Allyson Eamer

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. ***** 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. 98 Making English Our Own 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 interlanguage 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. Allyson Eamer 99 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, Chinglish 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 Arabic 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. Allyson Eamer 101

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