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LANGUAGE AND IMMIGRATION BY EINAR HAUGEN America's profusion of tongues has made her the true Babel of a modern age. In city and countryside she has teemed with all the accents of Europe, yet she has never swerved from the Anglo-Saxon course set by her founding fathers. In the course of a century she has absorbed her millions and taught them her language more perfectly than Rome taught the Gauls and the Iberians in centuries of absolute dominion. Chinaman and Negro, Spaniard and Frenchman, Jew and Gentile have all been domesticated without leaving any serious impression on American English.1 Except for a brief hysteria during the late war all this has been done without political compulsion, through the social pressure of a culturally and economically dominant language. It has gone on in the face of a tenacious conservatism of language among the immigrants, a strong reluctance to give up speech habits ingrained from childhood. The immigrant could not be expected to reshape his speech overnight, for habits of speech are rooted more deeply in man's emotional and intellectual life than is generally realized. One's language cannot be tossed aside like last year's bonnet. From his first day in the new land a tug of war between his old and his new self was going on in the immigrant, and nowhere was the struggle more vividly reflected than in his successive linguistic adaptations. It is by slow, incessant attrition that each foreigner has been turned into an American, idea by idea, and word by word. Every language spoken by the American immigrant bears the marks of this conflict and 1 H. L. Mencken has gathered most of the available material in The American Language , 150-163 (fourth edition, New York, 1936) . German, Irish, and Spanish appear to have had some slight influence on American, but even this is insignificant. 1 2 STUDIES AND RECORDS only by recording and analyzing this evidence can we fully understand the processes of immigration. Only through this highly sensitive index can we reach some of the subtlest and most significant aspects of the immigrant's psychological and cultural development. The immigrant straddles two cultures , and if he is homeless in both, it is due in no small measure to his linguistic difficulties. This approach to the immigrant is one that has received little attention from historians of immigration. The fact is not surprising when we see that even linguists have often regarded the dialects of the immigrant as beneath their dignity. Nevertheless, some studies have been made, and anyone interested in finding them can turn to the appendix of H. L. Mencken's American Language ,2 where the material has been ably surveyed. Mr. Mencken's material reveals that there is a striking parallel between the changes that foreign languages have undergone in America. Each language has parted from the strict purity of its native form, and has taken over elements from American English. Each language has been forced to adapt itself to new conditions, and thereby gives us a vivid picture of the immigrant's struggle for a position within the new nation and his gradual accommodation to its demands . The usual attitude to this phenomenon, among both lay and learned, has been one of scorn or amusement. The educated foreigner has regarded the lingo of his American compatriots as debased and vulgar, and has struggled against the "demoralizing" influence of his American environment as best he could. He has felt much as did the Norwegian pastor who wrote home from the early settlements in Wisconsin, " Our Norwegian language is so mixed with American words that I was quite disgusted at what I heard when I first came here." 3 If the emigrant later returns to his native land, he 2 See p. 616-697. 8 A letter from Olaus Duus of July 8, 1856, in Historiografisk Sämling M ss., Oslo, copies of which were kindly lent me by Professor Theodore C. Biegen. LANGUAGE AND IMMIGRATION 3 is ridiculed because he is no longer a complete master of the old idiom. Among the Norwegians, as among other groups, the cry against language mixture has sounded from the start...
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