Anne Charity
ANTH 474: Language Attitudes in USA
The College of William and Mary
September, 2007
It is safe to say that were it not for language attitudes in America, I would not be alive today. And this paper, if written, would be remarkably different.
My father came from a Jewish background, and during his stay at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he elected to join the Jewish fraternity Tau Epsilon Phi. My mother was a year below him in school, and on a campus of 28,000 students, there was little chance that a Catholic freshman from rural New Jersey would even meet Michael Kessler, let alone get to know him well. But my mother felt lost in the southern accents surrounding her, and eventually pledged a sorority where she felt more at home. The girls there were from the north, like her, and they pronounced their words in ways she found comfortable. Relieved at this marker of solidarity, she joined their ranks, not letting the fact that they were predominantly Jewish stand in her way. One day at a mixer later that year, Colleen met Mike, and I suppose the rest is history.
I was raised in an interfaith household, which at times bordered on being interlanguage as well. My parents were both monolingual, but each had a grandmother from what they called the Old Country – and it was some time before I realized that Russia and Ireland were not in fact the same place. My father taught me the occasional Yiddish idiom, and my mother would sing a Gaelic lullaby as she rocked me to sleep. To this day, I find Irish accents to be incredibly rhythmic and soothing.
The biggest impact on my burgeoning language skills was likely the Hebrew lessons that my father insisted I take at the local synagogue. I learned to "read" a foreign tongue there, but only enough to understand the symbols and pronounce the words in my prayer-book. Nevertheless, it was a valuable experience, even if I may not have thought that at the time. I was young enough to gain several new phonemes from my studies, which I appreciated all the more in later years, when I returned to actually study Biblical Hebrew in college.
My interest in other languages was not given much room to flower until then, however. While growing up in central Florida exposed me to the occasional speaker of Spanish, my high school offered language courses only in that and French. My father, a lifelong Latin scholar himself, was outraged both by this paucity and by the string of insipid teachers hired by the local school system. It was not until my third year of Spanish that I finally had a teacher whose methods progressed beyond endless vocabulary lists and delved into actual syntactic structures. (Characteristically of the truly excellent teachers who have graced my school, she has since moved on to a more rewarding post in the next county over.) In my short time with her, Señora Seixas imparted to me a deeper understanding of her own language, of English, and of linguistic patterns in general.
I left for college once more enthused at the prospects of studying different languages. My first semester, I enrolled in Biblical Hebrew as well as Old English, but while I enjoyed the cognitive challenge of learning these ancient tongues, I found my thoughts turning more and more to their similarities and differences, and to the varying methods by which different languages solve the same problems. I signed up for the last available spot in Professor Shaw's Study of Language class, and was amazed at the introduction to the field of linguistics it provided. I learned answers to questions that had never occurred to me, and I learned to question assumptions I hadn't known could be in dispute. I found myself interrupting the conversation of friends with outbursts of "It's only ungrammatical from a prescriptivist standpoint!" and "But really, what is a noun?"
In 2010, I plan to graduate college with a degree in Linguistics. So much of my life seems cyclic, revolving about and always returning to the nature of language. I cannot help but examine the words I speak and hear. I cannot help but whisper a Yiddish phrase now and then to my father and watch his smile grow. And I cannot help but look at my friend Ross, an Episcopalian in our campus's own Jewish frat, and wonder if somewhere in the future his daughter's life will mirror mine.
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