Policing Language & culture

Migrants and second-language speakers are incredibly important for reproducing old, rigid, and traditional language norms.

There are only so many venues where the English of the Queen is spoken, and one of them is in the classrooms of English Language Learners in fancy British bilingual schools across the world, as well as many other low and middle-income language institutions (sometimes publicly financed) who place an economic bet on assimilation.

The same thing happens with the German Language. Not too long ago a teacher corrected one of my friends on the basis of a grammar mistake, yet I knew for a fact that the form she used is slowly becoming the norm in German spoken language. I told the teacher, and he responded laughingly, “Don’t tell her.” I also had two teachers in Berlin who explicitly told us they are not spending too much time teaching us how that particular conjugation is used in everyday life, because they prefer the old one. They eagerly want the old form (the genitive) to persist, and use us (broken German speakers) as carriers of classy conjugations, which local minorities are less likely to use in their fight for modernness.

Foreigners, both tourists and academia abroad, are sometimes clingy to a certain image of the native. In their enthusiastic search, they reward those who have the ability to embody this image (classy French restaurant with white servers in old traditional suits) and harm those who do not conform (and do not want to conform) to this image. The former shines up, for example, when an African American needs to switch from Vernacular to American standard English so a foreigner can understand him. It is not necessarily the fault of the foreigner but of the teacher who presented him with a particular image of what "correct English" is and forgot to teach the diversity within a language. The policing of the language is so strong that second language speakers police each other depending on the level of language assimilation they came with, or happen to obtain.

I do not want to finish without saying that the study of nativity from abroad can be revolutionary. I probably know more about German Migration than many "native" Germans because of the classes I've taken (and I am taking) in the United States with American teachers. Similarly, I have a Colombian friend who is learning about the indigenous history of Colombia from a Colombian teacher, in a classroom in the United States, filled mainly by domestic students. They now both KNOW more about Colombian Indigeneity than many Colombians in Colombia. I also know more about Canadian Indigeneity than many Canadians. And the list goes on. The look of the foreigner, whether as a teacher or as a tourist, has no excuse to constantly enchant flake European or North American ideals of classiness & whiteness, whether in terms of language or aesthetics. Yes, you can still drink wine. Just make sure to try other things. Get a grasp that the real Germany or the real United States is composed by as much döners and tacos, as sausages & hamburgers. And WAY more in between these two salient, stereotypical, and yet typical food options in the aforementioned countries.