Ethnicity and Language

Recently, in a bid to make a small amount of British currency (£6), I donated myself to two different linguistic experiments.

For the first experiment, the experimenter asked me a series of language background questions—What languages other than English did I speak? Mandarin Chinese. At what level? Intermediate. How did I acquire the language? I lived in China as a kid and went to local schools.

Then he asked, or more like stated: “One of your parents is Chinese.”

Yeah. My dad.

The incongruity of this question/statement struck me at the time: What does my ethnicity have to do with my language?

I imagine myself being born some twenty odd years ago, with one half of my language-genes programmed to “Chinese” and the other half to…uh, “German-American.”

Mark you, I wasn’t offended, only confused. I hoped that he hadn’t written down in his notes some version of, “Speaks Chinese because parent is Chinese.”

Surely a linguist, more than say—a non-linguist—knows the difference between language and ethnicity.

Perhaps we could have a brief moment of remembrance for those who are ethnically Chinese/Korean/Mexican/Filipino/Norwegian and cannot speak Chinese/Korean/Spanish/Tagalog/Norwegian.

I suspect that the question of parentage had more to do with personal curiosity than scientific interest—

That doesn’t bother me. I accept that being mixed-race means foregrounding the issue of race itself—if not for other people, then to my own benefit/detriment.

The second experiment appeared to be about gendered language. I rather enjoyed it.

~ by maylin2 on May 13, 2009.