Trip of the Tongue Read Free Page B

wherefores of our native languages. If you grow up in an English-speaking family and in an English-speaking community, it is easy to underestimate the number of men, women, and children throughout the country who are busy supplementing their native or traditional languages with English. It is even easier to overlook the fact that this has been the case since the very earliest days of United States history.
    Whenever I find myself forgetting this, I try to think of the 1910 Census. If you look at the reports from Schenectady, New York, you will find, in a long list of handwritten names with suspect spellings, the names Martin and Franziska Lupka. A laborer and a housewife, respectively, they came to the United States in 1889 with their son Franz and settled in New York City before eventually moving up to Schenectady. According to their Census data, twenty years later they still spoke Polish. At the same time, halfway across the country in North Dakota, Edvard and Mina Knain were raising their seven children on a farm just outside Northwood. Though they had emigrated from Norway in 1884, by 1910 Mina still spoke only Norwegian.
    Meanwhile, Franz and his siblings and Edvard and his children already all spoke English.
    Martin and Franziska and Edvard and Mina are my great-great-grandparents, and they serve as a reminder to me that, throughout history, men and women in America have experienced language in two radically different ways. While I use English with rarely a second thought, just a hundred years ago my ancestors were struggling—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—to adapt not just to a new way of living but also to a new way of speaking.
    The diversity of Queens, the artifacts of language contact, the persistence of English. Individually these may seem like ordinary observations. But taken together, they led me to think seriously for the first time about what it has meant to be a minority-language-speaker in the United States. What was it like to learn a new language before Berlitz or Pimsleur, much less Rosetta Stone or Google Translate? What challenges did these men and women face from the English-speaking community? Why do some languages last while others fade away? And did speakers of languages in the former group feel less American than speakers of those in the latter? How, ultimately, has the language experience affected the American experience?
    Queens may have led me to these questions, but the answers, I knew, could only be found outside its borders. So I culled through books, blogs, magazines, and Census data for information on language communities past and present, thriving and extinct. I looked for languages that had died out and been reclaimed; languages that had somehow managed to remain mostly the same, despite the entropy born of adaptation and assimilation; languages that were clinging to survival solely through the efforts of communities determined not to lose touch with the past. I looked for European languages, American languages, African languages, Asian languages. I looked for languages that had been here for centuries and languages that had been here for months.
    But most of all, I looked for languages that would be able to tell me something about why language communities in the United States have, again and again and again, eventually yielded to the seemingly implacable preeminence of English. I didn’t just want to better understand language in America; I wanted to better understand the language experience in America.
    Then I printed out some maps, packed up my Subaru, and hit the road.
    Over the course of the next two years, I drove more than 25,000 miles, traveling through every continental state save Vermont and Rhode Island. I stayed in hotels and motels, in cabins and on couches. A few of my trips were quick jaunts down the coast or up to New England. A few were cross-country marathons. Along the way, I lost four tires, three windshields, and my favorite pair of pants. But I