1 Assimilating to mainstream society Assimilating to mainstream society Disha Kewalramani University of California San Diego LIGN 8: Languages & Cultures/America Dr. Justin D. McIntosh 11/26/2022 Assimilating to mainstream society 2 Assimilating to mainstream society Why did I not learn my heritage language Hindi from an early age? I have persistently been trying to ask my parents this question since I was young. My family is an example of interrupted intergenerational transmission because my parents never taught me to speak my heritage language Hindi and I can only communicate using the English language. The reason why my parents decided to teach me English instead of our heritage language Hindi is due to them immigrating to the UAE from India. We currently reside in the city of Dubai where 89% of the population are immigrants. Though the UAE is an Arab country and the official language is Arabic, English primarily used as a language to communicate since most of the population don’t know Arabic as they have immigrated from other parts of the world such as Europe. Therefore, English is primarily spoken amongst people in the UAE because they either speak English as a second language or English is their heritage language. My parents were born and raised in India before immigrating to Dubai. They attended a Hindi-speaking school but they learned English as a foreign language. However, when they immigrated Dubai, they communicated with everyone in their workplace in English instead of Hindi as they initially worked in a British company operating in Dubai. My parents have lived in Dubai for the last 20 years and they have reached the point where they are now balanced bilinguals so they have a well-developed competence in both English and Hindi. Portes and Rumbaut describe the United States as a “graveyard for languages because of its historical ability to absorb immigrants by the millions and extinguish their mother tongues within a few generations” (Rumbaut, p.458). The UAE is exactly like the US because the national language of the UAE is supposed to be Arabic, however, the high population of immigrants has caused English to dominate the country’s official and national language and the native Arab citizens in the UAE are “succumbed” to speak English. Furthermore, my mother tongue Hindi is “extinguished” as I was born and raised in the UAE Assimilating to mainstream society 3 and I attended a British curriculum school so the lessons were instructed in English. Therefore, I am monolingual as I only know how to speak English and I have not been exposed to my heritage language Hindi. My sister is seven years older than me and from an early age, she was bullied at her school in Dubai because she couldn’t speak Standard British English. This is because my sister attended a Hindi-speaking school in India before immigrating to Dubai where she attended a British school. According to Rumbaut, my sister would fall in the “1.5 generation” as she “learned to read and write in the mother tongue at schools abroad, but her “education is largely completed here” (Rumbaut, p.1162). Therefore, she was a subordinate bilingual when she moved Dubai as she used to translate sentences from Hindi to English before speaking so her sentences were ungrammatical. Her teachers and friends used to correct her language use so the Standard British English has overt prestige in our society. Wolfram would describe this as the “principle of linguistic inferiority” which refers to the idea that the “speech of a socially subordinate group will be interpreted as linguistically inadequate by comparison with that of the socially dominant group” (Wolfram, p.59). However, my parents decided to teach and speak to me using Standard British English instead of Hindi since Standard British English has overt prestige in Dubai. My parents did not want me to be a subordinate bilingualist like my sister as they wanted me to fit in the linguistic norms of my society. Even though I have spoken the English language my whole life, I spoke the English language with an Indian accent and I was bullied for it by my teachers and classmates when I was younger. However, Lippy-Green questions whether people in socially dominate groups stigmatize others based on their “race, ethnicity or some other less-than-pleasing affiliation” rather than their use of language (Lippy-Green, p.296). This is perhaps true because as I became older, I adopted a British accent and people in my school stopped taunting me for my accent. Therefore, I assimilated linguistically to mainstream society. Assimilating to mainstream society 4 In conclusion, my loss of learning my heritage language Hindi was due my parents’ immigration to Dubai and the fact that Standard British English is overt prestige so I was forced to speak it in order to join the mainstream. 5 Assimilating to mainstream society References Rumbaut, Rubén G., Douglas S. Massey & Frank D. Bean. (2006). Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California. Population and Development Review 32(3): 447-460. Rumbaut, Rubén G. (2004). Ages, Life Stages and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immigrant Frist and Second Generations in the United States. The International Migration Review 38(3): 1160-1205. Wolfram, W. (2004). Social varieties of American English. In Finegan, E. & John R. Rickford (eds.). Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century, (pp. 58-75) Cambridge University Press. Lippi-Green, R. (2004). Language ideology and language prejudice. In Finegan, E. & John R. Rickford (eds.). Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century, (pp. 289-304). Cambridge University Press
