Social, racial and political connotations

An experiment was carried out in the USA in which a number of people acting as judges were asked to listen to tape recordings of two different sets of speakers. Many of the judges decided that the speakers in the first set were black, and the speakers in the second set were white. And they were completely wrong, since it was the first set, which consisted of white people, and the second of black people. But they were wrong in a very interesting way. The speakers were exceptional people: the white speakers were people who had lived all their lives amongst Blacks, or had been raised in the areas where black cultural values were dominant; the black speakers were people who had been brought up in predominantly white areas. This experiment demonstrates two rather important points.

First, there are differences between the English language spoken by Whites and by many Blacks in America. The Americans assign people with some confidence to one of the two ethnic groups completely on the basis of their language. This might happen in a telephone conversation, for instance, which suggests that 'black speech' and 'white speech' have some kind of social reality for many Americans. This was confirmed by other experiments, during which the dwellers of Detroit of all ages and social status, for example, recognized the speech records spoken by white or by black speakers on the basis of only a few seconds of tape-recorded material.

Second, the experiment demonstrates rather convincingly that, although the stereotypes of black speech or white speech provide them with a correct identification most of the time, the diagnostic differences are entirely the result of learned behaviour. People do not speak as they do because they are white or black. What does happen is that speakers acquire the linguistic properties of those they live in close contact with. Members of the two American ethnic groups learn the linguistic varieties in exactly the same way that social-class dialects require, and in those unusual cases where Whites live amongst Blacks, or vice versa, the dialect pattern they had was that of the locally predominant group.

In the past it was quite widely believed that there was or might be some connection between language and race. For example, during the nineteenth century, the originally linguistic term Indo-European came also to have racial connotations. This term was coined to cover those languages of Europe, the Middle East and India, which were historically related to each other. Subsequently, a myth grew up of an imaginary Indo-European or Aryan race who had not only spoken the parent Indo-European language but who were also the ancestors of the Germans, Romans, Slavs and others who now speak Indo-European languages. Unfortunately for the adherents of this view, any human being can learn any human language, and we know of many cases of the whole ethnic groups switching language through time. One has only to think, for example, of a large number of the African origin people who now speak originally European languages.

Ideas about languages and race die hard, however. The German language, for instance, was an important component of the Nazis' theories about the ‘Germanic master race'; and false ideas about the possibility and desirability of preserving ‘linguistic purity' (i.e. defending the language against 'contamination' by loan words from other languages). This goes hand in hand with equally false ideas about racial purity. Perhaps less harmful, but probably much more persistent, are references to the Romanians as descendants of Latin speakers. It is true, of course, that the Rumanian language represents a historical development of Latin. It is much more likely that they are also closely related genetically to their Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Hungarian, Spanish and Portuguese with whom they have been mixing for centuries.

There is no inherent or necessary link between language and race. It remains true, however, that in many cases language may be an important or even essential feature of ethnic-group membership. This is a social fact, though, and it is important to be clear about what sort of processes may be involved. In some cases, for example, and particularly where languages rather than varieties of a language are involved, linguistic characteristics may be the most important defining criteria for ethnic-group membership. For instance, it is less accurate to say that the Greeks speak Greek than to state that the people who are native speakers of Greek are generally considered to be the Greeks whatever their actual nationality. In other cases, particularly where different varieties of the same language are concerned, the connection between language and ethnic group may be a feature of habitual association, reinforced by social barriers between the groups.

By no means all American Blacks speak Black English, but the overwhelming majority of those who do speak it are Blacks, and can be identified as such by their speech alone. In these cases the connection between the speaker and the language, although not inevitable, is something that the members of the speech community come to expect, and breaking this connection the speaker can at first create an incongruity (несоответствие). For this reason many people find it amusing to hear a white person speaking with a West Indian accent. In any case, ethnic-group differentiation in a mixed community is a particular type of social differentiation and, as such, will often have linguistic features associated with it.

When the identity of ethnic groups is signalled by different varieties of the same language they may be perpetuated (увековечить) by the same mechanisms which are involved in the maintenance of social-class dialects. For example, individuals are much more likely to accept that they are 'Latinos’ or 'Blacks' than to recognize that they belong, say, to Low or Middle class'. This means that the ethnic-group membership may be an important social fact for them. Since, moreover, linguistic differences may be recognized, either consciously or subconsciously, as characteristic of such groups, these differences may be very persistent.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11