9.2: Language

The language a person speaks is another characteristic used by Americans to categorize people into ethnic groups. Like race, language is a convenient marker of identity that holds up poorly under scrutiny. In the United States, linguistic heritage is the first characteristic that officials from the government use to organize people into ethnic categories. The US government categorizes everyone into one of two categories: “Hispanic” or “Not Hispanic”.

Almost 20% of Americans speak Spanish “at home” and therefore are considered “Hispanic” by the government. Among Hispanics though, there are multiple subgroups or ethnicities. Because “Hispanic” is a linguistic characteristic separate from how one looks, people from any race could be Hispanic. There are Hispanic Asians (Filipinos, e.g.), Hispanic Whites(Spaniards, e.g.) and Hispanic Blacks (Cubans, Dominicans, e.g.).

A sizeable percentage of Hispanics in the United States have ancestors from both Europe and the Americas, and therefore, those persons are racially mixed. Traditionally, this racial mixture was known as Mestizo. Today, the term Latino is commonly used instead in the US to refer to people with Latin American heritage. It should be noted that the term Latino is an inexact synonym for Mestizo. Even though millions of Americans trace their ancestry completely or partly to Latin America, the US government does not officially recognize “Latino” or “mestizo” as racial categories. So, Latinxs (mestizos) living in the US typically select “other” when prompted to identify a racial category. Therefore, maps of race in cities like Los Angeles feature large swaths of people identifying as “other” in neighborhoods dominated by Latinx peoples. On the US census roles, this group appears as “Hispanic Other”.

Like American concepts about race, “Hispanic” is an overstuffed class of identity created by government officials seeking to conveniently reclassify heterogeneous groups into a single homogeneous category. Within the US, only Hispanics are grouped by language by the US government, which is somewhat ironic given that Spanish speakers are one of the few groups who do not readily classify themselves by reference to their language. Most Americans with ancestry from Spanish-speaking countries prefer to use nationality-based markers of identity, like “Chicano”, “Mexican-American”, “Tejano” or “Cuban”. Doubling the irony is the fact that there are linguistic groups in the US that do generally identity themselves by language (Basques, Chinese, e.g.) in a way the government does not. The government’s sloppy use of linguistic markers of identity indicates a long history of ignorance about, and/or indifference to, or even aggression toward people who speak Spanish.

Complicating the issue of race among Latinos is the varied way Spanish speakers use the expression “La Raza” (translated “the race”). Fascists in Spain used the term to celebrate the uniqueness and racial purity of Spaniards for decades, but the term has since been adopted/adapted (appropriated?) by various Latinx groups to refer to a host of sometimes competing claims to ethnic identities not based on race, or at least as it is defined in this text.

Switzerland

A quick examination of how Switzerland, a linguistically diverse country offers valuable insights. Switzerland is overwhelmingly “white”. Less than 10% of its population is non-European. Switzerland is nevertheless a multi-ethnic country because of its great linguistic diversity. Most Swiss speak German, but there are sizeable numbers of Swiss who speak French and Italian. Even Romansh is recognized as an official language in Switzerland, though only about 1% of the population speaks it.

Figure 9-8: Map of Switzerland - Mountainous regions often feature linguistic diversity. The Swiss present a model of ethnic harmony in the face of diversity. Source: Wikimedia.

The jigsaw-puzzle linguistic map of Switzerland is similar to those found in other rugged, mountainous, or inaccessible regions where the friction of distance is significant and the risk of balkanization is high, yet it has been a model of stability. So, despite their linguistic diversity, various peoples living in that part of the world agreed to become a country 1291, and since then Swiss have largely focused their attention on national commonalities such as their neutrality, love of democracy and Alpine sports to build a special sense of national identity that overwhelms the various linguistic identities. The strong tendency to self-identify with a common national identity by Swiss people is probably helped by the fact they have one of the highest standards of living in the world (health, wealth, happiness), but by the same token, their health, happiness, and prosperity are in no small part due to their ability to get along well with Swiss who speak other languages. What makes Switzerland somewhat unusual though is how the Swiss have embraced their linguistic diversity, even requiring school-aged children to become bilingual. The Swiss demonstrate to the world that people of diverse backgrounds can live together quite happily if they chose to do so.