A culture shift isn't always what you expected either

The book, Negotiating Identities, is about how to teach English learners in school, so its understanding of identity is as a foreign person arriving in a new country. However, there are similar identity conflicts when your native language is a dialect of the standard language, and when your culture and identity is very different from the dominate, educated, culture. This of course is true of many African-Americans, who speak some sort of Ebonics among themselves, or even Latinos/Latinas who have grown up in predominantly Latino culture, such as in East LA, where everyone speaks fluent, natural American, but with their own particular accent.

My first husband, A., a Dane, came from a proud and competent farm family. His mother was born is a small town, not on a farm, and conveyed her delight in reading to her children. When his eldest brother, N., finished the primary school in their farm community, he was encouraged to go to middle school in the neighboring town. There he was constantly taunted for his country-yokel dialect and his farmer ways. Nevertheless, he persisted, and got a job in a bank, which supported him to get his high school diploma and then a law degree in evening school.

My husband, A, would have none of this taunting, so he first went to a follow-up school for farm children, where he evidently developed an interest in more socialist politics, in contrast to the libertarian politics of most Danish farmers at that time. He was strong in his personal identity as he went on to a variety of jobs in industry, which he often lost because of conflicts with bosses. At some point, he decided to follow in his brother's footsteps, took evening classes to pass both middle school and high school, and was completing his second year of university studies in political science when I met him.

But A. had an identity problem. Somewhere in his schooling a teacher had convinced him that he would have to speak standard Danish (with the accepted local city accent) to succeed. He completely dropped his dialect, which I never heard him speak, even with his parents, whose dialect was so old-fashioned, that it took me several years to understand most of it. Even though he "lost" his native language, we went to the farm every weekend, where he loved working with the harvest or feeding the pigs. He appreciated his mother's influence on his book-learning as well, but in conversation always answered their dialect with standard Danish.

A. aimed at a career as a university professor, but felt that everyone who was competing with him for tenure track positions had connections through their academic family background. I don't really believe this was entirely true, although he was part of the first generation of non-middle class students who got an education beyond 7th grade. Before his generation, only about 12% became university students.

He is often quite bitter about his life - a stroke in his 40's didn't make life easier. While his parents were adamant that their children should decide their own careers (the youngest 2 remained farmers,) A. was insistent that his children should get a university education, which our son initially didn't do. This caused constant intergenerational conflict as well.

Some others I knew could easily switch between dialect with family and standard local Danish with their colleagues. (I remember feeling very honored when one of these invited me to a birthday party, where most of the others were local and family, with whom she spoke in dialect. She spoke in dialect at the party, also to me, so I felt like she had accepted me into her inner circle, almost as a native.)

Would the once very self-confident and strong A. have kept his confidence if he had accepted the language of his background? Was his denied language the most important part of his identity? He apparently dropped it voluntarily, but their were certainly outside influences that forced him to change that part of his identity instead of negotiating a space for it.