View Content #27143

By Lindsay Marean, InterCom Editor

This month I’ve been watching for examples of translanguaging to appreciate. My favorite this month has been Tito Ybarra’s video post on Facebook:

How many Ojibwe’s does it take to mow a lawn?
Four!!!
Three to do the mowing, and one to sing the Ojibwemowin song.

The video is exactly what you’d expect, a man on a riding lawn mower, a man dancing while pushing a mower, and a third dancing while weed-whacking, while Ybarra sings a song celebrating the Ojibwe language, or Ojibwemowin. The post has 600 likes (over 2/3 are the laughter emoji) and 674 shares at this time, attesting to how many people know enough Ojibwe, informal English (Ojibwe mowin’ is the English part of the pun), and cultural references (the song and the dancing) to find the joke funny.

This feeling of levity contrasts with my initial reaction to Fundéu BBVA’s most recent post, this one dealing with how to properly talk about yoga in Spanish. Fundéu is the acronym for Fundación del Español Urgente, a non-profit organization created in collaboration with the Real Academia Española to “impulsar el buen uso del español en los medios de comunicación” or promote the good use of Spanish in the media. Initially, as I read through admonitions to use an accent on the last syllable of namasté and to use the Spanish words esterilla o tapete rather than the English borrowing mat, I railed internally against this prescriptivist, purist attitude, parallel to those of similar organizations in other countries and for other languages, such as the Académie Française in France and the Taalkommissie for Afrikaans.

However, on closer reflection, I realized that these organizations and initiatives to regularize spelling and usage exist because at least some speakers of a language want them. Standard rules of usage can elevate the prestige of a language, and in some cases they align with a group’s desire to minimize the cultural influence of other groups, such as some indigenous language activists’ efforts to eliminate borrowed words from the languages of colonizers and to replace them with native words. In some cases, there are simultaneous calls for valuing translanguaging and standardization, as in the need to continue to “maintain and promote sign languages as named languages” while also exploring the “emancipatory potential of acknowledging deaf people’s translanguaging skills” (De Meulder, Kusters, Moriarty, & Murray, 2019).

In fact a consideration and celebration of individuals’ and communities’ languaging practices will inevitably turn up a wide range of attitudes and practices regarding prescriptivism, standardization, innovation, diversity of codes, and translanguaging (Tieken-Boon van Ostade & Percy, 2016). Both highly multilingual and strictly monolingual linguistic choices are reflections of the language users’ identities and expressive choices.

References

De Meulder, M., Kusters, A., Moriarty, E., & J. Murray, J.J. (2019). Describe, don’t prescribe. The practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2019.1592181.

Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I., & Percy, C., Eds. (2016). Prescription and Tradition in Language: Establishing Standards across Time and Space. Bristol, United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters.