Josh McNeill

Tag: vietnamese

Support bilingualism; be monolingual.

May 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Though it is not the only way to ensure that a language remains healthy, as in the case of Catalan, which was completely forbidden during Franco’s rule but remains quite strong today, institutionalization of a language is very important. Hebrew, for instance, may have only been possible to revitalize because it was already so deeply embedded within Judaism, and hence Jewish culture. Institutionalization in no way guarantees that a language will flourish, but it may guarantee that it at least has a stable persistence, providing the opportunity to be revitalized in the first place when the time is right.

Perhaps one of the best ways to ensure that a minority language is institutionalized within a community is to make sure that no one in that community can speak the majority language. One can see this in services that are offered to more recent immigrant communities, such as Vietnamese and Hispanic communities in New Orleans. A new community health center was recently opened in New Orleans East, where many Vietnamese people live, and it offers services in both Vietnamese and Spanish via translators. This both provides speakers of these languages with important services in their native tongues as well as economic opportunities for those who know these languages.

In the case of languages such as Louisiana French, a minority language which can very nearly always be easily avoided, speakers must insist strongly on its use to get the same result, perhaps to the point of refusing to speak English, regardless of being perfectly fluent in it. This doesn’t bode well for a population of speakers who just a few decades ago were generally ashamed of the language. Even people who have grown up with Louisiana French and use it professionally are liable to use English as their day to day language. In this climate, the desire to affect a change in the linguistic makeup of the state must be particularly strong.

Vietnamese, everywhere in the East.

March 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

So, I was a bit behind on posts because of Mardi Gras. I had to create a costume with pinwheels, attend daily parades and, maybe the most important activity, eat king cake, like this one here. This cake comes from Dong Phuong in New Orleans East, where I went with my friend so that she could buy one.

Despite having lived here for more than two years, I’ve never gone to the East, where there’s a large Vietnamese population. What I found there was writing everywhere in Vietnamese, on advertisements, on the windows, on the stores, on the products in the stores. Vietnamese is a language of business in the East. The cashiers speak it by default as if one must understand it if one wants to do business there. It seems to me that Vietnamese is maybe more institutionalized there than French is elsewhere in Louisiana, but it’s difficult to say that for me, seeing as I haven’t traversed the state all that much.

I intend to find out if on can speak French there also, as part of the project to create a map of the francophone businesses in Louisiana. While I was working at AT&T, I met a Vietnamese woman who spoke French, better than English. She was somewhere older, so maybe that is still common among the old. I’ve heard that this would happen in Terrebonne-Lafourche, that francophones were able to speak with the Vietnamese better in French than English. It would be interesting if the Vietnamese became the newest francophones in Louisiana, helping to preserve the language. I doubt this would happen, but who knows.

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