Language Choice: Anita Norich

The document discusses the concept of "language choice" and argues that it is not a very useful or accurate term. It suggests "language use" is a more productive concept that raises more nuanced questions. Language use depends on context, surroundings, the intended audience, and the impression and identity associated with different languages. Speculating about writers' hypothetical language choices reduces the complexity of the creative process and linguistic environment.

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Language Choice: Anita Norich

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What do we mean when we refer to “Language

Choice”? For parts of this year, I have been

fighting a losing battle to expunge the term
from our linguistic and cultural frames of
reference and I have not yet given up that
particular fight. And it brings us back to the
question of context. The language that multi-
lingual speakers or writers “choose” to use
depends, of course, on their surroundings and
interlocutors. Who is being addressed? What
impression does the speaker or writer want

Language Choice to make? How is her sense of herself tied to

a particular language or how does it change
from language to language? Who will under-
Anita Norich stand him? What are the political or social
signals that a particular language sends? These
are matters of ability, personality, identity
formation, environment, and imagined readers
or listeners. This allows us to understand
why Saadia Gaon (882–942 ce), Yehuda Halevi
(ca. 1075–1141), and Maimonides (1135–1204)
wrote some works in Hebrew and some in
Arabic — the language of philosophical and
scientific inquiry of their times. In the modern
era, too, it accounts for what I think is a
more fruitful concept than “language choice,”
namely language use.
Things become more complicated and,
I think, less interesting, when language is
mapped onto either romanticized or politicized
terrain as it so often is. My primary area of
study — Yiddish — has suffered from such
romanticized notions more than most. The
associations of mame-loshn, the mother tongue,
with mame, and home, and the past are unmis-
takable. Every Yiddish writer I can name was
at least bilingual, and more often multi-lingual,
as was the vast majority of their reading
publics. And yet, the popular myth goes, they
continued to write in Yiddish in defiance of
history and in memory of a vanishing or van-
ished world. I would suggest, rather, that the
Yiddish poet who continued to write Yiddish,

16
or the Yiddish novelist who was happy to be and I’d like to suggest that it should be on the
translated but stayed true to his mame’s loshn meaning of choice. Whether made through
is a nostalgic construct, a longing for home conscious deliberation or analysis or not,
that is understandable but that tells us very choice suggests that there are viable options,
little about the writers, readers, or speakers that one can weigh a number of possibilities,
of a language. What can it mean to say that select among them, think of one as preferable
Yankev Glatshteyn’s (1896–1971) English was to the others. I think — perhaps unfairly — of the
good enough to have allowed him to publish emphasis on choice as a particularly American,
some essays in English and then to ask why or at least particularly modern, phenomenon.
he didn’t write English poetry too? Or that We are meant to have choices about where to
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) hounded live, what work to pursue, whom to love, how
his English translators, working carefully with to raise our children or whether or not to have
many of them to edit and revise, so why didn’t them. I would venture to say that for most peo-
he just write in English to spare himself and ple, in most of the world and most of the time,
them the trouble? In literary terms, claiming such conceptions are foreign, even unimaginable.
Yiddish as a choice says more about the urge In any case, language — whether in
to protect the memory of the language than it speech or writing — is not chosen in the same
does about Yiddish culture. Hebrew is mythol- way that one chooses one’s clothing or one’s
ogized in similarly heroic terms. The revival of car. I do not want to return to the romanticized
Hebrew as a spoken, but first written, language view that suggests inevitability in the use of
may be something of a miracle if we are given language (as if whatever language it may be
to a belief in miracles. Writers of modern “chose” him; she was chosen to carry on the
Hebrew may indeed have chosen it for cultural legacy of some language); none of that makes
or political reasons: because it was a written much sense. Nor do I want only to question
language with an extraordinarily rich textual the politics of language use, important though
history, perhaps because writing in another such politics are. I would rather ask about the
language carried less prestige, perhaps — a politics of the idea of choice itself. To suggest
bit later — because they were proto-Zionists that Sh. Y. Abramovitch (1835–1917) chose
or Zionists. But surely that cannot be said Yiddish over Hebrew or Hebrew over Yiddish,
of contemporary writers. Or, to take another to wonder what A. Leyeles’ (1889–1996) poetry
example, does anyone believe that Saul Bellow would have sounded like had he written in
(1915–2005) “chose” to write English instead English, to think that Anton Shammas (b. 1950)
of Yiddish for pragmatic or rebellious reasons? could have or should have written Arabesques
To make a literary name for himself in America in Arabic rather than Hebrew — all such specu-
or to distance himself from his parents? Or lations reduce the dynamics of the creative
that Kafka (1883–1924) would really have chosen mind and of the contexts in which thought
his beloved Yiddish given half a chance? and expression take place. We speak, write,
Or what would it mean to say that Paul Celan hear — use — a range of linguistic registers
(1920–1970) or Elie Wiesel (b. 1928), writing and languages. use rather than choice raises
German or French, made a choice to give up more productive questions and leads to mul-
Rumanian or Hungarian or Yiddish? tiple, more nuanced understandings of all of
The emphasis in discussions of our complex linguistic lives.
language choice tends to be on the language