Edited by

Allyson Eamer

Making English Our Own: Ethnolects in Toronto’s Diasporas

Allyson Eamer

Abstract This chapter explores the development of school-based ethnolects in which English and a mother tongue reflexively shape the production of a hybrid language for use in the various diasporic school communities in a Greater Toronto Area (GTA) school. Research on the 1.5 generation of immigrants in a Toronto secondary school has revealed a number of emerging ethnolects whose origins lay in the desire to achieve social proximity with Canadian-born peers and social distance from more recent newcomers. Participants describe their use of a hybrid language which allows them to interpret and navigate the ‘new world’ and claim entitlement to the right to use English. The ethnolects or hybrid languages serve as badges of identity which mark them as members of both the diaspora and of the dominant Anglo culture and language, ensuring thereby the maximum gain with respect to accessing powerful social networks and their resources.

Key Words: Ethnolects, 1.5 generation, adolescents, social capital, linguistic capital, secondary school, pidgins, migration.

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1. Languages and Cultures in Contact

The laws of a culture, the folktales, songs, riddles, and rhymes, ironic phrase and puns, jokes, greetings, blessings and curses, religious texts … cannot be implemented or invoked without 1 language[.]

At the heart of this assertion made by sociolinguist Joshua Fishman is the conviction that language and culture are inseparable. Culture is encoded in language, and explanations of our realities are products of consensual negotiations arrived at through social dialogue. That being the case, when the language and culture of one community make contact with those of another through trans- migration, then exchanges, negotiations and borrowings ensue. Imperialism triggered the establishment of pidgins which reflected the power imbalance between the ‘colonisers’ and the indigenous people. The colonial languages became the lexifying languages, providing the majority of the vocabulary, with the indigenous languages providing the grammatical structures.2 The hybrid languages then became the means by which members of one group interacted with the members of another.

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But what about the effects of language contact within each group? When a hybrid language variety is used within a given community, it is called an ethnolect.

2. Canadian Multiculturalism Canada’s official multiculturalism has its roots in the Bilingualism Act of 1971, which asserted that Canada had no official culture and that no ethnic group could claim prerogative.3 Instead Canadian identity would be defined by respect for diversity. Ontario has consistently been the province of choice for immigrants in the past two decades. In 2005, 54% of all immigrants arriving in Canada settled in Ontario.4 Of that group, 77% chose to make Toronto their home.5 For this reason, Toronto, along with Montreal and Vancouver is referred to as a 1st Tier city. The appeal of Toronto and the other 1st tier cities seems to be the opportunity to settle in well-established immigrant communities with all the social, commercial and institutional advantages.

3. Language in the Second Generation Few sociolinguistic studies are undertaken today without an understanding of language as an instrument of power and not merely a tool for communication. Bourdieu calls this linguistic capital, and states that the possession of knowledge embedded in a culture is an indicator of cultural competence and entitlement to power.6 Second generation members of Toronto’s immigrant families have within their linguistic repertoires: the ancestral language for use with older family members, English for use in the broader community, and the which their parents use to navigate in their new environment. In Toronto, where ongoing immigration makes for the continuous emergence of a second generation of Torontonians, the interlanguage used by the first generation can become fossilised, and re-purposed as an ethnolect used between and among all members of the first and second generation Torontonians within a specific immigrant group.

4. Ethnolects Danesi explains that an ethnolect is a version of the home language, spoken by an immigrant community, resulting from prolonged borrowing, adopting and modifying words from the dominant language.7 The ethnolect is evidence of the psycho-linguistic adaptive strategies of the immigrant to manage the new environment and new realities. Loan words from the dominant language are nativised by adjusting the pronunciation and grammatical patterns for integration into the home language. In order to pass into general currency, the loan words must express something in the new environment in a way that the native language could not adequately accomplish. The ethnolect becomes a quintessential marker of allegiance to the mother tongue as well as the development of a hybrid identity.

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Danesi studied the unique way in which Italian dialects have evolved in Southern Ontario in response to English. The resulting ethnolect is known as Italiese (Italiano and Inglese). Over time, nativised English words, conformed to match linguistic features of the Italian word, have actually displaced the original Italian word in common usage. Italian rules for genderising nouns are applied to the English noun (storo has come to replace the Italian word negozio to mean the English word store) and English verbs are conjugated with Italian affixes (frisare replaces congelare to mean to freeze).

5. The 1.5 Generation

[A]ll around the GTA if you listen carefully, you'll hear English increasingly spiced with flavours from foreign languages. Hinglish, and Arabizi are just a few of the variations. With its ethnic neighbourhoods, Toronto is the perfect city for a revolution in spoken English ...“[Some people] think it is a sign of incompetence when it is really a sign of resiliency and 8 creativity.”

In migration discourse, the 1.5 generation is a term used to define those individuals who arrive in a new country as adolescents, having emigrated with their parents.9 Unlike their parents, they cannot be deemed first generation since they’ve arrived in their new countries while still in their formative years and still capable of acquiring native-like linguistic and cultural proficiency in the new setting. However they do not qualify as second generation since they have had substantial education and socialisation in their countries of origin, and like their parents, are cultural outsiders upon arrival. The 1.5 generation has a particularly challenging road to navigate. Developmental psychology theory asserts that adolescence is the time during which individuals create identities separate from their parents through increased social interaction with peer groups.10 This developmental task can be impeded for 1.5’s due to the lack of a peer group with which to identify in the new setting, and insufficient linguistic and cultural competence with which to gain access to coveted social peer groups. In Toronto however, immigrant adolescents are very likely to arrive at schools at which they will find a large community of students with languages and cultural backgrounds that match their own. It is at one such secondary school that this current study was undertaken.

6. Study Participants in this study were 12 secondary school students at a Toronto high school, aged 14-17, studying in grades 10, 11 or 12. Each of these 1.5 generation

100 Making English Our Own students had been in Canada for less than 2 years and had emigrated with their parents from countries in Asia. All of the 12 participants were members of ethnic groups with ‘hard boundaries.’ that is to say that group membership was determined via salient features such as race and language.11 Students were recruited through the school’s vice principal and ESL teachers, and participated in individual interviews and focus groups.

Table 1: Participants by Country of Origin and Language Participant Name Country of Origin First Language David Wong Hong Kong Cantonese Valerie Lam Hong Kong Cantonese Maggie Tang Hong Kong Cantonese Jaimie Lai China Mandarin Emily Lu China /Japan Mandarin/ Japanese Jimmy Kim Korea Korean Heather Park Korea Korean Sara Kermani Iran Farsi Parnian Badri Iran Farsi Ashkan Alizadeh Iran Farsi Sarah Suleiman Saudi Arabia/Syria Amber Garcia Philippines Tagalog

7. Methodology This exploration of emergent school-based ethnolects amongst 1.5 generation students employed a mixed methods approach. Individual interviews and focus group meetings were recorded, transcribed, and subsequently analyzed using grounded theory. Questions were used to solicit feedback with respect to 1) social issues such as school friendships and school club memberships, 2) academic issues such as achievement levels in various courses including English, as well as parental expectations with respect to academic success, and 3) language practices with native Canadian students and with students who shared their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Field notes were taken during multiple classroom observation sessions. Through standard grounded theory methods, recurring incidents of language choices and challenges for each of the 12 students were tracked. Transcriptions were coded so that a number of different intra- and inter- group themes could be compared, allowing for the exploration of context-specific language practices.

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8. Findings All participants described their secondary school as divided in terms of ethnicity. The cafeteria and all other public spaces within the school were unofficially sectioned off for use according to shared cultural and linguistic features. Amber, a participant from the Philippines described the school climate as segregated. ‘Here, you see everyone separated. Asian people are always together, black people; they’re always together … The Persian people are always together.’ Within each of the ethnic groups were sub-groups comprised of those who conversed in the ancestral language at school and those who used English at school. All participants described their awareness of fellow students who shared their cultural heritage, but were Canadian-born. These Canadian-born students were extremely reluctant to speak the home language with their newly arrived counterparts, and worked to create social distance from the immigrant students whom they called ‘FOBs’ (Fresh Off the Boat). Amber explained it this way. ‘If they speak pure…let’s say Chinese, I see them always together. Or if they speak mostly English, but they [are] Chinese, I see those people together too.’ The social risks inherent in choosing the wrong language with which to address a classmate made navigating the linguistic landscape of the school fraught with peril. David, Maggie, Valerie and Jaimie, all 1.5 Chinese students, referred to their Canadian-born counterparts as CBCs and as ‘bananas’ meaning that they had ‘yellow’ skin but were ‘white’ on the inside.12 They were acutely aware of the disdain with which the CBCs regarded them when they were overheard speaking Chinese in the hallways. Jimmy, from Korea, had a pragmatic explanation for this divide between Canadian-born Koreans and 1.5 Koreans. ‘They’re separate ’cause they can communicate in English. They can make friends because they can communicate.’ Just as there was pressure to refrain from speaking their first languages with Canadian-born counterparts, the 1.5 students experienced pressure to use only their first languages with their 1.5 peers. All students indicated that they were under tremendous pressure to avoid speaking English with peers from the same language group. Sara for example described being ridiculed when speaking English with other Persian-speaking students.

You know when you talk with Persian people, if you’re talking English, they’re going to be all, “Oh my god, you try to be Canadian.” So when you’re with Persian people, I’m trying to speak Persian.

Parnian, also a Persian-speaker, explained that her use of English when giving a specific directive to her peers was perceived as showing off her English proficiency.

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[W]hen they’re leaving, so I have to say, “Stack the chairs in the back of the class.” And we don’t have that sentences [sic] in Persian, so I have to say it in English. When I’m saying it, they’re all laughing and saying, “Yeah, yeah, we know you can speak English.”

Goldstein had similar findings in a Toronto high school math class. In this classroom, the use of Cantonese or Mandarin in group problem solving was a symbol of solidarity and friendship among the speakers of those languages. Conversely, for a Chinese speaker to use English with another Chinese speaker was perceived as an attempt to demonstrate greater power, and was therefore 13 socially and academically risky. An internal conflict was expressed by the participants when the desire to improve their English skills for both social and academic progress was mediated by the pressure to refrain from using English with peers who shared their mother tongue. This desire to maintain vital social networks with same-language peers, while at the same time giving the appearance of being open to Canadian culture and the may account for the emergence of school-based ethnolects. Participants described using these ethnolects with other 1.5 students, particularly those 1.5 students who had been in the school for more than a year. The ethnolects might also have had roots in the need to elevate one’s status within the school’s social hierarchy. The longer a given student had been in Canada, the more competence that student had typically acquired in English and in the school culture. This increased competence could be demonstrated through distancing oneself from more recently arrived counterparts who lacked linguistic and cultural competence altogether. Another source of these emerging ethnolects may have been the conceptualization of English as a language that was inadequate for describing the social experiences of the 1.5 generation students in this study. Each of the students shared many examples of situations in which English lacked the rich nuances which existed in their own languages to describe a specific feeling, action or personality type. Jimmy,for example, said that English did not contain a Korean- equivalent term for the first request by a boy to date a specific girl. Thus, if speaking in English, he’d be inclined to resort to the Korean phrase sa guicha for exactitude.14 The Cantonese participants expressed their frustration with English’s lack of nuanced verbs for indicating affection by pointing out that they had a verb which expressed a positive emotion towards another (hei fuen) without actually committing oneself to liking the person. The Cantonese students also bemoaned the lack of an English counterpart for the Chinese noun fat hau used to describe a female who obsesses about a potential romantic partner and does not worry about the competition. Amber lamented the

Allyson Eamer 103 lack of a word in English which could convey all that the Tagolog word maarte conveyed about a girl who was ‘picky, annoying and thinks she’s all that.’ Emily, a Chinese student, raised in Japan, explained that she used the Japanese word ‘Shnay’ when play fighting with her peers, since the English equivalent ‘Go to hell’ was too harsh. Sarah who spoke Arabic, explained that her language included a specific phrase which was used when one wished for another to listen to a specific message or song ‘Halleeni asam ike.’ She had noted that in English, one could say, ‘Let me show you this’ but, unlike Arabic, English did not have a way to say ‘Let me prepare you to receive this auditory information.’

9. Discussion and Summary In this study, 12 participants from the 1.5 generation described the social hierarchy, as they perceived it, existing in their secondary school in Toronto. At the top of the hierarchy were students who were born in Canada, had English as their mother tongue and who had European ancestry. Next were those students who were born in Canada, had an ancestry which marked them racially as non- European, but who spoke English as a native language. Next in the hierarchy were students who had immigrated in their teens but who could demonstrate some degree of cultural and linguistic insider status through their use of emergent ethnolects with their peers. At the bottom of the social ladder were students whose arrival in Canada was so recent that they were marked by their complete lack of social capital, along with those students who isolated themselves from the native English speakers by remaining in their own cultural and linguistic groups with clearly defined boundaries. In order to achieve social proximity to Canadian-born students, maintain vital social networks with 1.5 peers, and distance themselves socially from more recently arrived immigrants from the same country, the participants in this study described the use of developing ethnolects for use within the school setting. Also suggested in this study is that the establishment of school-based ethnolects reflected an increasing proficiency in English, such that a comparison of its features with those of the first language had become possible. Additional research, particularly longitudinal research would be highly valuable in tracking the longevity of these school-based ethnolects, as well as in documenting the linguistic patterns and grammatical consistencies among their speakers.

Notes

1 Joshua A. Fishman, ‘The Truth about Language and Culture and a Note About its Relevance to the Jewish Case’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 109 (1994): 86.

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2 Aleksandra Knapik, ‘On the Origins of Pidgin and Creole Languages: An Outline’, Styles of Communication 1 (2009): 1-5. 3 Harold Troper, ‘History of Immigration to Toronto Since the Second World War: From Toronto “the Good” to Toronto “the World in a City”’. CERIS Working Paper Series 12 (2000): 3-35. 4 CIC Canada. 4th Quarter Data 2005, The Monitor, No. 2 (2006), 1-18. 5 ‘Recent Immigrants in Metropolitan Areas. Toronto: A Comparative Profile Based on the 2001 Census’, CIC Canada, April 4, 2005, accessed October 25, 2006, http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/research/census2001/toronto/foreword.asp. 6 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges’, Social Science Information 16, No. 6 (1977): 645-668. 7 Marcel Danesi, ‘Canadian Italian: A Case in Point of How Language Adapts to Environment’, Polyphony 7 (1985): 110-113. 8 Deena Kamel, ‘A Language without Limits; Hinglish, Chinglish and Arabizi among Variations as Spoken English Undergoes a Revolution in the GTA’, Toronto Star, August 19, 2008, A03. 9 Kristen di Gennaro, ‘Investigating Differences in the Writing Performance of International and Generation 1.5 Students’, Language Testing 26, No. 4 (2009): 533-559, accessed May 26, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0265532209340190. Dana S. Peterman, ‘Generation 1.5 Students in the Community College’, Community College Journal of Research and Practice 26, No. 7-8 (2002): 683-689, accessed May 26, 2011, doi:10.1080/106689202760181878. Camilla, Vasquez. ‘Comments from the Classroom: A Case Study of a Generation-1.5 Student in a University IEP and beyond’, Canadian Modern Language Review 63, No. 3 (2007): 345-370, accessed May 26, 2011, doi: 10.1353/cml.2007.0020. 10 Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). 11 Hoffman Michol and James Walker, ‘Ethnolects and the City: Ethnic Orientation and Linguistic Variation in Toronto English’, Language Variation and Change 22 (2010): 37-67. 12 CBCs refer to Canadian-born Chinese individuals. 13 Tara Goldstein, ‘Bilingual Life in a Multilingual High School Classroom: Teaching and Learning in Cantonese and English’, The Canadian Modern Language Review 53, No. 2 (1997): 356-372. 14 Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic words were romanised with the assistance of the participants.

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Bibliography

Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges’. Social Science Information 16, No. 6 (1977): 645–668.

CIC Canada. ‘Recent Immigrants in Metropolitan Areas. Toronto: A Comparative Profile Based on the 2001 Census’. April 4, 2005. Accessed October 25, 2006. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/research/census2001/toronto/foreword.asp.

—––. 4th Quarter Data 2005. The Monitor 2 (2006), 1–18.

Danesi, Marcel. ‘Canadian Italian: A Case in Point of How Language Adapts to Environment’. Polyphony 7 (1985): 110–113.

Di Gennaro, Kristen. ‘Investigating Differences in the Writing Performance of International and Generation 1.5 Students’. Language Testing 26, No. 4 (2009): 533–559. Accessed May 26, 2011. Doi: 10.1177/0265532209340190.

Erikson, Erik H. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968.

Fishman, Joshua A. ‘The Truth about Language and Culture and a Note about its Relevance to the Jewish Case’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 109 (1994): 83–96.

Goldstein, Tara. ‘Bilingual Life in a Multilingual High School Classroom: Teaching and Learning in Cantonese and English’. The Canadian Modern Language Review 53, No. 2 (1997): 356–372.

Hoffman Michol, and James Walker. ‘Ethnolects and the City: Ethnic Orientation and Linguistic Variation in Toronto English’. Language Variation and Change 22 (2010): 37–67.

Kamel, Deena. ‘A Language without Limits; Hinglish, Chinglish and Arabizi among Variations as Spoken English Undergoes a Revolution in the GTA’. Toronto Star, August 19, 2008, A03.

Knapik, Aleksandra. ‘On the Origins of Pidgin and Creole Languages: An Outline’. Styles of Communication 1 (2009): 1–5.

Peterman, Dana S. ‘Generation 1.5 Students in the Community College’. Community College Journal of Research and Practice 26, No. 7-8 (2002): 683– 689. Accessed May 26, 2011. Doi:10.1080/106689202760181878.

Troper, Harold. ‘History of Immigration to Toronto Since the Second World War: From Toronto “the Good” to Toronto “the World in a City”’. CERIS Working Paper Series 12 (2000), 3–35.

Vasquez, Camilla. ‘Comments from the Classroom: A Case Study of a Generation- 1.5 Student in a University IEP and Beyond’. Canadian Modern Language Review 63, No. 3 (2007): 345–370. Accessed May 26, 2011. Doi: 10.1353/cml.2007.0020.

Allyson Eamer is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Canada. She researches in the space she calls the ‘i4’ - the intersection of three discourses: Language Education, Social Justice and Technology Enhanced Learning. Her interest in language and identity includes both diasporic and aboriginal communities.