In this part of the Sociolinguistics Series (ha, I gave it a name!), I'll be talking about two out of the three class surveys I conducted while at camp.
The first survey was about grammar, and we went around campus interviewing random people by asking them to first list a few grammar rules of the English language, and next, tell us whether or not they thought grammar was important. You think to yourself, "Of course grammar is important," but you would be surprised by how many people answered on the contrary. You would be even more surprised by how many people -- on a university campus, mind you -- couldn't think of one or two grammar rules. The most common rules people thought of were things like "Capitalize the beginning of each sentence," or "End each sentence with a punctuation mark," and sometimes, "Every sentence should have a subject and a verb," showing that many people associated grammar with punctuation and syntax of a sentence.
Grammar should tell us how to use our words to communicate thought, and it is vastly different across different languages (and even dialects of the same language). Some people were passionate about the importance of grammar and adamant in their reasoning. They said that "language was going to the dogs" and that kids these days disregarded conventional grammar. What we don't realize when we say these things is this: grammar is constantly changing. Language is constantly changing! The "kids these days" are trying out cool new things with language -- forming a consistent system -- to help language evolve! If a language doesn't evolve, it might die out; the only languages that never change are ones that are already dead. We can't change the grammar of Egyptian Hieroglyphics anymore because it's long gone. What we can do, though, is innovate with the languages we currently possess; we can do our best to help languages mix and blend and absorb new rules and grow.
The second survey we conducted was about bilingualism. We asked people a few questions: First, we asked what it meant to be bilingual. Then, we asked if the person considered him or herself to be bilingual. Lastly, we asked if they thought there were any advantages or disadvantages to being bilingual. Being on such a diverse university campus, we ran into quite a large number of bilingual people, making our survey results all the more interesting.
One of our TA's told us that while she was working at a refugee center, she encountered a woman who said the only language she spoke was French. The volunteers at the refugee camp persistently asked if that was the only language she could speak, and she kept insisting that she only spoke the language French. A few weeks later, it was discovered that the woman was also able to speak one of her tribal languages fluently, but she didn't tell the refugee workers because she didn't consider her tribal tongue to be a "valid language." Again, we see the issue of people not accepting tribal languages and regional dialects as separate, valid languages (and grammar systems). This notion runs so deep that a woman who speaks two languages herself would consider herself to be monolingual because she didn't see her own language as valid. This breaks my heart.
This was also seen in many of the survey results, as people who obviously spoke more than one language considered themselves not bilingual. When asked what their definition of bilingualism was, many people answered, "to speak fluently in two languages and be immersed in both cultures." These people had a noticeable accent while speaking English, but when I asked if they considered themselves bilingual, they said no. I would then probe further, asking what languages they spoke. They would say something along the lines of, "Well my mother tongue is Russian/German/French/one of the above, and I speak English as a second language." These people did not consider a learned second language to qualify them for bilingualism; they believed in order to be bilingual, you had to grow up learning both languages in the home. Obviously, I can't change how people think about themselves and if they consider themselves bilingual or not, but I still think it's incredibly sad when people undermine their abilities in many languages. They don't give credit where credit is deserved.
(Want to hear about the rest of this survey? Stay tuned for part 3!)
