By Conner
I was thrilled when I moved from a small, rural Appalachian high school to a high school in a mid-sized East Coast city. At my old school, foreign languages (French and Spanish) weren’t available until the 3rd of the 4 years we were in secondary school; my first year of high school, the only electives available were art and keyboarding. In rural schools, unwanted classes are often taught by athletic staff, so I had a choice between Coach Carl and keyboards: my mother told me keyboarding.
I spent an entire year learning how to use an electric typewriter. I typed a lot. It was 1996.
When I moved schools at the beginning of my second year, I had four choices of language classes (!!!!): Spanish, French, Latin, and German.
In retrospect, it’s interesting to observe the associated prestige and perceptions associated with each language class. Our high school definitely had its own language culture and language ideology. Language culture is defined by Schiffman (2000) as “the subconscious beliefs and assumptions about the social utility of a particular language in a given society that reflect values and patterns rooted in a society’s linguistic culture” (in Curdt-Christiansen, 2009, p. 354). Language ideology is “the perceived value, power, and utility” (Curdt-Christiansen, 2009, p. 354) of a language.
Let’s unpack: Spanish was for boys who didn’t care, girls who acted out, and kids who had some form of Latinx heritage, German was for nerds, Latin was for go-getters and smart kids, and French was primarily female students on the popular or “nice” end of the spectrum.
There’s a lot going on there!
In retrospect, I of course wish I’d taken French, since I’ve lived in Quebec for the better part of ten years at this point. But French at the time was the most romantic of the Romance languages. The teacher wore colourful tights and the students went on a yearly summer trip to France. The girls in the class were pretty and popular (read: intimidating), and coming from a rural school, I felt that I was not nearly cosmopolitan enough to take French.
The associated language ideology associated with French appears to have been linked with international travel and prestige. There was also the cultural capital of French as a language of refinement; many of the students in the class were dedicated francophiles. At the time, English was becoming more popular, but there was still a perception of French as a lingua franca; however, learning French was not associated with earning money, but rather having money.
I did not take French.
As an American, the language that would have probably proven to be the most “useful” in my day-to-day life was Spanish. There were not many Latinx students in my school, but their population all over the US was growing, and implicit in Spanish was the opportunity that you would actually be able to use it and find people to talk to. So why was Spanish not flooded with students? Lower prestige.
Unless students had a connection to the Spanish language in their families, the potential language community one could enter with Spanish must have been perceived as lower-class. Spanish was a language of workers, not international business and commerce, technological innovation, or historical prestige and education.
As an adult, I see Spanish as the best choice, but I enrolled in German with a Latin elective.
We were told Latin would help us on our SAT’s, the standardized test that American students take as part of their college applications, primarily through learning new vocabulary (which might have been available in Spanish or French). Advanced Latin students read racy poems by Catullus and traveled each year to state-wide Latin competitions (I have NO idea what that entails, by the way).
Latin did not have a direct economic capital, but it did promise an academic edge and a certain kind of prestige. I’m sure everyone in my Latin classes planned on going to university.
German classes were full of nerds of a variety of stripes. I think it might have been suitably male, while lacking the lower prestige of Spanish, and suitably counter-culture, lacking the moneyed outlook of French. A couple of my classmates were punks or skaters; another would wear bowties to school. They were interested in fields like computer science or engineering; there may have been something about the perceived “logic” of German that appealed to us.
I took German because it’s where I felt like I “fit.” I was correct; I did so well in my German classes that I completed two years’ worth of coursework in two semesters. I felt like I’d overcome the disadvantage of my rural high school and my keyboarding class.
A lot of what was assumed about these classes was implicit, and what was explicit was simply assumed as the “the way things are,” which is a pretty good sign that my high school had a very firmly entrenched language culture.
Most of of my German has faded with use and been replaced with French, in case you are wondering. These days I type around 80 words per minute.
What kinds of language culture or ideologies did you encounter while growing up? Do you view these in a different light now that you are older?
References
Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2009) Invisible and visible language planning: Idological factors in the family language policy of Chinese immigrant families in Quebec. Lang Policy, 8, 351-375.
