Multilingual Utica confronts COVID-19
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From Brenton Recht:
I live in a city with a large immigrant population in general and a large Bosnian population in particular (Utica, NY [VHM: population around 60,000; between Syracuse and Schenectady]). As such, I see "BiH" bumper stickers once in a while on the road. Most of the Bosnian population either came during the breakup of Yugoslavia or are children of those immigrants, so they are probably following the American trend of putting round stickers on your car for things you like or identify with, rather than the European usage of using them to identify country of origin.
The local refugee center has been buying digital billboard slots with notices about COVID-19 in the languages of the local immigrant groups. See this gallery. The languages included are English, Spanish, Bosnian, something in the Burmese script (either Burmese or Karen), something in Devanagari (likely Nepali), Arabic, Somali, and Russian. Other posts about COVID-19 to their Facebook page are also in Swahili, Maay Maay, Karen, and Burmese. See here for more photos.
Imagine trying to reach out in all these different languages before the advent of Unicode! Not that most of the text on the Facebook page isn't contained in an image anyways.
Utica is a small city in the center of New York state, far from any large metropolis. I am always intrigued by how significant numbers of people from the far-flung corners of the world would end up in a place like this. What forces and agencies lead, guide, and direct them to the towns where they settle? Why are there so many Hmong and Somalis in Minnesota? Eritreans in Columbus, Ohio, Nepalis in Irving, Texas, and so forth?
My surmise is that it's mostly missionary and church groups who channel these new arrivals to their final destinations, and that many of them are refugees. This is unlike the early pattern of migration, say of my parents' generation, when immigrants came through networks established by people they knew who came before them, i.e., their own networks, and that they were coming more in search of economic opportunity than for political freedom. These differing motivations are also reflected in the countries from which they came — primarily European nations a century and more ago, but later increasingly from all corners of the earth. Our earliest immigrants, however, the Pilgrims, were fleeing from religious persecution in the earliest 1600s.
- "Social distance posters in various Asian scripts" (4/3/20)
- "A better COVID-19 graph" (4/3/20)
- "COVID-19 testing: a warning" (4/2/20)
- "Looking on the bright side" (3/28/20)
- "Pandemic art" (4/11/20)
- "BiH" (4/11/20)
- "Stay uninflected!" (4/8/20)
- "Language for COVID-19: German and Finnish" 4/7/20)
- "Spiritually Finnish" (8/6/18)
- "Novel transmission of the novel coronavirus" (3/15/20)
- "Chinese coronavirus linguistic war" (2/22/20)
- "The PRC censors its own national anthem" (2/9/20)
Michèle Sharik Pituley said,
April 12, 2020 @ 3:37 pm
> The languages included are English, Spanish, Bosnian, something in the Burmese script (either Burmese or Karen), something in Devanagari (likely Nepali), Arabic, Somali, and Russian. Other posts about COVID-19 to their Facebook page are also in Swahili, Maay Maay, Karen, and Burmese.
Karen? Is that for real, or an autocorrect fail?
Victor Mair said,
April 12, 2020 @ 3:47 pm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karenic_languages
Brenton Recht said,
April 12, 2020 @ 9:11 pm
I should have said, not identifying the country of origin of the vehicle. The stickers are often identifying the country of origin of the driver.
cliff arroyo said,
April 12, 2020 @ 11:55 pm
"Our earliest immigrants, however, the Pilgrims"
How were the Pilgrims immigrants? Not everybody who moves somewhere is an immigrant… were you an immigrant in Nepal?
For me that word usually refers to people who want to become part of a different country and that's not what the Pilgrims were about.
A couple of years ago I tried to work of up a preliminary typology of who moves to other countries and why. I was hoping for some feedback but never got it.
https://cliffarroyo.wordpress.com/2017/12/04/immigrants-and-the-non-immigrantly-mobile/
Philip Taylor said,
April 13, 2020 @ 3:47 am
Cliff, the Pilgrim Fathers clearly weren't visitors (they were planning to stay) so although you could classify them as "colonists", "colonialist", "conquerors", "occupiers" or whatever, all of these terms would (justifiably) paint them in a very dark light, so the more neutral "immigrants" seems appropriate to me on a forum where the subject matter is linguistics rather than history.
cliff arroyo said,
April 13, 2020 @ 4:55 am
"you could classify them as "colonists", "colonialist", "conquerors", "occupiers" or whatever,"
In my taxonomy they were primarily settlers (with an undertone of colonists).
"the more neutral "immigrants" "
Why is this more neutral, it has very specific connotations and randomly expanding its usage just makes talking about people who live in other countries harder (and makes policy harder)
John Swindle said,
April 13, 2020 @ 4:57 am
cliff arroyo, Phillip Taylor, consider Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" with its "We are your overlords!" (Best experienced in Joel Veitch's now-forbidden Viking Kittens treatment.)
Bruce Foster said,
April 13, 2020 @ 6:49 am
The idea that a lot of the immigrants were settled by church groups spot on. Lutheran Social Services have been doing it since the 60's and it is one of the reasons that Minnesota is not longer all Northern Europeans. In the Clint Eastwood movie, Grand Torino (one of his best), the Eastwood character asks why there are so many SE Asians in Detroit. These are the next two lines
Sue Lor:
The Lutherans brought us over.
Walt Kowalski:
Everybody blames the Lutherans.
Priceless!
Philip Taylor said,
April 13, 2020 @ 8:04 am
Cliff, the OED gives as its primary meaning for "Immigrant (sb.)"
"A person who migrates into a country as a settler" would seem to me to describe perfectly the Pilgrim Fathers.
cliff arroyo said,
April 13, 2020 @ 8:36 am
Phil, my primary interest is not served by OED entries… but I accept that almost no one wants to think about reality (in which people go places for different reasons and with different goals) and simply prefer to refer to all kinds of people as immigrants no matter how little sense it makes.
But, within the EU, where I live, it's interesting that immigration essentially doesn't exist and yet governments and the public are stuck in immigrant narrative rhetoric and policy.
Philip Taylor said,
April 13, 2020 @ 8:45 am
Well, until my government took the most stupid decision of the last 100 years and decided to leave, I too lived within the EU. And my country (the United Kingdom) had (and still has) a very large number of immigrants, most of whom I welcome. May I ask exactly where you live, that immigration essentially doesn't exist ?
cliff arroyo said,
April 13, 2020 @ 9:16 am
I live in Poland, the source of many "immigrants" to the UK, except that only a tiny, tiny percentage of Polish people who have gone to the UK plan on staying there (of course time and intertia and the complications of everyday life means many stay longer than they originally intended but that's almost never the goal when they arrive). In my taxonomy they're gastarbeiters and calling them immigrants and treating them as such doesn't make much sense until and unless they have children.
Within the EU citizens have freedom of movement and there's no real legal need to assimilate or integrate. Were British retirees who moved to live full time on the Costa del sol immigrants? Are they now?
Until coronavirus there were over a million Ukrainians (from outside the EU) in Poland but again a large majority weren't planning any kind of permanent life change (though some will end up relocating permanently).
Modern life is complication but migration related rhetoric seems to lag several decades behind what's actually going on now.
Bloix said,
April 13, 2020 @ 9:31 am
In contemporary usage, "immigrant" has the connotation of a person or group moving into a nation-state that has control over its borders and institutions establishing the rule of law supported by control of force within those borders.
"Colonist" or "settler" implies the organized movement of people into a cross-border region or indigenously populated area, where few or no local governmental institutions exist, in order to establish quasi-independent social and economic communities. "Colonist" implies movement into a colony established by a distant government (at least by lines on a map, and up to a full colonial administration), while "settler" is broader and includes movement into regions that are not colonies.
There are no sharp dividing lines but in my own usage, it would be odd to call the Pilgrims "immigrants" although you do see it used for the rhetorical purpose of claiming that other than Native Americans, "we are all immigrants."
Philip Taylor said,
April 13, 2020 @ 9:59 am
Yes, I think the term Gästarbeiteren is probably very accurate for the many Poles, Lithuanians, etc., who make up a significant fraction of the UK's manual and rural labour force (or the Philippinos/as in the UAE). Our West Indian population, on the other hand, I believe are bona fide immigrants. And having spent quite some time in Poland, I do agree that it is indeed a country where immigration virtually does not exist.
cliff arroyo said,
April 13, 2020 @ 10:09 am
"Gästarbeiteren"
No need to be pretentious…. gastarbeiters works fine in English.
"Our West Indian population, on the other hand, I believe are bona fide immigrants."
Could be. I never said there are no immigrants _to_ the EU, just that _within_ the EU (from one EU county to another) immigration doesn't really exist and much confusion exists because intra-EU migration gets talked about the say way that migration from outside the EU does and that's not really helpful.
Jake said,
April 13, 2020 @ 10:22 am
As it's Utica, not Albany, they don't have to figure out how to translate 'steamed hams.'
Marina said,
April 13, 2020 @ 12:30 pm
"Gästarbeiteren" Is not even correct German. The plural, like the singular, is Gastarbeiter.
Philip Taylor said,
April 13, 2020 @ 2:28 pm
Well, being British, I am by definition not only monolingual but also completely incapable of attempting to communicate with any speaker of another language other than by shouting … (But no pretentiousness intended, Cliff: as your "gasterbeiter" was not in my idiolect, I simply substituted what I thought was the German equivalent).
Jerry Friedman said,
April 13, 2020 @ 5:03 pm
Our earliest immigrants, however, the Pilgrims…
I hope I can point out that the PiIgrims were the second group of British colonists to establish a long-term colony, since Jamestown was earlier. Dutch colonization of what is now the U.S. also began before the PIlgrims, as did French colonization of what is now Canada. The earliest long-term colonies in what is now the U.S. were Spanish.
Andrew Usher said,
April 13, 2020 @ 7:26 pm
Can't we translate 'Gastarbeiter' as 'guest-worker' as everyone else seems to, anyway? The problem with that term (in any language) is that some of them don't seem to want to go back as a 'guest' should and it thus becomes politically skunked.
I'd like Cliff Arroyo to define just what he means by 'immigrant', as I'm not quite sure, although I see his point about movement within the EU. It should be noted that most people undisputedly called 'immigrants' (here and presumably elsewhere) do not specifically want to assimilate and some may specifically want not to – they become American no more than the bureaucracy requires. I think it's a political definition unavoidably, and when we call the Pilgrims 'immigrants' we do so from the perspective of the current US, not theirs – they had motives fundamentally similar to those of later European immigrants. (Of course Jerry Friedman is right about them not being actually the first in any sense – they were the first in their part of America, though.)
Or, put another way, what people that intend to stay should _not_ be called immigrants?
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Adrian said,
April 13, 2020 @ 8:54 pm
There are many Polish immigrants in the UK. None of them should be called Gastarbeiter (or guest workers) since that system hardly operates here and it's a rather more negative, dehumanising term than immigrant.
It does make me laugh that anyone would complain at the Pilgrims being called immigrants. It's the neutral term, albeit that the likes of the Daily Mail have done their best to skunk it. "Settlers" is problematic because it implies that a country (or a part of it) was previously un-settled.
Cliff's complaint reminds me of those Brits in Spain who say "We're not immigrants, we're expats."
cliff arroyo said,
April 13, 2020 @ 11:38 pm
"it's a rather more negative, dehumanising term than immigrant"
Why is it dehumanizing?
Originally it was a placeholder term, FWIW the Polish people I've mentioned it to (I live in Poland) either find it unremarkable or funny…
"We're not immigrants, we're expats"
Exactly! Why is recognizing that many move to another country to work for a time with no intention of staying permanently demeaning? Why is retiring to another country and doing as little as possible to integrate with those already there not?
Why is someone who had been repeatedly deported referred to as an "immigrant" (from a case in the US)? Isn't that weird? I think it's weird.
cliff arroyo said,
April 13, 2020 @ 11:40 pm
"I'd like Cliff Arroyo to define just what he means by 'immigrant',"
I did that in the link I posted.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
April 14, 2020 @ 5:13 pm
Surely immigration was the main driver behind Brexit, and by definition that meant immigration from within the EU (more specifically from Poland etc.). So, the semantics is clear at least in England: an immigrant certainly can have the "impermanent" characteristics of a gastarbeiter as discussed above, and there certainly are negative overtones. Usage is king, isn't it?
Jarek Weckwerth said,
April 14, 2020 @ 5:24 pm
Oh BTW Ukrainians in Poland are very definitely referred to as "immigrants" locally, even though they are even more clearly of the gastarbeiter type. The Polish term imigracja/emigracja zarobkowa, literally 'for-wage immigration/emigration', captures the sense neatly.
Andrew Usher said,
April 14, 2020 @ 6:09 pm
Cliff Arroyo:
Yes, I did read your link – I'm apparently one of the few that does take care to read things like that. But that detailed taxonomy won't stand up to real usage – it's too complex. A further problem is that, as I mentioned, immigrants do not usually want actively to 'transfer their political loyalty and patriotic feelings to the new society', so that can't be a pre-condition.
On the other hand, I can see how ex-pats (the group you're thinking of) are different from immigrants, even if they intend to stay – I observe that Brits retiring to Spain, as you make the example, are hardly different in motive than the many Americans from the northern states that retire to the more southern states. I quite assume that the word ex-pat must be recent, and its full form, expatriate, wrongly suggests involuntary movement.
As for whatever person you were referring to that was 'repeatedly deported' but still called an immigrant, the probable reason is that the person was trying to be an immigrant – or political correctness.
Jarek Weckwerth:
You're right, 'usage is king' when it comes to the sense of a word. The definition of a word is determined by how people commonly use it. And as I like to say, definitions can't be wrong. You can argue a definition is misleading or not useful – but not 'wrong'. If Britons really are angry at there bring Polish workers in their country, it's not because of the words used to describe them – and using different ones isn't going to change their feelings.
Personally I doubt that any feelings of those kind were strong enough to push Brexit by themselves – it required also politicians using the issue for advantage.
Monscampus said,
April 14, 2020 @ 11:11 pm
@Philip Taylor
Your *gästarbeiteren* made me smile, because I could imagine Moomintroll using it, making it sound like Swedish. Where did you find it then? On http://www.quora.com? That was my only hit. (Änyway, Änglophönes jüst löve tö ädd ümläuts tö Germän wörds.)
About Gastarbeiter. The term started off as welcoming and was an improvement to the traditional Fremdarbeiter (foreign worker). Tourism was called Fremdenverkehr and "rooms to let" was Fremdenzimmer. These days "fremd" sounds quite strange – not surprisingly ;-) , except in Fremdsprachen.
Philip Taylor said,
April 15, 2020 @ 2:38 am
MC — I didn't "find" it, I created it. Solely through osmosis, I have acquired a very small amount of German, sufficient to mislead me into thinking that (a) if the English word were "guest", then the German equivalent would require umlaut to change the /æ/of "Gast" to an /e/ sound (because of a common root), and (b) that if arbeiter was singular, then the plural must be arbeiteren. Of course, as I now know, both of these suppositions were wrong, but had a useful outcome in that I was able to discuss Gastarbeiter, Gastarbeiterinnen and Gästebetten with a very elderly friend (90++) who has Covid-19 and who relished the opportunity to use her brain rather than just lie (?lay?) in her hospital bed …
cliff arroyo said,
April 15, 2020 @ 2:57 am
"Ukrainians in Poland are very definitely referred to as "immigrants" locally"
IME they're just referred to as "Ukraińcy" (and anyone with an accent that suggests the former USSR is assumed to be Ukrainian)
"immigrants do not usually want actively to 'transfer their political loyalty and patriotic feelings to the new society', so that can't be a pre-condition."
That's the old melting pot narrative in the US which seems to be dead now. Technically the idea is that adults never assimilate much but their children do… except when they don't as in much of western Europe. But if they don't want their children to prioritize loyalty to the new country…. why let them in permanently? What policy goal does that achieve?
"immigration was the main driver behind Brexit, and by definition that meant immigration from within the EU (more specifically from Poland etc.)."
And maybe a better type of reference that indicated that most Polish (etc) arrivals weren't intended to stay permanent might have lessened tensions a bit. It's a completely normal reaction to not be happy about the arrival of large groups of people behaving oddly (by local standards) and not making much of an effort to learn the language or abide by longstanding local customs.
Philip Taylor said,
April 15, 2020 @ 3:29 am
"It's a completely normal reaction to not be happy about the arrival of large groups of people behaving oddly (by local standards) and not making much of an effort to learn the language or abide by longstanding local customs" — I don't think that our Polish Gastarbeiter meet any of these criteria. In the UK, Polish workers are famed for their hard work, their willingness to work in what British workers regard as unpleasant conditions (pouring rain, for example), in general they speak excellent English (with an accent, obviously) and are an enormous asset to the country. Long may they continue to come.
cliff arroyo said,
April 15, 2020 @ 6:21 am
" Long may they continue to come."
At some level isn't that a wish for the Polish economy to remain under-developed?
I'm grateful for the presence of Ukrainians in Poland (without whom the pre-covid level of development wouldn't have been possible) but at the same time I realize that's not a sustainable model for either country and think it would be even better if they didn't need to come to Poland (and fewer Poles felt the need to go west for better pay).
But we're getting pretty far from the topic at hand so I'll sign off here on this topic.
Philip Taylor said,
April 15, 2020 @ 6:33 am
Agreed that we are straying a long way OT, so one final observation and then I too will shut up. Do I wish the Polish economy to remain under-developed ? I cannot answer that question, because "development" is not always a positive thing. The Polish economy is traditionally agrarian, and in (e.g.,) Biały Dunajec, a Polish village with which I am very familiar, that life-style continues to this day. Horses are still used to pull wagons, for example. So if you mean "would I like that life-style to continue ?", then my answer is an unequivocal "yes", for as long as the Polish people want it to continue. Those that I know well would argue that their economy is not "under-developed" at all, it is simply "less developed", and for that many are intensely grateful. Others, of course, would like to see all the tiny small-holdings amalgamated into a very few massive farms, horses replaced by diesel-powered what-have-yous, and so on. But my sympathies lie entirely with the former group, who value their close relationship with nature, not with the latter who feel no empathy with nature whatsoever.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
April 15, 2020 @ 9:16 am
@clif arroyo IME they're just referred to as "Ukraińcy"
Yes, I suppose "Ukraińcy" does predominate, but e.g. "imigranci z Ukrainy" still gets almost a million ghits (FWIW):
https://bit.ly/2REBZ3c
(and anyone with an accent that suggests the former USSR is assumed to be Ukrainian)
Yes and no. An anecdotally large proportion (majority?) speak Russian, and those are thought of as Ukrainian notwithstanding, true. (But then many of them are Ukrainian citizens.) But, for example, my city has a noticeable Georgian presence, and Georgians are usually not confused as Ukrainians. One of the reasons is that the accent is not eastern Slavic.
cliff arroyo said,
April 15, 2020 @ 10:56 am
"Georgians are usually not confused as Ukrainians. One of the reasons is that the accent is not eastern Slavic"
True enough but I wasn't sure about "Eastern Slavic accent" so… but in everyday usage anytime a person has a…. let's say Russophone (Russianish?) accent (or is heard to speak Russian) the default assumption, where I live, is that they're Ukrainian.
But then Russian speakers were very rare here until a couple of years ago. It might be different in a place like Warsaw which has had a Russian speaking … community? …minority? since the 1990s…
David Marjanović said,
April 16, 2020 @ 2:23 pm
It is indeed irregular that the singular is Gast without umlaut! The reason is that, basically as soon as Old High German introduced umlaut (around the time it began to be written), as a fashion that was spreading from the north, it immediately grammaticalized it; the pattern of umlaut in the plural but not the singular was so common that this word was adapted to it – the OHG singular would be expected to be *gesti, with the umlaut-triggering i still there, but in reality it was just gast.
Andrew Usher said,
April 16, 2020 @ 5:05 pm
Cliff Arroyo:
The 'melting pot narrative' is not mine – it was implied by your definition (which you specifically pointed me to). If it is wrong, then that definition is mileading, which is what I was saying.
Philip Taylor:
I'd be very careful about saying that (I disagree, but I'm assuming your opinion here), even though you qualified it – it could be seen as saying that less developed places (whatever is meant by that) should remain so for the benefit of foreign tourists, which is wrong and insulting.
Philip Taylor said,
April 17, 2020 @ 6:38 am
Andrew — I said explicitly "for as long as the Polish people want it to continue". Not foreign tourists, not we in Britain who now need to fly in Romanian fruit pickers, but the Polish people themselves, some of whom are amongst my dearest friends.