Baby Naming

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Language Attrition and Language Death

• Factors Motivating Change:
• Geography: when people move away from each other they diverge linguistically-more similar when they move together
• culture change over time: new object or ideas in culture create terms and old objects or ideas die out
• imperfect learning: children???, Creole???, Immigrants???
• social prestige: people will talk like those they identify with or admire
• SE, lavender speech, skater talk, hip-hop, beat
• ease of articulation: easier to pronounce
• randomness: fads, fashions, chance errors, social media
• Languages are always changing with changing culture
• Not all change is adaptive
• ATTRITION (language loss-simplification)
• narrowing of usage (pragmatics)
• loss of grammatical features
• loss of vocabulary
• failure to teach language to children
• failure of children to use language

• DEATH (a language has no speakers)
• language continues to go through the process of attrition until it is no longer viable
• language loses its context for use (dead language)
• the speakers of the language disappear (genocide)
• colonialism (acculturation)
• Latin (literate)
• Hebrew (literate)
• hundreds of indigenous languages

• Endangered Languages:
• of the approximately 7000 languages currently spoken in the world, about 400 (dominant languages) have 94 percent of the speakers. 
• minority languages are constantly under the pressure of attrition and language extinction.
•  At least 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages (about 50 percent) are about to be lost. Why should we care? Here are several reasons. 

  ---The enormous variety of these languages represents a vast, largely unmapped terrain on which linguists, cognitive scientists and philosophers can chart the full capabilities—and limits—of the human mind.

  
  

  ---Each endangered language embodies unique local knowledge of the cultures and natural systems in the region in which it is spoken.

  
  

  ---These languages are among our few sources of evidence for understanding human history.

  ---Those who primarily speak one of the world’s major languages may find it hard to understand what losing one’s language can mean--and may even feel that the world would be better off if everyone spoke the same language. 

  -The requirement to speak one language is often associated with violence.

  
  

  -Repressive governments forbid certain languages and cultural customs as a form of control. 

  -Conquered people resist assimilation by speaking their own languages and practicing their own customs.

• Results from speaker's perspective:
• feeling isolated, having few opportunities to speak, feeling invisible---forget words and grammatical rules
• lose culture which language indexes

• REVITALIZATION (expansion and complexification)
• Hebrew (modernize as a lingua franca of a new nation)
• Gaelic (teach in school as a marker of ethnicity)
• Kriol (affirm as national identity with independence)
• Tok Pisin (create a writing system-literacy)

• Short of these outcomes, there are basic processes which may describe the way that all languages change.
• Sound Change
• Apocope: loss of one or more sounds from the ends of words
• child-chile (bve)
• credentials-creds
• barbecue-barbie
• Barb, Ben, Steph, Jon, Theo, Len
• olde-old (English)
• Assimilation: when sounds become similar to their environment (ease of articulation with dissimilation)
• im-, il-, in-, ir-
• /sonz/ not /sons/
• /kar/-nasalized
• realize-realise (sound leads to selling change)
• 10 bikes -/tem bayks/
• sandwich-/samwich/
• Dissimilation (Hapology): sounds become less similar
• hoarse/horse (H), /fifth/-/fift/
• Metathesis: when two sounds change places
• /ask/-/aks/, /spaghetti/-/psketti/ (also assimilation)
• Prothesis: introduction of an initial sound
• /scoula/-/escuela/, 
• Syncope: loss of medial sounds
• /sewer/-/sore/, /crayon/-/crown/, /archaeology/-/archeology/
• Epenthesis: introduction of a medial sound
• /commercial/-/commercenal/, /athlete/-/athelete/
• grammatical change
• Analogy: irregular grammatical patterns are "regularized"
• fish-fishes, deer-deers, water-waters, shrimp-shrimps
• Back Formation: designates a new base form to then conjugate
• worker=work (noun), burglar=burgle (verb)
• text (noun)=texting (after functional shift)
• Folk Etymology: false history of words based on cultural association
• garter snake=garden snake, alzheimers=old timer's, crevice=crawfish, moscalini=mussalini, scape goat-escaped goat
• semantic change
• Borrowing: addition of new words which are marked as exotic
• aupair, bon voyage, ballet, hombre
• need language to be accepting of new words (USA=yes, France,=no)
• Calquing: words borrowed whole but parts are translated separately
• telephone (eng)=Fernsprecher (Ger) "distant speaker"
• Hunger grabs me, Ears hard (Belizean Creole)
• Extension of Reference: word widens its meaning
• Freshman (college), Virtue (male), Kleenex (brand)
• Narrowing of Reference: word narrows its meaning
• mete (food-meat)
• animal (not human-specific living things)
• liquor (liquid-alcohol)
• deer (animal-deer)
• token (like token-sign/symbol)
• Shift: shift in the sense of a word
• navigator (ship-car-plane-internet)
• artist (painter-actor-dancer-musician-poet)
• gay (happy-homosexual-gross)
• Figurative Use: shift in meaning based on analogy
• crane (bird)-crane(machine)
• mouse (rodent)-mouse (computer)
• bitch (dog)-bitch (high maintenance woman)/(lot of work)
• cool (temperature)-even headed
• hot (temperature)- angry/sexy
• bull (male cattle)-bull (strong man)
• Amelioration: word loses its original negative meaning
• mischievous (disastrous-playful trouble)
• bitch (neg. woman-positive female friend/lover)
• Nigger/a (BVE)
• Whore/Ho (BVE)
• Queer (strange-nonheterosexual)
• Pejoration: A word takes on a negative meaning
• notorious 
• villain
• liberal
• feminist
• negro/coloured
• Word Loss: 
• groovy, far out, harpice, etc
• Word Addition:
• Acronymns: SOBL, NATO, RSVP, RADAR (radio detection and ranging) LASER (light amplification through simulated emission of radiation
• Blending: Smog, brunch, duplex,
• Clipping: exam, taxi/cab (taxi cabriolet), dorm, gym 
• Coinage: kodak, exxon, snob, pooch
• Functional Shift: Shift part of speech without changing the word:
• laugh, run. steal, buy (v.-n.)
• text, position, process, contrast (n.-v.)
• Eponymy: named for a person
• Washington, DC, kaiser/tsar (Ceasar), ohm (george), watt (James)
• Social context of change: Change from Above and Change from Below
• CFA: motivation from SE institutions in culture 
• distinguish yourself from outsiders 
• assert power 
• raise status 
• hypercorrection (gender and class)
• conscious change
• CFB (move away from norms)
• create solidarity
• assert independence
• rebel against norms/change
• unconscious change

Creole Languages

The structure and function of Creole Languages

• the process of pidginization
• simplification and reduction
• the process of creolization
• elaboration and expansion
• the post-creole continuum
• ongoing interaction with language of power

How Yiddish Could Save the Jewish People

INTERVIEW...Culture & Yiddish

Language, Not Marriage or Religious Practice, Key to Continuity

riverside films

Passport to Peoplehood: Learning Yiddish gave Jordan Kutzik a better crash course on being Jewish than any day school could offer.

By Jordan Kutzik

The American Jewish community and its media frequently express concern about the Jewish future in America, citing mounting rates of assimilation and increasingly liberal trends in religious practice. In this discussion, intermarriage is frequently conceived of as being both the standard measure and the primary symptom of just how assimilated Jews are. What is usually left out of the discussion is any mention of linguistic assimilation.

In fact, most American Jews conceive of the Jewish people as being a religious group but rarely note the important role that Jewish ethnic and cultural heritage as expressed through language has traditionally played in Jewish survival.

The fact that many Jews cannot even conceive of ways of maintaining and transmitting their identity other than through religion testifies to the fact that outside of their religious affiliation, the vast majority of Jews are, culturally and linguistically speaking, hardly different from other Americans.

While religion has always played a central role in Jewish identity, Jews have also traditionally identified as not just members of the wider Jewish people, but also of specific Jewish ethnicities defined by Jewish languages. These languages, along with their respective cultures, foods and folklores, were, for the majority of Jewish history, the primary mechanism by which Jewish continuity was preserved. The knowledge of Yiddish, Ladino or one of the other Jewish languages of the Diaspora (for example, Bukhari, Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Aramaic) marked one’s identity as a member of the group. There was less need for debate about who was and was not a Jew. Whether a person was religious, a closeted heretic or an open Epicurus, she was a Jew if she spoke a Jewish language as her mother tongue.

• connections to Jewish heritage are typically through Jewish culture rather than religion:
•  learning Yiddish and Hebrew songs, hearing klezmer music, reading Sholom Aleichem’s stories, and cooking kugel and matzo brei with my mother.

• Languages are not just vehicles for communication; they are the storehouse in which culture, tradition and wisdom reside. Languages are the lifeblood of a people. For Jewish people, uniquely Jewish languages and cultures also served as the body in which the religious soul resided and was reproduced across the generations.  
• Jewish values are so built into the language that even the most mundane conversations in Yiddish about politics or sports feel more Jewish to most than conversations about the Talmud in English. 
• This is because the idioms used to praise, to condemn and lampoon are often in and of themselves quotations from Jewish scripture. A good example: “vi esroygim nokh sukes” (like etrogs after Sukkot— that is, objects that had already fulfilled their purpose and were now useless).

Learning a Jewish language, of course, is not a magic bullet in the fight for Jewish survival and should not serve as the sole basis of Jewish education. But at a time when a high rate of Jewish intermarriage outside Orthodox communities is a given, religion alone doesn’t guarantee Jewish continuity. And at a time when the internal Jewish communal dialogue around Israel is increasingly polarized and off-putting, Israel alone is not enough to guarantee Jewish continuity in America. We need an element that has kept us together no matter what we are saying to one another. It might be time to turn to language to bond us as a people.

Spanglish: Identity Preservation or Language Destruction?

Awesome Power Point on Issues

Living in Spanglish (watch)

language is not only a method of communication, but also an element that represents our cultural identity. If it is precisely our cultural inheritance the component that we intend to protect by teaching our language to our children, why [intentionally] destroy the shared core of our cultures?

Spanglish is informal due to the lack of structure and set rules. From a linguistic point of view, Spanglish often is mistakenly labeled many things.

• Spanglish is not a creole or dialect of Spanish, because although people claim to be native speakers of Spanglish, Spanglish itself has not yet become a language on its own but speakers speak English or Spanish with a heavy influence of the other language. 
• Spanglish is the fluid exchange of language between English and Spanish, present in the heavy influence in the words and phrases used by the speaker. 
• Spanglish is currently considered a hybrid language by linguists—many actually refer to Spanglish as "Spanish-English code-switching", though there is some influence of borrowing, and lexical and grammatical shifts as well.

The inception of Spanglish is due to the influx of Latin American people into North America, specifically the United States of America. Spanglish can be separated into two different categories: code switching or borrowing, and lexical and grammatical shifts.

• For example, a fluent bilingual speaker addressing another bilingual speaker might engage in code switching with the sentence, "I'm sorry I cannot attend next week's meeting porque tengo una obligación de negocios en Boston, pero espero que I'll be back for the meeting the week after"—which means, "I'm sorry I cannot attend next week's meeting because I have a business obligation in Boston, but I hope to be back for the meeting the week after."

Identity and Spanglish

The usage of Spanglish is often associated with an individual's association with identity (in terms of language learning) and reflects how many minority-American cultures feel toward their heritage. Commonly in ethnic communities within the United States, the knowledge of one's heritage language signifies if one is truly of a member of their culture.

• Just as Spanish helps individuals identify with their Spanish identity, Spanglish is slowly becoming the poignant realization of the Hispanic-American's, especially Mexican-American's, identity within the United States. 
• Individuals of Hispanic descent living in America face living in two very different worlds and need a new sense of bi-cultural and bilingual identity of their own experience. 
• Living within the United States creates a synergy of culture and struggles for many Mexican-Americans. The hope to retain their cultural heritage/language and their dual-identity in American society is one of the major factors that lead to the creation of Spanglish. 

Attitudes Towards Spanglish

Spanglish is a misunderstood skill because often times, “pure” Spanish speakers denounce Spanglish. In fact, Spanglish is not about necessarily assimilating to English—it is about acculturating and accommodating. Still, Spanglish has variously been accused of corrupting and endangering the “real” Spanish language, and holding kids back, though linguistically speaking, there is no such thing as a "pure" or "real" language.

• Presently, “Spanglish” is still viewed by most as a rather derogatory and patronizing word to its community because it seems like a “bastardized language”. In reality, Spanglish has its own culture and has a reputation of its own. 
• It is commonly assumed that Spanglish is a jargon: part Spanish and part English, with neither gravitas nor a clear identity, says the author of Spanglish and proponent of Spanglish, Ilan Stavans. 
•  Use of the word Spanglish reflects the wide range of views towards the mixed language in the United States. 
• In Latino communities, the term Spanglish is used in a positive and proud connotation by political leaders. 
• It is also used by Linguists and scholars promoted for use in literary writing. 
• Despite the promotion of positive usage of the term by activists and scholars alike, the term is often used with a negative connotation disparagingly. 
• People often refer to themselves as 'Spanglish speakers' if they do not speak Spanish well. 
• The term Spanglish is also often used as a disparaging way to describe individuals that do not speak English fluently and are in the process of learning, assuming the inclusion of Spanglish as a lack of English fluency.

Language and Immigration

misconceptions:

1. the idea of a homogeneous Hispanic/Asian community which refuses to learn English
2. the belittling of non-Castilian varieties of Spanish
3. the labeling of second generation bilinguals as semi- or alinguals
4. OFF-WHITES (Ambiguous)

Media portrayals:

1. Latinos
1. violent
2. explosive tempers
3. gang members
4. pimps
5. drug dealers
6. prostitutes
2. Asaians
1. males
1. tricky
2. surreptitious
3. determined
2. females
1. submissive
2. beautiful
3. delicate, needing male direction
3. Good Asian Male: (change)
1. unobtrusive
2. well behaved
3. smart
4. industrious 
5. successful (exhibiting cultural values conducive to socio-economic success)
3. Muslims/Arabs????
1. terrorists?
2. radical Islamist's
3. misogynists

Policy Reactions and Dealing with Immigrants:

We view the world as being composed of MONOLINGUAL NATIONS composed of uncontested , identifiable groups which are natural not only MONOLINGUAL, but also MONO-CULTURAL, so language is associated with nation. This creates an US versus THEM mentality

• Accent Reduction
• Associating language with RACE (Asians, Hispanics)
• English Only movements
• Resentment of "rudeness"
• QUESTION: Is it rude to speak English in front of those who don't understand it? ---English speakers that claim to feel excluded believe that he/she is reasonable in expecting everyone to accommodate to her/him. ENTITLEMENT
• Never have their racial embodiment questioned publicly
• Immigrants have COME OVER HERE (immigrated)
• Immigrants take our jobs and money (others)
• immigrants do not have the grace to learn our language-suggests their lack of commitment to the American Way of Life. AMERICAN=ENGLISH

LANGUAGE SIGNALS SOLIDARITY & IDENTITY

Discriminatory laws against Spanish sample page 265

Discrimnatory acts against Asians:

• Asian Exclusion Act of WWII
• Japanese internment camps in the US
• MOCKERY
• ching chong bing bong
• not understandable
• media and childrens cartoon
• schoolyard chants (also Jews, Blacks, etc)

Education Laws in the Southwest

• linguistic hyper-segregation in Arizona schools
• HR2083 passed in 2000, forbid any language other than English to be used in the public schools
• Tom Horne and the anti-Latino Ethnic Studies movement
• SPANISH ONLY (page 274-275)?

Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome: The Asians

• WHY IMMIGRATE?
• Push and Pull
• target smaller nations to dominate politically and economically  and socially.
• warehouse of goods and services in the colonies

Language and Ethnicity

Spanglish
Language in Education

langauge and racism

The Everyday Language of White Racism

·         How racism plays out in the everyday speech of white Americans.

·         racism is not a thing of the past but, rather, a current social and political fact.

·         white racism is inherent in U.S. culture and is found in and reproduced through the everyday language of white, middle-class Americans

·         most white people in the United States are disturbed by these matters and resist seeing themselves as racists.

·         Three key premises or assumptions are held by white common sense thinking on race.

o   First, folk theory holds races to be biologically valid. This assumption persists, even though biological anthropologists and geneticists long ago demonstrated that there is only one race, the human race. An example of how this nonscientific, white, common sense assumption persists is found in the argument that racial intermarriage will erase racial difference and conflict. In other words, the common sense assumption advances a genetic solution to a non-genetic, social construction.

§  Hill also cites numerous articles in news media that treat the scientific consensus as an “astonishing novelty,” as if the common sense assumption held scientific validity. Another way the erroneous biological view persists is in the “one drop rule,” enforced during Jim Crow that held that any trace of African ancestry made a person African-American. This “one drop” assumption can be seen in the way that Barack Obama was described as the “only black in the U.S. Senate” and the “first African-American” president even though he describes himself as a son of a white, Kansas mother and Kenyan father.

o   A second assumption of white folk theory holds that racism is entirely a matter of individual belief and that the ignorance of this individual view can be corrected by education. This view is commonly communicated in opinion pieces that rightfully desire an end to racism and decry the use of racial epithets. While Hill agrees the anti-racist intention is good, the proposed solution of educating individuals who are ignorant is completely inadequate to the task of addressing institutional and systemic racist practices.

§  A November 20, 2009, op-ed piece by a Louisiana State University senior in the New Orleans Times-Picayune is an example of Hill’s point. The op-ed, entitled “Tackling Bigotry at Ole Miss, LSU and Other SEC Schools,” rightly criticizes common racist talk and practices at SEC football games. However, like folk theory, the major assumption of the op-ed is that “it’s unfortunate for the individuals ignorant enough to believe such behavior is ok.” After all, “hopefully,” white racism is not “in the majority. ” Although the behavior widely persists in the institutional and societal context of SEC football games, the proposed solution is to educate individuals to overcome “intolerance,” ignoring the systemic breadth of the problem.

§  Critical race theorists do not deny that individual attitudes and beliefs figure in racism; rather, critical race theorists, like Hill, demonstrate how collective human interaction, including everyday language, produces and reproduces racial inequality. Hill’s analysis details the ways that well-intentioned whites still talk and behave in ways that advance systemic white advantage and disadvantage for people of color.

o   A third key assumption of white common sense or folk theory is that prejudice is part of the human condition, a view that is commonly described in the statement that “all people prefer to be with their own kind.” Critical race theorists demonstrate how whites use the premises of common sense knowledge to deny or distort the fact that societal resources, and benefits and burdens, are allocated so unequally. Hill points out that the distinctiveness of white social and political racism is “the magnitude of White power, and the enormity of [its] distortion.” 

·         racism is embedded in American history, institutionalized in daily life, and therefore often invisible to white people

·         two theories of race and racism—

o   folk theory

o   critical theory

·         Hill’s analysis explains how racism persists in white “folk theory,” or “common sense” knowledge that takes things for granted as the way things are. folk theory of race erases what is really important, attends to the irrelevant, and creates traps and pitfalls in the face of intellectual contradiction.

·         white, middle-class Americans form their own racist language ideologies portraying language minority populations as inferior and backward. These language ideologies, permeated with racism, are designed to camouflage racist discourses from white Americans

o   white virtue—the idea that whites are highest in a racialized hierarchy because of their biological, cultural, and moral qualities.

·         racial slurs as well as a variety of interesting examples of slur usage and the involvement and reaction of some white people.

o   people are most likely to utter explicitly racist statements in their own voices when they are protected by anonymity” (p. 177).

o   the legal status of slurs based on the First Amendment, international law, and Critical Race theorists.

o   proscription of racial slurs needs to be effected.

·         gaffes-racist slurs claimed to be unintentional by American society.

o   reproduce negative stereotypes and harm people of color.

·         social alexithymia-where whites reject the feelings of people of color who object to racist language.

·         covert racist discourses- forms of racism that, although invisible to whites, reproduce negative stereotypes and are perceived by people of color with hurt and frustration on many occasions.

o   Mock Spanish-how whites parody Spanish terms in their conversations in ways that convey inferiority.

o   examples found in television, newspaper articles, and artifacts such as illustrations of greeting cards and mugs.

·         linguistic appropriation-how whites carry out this discourse,

o   terms appropriated from from African Americans, Native Americans, and Spanish speakers.

o   produces negative consequences for minority languages and their speakers.

·         current ills of racism in U.S. society, and realistic solutions to eradicate racism and create harmony among all citizens

non verbal communication and gender

Philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky once observed that being feminine often means using one’s body to portray powerlessness.  These gendered postures are LEARNED and are not reflected in the preadolescence class photo above.

• A feminine person keeps her body small and contained; she makes sure that it doesn’t take up to much space or impose itself.  
• She walks and sits in tightly packaged ways.  
• She doesn’t cover the breadth of the sidewalk or expand herself beyond the chair she occupies.

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Likewise, burping and farting, raising one’s voice in an argument, and even laughing loudly are considered distinctly unfeminine.

• A feminine person doesn’t use her body to forcefully interact with the world, she lets others do for her when possible.  “Massiveness, power, or abundance in a woman’s body is met with distaste,” Bartky wrote.

Stunningly, when you think about it, these features of feminine body comportment are, in fact, not uniquely feminine, but associated with deference more generally.  Bartky again:

In groups of men, those with higher status typically assume looser and more relaxed postures; the boss lounges comfortably behind the desk while the applicant sits tense and rigid on the edge of his seat.  Higher-status individuals may touch their subordinates more than they themselves get touched; they initiate more eye contact and are smiled at by their inferiors more than they are observed to smile in return.  What is announced in the comportment of superiors is confidence and ease…

Acting feminine, then, overlaps with performances of submissiveness.

• Both men and women use their bodies in more feminine ways when their interacting with a superior, whether it be their boss, their commander, a police officer, or their professor.
• Psychologist Andy Yap and his colleagues tested whether “expansive body postures” like the ones associated with masculinity increase people’s sense of powerfulness and entitlement.  They did.  In laboratory experiments, people who were prompted to take up more space were more likely to steal, cheat, and violate traffic laws in a simulation.  A sense of powerfulness, reported by the subjects, mediated the effect (a robust finding that others have documented as well).
• large automobiles with greater internal space were more likely than small ones to be illegally parked in New York City.

Research, then, has shown that expansive body postures that take up room instill a psychological sense of power and entitlement.  The fact that this behavior is gendered may go some way towards explaining the persistence of gender inequality and, more pointedly, some men’s belief that they have earned their unearned privileges.