Victoria
I witnessed a rather interesting interaction downtown the other day that sparked some thought for me, so I thought I would share it here. I’d like to preface this by saying that I did a whole lot of inferring during this brief observation, so please take my reading of the atmosphere with a grain of salt.
While grabbing lunch at an A&W, I was expertly served by a lovely lady with a strong Mediterranean accent (maybe Greek? I wasn’t entirely sure) in excellent English, her demeanour polite and friendly. While I was waiting for my order to be finished, a customer with a Chinese accent approached the woman to ask for a drink. The customer appeared to still be in the fledgling stages of English-learning, pointing at the drink machine to try to make her choice clear to the server. However, in that moment, the server’s entire attitude changed. Rather than smiley and outgoing as she had been with me, she rolled her eyes at the Chinese woman, pointing at the machine as she tried to figure out what the woman wanted, asking “this one? This one?” loudly enough to draw other customers’ and workers’ attention. After the woman and her children left the restaurant, the server turned to complain about the woman to her coworkers, lamenting about how she had slowed down the lunch rush with her difficulty communicating.
After I left, I wondered at what point the server, who I am almost certain was also a first generation migrant to Canada and non-native English speaker, had lost sight of what it was like to be new to a country and its languages. Based on her accent, it seemed clear that there had been a point where that server had been in similar positions, struggling with a new language and a new culture, and yet, she appeared to have joined in the dominant culture in its mistreatment of non-native speakers and newcomers. My observation reminded me of Noel Ignatiev’s book “How the Irish Became White”, in which he explains that post-Potato Famine Irish immigrants, in an effort to ingratiate themselves with the European-white majority, joined in anti-blackness, as they realized that by working alongside them, they would forever be viewed similarly in the eyes of the dominant population. As a result, one oppressed people chose to oppress another group of people in order to impress the oppressors, which I wonder is what was happening in that A&W.
Of course, I’ll never know for sure what was going through that server’s mind, but her enthusiasm to speak with me as a native English speaker and her obvious disdain for an elementary-level learner of the language suggested that there might be a troubling inter-L2-speaker hierarchy that exists. As a member of the L1 English speaker group, I sincerely hope that learners of English do not feel the need to put other L2 speakers/learners down in an effort to carve out a space in the English republic. While some L1 English speakers may sneer at L2 learners, to me, the solution seems to be to stand with those learners rather than with those doing the sneering, no matter how powerful they may be. As Brie Larson aptly put it, “what I’m looking for is to bring more seats up to the table. … No one is getting their chair taken away. There’s not less seats at the table; there’s just more seats at the table.” Or the A&W counter, I suppose.
This is such a wonderful piece of “sociolinguistic noticing”! But I think there’s a piece missing, and it might be important. Isn’t it possible—nay, overwhelmingly probable—that the disdain, etc., on the part of the possibly-Greek server was “raciolinguistically” motivated? That a customer with similarly low proficiency in English (or French) who was a white European—a Roumanian tourist, say—would have received better treatment?