Multilingual La La Land

Language Use in Sixteen Greater Los Angeles Communities

Claire Hitchins Chik, Claire Chik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429016882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Home to immigrants from more than 140 countries speaking over 180 languages, Los Angeles is a microcosm of the world. While Los Angeles' ethnic enclaves have been the subject of study by researchers from a wide range of fields, these enclaves remain under-researched from a linguistic standpoint. Multilingual La La Land addresses the sociolinguistic landscape of the Greater Los Angeles (GLA) area, providing in-depth accounts of the sixteen most spoken languages other than English in the region.

Each chapter introduces the history of the language in the L.A. region, uses census figures and residential densities to examine location-based and network-based speech communities, and discusses the patterns of usage that characterize the language, including motivations to maintain the language. How these patterns and trends bear on the vitality of each language is a central consideration of this book.

1

Arabic in Greater Los Angeles

Many Varieties, One Community

Afaf Nash

DOI: 10.4324/9780429507298-2

A Book whereof the verses are explained in detail, a Qur’an in Arabic for people who know.

(Al-Qur’an 41:3)

Largely due to its historical connection to Islam, as the verse above demonstrates, the Arabic language has been associated with anxieties (Suleiman, 2014) and stereotypes, and even linked to terrorism (Bale, 2010). Suleiman (2014) posits that these attitudes may symbolically and instrumentally affect Arabic speakers negatively, and indeed incidents of public use of Arabic sparking mistrust toward a speaker have been reported. In 2016, a college student was removed from his flight after being heard to utter inshallah [if God wills] (Stack, 2016). These affective issues form a backdrop to the central topic examined in this chapter, namely the vitality of Arabic in Greater Los Angeles (GLA; see Table 1.1 for counties that make up GLA; “Los Angeles” and “L.A.” will be used interchangeably). This topic is explored from various angles: Documenting the early history of its speakers in the area; sketching present distributions of major Arabic dialects and their mutual intelligibility; exploring patterns of language practices in business, religious, and educational settings; and concluding with a discussion of the results of a small survey. The start, however, is briefly defining the term Arab American and explaining diglossia, arguably the most distinguishing characteristic of the Arabic language.

Who are Arab Americans and What is Arabic Diglossia?

The term Arab American defines individuals with ancestry in one of the twenty-two Arab countries that claim attachment to Arabic language and culture. This encompasses a community of ethnically and religiously diverse members with a considerable population of non-Arabs and non-Muslims, such as Amazigh, Assyrian-Chaldean-Syriac, Circassians, Druze, Kurds, Jews, Mandaeans, Yazidis, and others. Within the United States, GLA is home to the largest Arab-American community after Dearborn and New York. Its members are speakers of all Arabic dialects, with large concentrations of the Levantine (Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Palestinian), Egyptian, Iraqi, and Moroccan dialects.

Arabic is a Semitic language from the Afro-Asiatic language family and is well known for its diglossic nature, comprising a standard form, commonly referred to as FusHa or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA),¹ as well as colloquial forms named after the country where each is spoken in daily interactions (such as those listed in the last paragraph). Yet, the actual linguistic map of Arabic is imperfectly represented in this simple dichotomy. Each of the Arabic dialects has a number of varieties and registers distinguished by pronunciation, grammatical features, and lexical expressions. This complicated linguistic map was ushered in by a history that intertwines the literary heritage of pre-Islamic varieties, a divine status bestowed by religious connection, the development of science and philosophy, contacts with diverse linguistic groups, and a struggle to restore a status and function to the formal and colloquial varieties of the language that were diminished for centuries by colonial powers and regional conflicts.

Mutual intelligibility among Arabic varieties is too complex of an issue to be treated comprehensibly here, but in general difficulties of communication indeed exist, especially among geographically distant dialects, such as Yemeni and Moroccan, in contrast to closely located ones, such as Syrian and Iraqi, which are easily intelligible to each other’s speakers. Certainly, consistent security threats in the Arabic-speaking region do not help inter-dialect interaction. However, the formal variety can and does serve as a lingua franca for overcoming communication barriers. Additionally, the advent of the internet and satellite TV has made contact between different dialects easily accessible. In this environment, intelligibility can be manageable between people born and raised in native contexts;² however, this is rarely the case for individuals raised in emigrational settings. Members of second or later generations may find difficulty in understanding the Lebanese dialect, for example, if Iraqi is the form of Arabic spoken at home, even though these are relatively close dialects. Knowledge of formal Arabic is also likely to be minimal in diaspora contexts. Given this situation, the current chapter explores opportunities for the exposure, maintenance, and inter-dialectical exchange of Arabic in the Arabic-speaking L.A. community (ALAC, henceforth).

Methodology

As a member of ALAC, I have witnessed the development of the community over the last two decades. My community membership and sociolinguistic training inform this study. I employ a number of qualitative approaches (Schensul & LeCompte, 2012) that include archival records, demographic data, field observations, open-ended informal interviews, and survey questions, all in effort to profile the liveliness of Arabic and the opportunities that exist for its survival as one of GLA’s immigrant languages. To study the policies and philosophy of Arabic teaching, I conversed in person and by phone with two school principals, two mosque school directors, and language coordinators in Orange and Los Angeles Unified School Districts. In religious contexts, I observed prayers and Jum’ah khuṭba [religious speech] and conversed via phone with directors of a synagogue and a church. Finally, I conducted a small survey with university students.

Past and Present of the Arabic-speaking L.A. Community

U.S. Arabic-speaking pioneers came from what was then called Greater Syria (nowadays Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan), part of the Ottoman Empire, and were escaping religious persecution and economic stagnation. Between 1915 and 1918, the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon claimed the lives of around 200,000 people. By the end of World War I, a U.N. mandate had divided the area into two foreign-controlled regions: northern French rule over Lebanon and Syria, and southern British rule over Jordan and Palestine. It is in that time and context that Arabs began immigrating to “The New Land.” Sixty thousand young individuals, mostly illiterate (53%) and Christian (68%) entered the United States between the years 1899 and 1910, with limited knowledge of the English language and culture (Hitti, 1924). A prominent figure of this first wave was the writer and artist Khalil Gibran (1883–1931, immigrated in 1895). Many of these early settlers started as peddlers in lower Manhattan before spreading to other industrial cities. They sold a variety of goods, some marketed as artifacts from the Promised Land, and quickly gained enough resources and status to establish the first Arab-American communities in the places where they settled, one of which was Los Angeles. A succinct exemplary history of this early start sets the context for present-day capacity development, opportunity creation, and desire (from Lo Bianco & Peyton’s COD model, 2013) of the Arabic language in ALAC.

In Los Angeles County, a three-story Moorish-style villa built in 1907 by Nicholas G. Baida, a Beirut-born art dealer who immigrated to the United State in 1890, is a primary reference point for the early presence of Arab Americans in the area (Figure 1.1). The building, later used as a convalescent home for World War I veterans, is still standing as an apartment building in Santa Monica, recognized only by its large dome and a few original columns and ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Arabic in Greater Los Angeles: Many Varieties, One Community
• 2 Armenian in Greater Los Angeles: Negotiating Intralinguistic Diversity in a Diaspora Epicenter
• 3 Chinese: Multiple Varieties in a Changing Greater Los Angeles
• 4 Filipino: Language Practices and Affective Connections in Greater Los Angeles
• 5 French in Greater Los Angeles: Challenges and Opportunities
• 6 German: The Invisible Language Minority: The Historical, Political, and Linguistic Dimensions of the German Language Landscape in Multilingual La La Land
• 7 Hebrew and Yiddish in Greater Los Angeles: Bilingualism, Metalinguistic Communities, and Ethnolinguistic Infusion
• 8 Japanese: Language Practices and Cultural Exposure over Multiple Generations in Greater Los Angeles
• 9 Khmer Language Use and Presence in the Linguistic Landscape of Greater Los Angeles’ Cambodia Town
• 10 Korean in Greater Los Angeles: Negotiation Between the Individual and Ethnolinguistic Community Across Generations
• 11 Languages of South Asia in Greater Los Angeles: Diversity Diversified
• 12 Persian Language Use and Vitality in Tehrangeles
• 13 Russian in Greater Los Angeles: A Changing Landscape
• 14 Spanish: Never a Foreign Language in Greater Los Angeles
• 15 Thai as a Diasporic Language in GREATER Los Angeles
• 16 Vietnamese: Language Use in Little Saigon and Other Greater Los Angeles Neighborhoods
• Index