Immigration

Language and Immigrant Identity

Otherness and marginalization do not always mean being weak, but they do demand from the immigrant greater cognitive and affective effort at socialization because of the complexity of the immigrants’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. For a sojourner, the semantic field “thickens,” to borrow a term from Clifford Geertz. Everything, even the most mundane processes and objects, suddenly seem salient and become more prominent in one's consciousness. For the sojourner, food, [Page 385]clothing, rules for crossing streets, instructions for how to use a public telephone, and so forth, all become prominent in awareness, and this sudden foregrounding of so many experiences greatly increases the affective and cognitive labor for the newcomer. This increase in cognitive complexity and cognitive effort is not limited to being compelled to translate between two or more languages much of the time. Life abroad is more complicated and difficult than life in one's place of primary socialization.

Culture, as a way of life, becomes an important concept because it powerfully influences how an individual understands and interprets the actions and reactions of the world at large. To some extent, the self and culture are inseparable. The self is always a cultured being, a person who has been raised and enculturated by a larger group of people. And so, to the degree that cultures vary around the globe, so too must there exist many different kinds of selves. When a person says that he or she is Greek or Malaysian, this expresses the identification that exists between the person and his or her culture and, often, his or her language.

Language is important to personal identity. Language, culture, and self are difficult to separate. Language is a sensitive subject because it involves peoples’ sense of community and identification. In France, l'Académie française guards against the use of non-French words in public discourse. As early as the ancient Taoists, in what is now China; the ancient Jews in the Middle East; and the ancient sophists, such as Isocrates in Greece, thinkers have believed that language acquisition is the same thing as acquiring the ability to think and acquiring an identity, indeed acquiring a cultural identity. When children learn a language, they learn a system that will structure not only what they can think about but also how they think about it.

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