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Document Type

Essays, Studies, and Works

Abstract

I am an Iowan, a child of the prairie, an American, and so as the joke goes obviously I'm a monoglot. One might ask, "Why the fascination with languages you clearly don't speak, and have no ambition of learning?" The truth is I don't know. It just is.

My family didn't start out speaking English. They were mostly farmers and small business owners who wrested the prairie into productive farmland who lost their polyglottism during WWII. In the same way Arab-Americans seem to always be suspect today, Germans, Norwegians, and Swiss, made it their business to find ways to show patriotism, to blend in, and to keep a low profile in those days. If they had accents, the burden to prove social validity was on them. Maybe the madness would pass. Maybe it didn't. Maybe it was atmospherics, the times, the geography, or some inescapable hazard immigrants must navigate.

Publication Date

Spring 2006

Journal Title

UNIversitas

Volume

2

Issue

1

First Page

1

Last Page

4

Copyright

©2006 Ron Sandvik

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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