Re: Learning a language

From: Eugene Holman (holman_at_elo.helsinki.fi)
Date: 06/16/04 

Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 06:03:13 +0300

In article <40CEF95E.1A4D@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

<deletions>
>
> The way you've been approaching pidgins and AAVE doesn't have its roots
> in Labov, that's for sure.

Now that we've waxed all nostalgic about our shared Cornell past, what is
your intake on the following situation from the Cornell area?

About twelve miles due south of Ithaca there is a town called van Etten.
Its Dutch-looking name notwithstanding, a significant percentage of the
inhabitants of the town are descendants of Finnish immigrants from
Ostrobothnia (Western mid-coastal Finland) who settled there during the
early 20th century (for details, see http://www.fingerlakesfinns.org/).

Almost all of the inhabitants of van Etten, whether of Finnish descent or
not, speak what could be initially characterized as a local, heavily
anglicized variant of Finnish. Its grammatical structure is clearly
Finnish, even if study of its details reveals this to be that of
illiterate 19th century Ostrobothnian rural Finnish, not that of the
current literary language. Its lexicon, but not its phonology, has been
restructured towards English:

Van Etton Finnish (VEF) English etymon Standard Finnish (SF)
karpitsi garbage roska
peipipukki baby-buggy lastenvaunut
portsi porch kuisti
pussia to push työntää
rouata to throw heittää

Most current native speakers of Standard Finnish are fluent in English,
and they would understand it, even if they would regard it as a
hilarious-sounding (VEF mun komia akka 'my beautiful wife'/SF kaunis
vaimoni 'my beautiful wife'; mun [colloquial register] 'my', komea
'magnificent', akka 'hag'], corrupt, illiterate-sounding,
English-permeated version of their language.

This local patois functions in van Etten as a widely used code language
and it has attained some status because it has enabled the local
basketball team to win several New York state championships (although
they were once crushingly defeated in interstate competition by a team
from New Jersey, where the local patois was American Estonian. Estonian is
phonologically more innovative than Finnish, with many originally
unstressed syllables having been lost due to phonetic attrition, for which
reason speakers of Estonian understand Finnish more easily than vice
versa).

In any case, van Etten Finnish, which I shall refer to in the following as
Vanettenese, arose from transplanted, dialectal varieties of Finnish,
first as a code (or vernacular norm) to indicate ethnic identity, later as
a local code language with virtually no input from Standard Finnish but a
major
input from the locally spoken English, that can be used, among other
things, to indicate local loyalty. It is nobody's native language. The few
native speakers of Standard Finnish in the area have to learn Vanettenese
as a new and foreign code, just as native speakers of English in Papua New
Guinea have to learn Tok Pisin. Conversely, the local Finnish church,
which maintains links with the Finnish Lutheran Church and thus ensures
that there is a constant presence of native speakers of Standard Finnish
in the area,
conducts its services in Standard Finnish, which a decreasingly small
number of speakers of Vanettenese really understand or are interested in.

In my understanding, Vanettense is an independent offshoot of the
dialectal Finnish of several generations ago that was transplanted to an
area where English was the dominant language and which evolved into a
structurally simplified, functionally limited jargon that was used first between
native speakers of Finnish and the English speakers, who knew or had
learned some Finnish, with which they interacted. Eventually it assumed
the status that it has now of a code that is too far from Standard Finnish
to be regarded as simply a localized variant. Simply stated, Vanettenese
is a linguistic code in which a subset of 19th century rural Finnish
grammatical structure and segmental phonology have amalgated with American
English lexicon, suprasegmental phonology, and pragmatics. Vanettenese is
nobody's native language, and the primary reason for using it is to show
local loyalty to van Etten; it is not a symbol of Finnish heritage or
sympathy for things Finnish.

Vanettenese, did not arise in a slave or plantation culture, like a
paradigmatic pidgin. Nevertheless, it is the consequence of the
transplantation of one variety of a language and some of its speakers to a
new environment, and of the subsequent efforts of these speakers, most of
them first generation subsistence farmers and lumberjacks, professions of
low social status and with a strict delineation of gender roles, to
communicate with the English
speakers, generally of higher social status, in the locality to which they
moved.

What methodological objection do you have to calling Vanettenese a
Finnish-based pidgin? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the
social environment in which the interaction between the two speech
communities involved was not characterized by the degree of social
distance that accompanies the evolution of the paradigmatic pidgins? And
if so, how do you regard Russenorsk, a pidgin that arose along the Arctic
coast between Norwegian and Russian-speaking fishermen? Why does
Russenorsk qualify as a pidgin (according to Holm 1988), but not
Vanettenese?

Regards,
Eugene Holman