Ana Celia Zentella Professor Emerita, UCSD. Photo courtesy of:

Transcription

1 Ana Celia Zentella Professor Emerita, UCSD Photo courtesy of:

2 Welcome to San Diego, California's second largest city. Where blue skies keep watch on 70 miles of beaches and a gentle Mediterranean climate begs for a day of everything and nothing. Opening line on the website of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau: Photo courtesy of:

3 population of SD County: 2,941,454. 1,256,951 residents of the eighth largest metropolis in the United States.. America s finest city Multilingual San Diego

4 With its growing Latino population and waves of immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, contemporary San Diego offers up a paradox in which the real city is all but eclipsed by the tourist Mecca. Because many of its communities are isolated from one another by a labyrinth of canyons, freeways, and class divisions, a lot of the city s own residents don t know how multifaceted and multicultural San Diego has become. (Mayhew 2003: 272) Photo courtesy of:

5 Artwork courtesy of: (top), (bottom)

6 Artwork and photo courtesy of: /skyline1.jpg,

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8 Paradox of the real and the tourist San Diego: languages and cultures have been elided in the narrative of the nation s finest city Monolingualism as a national ideology: Ignorance of San Diego s ethnolinguistic diversity is consonant with national ideologies of monolingualism and immigrant assimilation. Distrust in San Diego. Recent nation-wide study: only 25% of the 300 San Diegans [Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians] who were interviewed trusted the three other groups (Putnam 2007).. Distrust was not limited to other groups; less than half (45%) trusted their neighbors, only 26% trusted their own group.

9 San Diego s Incomplete Language Timeline! San Diego Historical Society Timeline has 366 entries 20,000 BC ( ONLY 3 entries make specific reference to language: BC to 1000 AD Yuman-speaking peoples intrude and assimilate La Jollan cultural group. 2. November 12, 1602 Indians appear with bows and arrows, but the Spanish offer gifts and communicate with sign language Because of his diplomacy and mastery of English, Ah Quin quickly finds work as a labor contractor for the California Southern Railroad.

10 Indigenous languages and colonization by Spanish speakers! Kumeyaay: First residents of San Diego, 12,000 years ago.! Iipay aa : less than 350 speakers, mainly in Mexico [10-50 in San Diego]! San Diego (est. 1769) was largest mission. In 1790s, most of its 1,523 inhabitants were Indians.! San Diego was multilingual and multidialectal.! : Castilian was not the linguistic norm-- majority (55/89) of the officials and missionaries came from new power centers of the north, northwest, and eastern provinces of Spain; only five were from New Spain. Courtesy of: /kumeyaay.jpg! California settlements included 22 indigenous language families and 138 dialects or varieties

11 (Continued )! Population loss paved the way for language death.! Although the San Diego Mission recorded a total of 1,567 converts by 1803, an alarming 1,322 deaths had also been recorded (Baker: 18).! Spanish Rule ( ): multilingual indigenous majority dominated by a Spanish speaking minority! Mexican Rule ( ): Spanish speaking administrators from newly independent Mexico. Californios constituted the majority of the population! In 1821, San Diego consisted of a large mission, a small presidio, and 450 settlers, predominantly Spanish speakers. By 1840 only 150 remained (Baker, 200).

12 The Anglo/English Gold Rush and US annexation! 1848: Gold Rush caused twelve-fold increase in California s population in four years.! (California statehood): San Diego s population jumped from 150 to 650.! : Population tripled, to 2,300! : city grew from 2,637 to 16,159, county expanded from 8,618 to 34,987 ( SD population boom was heavily Anglo and English speaking. Artwork courtesy of:

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14 Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (Rumbaut, Massey and Bean 2006)! 2,400 students in 9 th and 10 th grades followed for 10 years, until years old (n=1,502)! SD youth of Mexican, Filipino, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian backgrounds! San Diego is a graveyard for languages! No mother tongue can be expected to survive beyond the third generation! After at least 50 years of continuous Mexican migration into Southern California, Spanish appears to draw its last breath in the third generation (op cit: 459)! Poor self-esteem and a more common sense of shame at their parents culture (Portes and Rumbaut 2001: 133).! Fluent bilinguals are the least embarrassed by their parents, have the least conflictive relationship with them, and are most prone to maintain friendships with co-ethnic children (134).

15 Determining the Ethnolinguistic Vitality of a Community! Status, Demography, and Institutional Support: -! Status variables pertain to a configuration of prestige variables of the linguistic group in the intergroup context. -! More status a linguistic group is recognized to have, more vitality it possesses as a collective entity. -! Demographic variables are related to the sheer numbers of group members and their distribution throughout the territory. -! Ethnolinguistic groups whose demographic trends are favourable are more likely to have vitality as distinctive groups than those whose demographic trends are unfavourable and not conducive to group survival. -! Institutional support variables refer to the extent to which a language group receives formal and informal representation (op cit: 309)

16 3 major variables, 18 sub-variables:

17 Table B:

18 Table B suffers from at least four serious limitations: 1- Lack of objective measures for determining the strength of many factors, e.g., mixed marriages (exogamy), social status, immigration/emigration, and formal/informal support in industry. 2- Difficulty in determining the relative weight of some factors vs. others, e.g., is population density more important than economic or social status? 3- Lack of homogeneity in most groups, e.g., first generation lower working class Mexican immigrants differ from second generation Mexican American students at UCSD. 4- Absence of significant factors, e.g., race, legal status.

19 Multilingual San Diego Portraits of Language Loss and Revitalization Table of Contents

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