---

Olivia Natan | Phoenix Staff

Zentella teaches “Language, Race and Ethnic Identities in the USA.”

BY RUOLIN HOU

In print | Published September 17, 2009

Linguistics professor Ana Celia Zentella doesn’t just plan to write a book with Swarthmore students about multilingual Philadelphia. She also wants to change a category in the census.

Zentella was named the Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change last semester. The college offers this professorship to people who are “distinguished by their engagement with social justice, civil liberties, human rights and democracy,” according to the college website. She will be here for a year, teaching a course each semester.

This semester, Zentella is teaching a linguistics course called “Language, Race and Ethnic Identities in the USA.” Besides the usual lectures and readings, the class will have students write a term paper on a topic of their choice regarding languages in Philadelphia. Zentella hopes that she can receive funding to take each of the term papers and make them a chapter in a book written collectively by the students.

This is not the first time Zentella has done this. While teaching at U.C. San Diego, she taught a similar class and published a book called “Multilingual San Diego: Portraits of Language Loss and Revitalization,” which touched on the language diversity of San Diego. The course was so successful that others plan to adopt the model for their own classes. The first will be Professor Alexandra Jaffe of California State University, Long Beach.

Though writing a book at first seemed intimidating, Stephanie Rodriguez ’12 said that she is now excited by the prospect.

“At first, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how are 30 of us going to sit together and write a book?’ ” Rodriguez said. “But now it sounds like a really good idea because it’s a challenge.”

Rodriguez has already begun planning for the topic of her term paper.

“There’s a magazine in Philadelphia called ‘Motives,’ or ‘Motivos’ in Spanish, and they use a lot of bilingual text, with Spanish articles translated into English and English articles translated into Spanish,” she said. “I kind of want to study the dynamics of that and why the magazine is bilingual and how they decide what text goes in the magazine and what they’re doing about language since it’s mainly for high school students.”

She added that she’s interested in studying a specific area in Reading, Philadelphia, which has a large Dominican population.

In addition to her new endeavors at the college, Zentella has been working for the past five years on changing a category in the national census that Zentella finds discriminatory. A category titled “linguistically isolated” was used in the 1990 and 2000 censuses. The category is based on the answers to three self-reported questions:

1. Do you speak a language other than English at home?

2. If so, what is that language?

3. How well do you speak English?

In the last question, the choices provided were: “very well, well, not well and not at all.” According to Zentella, anyone belonging to a household that does not have a person older than the age of 14 who speaks English “very well” is considered linguistically isolated by the census bureau. Zentella finds the category highly discriminatory and unjust, not to mention inaccurate.

“If you’re living in a family where no one over the age of 14 speaks English very well, anyone in the family, including children under the age of 14 who speak nothing but English, are related as linguistically isolated. And you’ll always see reports that say such a neighborhood is linguistically isolated,” she said. “What it does is create the notion that there are large groups of people who are not in human contact. Because the very notion of linguistic isolation is untenable unless you’re talking with a person in a forest who is not in communication with the rest of the world. So people who are children of immigrants and the immigrants in the U.S. do speak English, and many of them speak English well or very well.”

Zentella said that she also finds it unfair that only those who do not speak English fluently are considered linguistically isolated, while people who speak no other language but English are considered normal.

Since discovering the use of the term while reading the news one day, Zentella has been presenting resolutions to various linguistic organizations in an attempt to remove the use of the category from the census. Zentella’s resolution for the census is currently backed by the American Association of Anthropology, the American Association of Applied Linguistics and the Conference on College Composition Communication.

“Most of us have never thought about the census being biased before. It’s pretty awesome that Professor Zentella can get this movement going to make the census less biased,” said Daniel Duncan ’13, a student in Zentella’s course.

Though the change is unlikely to occur by the 2010 census, Zentella hopes that she will be able to convince the new director of the census bureau and the committee to change the category in future years.

---

« RETURN TO NEWS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »