Language Loyalty

Types of Language Loyalty in U.S. History

Joshua A. Fishman, who wrote the first major work on language loyalty in the United States, asserts that various types of language loyalty played a major role during the last five centuries of European history. Each of these loyalty types is related in different ways to nationhood. The earliest immigrants came to North America from Europe because they were disconnected from the nation building process by virtue of their peasant status and had no stake in staying in Europe. Another group came because of a concern that the European nation was corrupting the language and culture and the belief the New World provided for the preservation of their language and culture. A third group came out of fear that the language and culture were being obliterated by outside political forces in their nation, and the New World provided the place to be at liberty to live the language and culture of the Old Country.

In the colonial era and early national U.S. history, language loyalty was associated with a tension between nation building and ethnic identity. Though language loyalty was important to the nation building that was an outgrowth of the Renaissance, early immigrants arrived in the U.S. colonies and the newly established nation having meager familiarity with European events and movements to which language loyalty was related. The early immigrants were not among the European intelligentsia, middle class, and working class who stayed behind in Europe. Those who remained in Europe considered language loyalty and the maintenance of ethnic languages and cultures important to the building of European nations. Generally, those who ventured forth to the American colonies did not consider language loyalty an important factor in nation building in the New World.

Thus, as Fishman states, though the United States was born during a period when European nationalism [Page 446]was extremely important, and though the United States was a reaction to that nationalism, millions of immigrant people to the United States paid little attention to language loyalty as a nationalistic concern. What was more important to successive waves of immigrants throughout U.S. history appears to have been ethnicity of a traditional, particularistic, and nonideological character. Ethnicity, with its associated language and perhaps religion, has been the general rule among immigrants rather than language as a symbol of nationalism. Languages spoken and to which immigrants have been loyal in early U.S. history were related more to everyday life than to causes or ideologies.

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