36 Sociolinguistic correlations: Ethnicity
Like gender, ethnicity is socioculturally and sociolinguistically complex. Language and ethnicity are intricately linked and often co-constitutive. That is to say, each is often circularly defined; divisions between languages are often defined with reference to divisions between cohesive cultural groups that use those languages and ethnic groups are often defined with respect to the language that the group uses (e.g., think about how Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible but understood as distinct languages, spoken by distinct ethnic groups). Around the world, people tend to live in close proximity to other members of their ethnic group. This is true both in places where that ethnic group is indigenous or in contexts of colonialism and diasporic migrations. This means that people often – but certainly not always – have social networks that are ethnically homogeneous. The linguistic consequence of this is that, because we tend to use language in the same way as the people we interact with most, ethnolects of many languages have emerged. Ethnolects are varieties of an ambient (standardized) community language used by a minoritized ethnic group. That’s not to say that the ambient standard doesn’t also have ethnoracial associations though! In North America for example, while people tend to assume that the ambient standards of Canadian English, Quebecois French, American English, and ASL are ethnically-neutral, they are ideologically associated with whiteness and European settlers.
I don’t have the space to dive into the complex intersections of language, ethnicity, race, and prestige but what I want to do is demonstrate the importance of linguistic variation with respect to ethnolects. The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is an Indigenous group in the United States and in fact, with 45 000 members, the Lumbee Tribe is the largest Indigenous group that lives east of the Mississippi River. The majority of Lumbee people live in Robeson County, North Carolina, a multiethnic area: 40% of residents are Lumbee, 35% are Anglo-American, and 25% are African American (Wolfram, Daugherty, Cullinan 2014). These three groups, though living in close proximity, each live mostly selectively-segregated within the county. The Lumbees’ political situation is thorny; they have state-recognized Indigenous status in North Carolina but are not federally recognized with formal tribal status by the US Government. For almost a century and a half, the Lumbees have been unsuccessfully petitioning for full federal recognition. A major roadblock for the Lumbees’ petition has been their language history. Knowing one’s ancestral language is a key piece in demonstrating descent and is key to federal recognition. However, the Lumbee people’s ancestral language was taken from them very early on in the settler-colonial history of North America (they were documented as speaking English as early as 1730!). In an effort to combat this mitigatin