Gender in Language and Life a duch American foe example
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Suzaning a foreign language effectively requires utilizing the patterns of thought that the language embodies. 4 Whether one agrees with the patterns is another matter, but to become fluent, one must recognize them. As historians of immigration, we have sought to chronicle the move from one culture to another, and in particular, how perceptions of gender and class change in that process. (I came to study language in that context.) Language shift in an immigrant population takes place at different levels: individual, family, and ethnic community, to name the most prominent.5 Within those categories, people have different access to language acquisition, different levels of incentive and compulsion to shift, and different evaluations of language shift. At each level, the difference is gendered, but other factors, most notably age, also affect who shifts and why. 6 Crossing a linguistic boundary, in other words, can have very different meanings. To describe that process, we conducted did a case study of Dutch Protestant immigrants in the United States. My focus was on the turn of the century, the period in which much of this ethnic group made the linguistic shift from Dutch to English, or in sociolinguistic terms, English became the socially dominant language. Nonetheless, Dutch language use continued fairly extensively until World War II, and only after that time underwent a decline indicating imminent language death. 7 One of our major sources for information on language was a collection of interviews with nearly 300 people, carried out under the aegis of the P.J. Meertens Institute in the 1960s. Since these impressions were filtered through the lens of age, however, we sought out contemporary sources as well. We utilized several hundred "America" letters (from the U.S. to the Netherlands), church and philanthropic organization records, and Dutch American newspapers, to name a few. 8 The Dutch came to the United States in three separate waves of migration: colonial, mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, and post-World War II. The first, which began in the early colonial era, had largely assimilated into an American identity, and conversely, American identity had incorporated aspects of Dutch American life to a point that words, names, and aspects of ethnic culture were no longer foreign by the time the second wave began arriving in the mid-nineteenth century. 9 The descendants of the colonial group still included a few Dutch speakers, and in general, members of the American branch of the Dutch Reformed Church provided help for their co-religionists. The second wave of migrants began in the 1840s with several congregations of seceders from the Reformed Church, the quasi-state church of the Netherlands. These pietists, led by their dominies (ministers), founded the major Dutch American colonies of the era and had an impact far beyond their numbers. A second religious movement in the Netherlands in the 1880s spurred another group of religious conservatives to migrate in disproportionately large numbers. 1~ While the majority of the immigrants from the Netherlands
Suzanne M. Sinke
Gender in Language and Life: A Dutch American Example
Abstract: This case study of language shift among turn-of-the-century Dutch Protestant immigrants highlights how language operates to create and reinforce social systems of meaning. The author describes how gender variations in language acquisition relate to social and economic positions of the migrants and their age at arrival. At the individual, familial, and ethnic group level, language acquisition was gendered. Men and women had different reasons for learning or preserving their language, with women occupying the extremes of both innovation and retention. Using socioloinguists' interviews, immigrant letters, literary works, and a variety of other sources, the author argues that the relative absence of gender and class distinctions in English grammar reinforced a particular vision of America that also included freedom from these elements. Change language, change perception. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have chronicled such shifts extensively, and at times have sought to describe the meaning of such shifts in terms of changing social relations within the minority-language or bilingual communities, including gender dynamics. 1 Others have explored gender roles and their relations to language in a wide variety of settings. 2 However, their most common methods, participant observation and questionnaire, are not available for past populations. Among historians, the interest in language and the creation of meaning through language in recent historical scholarship on gender has less often addressed language shift among immigrant populations. 3 We seek in this article to describe the shifts in perception related to language shift for one historical ethnic group, and in the process add to our understanding of how ethnicity and gender interact in situations of changing language.
