Trip of the Tongue (22 page)

And this is the experience of an affluent white Midland American English-speaker who works with language for a living. For someone who speaks a genuinely non-standard form of English—or, in this case, a language that
resembles
non-standard English—the repercussions of linguistic prejudice can be far more severe, ranging from economic disadvantage to psychological trauma. Linguistic skill is commonly assumed to be correlated with intelligence, and standard usage is commonly assumed to be correlated with linguistic skill. As neither of these assumptions is necessarily true, the implication that standard usage is correlated with intelligence would seem to me to be doubly flawed.

But this is a common experience of creole- and pidgin-speakers in America and throughout the world. They routinely face prejudice and derision born of the mistaken assumption that their languages reflect some combination of simplicity and stupidity. Speakers of Louisiana Creole are demeaned by speakers of Standard and Cajun French; speakers of Gullah are demeaned by speakers of English. And while the existence of a creole language may be evidence of historical social, economic, and political inequalities, the perpetuation of negative perceptions of these languages is a sign of present inequalities.

Even more troubling, as we've seen, the deep and persistent shame engendered by these perceptions is a surefire way to effect language loss. And when a community loses its language, it loses incalculable cultural artifacts. It would be as if someone had walked into Charleston's historic homes and set them all on fire. No more armoires, no more grass mats, no more wallpaper. No more names, no more stories, no more songs. An entire people would lose the chance to know their history.

Faced with the proximate and inescapable pull of English and relatively high-prestige forms of Louisiana French, Louisiana Creole is fading fast. But I hope things will be different for Gullah. Even though it has fewer than 10,000 monolingual speakers and is harder than ever to find, I saw more than a few signs of vitality. Gullah organizations, for instance, are hard at work restoring a sense of linguistic and cultural pride through education- and entertainment-based outreach. Every November the Penn Center hosts Gullah Heritage Days, a celebration that includes performances, activities, exhibits, and symposiums. Additional festivals take place throughout the year in Beaufort, Hilton Head, and other nearby communities. Outside interest in Gullah language and culture is also on the rise, and today you can find a wide assortment of articles, books, and documentaries about Gullah, none of which refer to it as “bad English.”

The geographical isolation of the Sea Islands' Gullah populations is also undoubtedly a powerful ally of those in favor of language retention. The island was for many years home to an overwhelmingly African American population that until relatively recently did not have a great deal of interaction with the mainland. It wasn't until 1927 that the first bridge between St. Helena and Beaufort was built, and there are reports from as late as 1949 that some residents of St. Helena had never even been to the mainland. This isolation strengthens the Gullah language in two ways: first, by insulating the island from the influence of English, and second, by protecting its residents from white-majority prejudice. As Patricia Jones-Jackson writes, “Growing up as a black majority almost free from outside social influences, such as racial prejudice characteristic of the white-dominated society in the inland parts of the United States, undoubtedly affected the attitudes and perceptions of the islanders, to the extent that few of them wish to leave the islands today.”

And, perhaps just as important, those who do leave the islands eventually come back. Patricia Nichols, professor emerita of linguistics at San José State University, describes this phenomenon as “re-creolization”: “Many speakers learn and use [Gullah] as children, move away from their communities for education and jobs where they use a variety of African American English or a regional Standard English, and then return to their communities in retirement when they ‘re-creolize' their speech.”

All in all, when I think back on my time in South Carolina, whether or not Gullah has a viable future as a mother tongue was honestly one of the least of my worries. Rather, what I took away from the Sea Islands and the Lowcountry was an understanding that it isn't only a proximity to English that whittles away the minority languages of America. It is also a proximity to social injustice.

Chapter Six

Nevada: Basque

At the same time that African languages were mixing and melding with French, English, and other languages of the American South, the languages of Europe were extending into the farthest reaches of the country. Between 1820 and 1924, nearly 36 million immigrants came to the United States, first from the United Kingdom and northwest Europe and later from eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. They streamed into the ports of Boston, Baltimore, and New York, making their way by train, by horse, or by foot to destinations throughout the United States. Some of these immigrants made their homes in the nation's cities, settling the neighborhoods that decades later would contribute so much to regional character. There were Poles in Chicago and Hungarians in Cleveland, Greeks in Detroit and Italians in Providence, Russians in Baltimore and Irish in Boston.

Other groups chose to venture out into the great expanse of the American West. These men and women were driven by economic concerns as surely as were the factory workers of the Northeast, drawn not to the garment or automobile factories but to the cheap, plentiful land available to anyone willing to work it. Soon there were Finns in upper Michigan and Czechs in central Kansas; there were Swedes in northern Minnesota and Portuguese in southern Illinois.

And then there were the Germans, who were just about everywhere.

For years, these rural communities and their languages were largely cut off from the rest of America. These immigrants built schools, held religious services, ran businesses, and established local newspapers, all in their native languages. But over time, the same economic forces that attracted so many immigrants from so many corners of the world reduced these language communities to whispers of their former selves.

I've spent years of my life in cities with rich histories of immigration. I'd been to Little Italys and Little Tokyos and Little Indias and Little Seouls. I knew what ethnic neighborhoods and enclaves looked like; I knew what they sounded like. But I didn't have the slightest clue about their rural counterparts. Why hadn't they been able to maintain their language and traditions? What were the particular challenges that they faced? Were there any traces of linguistic heritage still to be found? I decided to find out.

I pulled out my ratty old road atlas and flipped to the big square states. I needed to pick wisely. Though the languages of nineteenth-century immigrants are, on the whole, far more familiar to me than Navajo or Makah, I knew that on this side of the ocean, these languages live on less in conversation than they do in the everyday rituals of American ethnicity. I didn't want to drive eighteen hours to a town whose only lingering ties to the motherland were souvenir shirts that read “Kiss me, I'm One Thirty-Second Slovakian.”

To avoid this, I decided to structure this portion of my trip around the loudest, busiest, and most accessible ethnic ritual of all: the big, boozy festival. I figured there was no better way to get to know America's immigrant communities than to party with them. I'd eat my weight in fried food, drink twice as much cheap beer, and hang out with a bunch of old people. And along the way I'd try to pick up on the ins and outs of frontier life in another language.

As soon as I figured that out, I knew exactly where I wanted to go: Elko, a small city in northeast Nevada that has for many years been home to a small community of Basques.

Strangely enough, I'd actually been there before.

The first time I visited Elko I was feeling lucky to be alive. This was due in part to the fact that I hadn't known what snow chains were until I tried to drive across the Sierra Nevada in the dead of winter. I tend to pride myself on my road-tripping know-how, but in this instance I will freely cop to both ignorance and foolishness. Honestly, you have to be more than a little bit crazy to think mid-February is a good time to make the drive east across the mountains into Reno.

I swear it made sense at the time. My husband and I had been living temporarily in California, and we needed to get back to New York. Having made the cross-country drive a number of times, I was experienced enough to know that I should have swung south in the hopes of avoiding the worst weather the winter had to offer. But two things changed my mind: the incredibly dull stretch of I-40 between Amarillo and St. Louis and the incredibly cheap blackjack to be found in northern Nevada. So I decided to take I-80, the country's second-longest interstate highway, which travels all the way from downtown San Francisco to the New Jersey Turnpike 2,900 miles to the east. I figured that it might be tough going from time to time, but at least I'd be skirting the Colorado Rockies, and as far as I knew those were the only real mountains of note in the continental United States.

I was wrong.

When we left the Bay Area the weather had seemed unexceptional. Chilly, a bit gray, but nothing out of the ordinary. A few snow flurries had started to fall here and there by the time we made it to Sacramento, but I still wasn't worried. As I said, I didn't think the Sierra Nevada were real mountains. But then we moved from snowfall to snowstorm, and suddenly I began to take notice of ominous signs that read “Chains Required.”

This is when I turned to my husband and asked, “What the fuck are chains?”

About ten miles later I had my answer. A couple of hundred yards ahead, barely visible through the strengthening blizzard, I saw a California Department of Transportation checkpoint. To my right, a dozen or so cars and trucks had pulled over to the side of the road to install snow chains—which are, of course, simply chains that wrap around the tires to provide traction on snow-covered roads. A few drivers had bundled up and ventured outside to install the chains themselves, but most relied on the services of for-hire chain installers, stocky men in Day-Glo vests who hustled ably from vehicle to vehicle.

As we neared the checkpoint, a flashing light drew my attention to a set of instructions: “4-Wheel Drive with Snow Tires OK.” I scowled. Not only did I not have snow chains, I didn't have snow tires. In the absence of a roadside auto center, however, I had little choice but to try to brazen it out with my nothing-special all-weather tires. When the car immediately in front of me was turned aside, I figured we were done for. But for whatever reason Caltrans deemed my car safe for travel and waved me through.

I still wonder what they were thinking. I still wonder what
I
was thinking. The storm intensified minutes after we left the checkpoint, and soon I was able to see only about ten feet in front of me. I couldn't have been going more than fifteen miles an hour, but my car was handling like one of those monstrous flatbed dollies they give you at IKEA. To make matters worse, the road was getting steeper and steeper, and I was doing my best not to consider a scenario in which I stalled out and had to get back into first gear on the icy incline.

At this point I normally would take a moment to say a little something about the scenery, the flora or the fauna, or maybe the quality of the road. But I couldn't see anything, not through the snow. Even if I'd been able to, I wouldn't have been looking. My eyes were cemented to the tire tracks in front of me, to the feeble red flicker of taillights in the distance. My left hand gripped the steering wheel so tightly that it would be sore for days; my right hand lurched nervously between the gearshift and my heart.

All in all, I was almost relieved when they stopped traffic until the storm passed. We were stuck somewhere in the middle of a line of other vehicles, far enough back that we couldn't tell if we'd been stopped for an accident that had already occurred or in order to prevent one from occurring. And then we sat there, in the snow, for an hour. Then two. By hour three I was beginning to get concerned, so despite being preposterously underdressed in tennis shoes and my Cardinals hat, I got out of the car and hiked through two feet of snow toward a ramshackle service station in search of some information.

When I got back to the car, my husband asked what I'd discovered. “Well,” I said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is we're only thirty miles from Reno. The bad news is we're two miles from the Donner Pass.”

As it turned out, though, there were more bad decisions to be made that day.

By the time we finally got to Elko, I was desperately in need of a drink, so my husband and I rallied and headed to the casino just down the street from my hotel. It was here that I got my first taste of Basque American culture.

We were sitting at a table, nursing a couple of beers over some low-stakes blackjack, when a well-lubricated local sat down next to us and introduced himself. As soon as he found out we were from out of town, he demanded that we try the local drink, something he called Picon (pronounced “PEE-cone”) punch.

The classic Picon punch is a combination of grenadine, club soda, brandy, and a French liqueur called Amer Picon. As I discovered later, in America this is considered
the
quintessential Basque beverage, and you can find it throughout the West, particularly at Basque hotels and restaurants. It takes its name from the creator of the liqueur that gives the drink its unique flavor, a Frenchman named Gaétan Picon who in 1837 invented a potent brand of bitters. The liqueur eventually made its way to the western United States, where it was thrown into the punch that now bears its name.

The man brought us back two lowballs from the bar and set them in front of us with a challenging look. “Here,” he said. “Our national drink.”

I looked at my husband; he looked at me; we both took a sip.

Reader, I nearly died.

It tasted like lighter fluid mixed with battery acid topped with the actual hair of a dog that had bit me. I managed to approximate something like a smile as I thanked our new friend, but as soon as he looked away I slid my glass as discreetly as I could over to my husband. He drained both glasses and promptly passed out. He claims to this day that it was his body's natural defense mechanism.

In his absence I began, tentatively, to make conversation with the other players. And over a long night of cards I learned to my surprise and pleasure that there's more to Elko than blackjack and buckaroos. Elko also happens to be one of the centers of Basque American culture—a thing that, to be perfectly honest, I hadn't even realized existed. At that point, just about everything I knew about the Basque people and language I'd learned from Alan R. King's
The Basque Language: A Practical Introduction
. (Although in my defense, if you're only going to read one book about the Basques, it's not a bad way to go.)

The Basque people come from the region surrounding the geographical crook where France meets Spain at the Bay of Biscay. Called Euskal Herria, Euskadi, or, most frequently in English, Basque Country, the area consists of the Spanish provinces of Álava, Biscay, and Gipuzkoa and the French provinces of Labourd, Lower Navarre, and Soule. The much-larger Spanish province of Navarre, home to Pamplona and its bulls, is also traditionally considered part of Basque Country.

The most important thing to know about the Basque language is that though it is a European language, it is not an
Indo-
European language. This means it's no relation to the sprawling language family that includes (among many others) French, Spanish, Irish, Swedish, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and English. Nor, in fact, is it a member of any other known language family, despite the best efforts of scholars to prove otherwise.

Believe it or not, this is actually one of the more frequent topics of conversation I'm confronted with when I reveal to new acquaintances my interest in language. “Did you know,” they ask me, “that Basque is a relative of [Finnish/Japanese/Etruscan/Burushaski]?” Unfortunately, as intriguing as it would be to learn that Basque is related to an obscure language in northern Pakistan, none of these statements is true. Although Basque has certainly borrowed words from other languages (Spanish in particular), as far as we know, Basque marches to the beat of its own drummer. It is that mysterious and fascinating creature known as a language isolate.

It's for this reason, I think, that Basque gets such a bum rap. See, for centuries the Basque language has been widely regarded as an impossible mess, a tangled soup of
x
's,
k
's, and
z
's that's best left to locals—if not best left alone. In fact, if you've only heard one thing about the Basque language, it's probably that Basque is hard. Really hard. So hard that, according to
A Basque History of the World
, the nineteenth-century Royal Spanish Academy dictionary actually included in its definition of the Basque language the qualifier “so confusing and obscure that it can hardly be understood.”

Even the Basques themselves love to boast about how difficult their language is. There is actually a story the Basques tell about the time the Devil tried to learn their language. He had been conducting what I can only assume were routine demographic surveys of the condemned souls under his jurisdiction, and he noticed that Basques were severely underrepresented. He decided to visit Basque Country in person and see what could be done to boost recruitment in the area. But first he had to learn the language.

So he found a farmstead in the countryside and settled in to eavesdrop on household conversations until he had learned enough to get on with his business. Days turned into weeks, which turned into months, until eventually, after seven long years, the Devil was forced to admit defeat and leave the Basques in peace. Because after all those years, he'd managed to learn only two words: those for “yes” and “ma'am.”

Now, it's possible that this story may be a slight exaggeration.

All told, there are far too many variables involved in the determination of linguistic difficulty for anyone to be able to make an unqualified statement about any given target language. But generally speaking, two languages from a single family will show some very fundamental similarities—in terms of subject-verb-object order, for example, or the basic ways in which words are formed—and two languages from two different families will show some equally fundamental dissimilarities that make one language harder for a speaker of the other to learn. For instance, in an Indo-European language such as English, we're used to thinking in terms of subjects and objects. In Basque, however, a distinction is made between ergatives and absolutives. Ergatives are simple enough—here it's just a fancy word for “subject of a transitive verb”—but absolutives are trickier. They encompass both subjects of intransitive verbs and objects of transitive verbs. This is easy enough for a Basque-speaker to keep straight, but for an English-speaker it's roughly akin to being asked to sort apples and oranges with the understanding that Granny Smiths get lumped in with the Hamlins and Valencias.