Canada known as Acadia (modern day Nova Scotia) in the early 1600s. For many years, the territory was ceded back and forth between France and England as the spoils of war, and the settlers were left virtually undisturbed. In 1713, however, the Treaty of Utrecht permanently sealed the fate of the small colony – it became a permanent possession of the British. The Acadians were allowed to live in peace for a period of time, but because of their friendship with the Native Americans living in the area, and also because of an influx of British settlers, the British crown decreed that all persons of French ancestry must pledge allegiance to the British government. Beginning in 1755, those who refused to do so were deported and scattered across various coastlines in the American colonies in what their descendants still refer to as le grand dérangement. There are pockets of French culture and language surviving in diverse areas of the United States as a result of this forced migration, includ- ing Maine, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. Some deportees also ended up in the then French-ruled Caribbean islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti, while others went back to Europe. The Acadians (shortened by English speakers to ’Cadians and then to Cajuns) were reviled and feared by their English-speaking Protestant neighbors in the American colonies, so they sought out isolated com- munities where they could practice their religion and teach their native language to their children. This isolation led to the preservation of some elements of French as it was spoken in the mid-1700s. In fact, some of the lexical items in Cajun French today are essentially unchanged from the French of that era, e.g. le maringouin ‘mosquito’ (modern French le moustique). AVC37 21/7/05, 10:54 AM239 240 Stirring the Linguistic Gumbo The English that the Cajuns acquired for trading and economic purposes has been strongly influenced by their native French. The dialect has also been affected by the assimilation of the Cajun culture by various other ethnic groups living in the region: Native American tribes, German and Irish immigrants, African and Caribbean slaves, and the Spanish- speaking Isleños from the Canary Islands. More recently, forced schooling in English pursuant to the 1921 Louisiana constitution (which established English as the official language of the state), and the intrusion of mass media into even the most isolated bayou communities, have led to fewer and fewer people speaking French, with a consequent rise in the use of English. Today’s reality is that English is just as much a part of the culture as French, and English is rapidly overtaking many of the sociocultural parts of the Cajun heritage. Characteristics of Cajun English Although there are many dialectal oddities in Cajun English, five features strike the listener right away: vowel pronunciation, stress changes, the lack of the th phonemes, non-aspiration of p, t, and k, and lexical differ- ences. The use of these features has resulted in no southern drawl at all in Cajun English. Cajuns talk extremely fast, their vowels are clipped, and French terms abound in their speech. These variations have been studied by a few linguists, more folklorists, and, in a casual way, many more tourists. The vocal differences of Cajun English are both qualitative and quanti- tative. The qualitative differences (the differences between the standard forms of English vowels and Cajun English vowels) are easily identifiable. Quantitative differences are changes that are across-the-board and non-random in the speech of most Cajuns. Some examples? Diphthongs (or dual-vowel sounds) change to monophthongs (single vowels) in words such as high. Standard American English uses a diphthong i as in tie while Cajun English speakers use an unglided vowel as in tah. The word tape, pronounced in English as ta-eep is pronounced without the ee glide, as tehp. In addition, many Cajun English speakers use the tense version of English vowels, making words like hill and heel “homophones,” or words which have the same pronunciation – heel. Intonation and stress are so striking in Cajun English that entire joke repertoires have been based on them. The French spoken by the older AVC37 21/7/05, 10:54 AM240 Megan E. Melançon 241 Cajuns was passed on to their descendants, who found it necessary to speak English for socioeconomic reasons, and the syllable-final/phrase- final stress of French persists to this day in the speech of Cajuns. Bilingual stress patterns often exhibit a form of mutual borrowing, and even though many Cajuns do not speak French at the present time, or speak it very poorly, the patterns of French are still imprinted on the dialect. As has been found in French Canada, English-like stress patterns are invading the French of the Cajuns, while the syllable-final stress pattern of the French has seeped into the English of the former Canadians. This leads to words such as Marksville, normally pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, being pronounced with stress on the second syllable (with a shortened and raised final vowel sound). Voiceless and voiced th replacements occur frequently in the speech of non-standard speakers, and the Cajuns are no exception. In fact, the replacement of the th sounds with a t or a d sound is another source of the numerous jokes and imitations of Cajun speech made by others (and sometimes by Cajuns themselves, as in the “Cajun Night Before Christmas” recording made by Jules D’Hemecourt). Although many southern English and African American English speakers use f or v in place of the th phonemes, both Creole and Cajun English speakers use the voiceless and voiced alveolar stops t and d. Many bilingual French- Canadians exhibit this same linguistic behavior with regard to the th phonemes, while standard French speakers tend to use s or z in place of a th sound. Standard English speakers normally aspirate (exhale a breath of air) when pronouncing the stop consonants p, t, and k in stressed, syllable- initial position. Cajun English speakers do not, yielding words like pat sounding much like the word bat, with a shortened vowel sound. The source of this is probably the French language. French speakers do not aspirate the voiceless stops. The mystery is why the Cajun English speakers in Louisiana, many of whom do not speak French, and who are more than 300 years removed from contact with French speakers, still retain this feature in their speech. Lexical differences are perhaps the most apparent to the casual observer: boudin, lagniappe, making groceries, and get down out of (a vehicle) are all unacceptable to modern-day spell- or grammar-checkers, yet are quite normal in southern Louisiana (meaning ‘a rice and sausage mixture wrapped in an intestinal sack’, ‘a little something extra’, ‘going grocery shopping’, and ‘get out of’, respectively). Some (like boudin and lagniappe) are borrowings from French; others are calques, or direct translations, AVC37 21/7/05, 10:54 AM241 [...]... dialect we typically refer to in America today as Jewish English History Two main varieties of Jewish English emerged in America, originating from two regionally distinct European groups: Sephardim and Ashkenazim Sephardic Jews immigrated to America from Spain and Portugal, beginning in the 1600s, and from the Ottoman Empire during the late 1800s and early 1900s In addition to the languages of their... apparently adopted originally from the regional dialects in the vicinity In the 1700s and 1800s, Lumbee English was connected with the coastal dialects of North Carolina, and this historical connection is still reflected in some dialect features At the same time, there is obvious influence from the Scots-Irish who spread eastward from the Appalachian region, as well as from the Highland Scots who settled... existence of Lumbee English, which differs from the speech of the neighboring African American and European American communities in Robeson County Given tape-recorded samples of African American, European American, and Lumbee residents, listeners from Robeson County correctly identified Lumbees over 80 percent of the time – a higher rate than their correct identification of European Americans in the county Although... of the Native American languages that were spoken in 244 AVC38 From the Brickhouse to the Swamp 244 21/7/05, 10:54 AM the 1800s are still spoken today, and the remaining ones are disappearing at an alarming rate What happens to the speech of Native American groups when their heritage language base erodes? Do they simply adopt the speech of the surrounding non-native community and blend into the English... That’s how it bes or The dogs bes doing that Although the finite use of be is often associated with African American Vernacular English, its use in Lumbee English differs from its African American counterpart in two important ways First, it is inflected with -s, whereas be in African American English does not take the inflectional -s Second, finite be is more expansive in its meaning; it is not restricted to. .. features of vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and discourse set Jewish English apart from other varieties of English Vocabulary The Jewish English lexicon ranges from items in the mainstream of American English to ones that are highly specialized Large numbers of words have spread from Jewish English into more general American usage: kosher ‘ritually clean, legitimate’, glitch ‘slip-up’, bagel ‘doughnut-shaped... Orthodox and Conservative Jews, for example, may be referred to as either a kippah (Hebrew) or a yarmulka (Yiddish) Some variants, however, convey subtle differences in Jewish identity: in referring to their place of worship, for example, Reform Jews typically refer to temple, Conservative Jews to synagogue, and Orthodox and Chasidic Jews to shul Holidays may be named either in English (Passover) or... of the tongue, as in this example: 260 AVC40 Fading Future for Ferhoodled English 260 21/7/05, 10:53 AM “You see him out with the sens [scythe] knocking down grass.” Other speakers deliberately select a word to invoke humor or to impress the listener with their knowledge of Pennsylvania German, as these examples show: “I can, but I get verhuddelt every now and then.” “I used to try to talk to Daddy... English and are very noticeable to people new to the area These special melodies include yes/no questions with a falling tone of voice at the end instead of a rising questioning tone In the question Did you get it? the voice falls from its high pitch on get to a low pitch on it In the question Are you coming over? the high pitch is on the first syllable of over and falls to a lower pitch on the second... colonial times, the Carolinas were inhabited by speakers of several different major families of Native American languages, including Siouan, Iroquoian, and Algonquian languages The Lumbee were among the first Native American Indians to learn English during the early English settlement of the Carolina coastal plain and were reported to be speaking English as early as the first half of the 1700s With the . community. However, Cajun English use has been documented among even the youngest Cajun descendants, a fact that is easy to verify simply by going to any café in any small town in south Louisiana. To. English, which differs from the speech of the neighboring African American and European American communities in Robeson County. Given tape-recorded samples of African American, European American, . their versions of English and French differ from American English and the French spoken in France. So, who are the Cajuns, and where did they come from? History of the Cajuns Cajuns are descendants