America’s Loveliest Accents: New York

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One thing I have to mention at this point: It?s okay to not like an accent. This is a matter of taste. You like what you like, and you dislike what you dislike. If you think an accent is ugly, or lovely, that?s completely your prerogative.

On the other hand, patterns of likes and dislikes can be telling. If all the accents you dislike are from cities, maybe you?ve got something against cities or the people who live in them.

New York City

This one is very personal for me. My family has lived in New York for over a hundred years. My grandfather talked about ?turlet seats? and putting ?earl? on his salad. I was born in New York City, and I live here now. Many of my close friends have New York accents. My son has one. I could write a book about this accent.

New York accents are used in movies and television as shorthand for thugs and con artists and Jewish Princesses. They?re used in cartoons for villains and comic relief (I?m lookin? at you, Gilbert Gottfried). What?s worse, New Yorkers have internalized this hate, as William Labov documented extensively in his dissertation. Alan Chartock, in a pathetic display of this self-hate, regularly suggests that Andrew Cuomo will not win the presidency without taking ?elocution lessons.?

My mom received a steady drip of criticism and mockery for her accent until one day she snapped and said to her boyfriend, ?You know, I speak very good Bronx.? New Yorkers are smart, funny and creative. There are so many great New York voices, it?s hard to choose just one. Woody Allen, Isaac Asimov, Lenny Bruce, the Shangri-Las, Salt-n-Pepa, Paul Simon, Lou Reed and Alan Alda all come to mind. But for this post, I?m choosing Washington Heights?s own Lin-Manuel Miranda to represent the New York accent, teaching children about language on public television:

Previously: Scranton. Nextly: Pittsburgh.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Scranton

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In his post about Gawker?s “America?s Ugliest Accent” series, Joseph Fruehwald notes, “Predictably, the kinds of accents and languages which get dumped on the most, and get branded the ‘ugliest,’ always wind up being spoken by socially disadvantaged people.” And that?s really the ugliest thing about this Gawker gimmick: it?s pretty much the epitome of punching down. In particular I noticed that while linguists find accents in cities, suburbs and the country, all the accents that Dayna Evans chose are urban accents. On the plus side, it means that we?ll be spared the racist comments about inbreeding and Deliverance that always pop up when rural Appalachian accents are mentioned. On the minus side, it means lots of racist comments about inner-city black people. Is it a way for Evans, a native of Leicester in the British Midlands, to impose English class-consciousness on the American people? Or just an effort to mimic the championship sports brackets, which are usually filled with teams named after cities?

Scranton

I have to be honest with you: I?ve never been to Scranton, and I haven?t met too many people from there. Off the top of my head, the most famous people I?ve heard of from Scranton are Joe Biden and Jane Jacobs, who are both known for their ways with words. The right likes to portray Biden as a ?gaffe machine,? in the words of Brian Williams, but he does have a certain wit and sass.

Even though I haven?t been to Scranton, I did go to college in Binghamton, about sixty miles to the north. From what I understand, the culture and language in the two cities are not that different. The area is influenced by both the Appalachian mountains and the Rust Belt. I had two classmates at Binghamton with two different accents. One sounded like most of the SUNY students who weren?t from the city or Long Island; the other could almost have come right out of a West Virginia farmhouse. These women were best friends, and they had grown up down the road from each other in a subdivision on the outskirts of Binghamton.

All that is a long way of saying that I don?t really know what a Scranton accent sounds like, but it can?t be that bad. I bet most of the people voting up Scranton for “Ugliest Accent” haven’t heard anyone other than the Vice President. And I don?t know what a small city like Scranton is doing on Gawker’s list of sixteen accents, while there?s no Dallas or Houston. I guess Evans didn?t want to mess with Texas.

Previously: Boston. Nextly: New York City.

America’s loveliest accents: Boston

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Josef Fruehwald has some well-thought-out criticism of Gawker?s latest hate-fest, “America?s Ugliest Accent.” He concludes: “At the risk of coming off as a slacktivist, I’d encourage you all to be the change you want to see in the world, and say something nice about an accent today, even if it’s just your own.” I was actually thinking, as I looked at the Gawker bracket, how much I like some of these accents. So I?m going to try to say something nice about all sixteen of the ones they chose, with some of my thoughts about the whole shebang, and maybe throw in a few more accents at the end.

Boston

There are lots of voices you may hear when you think of a Boston accent: President Kennedy, Mayor Quimby, ?Park the car in Harvard Yard.? I think of Philip from American Tongues, but mostly I think of Tom and Ray Magliozzi, also known as ?Click and Clack, the Tappit Brothers,? from National Public Radio?s Car Talk. They are masters of the Boston accent, which is sort of a Bizarro version of my family?s New York accent with a lot of the same dropped ?r?s, but we raise the ?o?s in some places where they don?t, and they front the ?a?s in some places where we don?t. It?s all good.

You might be one of those who think Tom and Ray are annoying, and their banter can be hard to listen to if you?re not in the mood for it. I suspect that for years someone has been editing in extra chuckles to pump up the jolly mood, and it?s unnecessary. You might dismiss them as a pair of know-nothing car mechanics with working-class accents, but they?re actually well-educated technophiles, and they do great things with language and sound. I don?t own a car, and I don?t much like cars, but I listened to their show regularly for years. Just their fake end credits, like Statistician Marge Innovera, are worth tuning in for. And they sound better in a Boston accent.

Nextly: Scranton.

Gatekeeping the creepers

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I’ve told you about one kind of category fight, accusing someone of a bait-and-switch and this week I came across an excellent example of another one. A blogger who goes by the alias of Doctor Nerdlove wants to protect the category of Socially Awkward Men from incursions by people who are just assholes.

In this case, the Socially Awkward Men have established themselves as a disabled class and asked for accommodation. They argue that they are less capable of recognizing boundaries set by potential dating partners, and request additional clarity when those boundaries are communicated. What is key here is that they also ask for understanding if they unwittingly overstep those boundaries.

Nerdlove identifies another group of men who claim this accommodation. He argues that these men are not true members of Socially Awkward Men, but instead “creepers” who can recognize boundaries and don’t care. As Nerdlove tells it, these men do not deserve the accommodations offered to Socially Awkward Men, and their dishonesty and their abuse of dating partners has the potential to besmirch the reputation of all Socially Awkward Men.

This gatekeeping argument has close parallels with the watchdogging against Tyson Farms’s abuse of the Natural Chicken category. In both cases, a dishonest actor is claiming membership in a category in order to obtain something that they are not entitled to. The main difference between the free-riding alleged by Nerdlove and the bait-and-switch alleged by the Truthful Labeling Coalition is that the “creepers” are claiming a right to benefits based on their supposed category membership, while the seaweed-injecting chicken manufacturers are claiming to provide value based on their product’s category membership.

One key difference between the two allegations is that bait-and-switchers almost always know what they’re doing, but free riders may sometimes truly believe they are members of the deserving class. In this case there may be some creepers who pose as Socially Awkward, but I think most of the ones who claim the status of Socially Awkward truly believe it.

The besmirching is an added wrinkle to this, and probably deserves its own post. In a besmirching argument, the gatekeeper does not necessarily claim that the intruders are undeserving of the benefit, but rather that they are somehow undesirable, and that their association with the true members will ruin the high esteem that the class is held in. Nerdlove does this when he says that excusing creepy behavior as Socially Awkward “end[s] up continuing the idea that being socially awkward is inherently creepy.”

So there you have an example of the gatekeeping accusation of free riding, and its differences from the watchdogging accusation of bait-and-switch.

I personally agree with a lot of Nerdlove’s argument, but not all. In particular, Nerdlove says, “Here?s the thing about the socially awkward: they don?t want to trip over people?s boundaries.” But as my wife pointed out to me, it’s possible for a guy to be Socially Awkward and still be creepy. He can be unaware of where others are setting their boundaries and not care about them even if he finds out. But Nerdlove’s overall point still stands: there are many Socially Awkward Men who want to learn how to read feedback from others and respect their boundaries. They should be given that feedback, and a chance to learn from it.

A biography of my grandfather from a local business club

The Scotch Referendum

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The American linguist Lauren Hall-Lew, currently living in Edinburgh, was musing on Twitter recently about how both Scotch and Oriental are considered offensive when categorizing people, but not offensive when describing alcohol or rugs. Her main point is valid and very important: as I’ve discussed before, emotions can run very high when discussing how to categorize people, this is because so much more is at stake.

A bunch of us derailed the discussion by questioning Hall-Lew’s assertion that scotch was offensive, and I want to continue that derail here. I had heard that assertion, but never from my father, whose own father came from Dundee in 1909 and whose mother was descended from “Scotch-Irish” immigrants from County Antrim.

Hall-Lew provided links to Wikipedia, the Grammarphobia Blog and the Urban Dictionary, which all reported that “many Scots” objected to using Scotch to categorize them, sometimes on the basis that “scotch is a type of liquor.”

The Wikipedia and Grammarphobia articles are particularly intriguing, because they tell us that the taboo declaration for Scotch describing people has been contested for its entire life, beginning with Robert Burns who said “The appellation of a Scotch Bard, is by far my highest pride; to continue to deserve it is my most exalted ambition.” While people in Scotland seem fairly united on declaring Scotch taboo to refer to people, people of Scottish/Scotch heritage living in North America have shown strong resistance to the taboo. Canadian politician Tommy Douglas referred self-deprecatingly to “my thick Scotch head.”

This controversy over Scotch reminds me of similar verbal hygiene practices among another group that I belong to, the transgender community. If you talk to certain people, as Jessica Roy of Open Source TV did, you can get the impression that we’re united in declaring transvestite and tranny taboo, and we love the word cis.

But just as with transvestite, nobody actually went around Scotland asking people if they agreed on this. There were simply some “community leaders” who decided that Scotch was bad, and convinced everyone who had any significant power in Scotland to go along with this. But they didn’t think to go talk to my grandfather, or Tommy Douglas, or any of the other people of Scottish heritage living outside Scotland.

Overvaluing the opinions of vocal “community leaders” can get you into trouble. For over a century “everyone knew” that if you were really from San Francisco you didn’t call it Frisco, you called it San Fran or SF or something. There was even a Don’t Call it Frisco Laundromat. But on New Year’s, Joe Eskenazi in the SF Weekly found that not only were younger residents embracing the name Frisco, but that it had long been popular among the city’s African American residents – it was primarily rejected by white people.

As I discussed in my post, you can’t have a vote of the transgender community because so many of us are in the closet or stealth. You could actually have a vote of the “Scottish community,” and in fact residents of Scotland will vote in September on whether Scotland should become an independent country again. There is some controversy over whether expatriates born in Scotland, including some 800,000 living in other parts of the United Kingdom, should be allowed to vote. They could even open up the vote to expatriates of Scottish ancestry like myself, but it doesn’t look like that will happen.

If you can have a vote on independence, you can at least have an opinion poll, based on a decent sample, on issues like the usage of Scotch. This might not have been feasible a hundred years ago, but it is certainly doable in this day and age for linguistic researchers to partner with opinion pollsters on questions of the acceptability of certain terms.

Over email, Hall-Lew clarified that by saying that Scotch “is offensive,” she didn’t mean to signal that she was accepting the word of “the community” on verbal hygiene issues. She was simply pointing to the existence of ideologies that mark Scotch and Oriental as offensive with regard to people. This kind of nuance is difficult to convey on Twitter, which is why I followed up with tweets and emails.

I actually believe that it’s very difficult, even among well-informed linguists, to say that something “is offensive” without implying that it’s a universally held opinion in the community. In public, it’s well-nigh impossible; someone will always assume that the group is united on this issue.

I’ve observed, particularly on Tumblr, that this is in fact how some of these ideas are transmitted: someone will declare that transgendered is offensive, and unless that is challenged it will be taken by others as a statement of community consensus. Even if, as with Frisco, the consensus leaves out the city’s black population.

For linguists (and grammarians and encyclopedia editors), especially those who try to be impartial observers, there is an observer’s paradox here. Just by stating that something “is offensive,” we can reinforce that ideology. We should be aware of this, and take care with our words. At the very least we should say “is considered offensive by some.” We can take steps to identify the most vocal opinion-makers. And if we’re really interested, we can verify the extent to which the population in question really agrees with a particular opinion or not.

The case of “Frisco” shows clearly that this is not a pedantic matter of crossing “i”s and dotting “t”s. It’s a matter of basic fairness. If people hear that “San Franciscans” don’t like Frisco, it excludes black San Franciscans and implies that they don’t matter. If they hear that people don’t like Scotch, they get a message that people in the Scottish diaspora don’t matter. That’s not right.

Categorizing people

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Earlier this year I talked about Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, which Rosch interpreted as radial categories. I’ve also talked about how categorization is used in arguments, with a layer of “category fight” superimposed on an underlying conflict, and often obscuring that underlying conflict.

I’ve used this in class with my students when we’re studying semantics. I think an understanding of polysemy and an ability to see beyond category fights is a hugely important skill, one that I don’t think they’re likely to get elsewhere. I use real examples, and I can find several new ones every week. But I try to stick to fights over non-human entities, because whenever people try to categorize humans it causes problems.

I don’t know for sure why fights over categorizing humans are so much more fraught than categorizing, say, food, but I have a couple of guesses. First of all, humans are just a lot more complex than almost anything else we categorize. We’re hard to pin down, and thus more likely to belong to radial or complex categories. Second, we’re humans, so the stakes are higher. The human you categorize may well turn out to be yourself.

One of the most contentious categorization project is the bitter wars that have been fought over various categories of people with transgender feelings, thoughts and actions, which I discuss extensively in another blog (but even I only scratch the surface). It has become a commonplace of political correctness to refer to categories of people with adjectives rather than nouns, because the nouns tend to have more negative connotations (for example, “Jewish person” vs. “Jew”). I recently had a discussion on this blog and on Twitter with some editors about the categories of “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist,” and I grew more and more convinced that the root of the problem was that we were trying to categorize people.

A few months ago I was thinking about all the problems that come from categorizing people, and I wondered, “what if we just stopped, and didn’t categorize any more people? Why do we categorize people, anyway?” In thinking about it some more, I realized that we have a deep and ancient need to categorize people. When we see someone we ask ourselves a number of questions in rapid-fire succession:

  • Is this a stranger or a friend?
  • Is this person dangerous?
  • Is this a potential mate?
  • Is this someone who might want to buy what I’m selling?
  • Is this someone who might have something valuable to offer?

We use categories to help us answer these questions: Is the person one of us? One of the bad people? Man or woman? Old or young? Rich or poor? But it’s important to note that these categorizations don’t actually answer the question. They’re only good for an immediate first pass. They’re kludges.

Even in these contact situations, when we have the time and energy we should probably look beyond our initial categorization to see what our kludges might have missed. But whenever there isn’t that immediate face-to-face sizing-up, such as when we’re setting up rules to allocate resources, we should definitely look beyond categorizing people.

In the transgender case I came to the conclusion that it’s better to think of transgender feelings, beliefs and actions than to try to categorize people. Today I decided that that’s true of prescriptivism, too. It’s probably true of Judaism and team captainship as well.

On advising descriptively

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Some nice people retweeted my post about being a humble prescriptivist, and I had some interesting reactions in the comments and on Twitter, but Peter Sokolowski had one that I wasn’t prepared for.

Jonathon Owen held up Robert Hall’s Leave Your Language Alone as an example of the kind of pure descriptivist that I was referring to, and Sokolowski tweeted:

After thinking it over, I’ve come to the conclusion that there really are two ideas of “descriptivism.” When writing my post I was thinking of the Robert Hall kind, which is the kind that most linguists talk about and aspire to – although I would agree with Sokolowski that we only wind up as hypocrites, loudly declaiming prescriptivism as we prescribe left and right. I think Sokolowski was thinking of a different kind of prescriptivism, as described by Jesse Sheidlower in an article that Sokolowski tweeted last year:

Descriptivism involves the objective description of the way a language works as observed in actual examples of the language. Descriptive advice — almost an oxymoron — about the acceptability of a word or construction is based solely on usage. If a word or expression is not found in careful or formal speech or writing, good descriptive practice requires the reporting of this information.

This kind of “descriptive advice” (I saw how you ducked “prescription” there, Sheidlower) is a venerable tradition with a long history in second language instruction. Most second language learners aspire to speak and write like native speakers, so it makes sense for their teachers to study the speech and writing of native speakers. As Battye, Hintze and Rowlett tell us, it was applied to instructing native speakers on “good usage” by Claude Favre de Vaugelas in 1647:

vaugelas1647-1

These are not just laws I made for our language based on some personal prerogative of mine. That would be reckless, some would say insane, because what authority, what basis do I have for claiming a privilege that is the sole right of Usage – the power that everyone recognizes as the Lord and Master of modern languages?

Vaugelas’ point – the reason people bought his book – was not to base these laws on all usage, but on “good usage,” le bon Vsage, which he explicitly defined as the usage of the members of King Louis XIV’s court. His book contained “descriptive advice” for people who were already literate in French – and thus presumably upwardly mobile – and wanted to write like courtiers so that they would fit in better, and maybe even be admired, at court. Write like these people and you’ll get ahead.

Somewhere along the line Vaugelas’ bon Vsage became Sokolowski’s “standards of good English.” The goal is still to write like these people and get ahead – Sokolowski tweeted, “I bet [Hall’s] kids speak good English.” I bet, but I doubt they needed any descriptive advice to do it. They spoke good English because they were raised as members of the elite. Sokolowski’s job as an editor at Merriam-Webster is to describe the writing of the elites and make prescriptions (aka descriptive advice) that upwardly mobile people can follow when they want to fit in.

The main difference between France in 1647 and the United States in 2013 is that there’s no explicit reference to a court. There are still elites, and people are still striving to fit in with them, but the old court all went to the guillotine, so nobody wants to name the new court. Instead they just handwave in the direction of “standards.”

If we’re using this definition of “descriptivist” – someone who describes the way elites talk and sells that descriptive advice to strivers – then my descriptivist chemist is not accurate. I think that’s a perfectly valid definition of “descriptivist” and I’m not judging (even if I am teasing a little) – I may be looking for a job doing that at some point.

I think it is important for linguists to be clear when we are actually attempting to describe language objectively as scientists, when we are advising descriptively, when we are humbly prescribing language with a political goal in mind, and when we’re being the kind of crotchety traditionalists that Vaugelas thought were insane back in 1647.

The humble prescriptivist

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There’s been some discussion of prescriptivism on various linguistics blogs lately (Kory Stamper has links). The prescriptivism in question is definitely annoying, but I think everyone misses the mark a bit. Jonathon Owen comes the closest to the way I think about it. And the way I think about it comes from Deborah Cameron’s excellent 1995 book Verbal Hygiene (re-released in 2012 with a new foreword).

Since I first heard the term, I’ve come to realize that “verbal hygiene” is kind of a clunky term, so let me propose an alternate one: humble prescriptivism. Before I get to that, though, let me show you what I see as lacking in the descriptivism that linguists so publicly cherish. Meet Chris, the descriptivist chemist:

STEVE: Chris, did you test that substance?
CHRIS: Yes, it’s quite toxic.
STEVE: What?
CHRIS: Oh yes, the amount he put in that punch bowl is enough to kill anyone who takes a sip.
STEVE: Why didn’t you stop him?
CHRIS: I’m a scientist, Steve. I describe the way the world is, not the way I think it should be.

Dave, the descriptivist fashion consultant:

LISA: Dave, what do you think of this suit?
DAVE: It’s blue.
LISA: Yes, but so is that one.
DAVE: It’s a lighter blue than that one. And it doesn’t have pinstripes.
LISA: Yes, but which one is better for this interview?
DAVE: I’m a scientist, Lisa. Some people wear light blue suits to interviews, some people wear dark blue suits. Some people wear suits with pinstripes. They’re all considered appropriate.

Mary, the descriptivist musicologist

STEVE: So, great concert, huh?
MARY: They played with enthusiasm.
STEVE: But did you like it?
MARY: The melody of this version of “Smoke on the Water” didn’t match the studio version or the original Deep Purple version.
STEVE: So you didn’t like it?
MARY: I didn’t say that, Steve. I’m a scientist. Who am I to say that their playing is good or bad? They’re people. They play music.

There are three humble ways to be prescriptivist:

Aesthetics. De gustibus non est disputandum. People’s tastes are their own, and if I happen to think that Portuguese personal infinitives are sublime and “intranet” is one of the ugliest words in the English language, that’s my right. This is respectful as long as I make it clear that it’s my personal taste.

Social utility. There are communal norms and trends, and sometimes it’s useful to take them into account. It’s especially useful when you’re selling things. This is humble as long as we’re honest about how well we really know and understand these community norms and trends, and what our claims are based on.

Politics. Speech acts are quite often political acts. Names and categories are frequently fraught with politics. Language policy, like all policy, is political. This is respectful as long as we’re honest (with ourselves, at a minimum) about what our political goals are, and how likely our language actions are to achieve them.

It’s arrogant to disguise your political, social or aesthetic goals as the implementation of some universal standard of good or bad, right or wrong. It’s disrespectful to pretend that your norms are everyone’s norms. It’s disrespectful to insist that everyone else slavishly follow the traditions that you personally value. It’s arrogant to set yourself up as the arbiter of good taste.

It comes down to humility and respect. If I want you to (say) stop using “come out of the closet” to mean “declare a gender transition,” I’m going to explain to you exactly why that’s a bad idea, and it’s up to you to decide whether to agree with me. If I think you’ll have a better chance at that job interview if you can avoid dialect features that are known to trigger the interviewer’s unconscious prejudices, I’m going to explain that and let you decide if you want to take that chance. If I would rather hear you say “internal website” than “intranet,” I’m going to tell you that’s my personal preference, and leave it up to you whether or not you want to accommodate it.

Linguists should not be arguing against all prescriptivism, only the arrogant, disrespectful kind. And there’s really too much of that kind in the world.

The politics of soft “g”

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Soft or hard “g”? It’s been in the news lately in relation to the file format “gif,” which is currently enjoying a renaissance as a new generation discovers its usefulness in creating annoying animations. This week the “creator” of the Graphical Interchange Format weighed in that he’s always pronounced it with a soft “g.”

Arika Okrent gives some historical context on the sources of “g” words in English. Soft “g” is actually one of the world’s most controversial sounds, along with “sh”, “r” and “l,” and this is hardly the first pronunciation fight over it, as noticed by the singer Frank Black:

I heard them saying “Los Angeles”
In old black-and-white movies,
And if you think there’s nothing to this,
How come we say “Los Angeles”?

Black pronounces the first “Los Angeles” with a hard “g,” and the second with a soft “g.” There are vowel differences as well, but the “g” is the most salient difference. A friend of mine sent me this song back in 1994, and I happened to know the answer to Frank Black’s question because I had just read it in an obituary for the linguist Dwight Bolinger by his colleague Robert Stockwell. In 1952, as Chair of the Department of Spanish and Italian at the University of Southern California, Bolinger served on a mayoral “jury” appointed to decide the pronunciation of the name of the city. The jury was supposed to have an answer for the 171st anniversary of the founding of the city on September 4, but admitted they were deadlocked. On September 9 they announced that they had come to a decision, which Stockwell credited to Bolinger:

From a linguistic point of view, the real possibilities, no matter how they came to be represented in the press, were, of course, only these three: [los?ŋxeles], [lasǽndʒələs], and [lasǽŋgələs]. The third version, with [g], was favored by the mayor and most Anglo natives of Southern California who expressed opinions in the polls (over a thousand of them, not counting columnists). Hispanics predictably preferred the first version because it is correct Spanish. Bolinger apparently persuaded the jury, contrary to the two opinions most favored in the polls, that ‘Loss-An-juh-less’ should be recommended, and there are headlines all over the newspapers of early September 1952 citing Bolinger as the one responsible for ‘the phonetic syllables’ and quoting him as saying that, ‘from a Spanish language standpoint, the pronunciation is not as much at variance with the true Spanish as that employing the hard “g”. (Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1952). What he had done was diplomatically persuade the jury to accept the pronunciation which is in accord with English orthographic traditions. It should be added that he was consistent: for his own name he preferred [báləndʒər] though his son prefers and has always insisted on [bóliŋər].

The current soft “g” pronunciation of “Los Angeles” was actually crafted by Bolinger as a compromise between the hard “g” preferred by Anglos and the jota used by Hispanics. It just happened that it fit with Bolinger’s own agenda. In 2011, the L.A. Times compiled more details from its reports at the time. Of course, in 1952 “the mayor prayed that civic pride would prevent its citizens from ever, ever referring to it as ‘L.A.’,” but really, that’s what they do today.

Stan Carey argues that “You can pronounce ?GIF? any way you like,” and echoes another linguist’s pronouncement from the early 1950s, “Leave your language alone.” In this particular case I’m with Carey: I don’t really care how “gif” gets pronounced; I just want people to stop using them so much, especially those annyoing 4-up captioned screencaps. But as the “Los Angeles” case indicates, some pronunciation choices do have political consequences. To paraphrase Deborah Cameron and Joshua Fishman, we can’t leave our language alone because it’s not just ours. It’s community property, and if we don’t take care of it others will mess it up.

Appreciating interpreters

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My friend Dan Parvaz, who is a registered American Sign Language interpreter, posted yesterday on Facebook that it was Interpreter Appreciation Day. Further investigation reveals that this day is intended specifically for sign language interpreters, but spoken-language interpreters work hard and deserve appreciation too. Dan mentioned that September 30 is Saint Jerome’s day, the patron saint of translators, but as far as I know nobody mentions interpreters then. It’s as good a day as any other to appreciate the hard work that interpreters do in all languages.

I wanted to share a couple of radio stories that have made me appreciate professional interpreters even more – by their absence. In one case things seem to have turned out well despite the lack of interpreters, and in another they went very badly.

The first is a segment, “I Am Curious Yellow” in the “Tribes” episode of This American Life, which first aired on March 29. Debbie Lum, a Chinese-American filmmaker, produced a documentary Seeking Asian Female, which premiered at South by Southwest last year. She focuses on a white American man with a fetish for Asian women and his Chinese mail-order bride. She recounts how she intended to play the part of the neutral documentarian, but found herself being drawn into the story. She serves as an unpaid, amateur interpreter for Sandy and Steven, and even an informal relationship counselor, helping them both to understand each other and what they want from the relationship.

The second segment, “Yellow Rain,” was part of the Radiolab episode “The Fact of the Matter,” which first aired on September 24 of last year. During the bombing of Hmong villages by the Viet Cong in 1975, a suspicious “yellow rain” fell; some people believe it was poison, and others that it was “bee poop.” Host Robert Krulwich interviewed one of the survivors, Eng Yang, “translated by his niece,” writer Kao Kalia Yang. Krulwich later admitted that he “pressed too hard” in his quest to get evidence to condemn Ronald Reagan. At a certain point in the interview, Kao Kalia Yang, overcome with emotion, cut off both Krulwich and her uncle, yelled at Krulwich and then terminated the interview.

You can read Kao Kalia Yang’s side of the story here and here, and a brief statement from Eng Yang. Krulwich’s statement is here, and one from his co-host Jad Abumrad.

The only place that I have seen discussion of Kao Kalia Yang’s role as interpreter was a comment from “Diane from MN” on the “Yellow Rain” show page: “I speak Hmong and can hear Eng telling the interviewers repeatedly in the final cut he knows what bee pollen looks like. … Even Kao Kalia’s husband, who witnessed the interview, has said Eng was talking about his knowledge of bees and told the interviewers he is an experienced beekeeper. Did you hear any of this in the final cut? Not unless you understand Hmong!”

What Diane from MN is telling us is that Kao Kalia Yang, in her frustration, did her uncle and their cause a disservice. By stepping out of her role as interpreter, she left no one there to honor his voice. It is not even clear to me that he wanted to end the interview.? But even before that she did herself a disservice by agreeing to interpret in a situation where she would not be able to remain impartial.? In her reaction to the show she expresses frustration at being “reduced” to the role of niece in the show credits, when she is a published author.? But taking on the role of interpreter requires the humility to set aside your own agenda and qualifications, something she was not prepared to do.

Over the years I have watched Dan and my other interpreter friends work hard to convey meaning between Deaf and hearing people in as clear and neutral a way as possible.? Many of them are accomplished scientists of language and that may help them to interpret more clearly, but they set aside their research and their egos when they are interpreting.? Some of them will interpret for a friend or spouse in a casual setting, but in a formal situation where the stakes are high, Deaf people need to know that they are getting an unbiased translation of what’s being spoken, and that their own words are being translated fairly. It is the same for Hmong speakers in the United States – for anyone who needs to communicate with someone without a common language.

Ted Xiong, a Hmong interpreter at the Fairview Clinic of the University of Minnesota, told Minnesota Public Radio in 2008, “It’s being in the middle, between the patient and the provider. You cannot advocate for them, you can’t give them advice. It’s like… you are just a voice.” Xiong finds that frustrating, but the alternative is worse. Elizabeth Heibl, a doctor, added, “What you want is a two-way conversation between the clinician and the patient, with the interpreter there to help with communication.”

Unfortunately, children of immigrants like Kao Kalia Yang – the “1.5 generation” – and hearing children of Deaf adults are often thrust into the role of interpreter without any training or qualification. They find themselves interpreting for their parents with bureaucrats, teachers, shopkeepers and doctors, because nobody has hired Ted Xiong or Dan Parvaz or one of their colleagues – because interpreting services are expensive and many in government and business don’t know or care that people need this service. They find themselves forced to choose between conveying accurate information and being a full participant in the event. This is not fair to anyone.

There are some languages that have very small communities in the United States, and it can be very hard to find a trained, neutral interpreter. The Hmong languages are not like that. In a quick Google search I found three services offering professional Hmong translation. Eng Yang should have insisted on one; if so desired, Kao Kalia Yang could have participated as an advocate, free from the responsibilities of interpreting. But really, they shouldn’t have had to ask. WNYC can afford a Hmong interpreter for a two-hour interview session, and Pat Walters, the producer, should have simply provided one as a matter of course as soon as it was clear that Eng Yang’s English wasn’t fluent enough.

Walters and Krulwich set out to find the Truth. The Truth is a slippery thing. But you’re never going to get anywhere close to it without a reliable, neutral interpreter. And you’re probably going to mess things up.