Heritage Languages and Their Speakers

📖 The Scoop

"Who are These Speakers, Where Do They Come From, and How Did They Get to Be the Way They Are? Setting the stage In his classic if somewhat forgotten paper, "Literate and illiterate speech" (1927), Leonard Bloomfield describes speakers of the Algonquian language Menominee (Menomini, Menomenee). He worked with these people over the course of his fieldwork in Wisconsin and categorized them into six linguistic portraits: Red-Cloud-Woman, a woman in the sixties, speaks a beautiful and highly idiomatic Menomini. She knows only a few words of English, but speaks Ojibwa and Potawatomi fluently, and ... a little Winnebago. Lingusitically, she would correspond to a highly educated American woman who spoke, say, French and Italian in addition to the very best type of ... English. [...] Stands-Close, a man in the fifties, speaks only Menomini. His speech, though less supple and perfect than Red-Cloud-Woman's, is well up to standard. It is interlaced with words and constructions that are felt to be archaic, and are doubtless in part really so, for his father was known as an oracle of old traditions. Bird-Hawk, a very old man, who has since died, spoke only Menomini, possibly also a little Ojibwa. As soon as departed from ordinary conversation, he spoke with bad syntax and meagre, often inept vocabulary, yet with occasional archaisms"--

Genre: Education / Bilingual Education (fancy, right?)