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| Jennifer
Stone arrives at Kali Camp, a cultural immersion program on the North
Slope. Her ears were attuned to language variations among locals. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Stone. |
Jennifer
Stone joined UAA six years ago and teaches the history of the English
language, among other classes. That story is long and complex,
documenting how many other languages shaped the English we speak today.
To
make some of the concepts relevant to her students, Stone looked
locally for examples of what happens when different languages splash up
against each other.
She could hardly find richer territory than
the 49th state, known for varied indigenous languages, and in more
modern times, as the landing site for immigrants and refugees from
around the world. She’d stumbled into a language mother lode.
When
languages clash, Stone says, all sorts of things can happen, from one
language killing another, to the mixing of those languages, to a whole
new language forming altogether.
Certainly in Alaska, as in most
colonized places, local languages yielded to the voice of power and
authority. Historical education policy dismissed Native languages to the
point of near extinction; recent revitalization efforts have helped
support and reignite them.
“That’s part of our legacy as a state
that we need to acknowledge,” Stone says. More importantly, “We need to
think about how we approach language in the educational setting so that
does not happen again.”
Village or local “Englishes”
Yet, even in the messiness of clashing languages, Stone sees tremendous vitality.
“English did not just take over Yup’ik,” she said, “but Yup’ik speakers took in English and changed it.”
What
she’s talking about are the wide variety of Englishes that have
surfaced all over Alaska. “We have tiny little pockets of language
speakers and in each of those local communities, a different variety
will pop up.” English that sounds like it has grammatical errors may
sound that way because it has been influenced by indigenous sentence
structure.
I asked for examples. Stone sent me a 1984 “Handbook
for Teachers” on Central Yup’ik from the Alaska Native Language Center.
Yup’ik-influenced English includes samples like “He wants to go
college.” In Yup’ik, the handbook explains, it is legitimate to treat
many nouns (like college) as verbs as long as they are accompanied by
‘go.’
This past summer, Stone participated in a
culture camp at Pt. Lay on the North Slope.
Her ears were tuned to the varieties of English used there, and she
wasn’t disappointed. One example: When locals communicated on their
radios, she noted, “They did all the greetings doubled. So, it was a
lilting ‘Good morning, good morning,’ and ‘Good afternoon, good
afternoon.’” Also, they often mixed Inupiat words like
tuttu (caribou) and
aiviq (walrus) into English speech.
Stone’s
interest and enthusiasm for language varieties is influenced by the
work of Geneva Smitherman, a linguist who studied children’s writing
performance on national assessments. She found that students who used
common features of African American English, like poetic language,
without adding errors like double negatives, outperformed their peers on
the test.
“One of my questions is, “What does it mean for us as
educators if we make the sort of move that Geneva Smitherman did…Hey
wait a minute, this is a language born out of a particular culture and
set of historical circumstances. Instead of saying it’s wrong, bad,
poor, not real English, what if we look at it as a cultural resource
that can work to people’s advantage.”
Research initiative
To
answer that question, Stone has embarked on a major research effort on
language, literacy and technology. Last year, she won an Innovate award,
university seed money, to launch the project. In spring, she trained a
class of undergraduates in interview techniques and had them partner on
nearly 60 interviews with students in freshmen English courses,
including those in a college preparatory version.
Participants
spoke many different languages, including Tsimshian, Tlingit, Yup’ik,
Russian, Yoruba (from Nigeria), Inupiaq, Hmong, Spanish, Ukrainian,
Japanese and Thai. The interviewers asked them to describe their
experiences in home, school, work and leisure settings, and their access
to tools or technologies that influenced their literacy.
The data
analysis will take years, but already she’s pieced together the tale of
one college freshman who found his way to writing through heavy metal
music. The teenager said he wasn’t a great student and never thought of
himself as a writer. But in the 10th grade, he and his buddies formed a
heavy metal band; his job was to write song lyrics. That, and the
writing he did to promote the band and negotiate with performance venues
increased his skill dramatically. By the time he got to college, he
thought of himself as a writer and his skills were validated in freshman
English.
Stone plans at least five academic articles over the
next year to explore similar stories from the interviews. She also
envisions a book offering a less academic and more broadly interesting
discussion of Alaska’s many “Englishes.”
It’s virgin territory,
both for village “Englishes” and those shaped by Alaska’s immigrants and
refugees. “We know nothing,” she said. “It’s a huge gap in the field.”
NOTE:
A version of this story ran in the Anchorage Daily News on Dec. 14, 2013.
