Cultural Appropriation?

[Serpent]

I'd love to sit down and have a long talk with a native-speaker some day, in any language.

This stood out to me now. I think this really matters a lot. We've brought up the issue of the natives (not) being interested. But are you interested? Would you want to speak with them if you had to resort to English or another "boring" language? It's very telling that iguanamon would be willing to use any language

[Cavesa]

That, and an innate knowledge of how social customs work in the other culture. I, for one, don't have troo much trouble speaking French, but probably it's because I have spoken it for a long long time and my accent doesn't really give much away.

And when I was in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, people were perfectly happy to speak to me in Czech and Slovak. My Czech isn't that fantastic, but it does the job.

And then your level may not be as good as you think it is, or you may be giving some sort of cultural hints that they are picking up on, but that you're not privy to.

And for me personally, one reason this method worked well is because I didn't visit very touristic spots and lived in provincial cities and villages, where foreign language knowledge is much lower, and people will usually feel relief at being able to speak their native tongue because it costs them much less effort.

Personally, I never learnt a few words though. I've always gone in well-prepared. The exception was Spain. But in 2,000 people villages you just can't expect English to work there.

No, I am not a delusional overly confident beginner. Getting high speaking score at DALF C2 is not a fraud or luck. being guessed as a native from another region sometimes, that also shows something. the automatic assumption people with my kind of experience are surely just overestimating their level is untrue and offensive. Social norms are not the problem either. The difference is having my czech speaking family with me, that is the most obvious clue. or being known as a czech before the introduction ( student exhange situations but not only). From various experiences, it is very clear the problem is more like "ah, some dumb eastern europeans, they surely won't speak french
and even hearing fluent french from one of them proves nothing".

but the main point was a demonstration of how common it can be to meet unwilling natives, and that the expectations "people will surely love to talk to me in their language" are sometimes naive. and french is a lnguage, where people have no huge reasons for this attitude, while the minority languages with a lot od oppression in their history are a totally different league.

Spanish is a different case, natives usually don't switch even on beginners, as long as the interaction at hand is possible. and i was more wondering about benny and similar travelers, who are proud of how little they know before getting on the plane. you are a great example of preparation before the travel, when in comes to both the language and the culture.

Czech is an example of a language, where it is highly unlikely the native's English will be very good, that is the difference. Slovak is the same case. That is totally different from usual natives of Irish, Swedish, Welsh, Euskera, or native american languages.

my intended message was:
1.don't assume stuff, do your research
2.don't expect people to care about you just because you are lerning their language
3.prepare yourself to face discouraging situations

[tarvos]

Cavesa, I wasn't talking about you in particular. And to be honest with you, I've never had trouble in Sweden either - I always spoke Swedish there just fine (and people barely believed I wasn't Swedish. One woman who sold me a ferry ticket couldn't believe her ears. She forced me to show ID and answer questions to ensure it. I'm serious. Ask Jeff.)

Not everyone in France speaks English either, although the situation there is very different from thirty years ago when English was very uncommon in France. My parents, who don't speak much French at all (they understand a bit) used to have to muddle through with their French (and if they stay there for a few weeks their French improves leaps and bounds). Nowadays people will try to speak English to them, which my mother is very happy about because her French isn't very good. I think this has to do with how touristic France is and in what region or social situation you find yourself. I don't think that everyone thinks of foreigners as "dumb eastern europeans" either, but a certain cultural bias may exist. But I have been to France many times, and also to Belgium, and I've never had problems having to speak French, because it was simply expected. Nobody spoke anything else around me. Not even in Brussels, where people by rights should speak some Dutch.

And I think Paris is a special microcosm. I have usually found Parisians to be more eager to speak English to deal with the influx of tourists, but once you go outside of Paris French really becomes key. The big cities and the countryside are two different things.

And yes, if you are with your family, that also makes it more obvious you are a foreigner. But have you tried the "je parle français. J'habite ici. Je comprends que vous êtes inondés avec des touristes imbeciles, et je sympathise avec votre point de vue. Mais comme j'habite ici, je vous prie de me parler en français en tant que bon citoyen européen." French people are used to the worker having all the power, not the client - you have to do it this way.

[Arnaud]

"je parle français. J'habite ici. Je comprends que vous êtes inondés avec des touristes imbeciles, et je sympathise avec votre point de vue. Mais comme j'habite ici, je vous prie de me parler en français en tant que bon citoyen européen." French people are used to the worker having all the power, not the client - you have to do it this way

Said like that, I'm pretty sure it won't work
French people won't switch to english if you french is good, no need to beat around the bush, because in general our english sucks and we know it. If your french sucks more than our english, then no luck for you, whether you're A2 or C2: that's not tattooed on your front and only the subjective feeling counts.

[dampingwire]

And yes, if you are with your family, that also makes it more obvious you are a foreigner.

Indeed. I had this happen two times in Italy last month. At the supermarket, because the cashier heard us talking about the shopping in English, she started calling out the price in English (and was quite relieved when I replied in Italian). At a restaurant in Pisa the transaction to get our table happened in Italian, but the confused waiter then tried to switch to English (presumably to be helpful when he heard English being spoken). When he delivered the drinks he asked why we were speaking English, I explained and then everything else happened in Italian (unless someone spoke to him in English).

Maybe Cavesa needs to move south from France and try out northern Italy

[Cavesa]

"je parle français. J'habite ici. Je comprends que vous êtes inondés avec des touristes imbeciles, et je sympathise avec votre point de vue. Mais comme j'habite ici, je vous prie de me parler en français en tant que bon citoyen européen." French people are used to the worker having all the power, not the client - you have to do it this way

Said like that, I'm pretty sure it won't work
French people won't switch to english if you french is good, no need to beat around the bush, because in general our english sucks and we know it. If your french sucks more than our english, then no luck for you, whether you're A2 or C2: that's not tattooed on your front and only the subjective feeling counts.

Telling them politely like that doesn't work in some cases. And yes, the worker has the power. But I simply believe that since I am the one paying, I should be the one choosing the language. Especially in the tourism industry, where natives seem to forget that the language is one of the reasons why people arrive, having paid for the expensive AF classes and such, instead of choosing equally beautiful Spain or Italy or other countries.

I was told openly that "English is the international language" and then asked about basic words in Russian, while I was speaking normally in French. I was asked whether I speak a little bit French and offered English, while the person was also reacting to stuff I was saying in French. I was in a group of people, where some would talk to me normally, it was obvious I understood and reacted, yet one insisted on translating to English "for me" as if I were stupid. It is not just about Paris, it is not just in the touristy areas. I was switched on by people with A2-like English or worse. Outside France, I was told "I am not here to speak French" in a situation where it was the logical choice between us.

Sometimes, there is a reason for such a prejudice. A sad example are people automatically reacting to the word "Erasmus" by switching. In my opinion, people who go to Erasmus and fail to learn the local language should give back all the money they got from the public funds. But most switching cases I've experienced happened without this label.

In vast majority of those situations, the native French speaker's English was worse than my French. And it was so even in those times of my B2 French. Perhaps the natives tend to be overly confident about their English?

What also doesn't help is me being a young woman. Some people seem to expect my monolingual father to be the one talking, and try "English" for him and make the communication very complicated. My father is monolingual. Some people are ok, but the problematic ones still address him, even after it is made very clear I am the only one who understands there.

Over the years, I have minimised the amount of switching, yet it still happens at times. And one of the valuable lessons was: being stubborn and assertive is just as important as being good at the language. One can easily do this with the French natives, and it often works. But I definitely wouldn't dare to apply this approach in a sensitive context of a minority language.

But that is getting a bit further from the point of this thread: There is little we can do, when the natives simply refuse to speak their language with us. And it is something people very rarely take into account. If you don't pay, you cannot expect anything. If you are learning a minority language, the speakers may all be bilingual, making it even harder. So, everyone considering a minority language should decide, whether they love the language so much this won't bother them.

I really liked the posts about the saviour complex. I think stuff like that should be published more visibly all over the internet, and in a bit wider complex. I think it is one of the side effects of our education and social expectations. Normal travelling and learning for one's own pleasure is too mainstream in some spheres of the society, and the selfishness vs. altruism subject is such a vibrant subject everywhere. The "I want to make a difference" culture. No wonder some people primarily want to feel as saviours, and are just looking for targets of the help, whether they want it or not

[Chung]

I only just heard of cultural appropriation recently and I feel a bit disheartened by it. I never would've thought that people would find a love of languages, culture and people to be something strange or offensive.

Do you think it's hard to find language partners/friends online in the languages you're studying because of it? I'm interested in a lot of languages and cultures and two of the more obscure languages I wanted to study are Scottish Gaelic and a Native American language due to my heritage.

It's seemed to me that it's depended on the target language. If you could do an experiment of contacting potential partners belonging to several speech communities of endangered or minority languages, you'd probably get more success with some languages than others.

I've never experienced hostility on the grounds of cultural appropriation (or a sense that my target languages are off-limits to an outsider like me), although I've read and been told about it when it comes to the Saamic languages. The one time when I did get in touch with a speaker of Inari Saami, she was quite happy to help me and correct my homework but then there are cases as described in this post by a Finnish student taking classes for Inari Saami.

Cultural appropriation is a tricky problem to deal with, and I think that it's gained greater visibility lately because of the greater ease in reaching an audience than before to express outrage (whether anything will truly change because of the outreach is hard to say despite the grandstanding and lip service). What makes it a real drag now to deal with is that it encompasses several facets and that it's not always an intellectual slam-dunk to paint it just as an outgrowth or legacy of 19th century colonialism/imperialism or more broadly a one-way flow reflective of an uneven distribution of social power. I was taking a stroll with a Chinese friend in a Chinatown not long ago and as we passed various storefronts with things printed in characters, we started talking about that trend among non-Asians in their 20s and 30s at around the start of this century to have tattoos of Chinese characters (爱 "love" was especially popular but made us think a bit about the hippies who talked a lot about (free) love). We figured that it was a bit of the reverse of seeing clothing made in East Asia emblazoned with nonsense in English (see here for some examples). To me the language geek, both phenomena seemed to reflect a form of "othering" by using scripts as props for fashion or personal expression. Then there's the drifting into how the Japanese and Koreans culturally (mis)appropriated Chinese characters about 1500 years ago (i.e. Kanji and Hanja respectively).

Without getting deeper into this swamp (but I sure as hell have my views about it), I'll leave it as saying that cultural appropriators first and foremost run the greatest risk of looking foolish or socially clueless in front of those whose culture was appropriated/imitated/copied/adapted - personal offense might not even be taken by the latter group. For example, I suspect that a Chinese (or Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese) native is more likely to ridicule people with these kinds of tattoos and leave it at that than subsequently get outraged.

For language learning, it's good to know how the speech community can react to outsiders wanting to learn a language, if nothing more than to set reasonable expectations and sometimes even not take personally native speakers' indifference (or worse, hostility). One is then running up against a problem or dynamic that is beyond mechanical plowing through a coursebook, looking things up in a dictionary or sweating it out when trying to use the target language grammatically for the first time. It just eludes a neat solution.

[reineke]

Cultural appropriation and language learning.

https://reclaimingasia.tumblr.com/post/ ... eign#notes

According to the author, Spanish is a non-white language and you are appropriating it if your intentions are not pure. According to other authors you may be appropriating other languages regardless of your intentions.

No worries, French is safe...

images-1.jpg

"white languages like French, Swedish, German, etc. don’t get mocked and accessorized like POC languages such as Japanese, Korean, or Spanish"...

2017-09-03-19-36-38-.jpg

I will spare you the picture of a stereotypical Swede but I'll share that Viva's Mola Adebisi influenced my German:

images-2.jpg

Somebody asked:

"If cultural appropriation is about power, what is it called when a PoC appropriates from another PoC's culture. Is that cultural appropriation or not?"

The answer:

"It’s horizontal aggression and disrespectful to the culture. But fellow PoC don’t have the power to divorce a thing from its cultural roots like white people do."

If this all sounds stupid it's because it is and there is plenty of it around.

[Chung]

Cultural appropriation and language learning.

https://reclaimingasia.tumblr.com/post/ ... eign#notes

According to the author, Spanish is a non-white language and you are appropriating it if your intentions are not pure. According to other authors you may be appropriating other languages regardless of your intentions.

No worries, French is safe...

images-1.jpg

"white languages like French, Swedish, German, etc. don’t get mocked and accessorized like POC languages such as Japanese, Korean, or Spanish"...

2017-09-03-19-36-38-.jpg

I will spare you the picture of a stereotypical Swede but I'll share that Viva's Mola Adebisi influenced my German:

images-2.jpg

Somebody asked:

"If cultural appropriation is about power, what is it called when a PoC appropriates from another PoC's culture. Is that cultural appropriation or not?"

The answer:

"It’s horizontal aggression and disrespectful to the culture. But fellow PoC don’t have the power to divorce a thing from its cultural roots like white people do."

That tumblr post comes to me as being damned close to not even wrong.

On the plus side, Japanese and Korean are no longer to be considered language isolates as they're actually part of the "POC" family which includes Spanish also

[tarvos]

Cultural appropriation certainly doesn't apply to Spanish, which originated on the very white continent of Europe on the Iberian peninsula... Does the author know people speak Spanish outside of Latin America and that Spanish was actually the language of the colonizers, not the colonized?

If the Spanish hadn't come along, we'd have been describing a lot of people who spoke Nahuatl and Guaraní, not Spanish. And most people are mestizo anyway.