Hey, this is Annie from all the way from Hong Kong. Yes, I am abroad, as a former AAA member asked my good friend and Barnard VP for AAA, Ai-Lin today. But wanted to bring forth an article that hit the front page of the NYTimes Page today. This has been happening for years: Mandarin is eclipsing Cantonese as the dominant spoken language in Chinatown! An influx in the Mandarin-speaking population as well as an increasing interest in learning the Mandarin language have shifted demographics. Cantonese, for those who are unfamiliar with Chinese languages, is a dialect of Souther China; Mandarin is the official language of China, and the two are quite different dialects. While the written characters are the same for the most part, the dialects are such that a Cantonese speaker may not understand a Mandarin speaker, and vice versa. In addition, many of those in Chinatown are Taishan speakers: Taishan is a dialect of Cantonese which Cantonese speakers may not understand!

Now why am I concerned? Part of it is a personal reason; Chinatown is where I was born and raised, and still consider home today. I've grown up using my broken Cantonese/Taishanese to buy groceries, wander around, talk to my parents, etc. Put in context, my parents are Taishanese, and speak Cantonese. My mother speaks a bit of Mandarin, while I believe my dad does not understand it at all. As the article mentions, historically it was Cantonese speakers who immigrated to this country and made lives here. Chinatown, especially, is a place where one can make friends, connections, a living, and generally have all you need-- without learning another language. We've seen problems at the voting polls because of language barriers and limited resources (side note: you all should consider helping AALDEF on Election Day with its Poll Voting Survey! more information is linked). This already underrepresented group (albeit increasing in awareness and political clout) is beginning to be alienated from its home, Chinatown!

And it's not just a problem in Chinatown; this has worldwide implications for whole groups of people who've lived their lives with only one language. In Hong Kong already, there are schooling shifts to teaching Mandarin and English, as Cantonese is not as widely used, primarily only used in Southern China. (The Chinese dept. at the University of Hong Kong, on a side note, only teaches beginning Cantonese to exchange students, while Mandarin is available through an intermediate level). Now I am not saying demographic shifts or the teaching of different languages are a bad thing; Chinatown was once a Jewish and Italian neighborhood, and I understand completely the role of cultural diffusion. What I am saying is that something needs to be done to make sure these communities are not alienated and eventually endangered or exploited. This is especially applicable to the Asian-American community, which has such a diverse number of languages. I understand it may be inevitable that Chinatown shifts in languages as more Mandarin speakers arrive in America, but yeah, I'll be helping my dad translate throughout. I just hope that if and when Chinatown and other places like it change, as is inevitable, that others will be helping those like my dad, my fellow Chinatown-ers and those beyond its limits.

Postsecret is for anonymous viewers and senders.

So how can one not expect a little bigotry?

What I'd like to know is: Frank Warren (creator of Postsecret), what are you trying to prove by posting this?

[1:03 pm update]

According to the Spec:

Responding to a question about homosexuality in Iran, Ahmanidejad said, In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” a statement which drew laughter followed by boos.

Aries Dela Cruz, GS ’08 and communications chair of the Columbia Queer Alliance, said after the speech that the question to Ahmadinejad had been poorly phrased.

“The Western category of gay or lesbian doesn’t translate well into Farsi,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that Ahmadinejad didn’t understand the question.”

As a linguistics/anthro major, it infuriates me that such a controversial issue was further complicated due to translation problems. My coworker commented that SIPA should have done a better job of finding a more competent translator (from the UN, maybe?). However, this delves into cultural issues, which are beyond languages in isolated form.

Rumor has it that the translator for yesterday's Ahmadinejad forum incorrectly translated the Iranian President's quote as follows:

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country.

We don't have that in our country.

In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it.

After speaking to a friend in the work office, I found that some of the Persian (American?) students who listened to the speech think that rather than just "We don't have that," Ahmadinejad directly stated a difference between Iranian and American culture.

This still has yet to be verified, but if it's true, it makes a very big difference. Who knows if Fox News has the intellectual capacity to make such a distinction.

Enjoy. Thank xkcd.com for its awesomeness.

Last night as I pored over Edward Sapir's (a name which any anthro major should recognize) horribly dense writing in the confines of Lehman Library, I found this:

For those of you who don't read this stuff every night: The above claim is one of Sapir's many that link a complicated relationship between language and culture. He later goes on to give the example of "the naive Frenchman" who does not separate "the two sounds 's' of 'sick' and 'th' of thick… not because he is really unable to hear the difference, but because the setting up of such a difference disturbs his feeling."

On The Blaaag, that all translates into, "blah blah blah." But Sapir is worth quoting anyway because the idea of language and its ability to be patterned by culture rings true to the injustice that immigrants in America face as they are chided for their difficulty speaking "proper (North American) English".

Even problematic, colonialist thinkers of the 19th Century believe that forcing a person to adjust to new linguistic habits causes a disturbance in one's innate patterning; yet this fact is overlooked and language still serves as an easy target for racial attacks, coupled with various other general impressions to create some sort of rice papery, ink brushed stereotype. ("...stlawbelly, lasbelly, chelly, alange, lemon, lime...")

Let this be a lesson learned for you who think that evidence towards racial injustice can't be found in unexpected places.

(p.s. Since we're talking academia – Ethnic Studies: support it now.)