Ryūkyūan Languages/Dialects

As the title of this section indicates, we are noncommittal as to whether Ryūkyūan is a language with many dialects or a small family of related languages. We are sure, however, that Ryūkyūan is not a dialect of Japanese, as asserted by Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Figure 13.1 Ryūkyū Islands

Historical Background

With a population of some 1.5 million and an area amounting to somewhat less than 2,000 square miles, the 100 islands of the Ryūkyū Island chain extend about 650 miles, from the southern main island of Kyūshū to within 75 miles of Taiwan, as shown in the map below. This is nearly half the north to south distance of Japan’s four main islands (i.e. from the northernmost tip of Hokkaido to the island of Kagoshima adjacent to Kyūshū).

The physical location and range of these islands are as important as their history to an understanding of their current status. If, as Shibatani maintains, the numerous islands and mountainous interior of Japan lend themselves to a high degree of linguistic diversification such that Japanese speakers from Hokkaido would not understand their compatriots from Kyūshū, then one might expect much more linguistic diversification in an island chain strung out over 650 miles and isolated from the major Japanese islands.

The history of the island chain provides important insights into our understanding of the linguistic situation here. It has been suggested that the Ryūkyūans are descended from Jōmon hunters, gatherers, and fishermen, who had settled in the Japanese archipelago many centuries before the arrival of the agrarian Yayoi peoples, who immigrated from North Asia through Korea some 2,400 years ago.Footnote ¹⁰

Regardless of their origins, it is clear that the Ryūkyūans comprised an autonomous nation from the end of the twelfth century right up until their incorporation into the Japanese nation-state at the end of the nineteenth century. The first recorded Ryūkyūan dynasty (the Shunten Dynasty) was founded in 1187, at about the same time as the Kamakura shogunate (which marks the end of the Heian classical period and the beginning of feudal Japan). The Ryūkyūan kingdom started attracting the (perhaps less than welcome) attention of its more powerful Chinese and Japanese neighbors beginning in 1372, when the Ryūkyūan King Satto was compelled to begin paying tribute to the first emperor of the Chinese Ming Dynasty.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japanese feudal rulers got into the act. Upset that the Ryūkyūans refused to provide conscripts for a Japanese invasion of Korea, and taking advantage of a succession struggle in the Ryūkyū kingdom, the Satsuma rulers in Kyūshū invaded and defeated the Ryūkyūans in 1609. Deciding that a life well taxed was preferable to a life cut short, the Ryūkyūans wound up paying double tribute (to China and to the Satsuma) for another century. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, though, as China was slipping irretrievably into the losers’ column of the colonialist–colonized equation, Japan stepped up to claim the Ryūkyūs as a province, making them the Okinawa Prefecture of the Meiji state in 1879. China, after having been soundly beaten by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War, was finally forced to officially renounce its claim to the islands in 1895.

Thus, from 1879 until its defeat in 1945, the Ryūkyū Islands were ruled directly by Japan. Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, the islands were under a US military government until 1950, and then ruled by an indigenous government (though still subject to US oversight) until 1972. In 1972, the Ryūkyū Islands were returned to Japan. Adding up the years, then, the Ryūkyū Islands have been an actual part of Japan for only about one of the past eight centuries. This is a significant point in understanding the current context.

Linguistic Background

In order to understand the linguistic situation in the Ryūkyū Islands, some discussion of the language(s) spoken there is in order. As noted earlier, the linguistic relationship between Japanese and Ryūkyūan is a matter of contention, and there is a wide divergence of opinion on whether they are languages separate from Japanese, or “merely” dialects of Japanese.

Some have claimed that “Middle Korean, Old Japanese, and Ryūkyūan [are] sisters on a par,” which would surely make them distinct languages.Footnote ¹¹ Others, such as Robbeets, while placing Korean at a further distance from Japanese than Ryūkyūan, also consider Japanese and Ryūkyūan to be distinct languages. On the other side of the debate, there are many Japanese scholars who would classify the varieties spoken on the Ryūkyū Islands as “dialects” of Japanese. Shibatani notes that “the relationship between Ryūkyūan and Japanese is something like that between Spanish and Italian or between French and Italian,” and then goes on to say that “unlike these Romance languages, the Ryūkyūan dialects are often mutually completely unintelligible among themselves, let alone to the speakers of any mainland dialect.”Footnote ¹² Figure 13.2 shows Ryūkyūan children in a Japanese-language kindergarten in Okinawa at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Figure 13.2 Aikwa Kindergarten in the Ryūkyūan capital, Shuri, Okinawa, c. 1907

At issue is whether to consider Ryūkyūan varieties as belonging to the larger class of Japanese dialects or whether to see Ryūkyūan and Japanese as two families of related but distinct languages. For his own part, Shibatani dismisses the issue, saying: “Once a genetic relationship is established between two languages, it is a moot point whether to regard them as two languages or as two dialects of one language.”Footnote ¹³ But it is not a moot point at all. Whether the Ryūkyūans have their own language and linguistic traditions, or whether they all speak rustic (and by popular implication, inferior) dialects of Japanese, has enormous implications for them and for their linguistic culture.

As discussed in Chapter 4, in most (at least Western) contexts, considering two varieties of a language to be dialects entails that they be mutually intelligible to some extent. This is apparent with British and American English, whose speakers can readily converse with each other in their respective standard dialects, usually with no difficulties other than the occasional challenges presented by lexical differences (e.g. British lift for American elevator, etc.). In Asia, the term “dialect” is often used to refer to pairs of mutually unintelligible languages – e.g. Shanghai and Beijing “dialects” of Chinese, which are in fact distinct Chinese languages – and at other times to refer to what Western linguistics would acknowledge as true varieties (i.e. dialects) of a single language.

With respect to the Ryūkyūan–Japanese situation, the two languages are not mutually intelligible. In contrast, the various dialects of Ryūkyūan are mutually intelligible, relatively speaking, and so are the various dialects of Japanese proper. In assessing Ryūkyūan as a Japanese dialect, it has been asserted that “the Hirara dialect (of Ryūkyūan) is sufficiently close to Standard Japanese for its speakers to be able to create a good proportion of the standard vocabulary by applying sound changes to dialect words.”Footnote ¹⁴ But what is this evidence of? One could make the same claim regarding Italian and Spanish, or about Russian and Bulgarian. Clearly such a metric is not really informative.

However “transparent” the relationship between Ryūkyūan and Japanese, it is nonetheless the case that “the Ryūkyūan stock split from the mainstream Japanese language at the latest around 6 A.D.”Footnote ¹⁵ From an historical perspective, this would suggest a split at, or shortly after, the arrival of the agrarian Yayoi people in the Japan archipelago (i.e. around the time of the formation of a separate ethnic Japanese people). From a linguistic perspective, calling Ryūkyūan and Japanese dialects of the same language would be no different from calling English, German, and Icelandic dialects of the same language (whatever language that might be).Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, while it might be advantageous to Japan to consider Ryūkyūan languages as mere varieties (i.e. dialects) of Japanese, such an assessment does not carry much linguistic or historical weight (Shibatani’s characterization of “moot points” notwithstanding).

Beginning with its 2009 edition, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger includes, alongside Ainu, the following Ryūkyūan languages of Japan: Amami, Hachijō, Kunigami, Miyako, Okinawan, Yaeyama, and Yonaguni.Footnote ¹⁷ By classifying Ryūkyūan as a group of endangered languages, the UNESCO document thus affirms their status as autonomous languages, and as objects worthy of study and preservation.

The UNESCO classification serves as a challenge to “the long-standing misconception of a monolingual Japanese nation state that has its roots in the linguistic and colonizing policies of the Meiji period.”Footnote ¹⁸ It is also notable that Japanese society laid claim to the Ryūkyūan people and language as a part of Japan and the Japanese language, and simultaneously categorized them and their language as inferior and contemptible. It has also been maintained that the Ryūkyūan people are deemed by main island Japanese to be “backward, lazy, inefficient, prone to insanity, irrational and unhygienic … Japanese, in contrast, [are] modern, hardworking, efficient, sane, rational, and clean.”Footnote ¹⁹

Language Rights Issues

One of the central issues of concern, as noted, is the preservation of the Ryūkyūan languages. While there was some acknowledgement of local Ryūkyūan culture and language at the outset of Japanese de facto control over the territory in 1872, this did not last long. From the time of its administrative incorporation into Japan in 1879, there was a deliberate and focused effort at making the Ryūkyūans Japanese. This effort primarily took the form of disseminating the (standard) Japanese language through the public educational system.

The motivations for this are, to some degree, understandable. The Ryūkyū Islands stand at the southwestern extremity of the Japan archipelago and extend out into the vulnerable space between Japan and its larger Asian neighbor, China. The pressure to incorporate this space into the Japanese nation took on greater urgency after the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, as Japan was facing threats from the north, from Russia, which shortly thereafter culminated in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. It was in this same year (1895) that Japan occupied both Taiwan and Korea, making the Ryūkyūans the most closely related peoples in Japan’s recently acquired territories. In this context, and given the mutual unintelligibility of Japanese dialects to begin with, it is not a surprise that the Ryūkyū Islands became an extension of the Ministry of Education efforts to standardize Japanese throughout the empire. As far as the policy-makers were concerned, Ryūkyūan languages appeared to be nothing more than dialects of Japanese, and were consequently treated as such.

What this meant for the Ryūkyū islanders, at the start of the twentieth century, was that “efforts to spread [standardized] Japanese increasingly employed coercive measures.”Footnote ²⁰ In 1907, with the passage of the Ordinance to Regulate Dialects (hōgen torishimari-rei), children were now prohibited from speaking their native Ryūkyūan languages in school. As Japan’s imperial ambitions increased, so did the pressure on Ryūkyū islanders to conform to the national(istic) model of Japanese language and culture. In 1931, Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria (China’s northeasternmost territory), and on the island of Okinawa established the Movement for Enforcement of the Normal Language (fūtsūgo reikō undō). Under this movement, debate societies were established to promote the use of Japanese. At these gatherings, “speaking a Ryūkyūan language … was considered an unpatriotic act, and children taking part in debate circles risked being penalized if they failed to speak Japanese.”Footnote ²¹

While Japan lurched toward the expansion of military conflict throughout East Asia and the Pacific in the mid 1930s, there was an effort throughout the nation to promote loyalty, patriotism, and national unity. In this milieu, “active measures to suppress Ryūkyūan increased … [and] speaking Ryūkyūan in the private domain came to be seen as an obstacle to the spread of Standard Japanese.”Footnote ²² This period saw a marked increase in the use of the infamous hōgen huda (dialect tag) which was hung around the neck of any student who used their home dialect in school. Heinrich notes that punishments for speaking Ryūkyūan were not limited to shaming, but included many other punishments, such as being tasked with extra clean-up duties after school. It is also reported that, at one school, children had to sing “using dialect is the enemy of the country” (hōgen tsukau wa kuni no kateki) during morning assemblies.Footnote ²³ One author reports that when he was at school, “there was a clothes-line in the classroom on which colored paper in the shape of laundry was hung. If a student spoke Ryūkyūan, the expression used was written on a paper and symbolically cleansed.”Footnote ²⁴

By 1939, the suppression of Ryūkyūan had been extended well beyond the classroom. A law was passed requiring the use of Standard Japanese in all government offices and institutions. Customers who used Ryūkyūan in these places would be denied service and any employees who spoke Ryūkyūan were fined. As the war progressed toward its inevitable catastrophe, the situation only got worse for the Ryūkyūans. Heinrich characterizes the attitude toward Ryūkyūan as “hysterical,” such that by 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa, the Japanese army stationed there ordered anyone found using Ryūkyūan to be considered a spy. Remarkably, there were instances in which the order was executed and individuals found speaking Ryūkyūan were shot or stabbed to death.

Heinrich also points out, accurately, that “language ideology is always also ideology about something other than language.” In this light, the ideology of the Standard Japanese (national language) movement is about the projection of political power from the capital region of the country (i.e. Tokyo/Yokohama) where standard dialect is spoken. The Ryūkyūan languages have been measured (along with many true Japanese language dialects) against the “correct” national standard, and under the mistaken assumption that Ryūkyūan is a variety of Japanese, the Ryūkyū Islands stand out “as the region in which (perceived) embarrassing language behaviour [is] most pronounced.”Footnote ²⁵

After the end of the World War II, there were attempts on the part of the American occupiers (in concert with local Ryūkyūan activists and scholars) to promote the distinct culture and language of the Ryūkyūan Islands. However, resentment of US occupation served to enhance Ryūkyūan islanders’ affinity with Japan, and to cause them to agitate for reunification. Since 1972, the incursion of Standard Japanese into all forms of communication (public and private) and the diminution of Ryūkyūan languages has proceeded unrelentingly, to the point that the entire group of the Ryūkyūan languages is about to disappear.

While the UNESCO recognition is long overdue and welcome, it is unclear whether it has perhaps come about too late to effect any meaningful preservation of Ryūkyūan languages and culture. There is some reason to be mildly optimistic though. As Heinrich reports, the establishment of a Society for Spreading Okinawan (uchinaguchi fukyū kyōgikai) has begun to exert a positive influence, through the establishment of dialect classes in public schools and the introduction of a standard orthography for the language. A recent “dialect boom” throughout Japan may also have the effect of making Ryūkyūan languages more fashionable as well.

Conclusion

The Ryūkyūan case is one involving (for the Japanese, at least) an intra-ethnic minority. In this regard, the Japanese imposed the same regionally dictated chauvinist solution as was promulgated for all “dialect”-speaking subgroups. To promote national unity, one variety of Japanese would have to be officially favored, and be esteemed over all others. In this model, the Ryūkyūans were simply deemed to speak a different dialect of Japanese, and one that was judged “clearly” inferior to all the others.

Historical Background

To understand the linguistic and ethnic origins of African Americans, one must understand the history of the slave trade within and from Africa, since this is the means by which African Americans came to be in the United States. The story of North American slavery is, though, a very small part of the totality of modern slavery and its depredations in the world. Trade in African slaves, long before the Europeans came into the picture, was dominated by Arabs and other Muslim tribes, beginning in the eighth century and lasting at least until the rise of the European Atlantic slave trade. In those medieval times, African slaves (largely from Bantu-speaking tribes) were transported and traded across Saharan northern Africa, and along the east African coast of present-day Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania.Footnote ²⁶ European involvement in the worldwide slave trade began with the Portuguese, and didn’t really begin in earnest until the fifteenth century, when Portugal established a permanent trading post at El Mina, in what is present-day Ghana. The immediate motivations for establishing a presence on the west African coast was to bypass the Arab traders and gain direct access to gold, ivory, and spices. It wasn’t long after, with the sixteenth-century establishment of plantations in the New World with their labor-intensive crops, that the need for cheap (i.e. slave) labor propelled the Portuguese (and other European nations, eventually) into the slave trade, once again bypassing the Arab traders and their routes.

The depredations of the slave trade upon the African continent were extreme by any objective measure, but put into the context of its time, the human catastrophe was astounding. Some 11 million Africans were transported by European slave traders across the Atlantic Ocean from the western coasts of Africa, and an additional 2 million souls died in transit. To this, one must add some 14 million slaves traded to South Asia and within Africa (including north Africa) and the estimated 4 million who died in the process of enslavement.Footnote ²⁷ The effect of 30 million slave-trade victims over two centuries (1650–1850) upon the fortunes of Africa is even more shocking when compared with world population figures of that time. During the 100-year period from 1750 to 1850, primarily as a consequence of the slave trade, the population of Africa rose by less than 5 percent (see Table 13.1). This was during a time when the populations of every other continent increased dramatically: Asia 60 percent, Europe 68 percent, Latin America/Caribbean 138 percent, and North America 1300 percent. Put another way, the slave trade affected a number of people equivalent to over 25 percent of the population of the African continent, which would represent some 200 million people in present-day terms.

Data depicting the routes and human traffic of the Atlantic slave trade place the North American traffic in its broader context. During the period 1650–1860, 500,000 African slaves were taken across the Atlantic Ocean from the western coastal regions of sub-Saharan Africa (primarily from the slave trade regions of present-day Senegal, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Benin, Cameroon, Congo, and Angola). These half million slaves, brought to British North America, represented a mere 5 percent of the total number of African slaves delivered to the New World (about 11 million). This means that some twenty times as many African slaves (10 million) were brought to Latin America and the Caribbean, with about 4.5 million being imported into the West Indies and about 5 million being carried to Brazil. Unsurprisingly, they (and their descendants) represented a much larger portion of their region’s 38 million inhabitants than did the slaves who were brought to British North America.

Figure 13.3 Handbill advertising a slave auction, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1840

The slaves brought to North America largely ended up in the present-day southeastern United States, which is where they were most useful to the cash-crop plantation economies that sprang up there. In any case, the British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery altogether in 1833, throughout the British Empire. By the middle of the nineteenth century, as illustrated by the advertisement for a New Orleans slave auction here above, the only African slaves in North America were in those states in the United States that allowed it (i.e. primarily in the states that would secede from the Union to form the Confederacy beginning in 1860).Footnote ²⁸ By 1860, at the beginning of the American Civil War, the black population of the United States (consisting of the African slaves and their descendants) numbered 4.4 million and accounted for 14 percent of the US population. Some 90 percent of these were slaves in the slave-holding states, as shown in Figure 13.4. Of the approximately 500,000 free blacks, more than half of those also lived in the slave-holding states.

Figure 13.4 Distribution of slave population in the southern states of the United States, 1860

At the end of the Civil War and for some time afterward, the slaves who had been emancipated mostly remained in the states of the former Confederacy. During the Reconstruction Era of the 1860s and 1870s, African Americans in the southern states had some reason to hope that their conditions would vastly improve in the place of their former slavery. However, the departure of US Federal troops from the newly “reconstructed” states led quickly to a revanchist takeover of local governments and civil institutions by white-supremacist Radicals, who overturned and reversed any accommodations that had been made to the recently liberated slaves.

While conditions had deteriorated rapidly, it wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century that African Americans began to find opportunities (in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West) that allowed them to leave the Southeast. From 1910 until 1970, over 5 million African Americans migrated out of the South, with over 50,000 per year leaving in the first thirty years and over 110,000 per year moving out from 1940 until 1970.Footnote ³⁰

African Americans have moved over the past 100 years far beyond their original concentrations of settlement in the American South, and comprise significant portions of the population in most states in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West. Their concentration into major urban population centers in all these areas is also significant. However, while African Americans are much more widely settled across the United States, their representation in the US population has not increased at all. In fact, where 4.4 million blacks comprised 14 percent of the US population in 1860, this country’s current population of 42 million African Americans constitutes only 13 percent of the population in 2010 (some 150 years later).

One effect of this dispersion (which was not accompanied by any increase in African Americans’ proportional representation among the populous) has been the increased degree of linguistic and cultural contact between African Americans and the white population of the United States. In 1860, it was likely that the vast majority of (white) Americans, and nearly all those outside the South, had few occasions ever to see, much less interact with, a black person. Black slaves at that time were concentrated in areas in which they were often a majority, and in which they typically had contact only with the whites who owned and supervised them. In this context, their variety of speech would not be something that Americans outside the plantation culture would have any awareness of. And they themselves would have been less likely to have consciousness of their “dialect” as a marker of their identity. After all, their dialect was simply how they themselves spoke, and was in the main pretty much all they heard (except when communicating with the whites they were required to interact with).

The Great Migration out of the South brought African Americans into close and regular contact with the majority of other Americans, especially so in the largest American cities, where the African American population increased anywhere from seven to 100 times, as illustrated in Table 13.2.

And while racism and discrimination certainly impeded contact between African Americans and the rest of the citizenry, white Americans have, over the past 100 years, been increasingly exposed to African American cuisine, music, and vernacular English. This plays a role in our discussion of AAE here below.

Linguistic Background

Before the Great Migration, AAE was an isolated subvariety of English, spoken by a particular ethnic group (African Americans) in a particular region (the American South). Many features of this dialect were shared with Southern American English (the prevalent dialect of white speakers in that region). As a consequence of migration, this English dialect was carried to all parts of the United States and became a marker of ethnic identity for African Americans wherever they went.

This is not to say that all African Americans speak AAE. They don’t. Nor is it the case that only African Americans speak AAE. Furthermore, AAE is not monolithic. It is not spoken the same way by all speakers at all times. There are regional differences. There are socio-economic distinctions in the variety that is used, as well as situational differences in how and when it is used. Nevertheless, there are some very well-known features of AAE that are common to most subvarieties of it. Table 13.3 lists some features common to AAE pronunciation (focusing here on consonants).Footnote ³¹

In addition to its phonology of AAE (i.e. the AAE “accent”), the variety has its own characteristic lexicon and syntax (like any other dialect). Well known among these features (at least to linguists) are the complementary phenomena of “zero copula” and “habitual be,” which are exemplified here alongside their Mainstream American English (MAE) equivalents (notice that MAE does not make any distinction between these two uses of the verb be):

The first of these (with “zero copula” – i.e. the omission of the copula verb is) means that she is presently, at this time, working late. The second (with the uninflected form of the verb be) means that she often, or habitually, works late. Thus, in AAE it would be acceptable to say She be workin’ late most of this year, but not *She workin’ late most of this year. Likewise, it would be fine to say She workin’ late tonight, but not *She be workin’ late tonight.

More central to our discussion of AAE are its origins and the attitudes that speakers of AAE themselves and speakers of MAE have, respectively, to it. As is pointed out by Preston and Robinson, “It is perhaps the least surprising thing imaginable to find that attitudes toward languages and their varieties seem to be tied to attitudes toward groups of people.”Footnote ³² Accordingly, individuals who have negative attitudes toward a group of people will also have negative attitudes toward the dialect of that group (attitudes that are provably unconnected to the actual linguistic features exhibited by the dialect). Unsurprisingly, it is also the case that groups of people have attitudes toward their own dialect. In this regard, it has been observed that members of an economically and socially dominant group typically have positive attitudes toward their own patterns of speech, while members of a minority group will variously (depending on the individual and the circumstance) display either positive or negative attitudes toward their own dialect. With respect to AAE, we know (and will discuss further below) that MAE speakers oftentimes display very negative attitudes toward the dialect, and that these attitudes have negative real-world consequences for AAE speakers’ opportunities to prosper educationally, socially, and economically in the larger society.

The attitudes of AAE speakers toward their own dialect vary widely. Some African Americans take pride in using it, seeing it as an integral part of their ethno-cultural identity, while some avoid using it to the extent that they are able, considering it to be an impediment to their success. As might also be expected, some AAE speakers use or avoid using the dialect depending on the context. Thus, an AAE speaker might be careful to avoid features of the dialect in a professional setting, but would utilize all the dialect features at a family function or among close friends (this is, in fact, typical of speakers of just about any non-mainstream dialect of any language). Thus, the decision to use or not to use it is an intensely personal one. African Americans who eschew their dialect are often judged by their peers to be inauthentic, and non-African Americans who adopt AAE (or its linguistic features) can be branded as imposters (this has been observed in regard to the performance language of some white hip-hop artists). For many in the African American community, it is difficult to express oneself fully and authentically without it. As Toni Morrison writes in her 1970 work The Bluest Eye,

One factor with the potential to influence African Americans’ attitude toward their own dialect is the matter of its origins. An examination of this issue will help explain why. There are three main (and competing) theories on the origins of the AAE dialect, which are commonly labeled: (i) the Substratist position, (ii) the Anglicist position, and (iii) the Creolist position.

The first of these, the Substratist position, claims that AAE is very heavily influenced by West African languages spoken by the slaves that were brought over to British North America, with marginal input from English. Supporters of this theory have noted lexical and grammatical similarities between AAE and varieties of West African English that are spoken in Nigeria and Ghana. The idea behind this is that if the speakers of AAE and West African English exhibit similar linguistic features, then these could not have arisen in the United States by virtue of their contact with English-speaking slaveholder whites.

The second, Anglicist, position holds that AAE is a British-dialect-based variety of English with little or no outside influence from African languages. Support for this theory comes from the records of several African American communities in Nova Scotia and the Dominican Republic whose dialect (presumably) has remained constant throughout the years, along with study of other older English dialects. This position holds that many of the features that have come to be associated with AAE can be found as regular, rule-governed features of other English dialects, and attested in older forms of English.Footnote ³³ In the United States, supporters of this theory attribute the documented similarities between AAE and Scots-Irish varieties as due solely to contact.

The Creolist position (or hypothesis) suggests that AAE exhibits patterns that are similar to the general phenomena associated with creole formation. According to this view, AAE developed from a mix of both African languages and English. During the time of the slave trade, a lot of different African peoples without a common language were forced together and their need to communicate resulted in a pidgin language which cobbled together aspects of many languages. This pidgin was simplified and incomplete until it was ‘creolized’ and began to have native speakers who perfected the grammatical forms of the language. The English influence comes from the white slaveholders, and all of these influences led to a language with a unique grammatical structure and vocabulary.Footnote ³⁴

How do these different theories reflect on the speakers of AAE, and how do they affect the way that AAE is valued in African American society? Marcyliena Morgan discusses this issue in some detail, noting that “when two or more languages come together, two or more peoples have come together and the result is always about power and identity.”Footnote ³⁵ She suggests that each of these theories brings with it a different perspective. The Anglicist hypothesis, according to Morgan, incorporates the notion that “trans-Atlantic slavery left African Americans with no cultural roots worth mentioning,” making AAE out to be nothing more complicated than wholesale imitation and borrowing from (and corruption of) British English. The Creolist hypothesis, for its part, suggests that the language of the African slaves is the newly formed language of a “conquered people who never got back home.” The Substratist hypothesis, in contrast to the others, is built upon the notion that African languages (along with traditions, beliefs, and culture) made the crossing together with the slaves that carried them, and that this cultural wealth was transmitted down through the generations. On this view, the new language encodes traces of the original land from which the slaves were brought. Irrespective of which hypothesis is correct (and in truth AAE possesses features attributable to each one of them), one can see how AAE speakers’ beliefs about their own dialect might affect their attitudes toward it. If AAE is a relic of slavery, a souvenir of those depredations, then perhaps it is something to be rid of, as a reminder of a painful time. On the other hand, to the extent that AAE preserves in itself elements of the African languages spoken by the free ancestors of the enslaved peoples, it is a legacy of that time and place, and worth preserving.

Recalling that attitudes toward language varieties are tied to attitudes toward the people who speak them, we turn now to two cases which demonstrate how African American speakers are judged (and discriminated against) on the basis of the language they speak. The first case illustrates how the use of AAE (as much as physical appearance) can be used to identify and discriminate against African Americans. The second case reveals just how deep-seated are the negative attitudes that people can have toward the dialect.

The first case involves an experiment conducted by a group of scholars in the 1990s which followed from the experience that one of them, John Baugh, had trying to get an apartment.Footnote ³⁶ Baugh, an African American visiting scholar at Stanford looking for a place to live, had called several landlords and had been having trouble getting appointments to see them. He and his research team wondered whether his difficulty might be related to the AAE dialect he speaks. The experiment involved having speakers of three different varieties of American English – MAE, AAE, and Chicano (Mexican) American English (CAE) – respond to apartment listings in five San Francisco Bay area neighborhoods. The five neighborhoods differed greatly in the number of minority residents, with East Palo Alto having the lowest percentage of white residents and the highest percentage of African American and Hispanic residents, and Woodside being the “whitest” neighborhood (with fewer than 5 percent minority residents). Table 13.4 above shows the population distribution, based on 1990 census figures. Table 13.5 illustrates what happened when inquiries were made by speakers of MAE, AAE, and CAE.Footnote ³⁷

Nearly 1,000 calls were made, with the caller in each case following a prepared and identical script. Notice that an AAE-speaking caller was offered an appointment nearly 80 percent of the time when phoning East Palo Alto, but less than 30 percent of the time when phoning Woodside. White MAE speakers were offered interviews 70 percent of the time in calls to Woodside listings, and nearly 60 percent of the time when phoning up listings in East Palo Alto. Often, after telling the AAE-speaking caller that the apartment was already rented, a landlord would offer a white MAE speaker an appointment to see the same apartment. What is overwhelmingly clear from the experiment is that (i) people can very accurately identify speakers of other dialects on the basis of a very small sample of phonetic information, and (ii) people’s attitude toward a dialect (and the speakers of it) affects their behavior.

The second case involves an effort some twenty years ago (in 1996) by the Oakland Unified School District in California to help the AAE-speaking majority of children in their district. They proposed recognizing AAE (which they called Ebonics) as the native language of the pupils who spoke it, their purpose being to be able to accommodate them in English and other subjects. Their rationale for doing this can be understood in its context. At that time, significant resources were being used to ameliorate English Language Arts deficits of Hispanic students who were not English native speakers. Recognizing that Hispanic students spoke a language different from English, educators were providing bilingual instruction and extra help in learning (Mainstream American) English as a second language. The Oakland School Board reasoned (correctly) that AAE-speaking students also had “non-native-speaker-like” language deficits on account of their speaking a variety of English that is quite different from MAE. And since African American students had similar difficulties bridging the gap between their dialect and MAE, recognizing AAE as a distinctive variety would help.

It would be an understatement to say that the reaction to this attempt to address a real problem was extremely hostile. And this reaction was characteristic of the white society at large, as well as the African American community leaders themselves. In his 1997 column on this matter, linguist Geoffrey Pullum states that the nation was scandalized by the proposal “to recognize the native tongue of most of its (African American) pupils as a language.”Footnote ³⁸ And while all linguists agree that AAE is a dialect of American English, and not a separate language, the controversy was more about what this variety represented than its linguistic status. AAE, Pullum said, was “described as if it were English with mistakes and omissions … commentators clarified little except the deep hostility and contempt whites feel for the way blacks speak …, and the deep shame felt by Americans of African descent for speaking that way (a Los Angeles Times column by Eldridge Cleaver, a former Black Panther party official, compared the official acknowledgement of AAE with condoning cannibalism).” Reverend Jesse Jackson’s (initial) reaction to the proposal was (stereo)typical, stating: “I understand the attempt to reach out to these children, but this is an unacceptable surrender borderlining on disgrace … It’s teaching down to our children and it must never happen.”Footnote ³⁹

However, as Pullum suggests, most Americans do not realize that AAE is not merely “bad English,” but (as has been shown by numerous linguists) is the same as any other human language, having a unique grammar and pronunciation rules.Footnote ⁴⁰ “There is no more reason for calling it bad standard English,” Pullum says, “than there is for dismissing western dialects of English as bad eastern speech, or the reverse.”Footnote ⁴¹ What we can take away from this is that there is a general popular misunderstanding about the nature of dialects, and a tendency, based on this misunderstanding, to respond viscerally to speakers of them rather than to the dialects themselves.

Occitan in France

Occitan is a language spoken by some 1.5 million people in southern France. It encompasses a number of varieties that eventually arose from Vulgar Latin following the fall of the Roman Empire. Variously referred to as Langue d’Oc and Provençal and some of the other local varieties, it is famously the language of the French troubadours, the wandering minstrels of the late medieval period, and was, as such, an established literary language. Although the area was subsumed in the Kingdom of France in the thirteenth century and French declared the language of government and state affairs, in practice government and court documents were translated into local varieties of Occitan. There was a major shift following the French Revolution, at which point Parisian French was declared the official language of the new republic of France, viewed as a vehicle for the establishment of a unified French nation. However, despite the fact that French became the language of free education, government, the courts and public signage, Occitan was still used as the language in the home, business, and art.

Pressure on minority languages continued to increase in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Primary education in languages other than French was not sanctioned by the state and efforts were made to eradicate local languages even in the schoolyard. French was reasserted as the language of the French Republic. The result was a significant decrease in the number of speakers, virtually all of whom were also native speakers of French. In the 1950s the teaching of Occitan was allowed in schools, but not beyond the primary level. The issue of Occitan and language rights for its speakers has been brought to the fore by recent attempts at some revival (e.g. bilingual signage) and by France’s signing in 1999 (but not ratifying) the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. The continued decline of Occitan and other local varieties continues to be a contentious issue.

Singaporean English and Local Chinese Dialects in Singapore

Lying just off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, the island city-state of Singapore recognizes four official languages – Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English – a reflection of its complex history and inhabitants. Despite its multilingual heritage, Singapore has experienced language conflict, in part owing to its economic aspirations and its bilingual policy which required each student to be able to speak English and their home language.

The Chinese population traced its ancestry to diverse regions of China and largely spoke Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and Hakka varieties. In 1979, the Singapore government launched its Speak Mandarin Campaign to encourage the use of Mandarin in public with an eye toward economic development, promoting Chinese cultural identity, and facilitating communication among its Chinese residents. Use of Mandarin was mandated for government employees (except when speaking with residents over 60 years of age) and for service industry workers under the age of 40. Some complained that many children were in practice compelled to learn two second languages in school, English and Mandarin, and that communication between children and ‘dialect-speaking’ elders was hampered. The Speak Mandarin Campaign continues to this day.

For years under British rule, English was well established in Singapore. However, Singaporean English, or Singlish, is a creolized variety that incorporates features from Hokkien, Malay, and other local languages and is distinct from British (or American) Standard English. Citing economic concerns and the need to communicate with the global community, the government launched the Speak Good English Movement in 2000, in an effort to reduce if not eradicate the use of Singlish, discouraging its use in broadcast and print media, in educational settings, in the service industry and elsewhere. However, many consider Singlish to be an integral expression of what it means to be Singaporean, an expression of their postcolonial experience, and suppression of the language is suppression of personal and cultural identity. In some respects, the Speak Good English Movement has strengthened the resolve of speakers of Singlish and is used by some politicians to help build their constituency. The Movement remains an ongoing program of the Singapore government.

Landsmål/Bokmål in Norway

Sitting along the North Sea coastline adjacent to Sweden, Norway is a relatively “new” country, having become independent (for the second time) only in the twentieth century. Norway had been an independent kingdom previously for some 500 years (872–1380) until it was absorbed by the Danish crown, as a consequence of being greatly weakened demographically and economically by the Black Death of the fourteenth century. After over 400 years of Danish rule, followed by some ninety years of Swedish rule, Norway became once again an independent monarchy in 1905 via a peaceful dissolution of its union with Sweden. This union, for diplomatic, economic, and cultural reasons, had outlived its usefulness to both nations, and Norway was once again able to seek its own fortunes.

One of the central conflicts in Norway’s resurgence into nationhood concerned language. The language of the first independent Norwegian monarchy had been Old Norse, but after 400 years of Danish rule, Old Norse had fallen into disuse as an official language, having been replaced by the local urban elites with a local variety of Danish (called Riksmål, ‘idiom of the realm,’ or Bokmål, ‘idiom of the book’). Old Norse itself had slowly evolved into a collection of local rural dialects. For urban Norwegians, Riksmål was a language that allowed them to distinguish themselves from the Swedes, from whom they had recently become independent. However, for others Riksmål was not “Norwegian” enough, and there was a strong desire to restore the Old Norse language with a newer version, called Nynorsk (‘New Norse’) or Landsmål (‘idiom of the land’) by its proponents. Those who wished to bring Nynorsk into use believed it to be a more “authentic” language for the nation. Those who opposed it felt that Nynorsk was merely a collection of rustic and crude dialects, and that using it would make it more difficult for Norwegians to communicate with their Scandinavian neighbors. Norway has had, since 1917, a law that permits children to use their own spoken variety of Norwegian in the classroom and encourages teachers to accommodate it – making Norway a far more accommodating place for regional varieties than many other nations (including the United States).Footnote ⁴³ It is nonetheless the case that disputes over what should be used as an “official” Norwegian language persisted through the twentieth century.