Educational Sociolinguistics

Code-Switching and English-only language-in-education policy

Kensaku Ogata

I’m doing a research assistantship in a project designing and implementing pedagogical strategies for addressing Sexual and Gender-based Violence in Agricultural Colleges in Ethiopia. Since I have found some articles relevant to code-switching, I would like to share one of them and to receive your feedback:

Opoku-Amankwa, K. (2009). English-only language-in-education policy in multilingual classrooms in Ghana.

This article is about English-only language-in-education policy in multilingual classrooms in Ghana. Let me briefly explain the context and participants, methodology, research questions, and main findings.

Passing

Lauren Schellenberg

I have no use for my anglophone accent. Late into the night I watch French television shows, whispering the lines over and over to myself. Piece by piece I am replacing my anglo turns of phrase with their French equivalents. The changes are usually small, for example:

J’aimerais un café, svp becomes je prends un café, svp

Ta sœur est belle changes to elle est belle, ta sœur

And je suis ici becomes je suis là

My French is an old car that I’ve been fixing up bit by bit – I’ve reached a point now where it looks pretty good if I drive by quickly. In short conversations I can pass as a francophone. Of course, the illusion decays as I continue to speak, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Shop keepers and waiters no longer switch to English when they hear me speak, even if I make a mistake. People don’t slow down when they talk to me or stop mid-sentence to define words for me. I feel like they’ve let me in.

SALE: português 70 OFF

Ana

I was driving my car one day in Brazil while listening to the radio. I don’t remember what exactly the host and the guest were talking about, but I was really shocked when one of the men mentioned downsizing a company by using the English word “downsize”. At that time, I had had lots of experience with English alread and was even teaching it at a language school. Despite that, it was the first time I was hearing that word. Due to the practicality of the English language, it was not hard to add 2 plus 2 and understand what he was saying: they were going to fire people. How infuriating that was… Have you ever heard about how confusing and vague corporate jargon is used to mislead people and even to hide corruption? (Check out this short video then.) Well, imagine that being done to you with words from a completely different language? That’s just evil… But that’s just one example of a recent trend in Brazil: importing English words that already exist in Brazilian Portuguese.

Paris is Burning, Polari, Drag Race, and the Decades-Long Journey for Queer Slang to Go Mainstream

Brian–Blog post #2

I first saw Paris is Burning a few weeks after 9/11, and the film had a tragic air to it. Though it had been released just eleven years earlier, in 1990, it seemed like a relic from a different era, right from the opening shot of the Twin Towers. The majority of the people who had participated in the documentary, primarily black and Latinx, were already dead then: the first before the film was even completed, murdered and abandoned beneath a dingy hotel bed, and the rest from AIDS-related illnesses. But it also seemed culturally irrelevant as flag-waving, the Patriot Act, and the War on Terror swept the US. It was exactly at this time, in fact, that the most famous drag queen, RuPaul, who I had seen in a recurring role on The Tonight Show, began a two-year sabbatical, knowing that there was little opportunity during such a conservative period.

Like Newfoundland English and Quebec French, there is “Yanbian Korean”

XIN

When talking about the variation of Korean language, people always firstly come up with the significant difference between North Korean language and South Korean language. For example, to me, the Korean language people speak in Pyongyang, North Korea sounds stiffer and more formal while the Korean language people use in Seoul, South Korea sounds milder, softer and more westernized. If you check the news broadcasting from North Korea and South Korea online, I bet you will be impressed by their huge difference. This is due to the fact that different vocabularies, expressions and tones have emerged and developed in different parts of the Korean Peninsula since it was divided at the 38th parallel in 1950 when Korean War began. But do you know that there’re other regions in the world where Korean community people speak Korean language that is neither the “standard Pyongyang Korean” nor the “standard Seoul Korean”?

How many languages do you need to speak as an immigrant in Montreal?

–Dantong

I know a Chinese immigrant family in Montreal, after participating several family parties with them, I discover some interesting and typical family language policies which are influenced by political, economic, and cultural factors, similar to what has been talked about by Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen (2009).

This Chinese immigrant family was from Taiwan, my friend Chen moved to Montreal with her parents when she was 10. Her father can speak Taiwanese, Mandarin, English, and learned a little bit of French after he came to Quebec. Her mother can speak Taiwanese, Mandarin, and a little English. And my friend Chen can speak fluent Taiwanese, Mandarin, English and French. Through several conversations with her, I realize that her language repertoire is closely linked to some “invisible language planning” (2009) which is embedded in a particular context of Montreal.

How included we feel and how much included we want to be: a newcomer’s perspective

Fangzhe

This morning, I was commuting to my class. There were only two days left before the traditional Chinese New Year, but the joyful atmosphere, which has already been rare even in China these days, was apparently nowhere to be found in a carriage of the subway in a country thousand miles away. Suddenly, a naïve voice from a Chinese boy next to me drew my attention: “妈妈，中国农历新年是在情人节那天吗?”(Mum, is Lunar Chinese New Year on the Valentine’s Day?) His mother did not say anything, and the boy quickly added: “还是你也不清楚呢?” (or…you are not clear either?) , followed by an awkward silence. Thanks to the conversation still, that is one of the few things that remind me that Chinese New Year is around the corner.

Currently, the Chinese population no doubt takes up a considerable proportion of the immigrants in Quebec. However, a lot of us will find ourselves outsiders of this ‘unique’ French-dominant place (Allen, 2006).

Translating Journey Part 1 – Training your brain

Lucía Ringuelet

While lately I have been trying to be more flexible, I have always had a clear tendency towards a “monolithic” type of interaction, or “double monolingualism” (Rymes, 2014, p. 5). My family immigrated from Argentina to Canada when my brother was 15 years old and I 12. From the moment we arrived, both my brother and I refused to speak in a language other than Spanish in our home, with our parents and among ourselves. I believe this can sound odd, as it is usually the parents who adopt that stance, seeking to protect the development of the mother tongue. Instead, my mother wanted to practice French with us, but we refused. Code-switching was almost taboo a for us. We wanted to speak “proper” Spanish. To be honest, I am not sure where this strict distinction came from at such a young age. It was certainly more emotional than rational.

Today, as an adult and from a rational point of view, I can find good reasons for it. In fact, I am happy we did it that way. It allowed my brother and particularly I, being the youngest, to maintain a good mastery of our mother tongue. The avoidance of code-switching to mix French in our Spanish has lent us to practice a wider range of vocabulary in the latter language. When I go back to Argentina or I speak with other Hispanic individuals whose repertoire does not include French or English, I am much more confident in my abilities to express myself solely in Spanish.

Haitian Kreyol Dialect, or a language

Anne

In 1961 Kreyol was recognized as one of Haiti’s official languages along with French. Haitian Kreyol is based on French and other languages such as Spanish and some west African languages. It is often described as a “French Dialect” or as a “broken French.” I have always asked myself if Kreyol was a broken French, why do people who speak French do not fully understand when someone speaks in Kreyol?

In Haiti, only 10% of the population speaks French, and a Haitian who speaks Kreyol is sometimes unable to understand another Haitian speaking French. It is unlikely to see the opposite because in Haiti the colonizing language has been prioritized over the Kreyol. Within Haiti there are three forms of dialect of Kreyol: the northern dialect of Kreyol, spoken in Cap-Haitian, the second-largest city; the Central dialect, spoken mainly in Port-au-Prince, which is the capital of Haiti, and also spoken by the majority of the population, and finally the southern dialect, spoken in “Les Cayes,” another big city located in the south.

Like any other language, Kreyol has its own and distinctive grammar that is different from French. One such example is the use of verbs, we do not have subject verb agreement and there are also no verb tenses. Instead we have markers that precede the verb to indicate the tense. For instance, we use “te” to indicate the past tense, “ap” for progressives, and “pral” for the future

Japanese Loanwords in Modern Chinese

Yidan

Since Kanji (Chinese characters) is an integral part of Japanese writing system, and a fair chunk of its vocabulary came from Chinese in ancient times, people tend to believe that Chinese language is in a dominant position in linguistic exchange between Chinese and Japanese. However, the situation has been changed since modern times. Modern Chinese has borrowed a great number of words from Japanese since the 20^thcentury. According to the work by Wang Binbin on the subject of Japanese-word borrowings into Chinese (1998), 70 percent of the modern Chinese words relating to sociology, humanities and natural science originate from Japanese. Representing new ideas, advanced thoughts and scientific knowledgefrom the west, those “Japan-made” words have been assimilated into Chinese so smoothly and naturally that most Chinese don’t really notice their Japanese origin.

In my case, I’ve had such misunderstanding about Japanese’s impact on modern Chinese language. I have visited Japan many times. When I see vocabularies written in Kanji in Japanese books, newspapers or other places, I can understand almost all of those vocabularies and in the subconscious I believe it’s because they were all from Chinese. I never thought that many of them were actually created by Japanese language and then were imported to China.