Bilingual Women

Anthropological Approaches to Second Language Use

Shirley Ardener, Pauline Burton, Ketaki Kushari Dyson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323214
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book studies women's language use in bilingual or multi-lingual cultural situations. The authors - social anthropologists, language teachers, and interpreters cover a wide variety of geographical and linguistic situations, from the death of Gaelic in the Outer Hebrides, to the use of Spanish by Quechua and Aymara women in the Andes. Certain common themes emerge: dominant and sub-dominant languages, women's use of them; ambivalent attitudes towards women as translators, interpreters and writers in English as a second language; and the critical role of women in the survival (or death) of minority languages such as Gaelic and Breton.

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Women and Second-Language Use An Introduction

Pauline Burton

Women’s Linguistic Choices

The papers in this book, collectively, present anthropological approaches to women and second-language use in a wide range of cultures. This is an exploration of an apparent gap between studies of gender and single-language use, and ‘ungendered’ accounts of bilingualism. With a few notable exceptions,¹ the considerable body of work on language and gender² deals with monolingual situations, whatever the cultural context. In the literature on bilingualism, on the other hand, gender is hardly mentioned; here, it seems, is an area in which the experience of women is little documented.

This lack of information is reflected in general texts on bilingualism; for example, in Hamers and Blanc (1989), a detailed and comprehensive account of recent work, there are only three citations of papers in which gender is a factor.³ In Hamers and Blanc and in Baetens Beardsmore (1982) the bilingual individual is referred to generically as ‘he’ throughout; and in his book on language policy, Tollefsen (1991) analyses inequality in language planning without addressing the issue of women’s access to second-language learning.

Such gender-blindness is a cause for concern for practical as well as intellectual reasons. Women, like men, are affected by language and educational planning decisions. In their study of language contact and bilingualism, Appel and Muysken argue that such decisions need to be supported by ‘a thorough and dispassionate analysis of bilingual language behaviour’ (1987:4). It is hard to see how such an analysis can be achieved without taking into account the language behaviour of women as well as that of men; we cannot assume that they are identical, nor that gender-related differences are subcultural and unimportant.

Some indication of the importance of women’s choices appears in Gal’s (1979) study of language shift in Oberwart, Austria. Gal shows that the shift from Hungarian to German is facilitated by women’s choice of marriage partners, as well as by choice of occupation (by men and women) and change from one generation to the next. Thus, women’s decisions can have far-reaching structural consequences. In a recent study of language and ethnic identity, Edwards comments: ‘General linguistic evidence … suggests that women are more likely to be favourably disposed towards prestigious varieties (including dialects within a language) than are men. This can be an important factor, given women’s traditionally important role with children, in the decline of languages in contact with powerful, higher-status rivals’ (1985:72).

The ‘general linguistic evidence’ that women automatically prefer high-prestige language varieties has been called into question by a number of sociolinguistic studies (notably, Nichols 1983; Milroy, 1987; Coates and Cameron, 1989). Where such gender-related preference does occur, it seems important to investigate (as in Gal’s study) how it is related to social strategiesj⁴ in specific contexts. However, Edwards raises two important points: first, that women’s experience of bilingualism is likely to be different from that of men; second, that these differences can be significant for the fate of minority languages, because of women’s role as mothers.

Why should women, as second-language users, be different from men? Surely, because women usually have a different life-cycle and life experience from men, though the ways in which these differ vary widely across cultures. As Gal puts it, in her classic paper ‘Peasant Men Can’t Get Wives’, ‘sexual differentiation of speech is expected to occur whenever a social division exists between the roles of men and women – that is, universally’ (1984:292). Gender, like age and race, is a common basis for social inequality; lack of power may limit women’s access to privileged forms of language, and to public forums in which such forms are used. One may recall Dr Johnson’s famous comparison of a woman preaching with a dog walking on its hind legs, an attitude which has much in common with the Quechua contempt for women speaking Spanish, recorded by Harvey in this book.

Stereotyping may, of course, be positive as well as negative; our papers also record the perception of women as ‘good at languages’, or as the ‘guardians’ of a minority mother-tongue – in itself, a powerfully emotive phrase. How can one reconcile these contradictions? One possible explanation is provided by Steiner’s argument that women, like children, ‘are maintained in a condition of privileged inferiority. Both suffer obvious modes of exploitation – sexual, legal, economic – while benefiting from a mythology of special regard’ (1984:375). Certainly, this comment fits several of the cases described in this book, though it is not necessarily a description the women themselves would recognise or endorse. However, though a persuasive explanation, it is incomplete; it does not take into account women’s perceptions of themselves as language users, nor their capacity to construct their own identities (individually or collectively) through their use of the languages available to them. Moreover, though the analogy between women and children is a compelling metaphor for the social and linguistic disadvantage of women in many different cultures, it disregards the point made by Edwards: that women, as mothers, are commonly (if not universally) responsible for children. Therefore, their ‘strategic and socially meaningful linguistic choices’ (Gal, 1984:293) affect their children’s life chances as well as their own.

The papers in this book (with the exception of Tonkin’s contribution) were originally presented at the workshop on ‘Women and Second-Language Use’ held at Oxford in Oxtober 1989 by the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women. The issues of language choice, and of constraints upon that choice, were explored through participants’ own experience as anthropologists, writers and second-language users. I have taken the title of the workshop as the title of this introductory essay, in which I shall attempt to draw out some common themes in the papers which follow.

Dominant Languages, Subordinate Women?

The use of the word ‘bilingual’ in the title does not imply that all the women referred to in these papers have equal competence in two languages. Indeed, some of them – like the ‘closed Aymara’ (non-Castilian-speaking) Andean peasant women in Spedding’s paper – may be regarded as monolingual within their own communities. Moreover, three or even more languages may be involved, as in Joan Burke’s description of a Zairean convent, in which French – ‘nobody’s language, therefore everybody’s’ – is used as a lingua franca. We have adopted a flexible definition of ‘bilingual’ as denoting the possibility of using more than one language as part of an individual linguistic repertoire.

Our papers deal with the experience of women in different situations of language contact. Applying Appel and Muysken’s historical typology of such situations, the cases fall into two main categories: those in which language contact has occurred through European colonial conquest, and those in which ‘individual pockets of speakers of minority languages … [are] cut off by the surrounding national languages’ (Appel and Muysken, 1987:5–6). There is considerable variation between individual cases in the status of the first language, and in its relationship with second and other languages. Bengali (for example) is a majority language within its own geographical boundaries, as Dyson’s paper below shows: it can be defined as a ‘minority language’ only in the context of migrant communities in Britain (and possibly, if unfairly, in the context of international academic writing). Breton, on the other hand, might be popularly described in France as a ‘patois’ rather than a language. Some of the first languages referred to seem to be stable; others are undergoing shift and are apparently dying, or (as in the case of East Sutherland Gaelic) already dead. Most of the papers here show dyadic relationships between dominant and subordinate languages; in some the relationship is less simple, as historical complexities present the choice of more than one possible second language, new first language or lingua franca. One paper (Liu Hong’s) falls outside Appel and Muysken’s typology altogether, as it recounts the experience of a bilingual individual within a powerful monolingual society; Liu’s personal ‘situation of language contact’ arises through her work as an interpreter.

Nearly all of the papers here are studies of bilingual women for whom a second or third language is the language of a dominant group, associated with power, prestige and access to economic benefits. The dominant languages to which our papers relate are English, French, Russian and Spanish (and to a lesser extent, Portuguese). For those who are native speakers of one of the powerful world languages, monolingualism is an attribute of dominance and may even (as in the English-speaking West) be regarded as a human norm. There is rarely such a pressing need for the members of dominant groups to learn the languages of minorities as for the reverse to happen. Hence bilingualism may be associated with inequality and social disadvantage, as Haugen points out: ‘for many people, “bilingual” is a euphemism for “linguistically handicapped’” (1979:73). This attitude may be reflected in the negative stereotyping of bilingual minority speakers as incompetent users of more than one language, including their own.

Such a negative perception of bilingualism may create a double bind for poor women in minority groups, disadvantaged by gender as well as by race and class. In her analysis of women’s speech in the Malinche Volcano area of Central Mexico, Hill (1987) describes how bilingual women are stigmatised (by Mexicano men) as incompetent in their use of Mexicano as well as Spanish. They are regarded as ‘lagging’ linguistically behind men in their use of Spanish; their Mexicano, on the other hand, is considered to be less pure than that of men, lacking the ‘power code’ associated with male Mexicano solidarity. Hill comments: ‘Rather than think of the speech norms of women as marginal to a core of male norms, we might instead think of women’s speech as highly constrained within a narrow range of possibilities, at the same time less Mexicano and less Spanish than men’s speech, whereas men are able to use the full range of code variation’ (1987:158). Hill adds that the women themselves do not perceive their own speech as in any way deficient; it is appropriate to their own needs and patterns of language use, which are different from those of men. This difference, however, rests on severe economic disadvantage and exclusion from ‘male-dominated social arenas’ such as paid employment.

Language contact may itself be mythologised in terms of sexual conquest, as Harvey’s discussion below of Quechua ritual demonstrates. In their book Appel and Muysken exhort the reader to ‘think of Cortes’ conquest of Mexico in 1532 not as an outrageous narrative of bravery, cruelty and betrayal, but in terms of the crucial role of his Indian mistress Malinche, interpreter between Aztec and Spanish’ (1987:1). It is worth noting, however, that the present-day descendants of this glamorous figure are the disadvantaged women described by Hill.

As Steiner has persuasively argued, there is a strong metaphorical association between the exchange of language and sexual intercourse: ‘Eros and language mesh at every point’ (1984:375). Hence, bilingual women may be seen as being sexually as well as linguistically promiscuous. This kind of stereotyping is summed up neatly in Elizabeth Tonkin’s account in this book of the myth of the ‘sleeping dictionary’. The ‘sleeping dictionary’ may, of course, have a certain basis in historical fact. It is a recognisable pattern, early in colonial conquest, for the women of the colonising power to remain at home, and for the men to seek local partners.

This image of bilingual women mediating between cultures through sex as well as language is not necessarily a negative one. Susan Abeyasekere has described how women acted as ‘cultural intermediaries’ in nineteenth-century Java. As servants, slaves, nannies, concubines – and, after a change in the law in 1848, sometimes as wives – Indonesian and Eurasian women brought about ‘the acculturation of Batavian Europeans and Chinese’ (1983:21). For a certain period, Abeyasekere argues, their influence helped to create a ‘social idyll’ within this relatively small, isolated society; ‘a distinctive Batavian culture with ethnic variants’ (op.cit., p.28).

It is tempting to see this as a specifically female form of power through bilingualism. However, as Abeyasekere indicates, this influence was exercised at a price; Eurasian women especially (as the products, as well as the agents, of ethnic mixing) were stigmatised by English and Dutch colonisers alike: ‘Eurasian women in particular are described by [nineteenth-century Dutch] writers … as promiscuous, selfish, cunning, lazy and superstitious – and also extremely sexually attractive’ (1983:22). Abeyasekere describes (p.27) how, from the late nineteenth century onwards, ethnic separateness was reinforced, as further immigration of Europeans and Chinese (including women) created distinctive groups. To Europeans, Chinese and Indonesians alike, ethnic mixing was seen as a form of adulteration, and criticisms of it focused on the idea of women as ‘guardians of the culture’. This is an idea which recurs in several of the cases described below.

In the early stages of colonial regimes, local girls may be excluded from ‘legitimate’ means of acquiring the language of the conquerors, if formal education is restricted to preparing local boys for service to the colonial regime. In addition, such exclusion may be defended on the grounds of sexual morality. In nineteenth-century Hong Kong, fear of the corrupting effects of second-language education was used as an excuse to end early attempts to provide English-language schools for local girls: ‘the experiment of educating Chinese girls in English proved to be a blunder and had to be dropped, since most of them became mistresses of Europeans’ (Endacott, 1964:143).⁵

This colonial motif is echoed here in Joan Burke’s paper, referring to the competence in French of Zairean nuns. The language of instruction in Belgian Congo schools was the vernacular until the late 1950s. The senior Zaï rean sisters – those who had joined the sisterhood before 1960 – were affected by this policy. Moreover, Burke comments, ‘I often heard them say jokingly – but also with a degree of resentment, because of the resultant language limitations – that they were not allowed to study French in their youth because of the missionaries’ fear that it would encourage them to converse with expatriat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Women and Second-Language Use: An Introduction
• 2. Open Castilian, Closed Aymara? Bilingual Women in the Yungas of La Paz (Bolivia)
• 3. The Presence and Absence of Speech in the Communication of Gender
• 4. Casual Chat and Ethnic Identity: Women’s Second-Language Use among Buryats in the USSR
• 5. Women and Second-Language Knowledge in Rural Soviet Georgia: An Outline
• 6. Women and Linguistic Innovation in Brittany
• 7. The ‘Death’ of East Sutherland Gaelic: Death by Women?
• 8. French: No One’s Language, Therefore Everyone’s Language: Convent Speech in Lower Zaïre
• 9. Language and Diaspora: The Use of Portuguese, English and Konkani by Catholic Goan Women
• 10. A Note on My Experience as a Student, a Teacher and an Interpreter of English in China
• 11. Forging a Bilingual Identity: A Writer’s Testimony
• 12. Engendering Language Difference
• Name Index
• Subject Index