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Challenge of Diversity. New Strategies and Language Patterns

The second half of the 20^th century saw great changes in the population patterns of the USA – the reforms in immigration policy shifted the focus from Western Europe to Asian and Latin American countries. In the 1990s, immigration added more than a million people a year to the population of the USA, and most of the immigrants came from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

The shift in the population became characteristic of different regions of the country. For example, in Miami, Florida more than 60 % of population spoke Spanish at home, and on the west coast, the Los Angeles school district taught students who spoke one or more of eighty-two different languages.

New patterns of population affected many aspects of national life. The issues of honoring differences and learning to work together became a matter of hot debate.

It was clear that in a country with diverse population the issues of cultural tolerance and language sensitivity became of primarily importance. Besides, Civil Rights and feminist movements raised pride and awareness in the historically disadvantaged groups of population. This resulted in a new movement in the 1990s – Political Correctness, when native English speakers became sensitive of biased terms and phrases that exist in the language and many universities acknowledged that their curriculum did not reflect the multicultural society.

During the 1990s, most American universities diluted or displaced the core curriculum stressing the great works of western civilizations to make room for new courses in non-western cultures, African-American Studies and Women's Studies.

As people became sensitive to bias on the basis of race, gender, age, and sexual orientation, they tried to minimize the negative impact of language that they used to discuss such issues.

Among the first signs of this movement was the feminist attempt to get gender equality in all spheres of life and diminish differences between men and women in the society. It included the criticism of the English language as "male-dominated" and "patriarchal". The history of society, as the feminists argued, was written from the male point of view ("it's HIS-tory, not HERstory"). So the solution was to shift from the old, "sexist" language to a new inclusive language. This meant, for example, avoiding the usage of male pronouns in the cases when the gender of the person is unknown. Utterances like Every student has to pass his exams were replaced by Every student has to pass their exams which violates traditional rules of subject-verb agreement but conforms to new rules of gender neutrality. General terms containing the segment man, like mankind and man-made were replaced by synonyms like humankind and artificial.

Functioning of new lexicon in English reflected the main social process in today's America – a tendency to race- and gender-blind society, toward equal opportunities for everybody. This new movement intended to erase discrimination that exists in language, its aim was to attain speak-no-evil consensus.

The serious changes in the English vocabulary touched many spheres of life. The US Department of Labor has attempted to overcome the exclusion of women from job categories and has revised the titles of almost 3,500 jobs, so that they are no longer male-designated, but sexually neutral: flight attendant instead of steward/stewardess, sales person/representative instead of salesman/woman, police officer instead of policeman, chairperson or chair instead of chairman.

The tendency toward "desexing" English was followed by the attempt to diminish ethnic and racial prejudices in the language. "Deracialisation" in English provided new names for nationalities and ethnic groups. The words Negro, colored, and Afro-American were replaced by black and African-American; Oriental or Asiatic became Asian or more specific designations such as Chinese American, Korean, Japanese American. Indian, a term that refers to people who live in or come from India, was differentiated from terms used for the native peoples of North America such as American Indian, Native American, or more specific terms like Chinook or Hopi.

Task 3. Showing sensitivity to ethnicity. Column A represents traditional names for different races and nationalities, and column B gives the sensitive version. Match the names from column A to column B.