Finegan Ch. 10 and 11

Wow, as I read the beginning of Chapter 10 I couldn't help but feel frustrated.  The author describes all these places in the world where multilingualism is a part of every day life and is totally natural.  And all I could think about is the ethnocentric attitude that I run into sometimes in which people feel that the Spanish language is somehow "invading" the U.S. here in the south.  Several months ago I heard a caller on some talk radio show complaining about how she saw bilingual signs in a grocery store that had the English underneath the Spanish.  She was upset that English was now supposedly inferior to Spanish and was asking questions along the lines of, "what country do I live in, anyway?"  It makes me so furious to hear people speak that way.  No wonder Americans get a bad reputation!  I could go on and on about the historical and cultural reasons why she is wrong to think that way, but this is supposed to be a blog about my reading.  :)  It just makes me very sad that not everyone values multilingualism when it has such advantages.  A major reason that I left Minnesota is that I want to live in a multilingual area that provides certain opportunities for me and my children.

The next part of Ch. 10 gets into written vs. spoken registers.  In my career as a bilingual educator, my Spanish abilities are definitely stretched to the limit when I am required to use different registers.  The spoken register is pretty easy for me now, and although I sometimes struggle when using education jargon with adults in Spanish (for example, terms like number sense and phonemic awareness), I am improving in that area.  However, the more formal the written register needs to be, the harder it is for me to be successful.  A very recent example of this is that I am beginning to translate a language evaluation report for a parent.  A district psychologist wrote up a report of the results, and it is done in a very formal register with lots of highly specialized terms.  It is intelligible to me in English, but stretches the limits of my English vocabulary a bit.  I have to think about it pretty intently to fully understand the report.  So then when I am trying to translate this into Spanish for the student's family, I am in way over my head.  I have never had any reason to use most of the terms in Spanish, and have very little experience in writing in that register.  I could probably write it in a more informal fashion, but I don't think that's the right thing to do since it would "water down" the information.  I have translated a few legal forms (permission forms, etc.) in the past, but was not confident in my results.  It was only out of necessity that I was the translator, since there was nobody else more qualified available to do it.  It makes me so sad that I am the best translator this family has... they have a right to this information and I hope I don't botch it too badly!  Another source of frustration for me is that in this bilingual city there is not universal access to highly-skilled translators (i.e. proficient in every register) in the school districts.  Am I admitting a lack of qualifications for my job requirements here?  ;)  Maybe so.

The topic of dialects in Chapter 11 is of course fascinating.  We've discussed this already quite a bit in relation to the video in American Tongues.  I was particularly struck by the section on gender language variety differences.  I am reading a book right now about the Pirahã tribe of the Amazon and their amazing language differences that lead some linguists to question Chomsky's theory of universal grammar (they use no recursion).  But unrelated to universal grammar issues, the Pirahã women use fewer consonant sounds than men.  For example, if a word contains a "male-only" sound, the women simply replace it with a different consonant.  I was floored when I read this, and I couldn't imagine how this could come about.  Unfortunately, my book offered no explanation.  But when I read p. 377 of Finegan describing how in some places in the U.S. and Canada, men delete consonant sounds in speech more often than women, it made me think that maybe the Pirahã phenomenon was not so strange after all.  In fact, when I think about some "tough" male speech versus more "polite" female speech in English, the Pirahã differences aren't actually surprising at all.

You know... in general, when you look at the big picture of language and all the amazing varieties, it's astonishing that people can ever feel their own speech is superior and the "correct" way to talk.  I mean, I get why they feel that way, because I have learned so much about the connection between language and identity over the past year, but really, how can any educated person claim to speak the proper register and criticize others' dialects?  I think all educators should be required to study linguistics!