Sarah Smith Blog 6: At What Cost?

A technique employed my dominant groups under threat of marginalization is implementation of a national or standardized language. Anderson mentions this technique repeatedly in Chapter 6, "Official Nationalism and Imperialism," of Imagined Communities. Throughout history, dominant groups faced by significant minorities often assert their authority through linguistic domination. Anderson references Gaeltacht being Anglicized in Scotland (Anderson 90), the emergence of German in Western Europe (Anderson 87), and, of course, there is the overwhelming spread of English with the advent of mass printing and global communication. Language, for centuries, has proven itself to be a channel by which dominant groups might protect themselves from encroaching minorities.

The relationship between language and culture is something I have studied extensively as a linguistics major, both in a classroom setting and through my work in ESL classrooms. Dominant groups tend to have prestige languages, or languages socially superior to those of minority groups, and begin to impose language limitations that benefit the majority over the minority of other-language speakers. Anderson's chapter made me think of two current examples of language domination: the US English-only debate and Haitian Kreyol.

With the rising prevalence of foreign language speakers, particularly Spanish-speakers, in the United States, the debate over whether English should be the national language has become an important conversation. We hear all kinds of projections about what percentage of the country will be represented by minority groups in a few decades, and many English-speaking Americans (i.e., part of the dominant group) feel threatened by this--and thus the desire for nationalizing English. It serves several purposes: streamlining language, so that government documents only need to be printed in one language rather than many, forcing foreigners to learn the dominant language and in doing so assimilate themselves into American culture, and, effectively, producing a barrier that keeps the dominant group dominant and the marginalized groups marginalized. While there is undoubtedly some utility in a national language, it is also a form of maintaining the inferiority of minorities. Speaking as a linguist, the practicality of a national language is so minimal compared to the loss that results from it. Bilingualism is a huge asset in terms of intelligence: those who can speak multiple languages have greater cognitive and metalinguistic awareness, a greater understanding of how words work, and greater memorization and comparative capabilities. Already the United States is far less bilingual than most industrialized nations, and making English the official language would do nothing to help. While language can be a means of unification, loss of native tongues is tied to loss of culture. The dominant group wants to remain dominant, but at what cost?

The situation in Haiti has similarities. Haitian Kreyol takes two forms: Rough Kreyol and Smooth Kreyol. Rough Kreyol is the vernacular form, spoken by the uneducated masses. Smooth Kreyol is much more like French, spoken by the educated elite. Generally, Smooth Kreyol is taught in schools. This has been changing in recent times, with government-sponsored initiatives to also teach Rough Kreyol. In Haiti, there has been a huge push from educators, professionals, academics, and parents to eliminate Rough Kreyol from schools. They know that Smooth Kreyol is the prestige language, and their children are more likely to be successful in Haiti and abroad if they are speakers of Smooth Kreyol. But again, these are members of the dominant group. By making Smooth Kreyol dominant and the standard, they marginalize those who speak Rough Kreyol, banning them from academia and making education a far more difficult process. It is not so different from US efforts to eliminate African American Vernacular English (previously "Ebonics") from schools, at the expense of those students who grew up speaking AAVE and were subsequently disadvantaged by being schooled in a dialect quite different from the one they spoke at home and outside of school. Again, the dominant remain dominant, but at huge cost to the minority and marginalized groups, who are effectively banned from upward mobility by their linguistic environments.

In class, we have experienced several films and lectures that epitomize anticipatory strategies of dominant groups who feel threatened by marginalization. Kunta Kinte is beaten into accepting an American name, no doubt that his masters want to avoid allowing the slaves to associate themselves with their cultures and potentially uprising against their masters. He must trade in his heritage, his name, for a name that represents the culture he has been forced into. Similarly, Diouanna in Black Girl is marginalized and mistreated by her mistress, who anticipates feeling like an outsider upon her return to Europe. In mistreating Diouanna, she allows herself to be dominant as she was before. Dr. Chinua Thelwell's lecture on minstrelsy shows a great example of the dominant white men portraying black men in a negative light, to patronize the rising number of blacks and let them know that they remained inferior in the eyes of whites. 

The dominant groups continue to assert their power over marginalized populations--but at what cost?!