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

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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.