Bilingualism and influence of other languages

Although the number of Lithuanian speakers in Los Angeles is small, one nevertheless cannot offer any uniform assessment of the state of the Lithuanian language in the Los Angeles area. Several different levels of proficiency and closeness to the standard tongue can be found within the language community. However, it is possible to discus and examine the status of the language as it appears in this area. Through interviews with community members regarding their language use and language use throughout the community, as well as the willingness of several individuals to render some sentences in Lithuanian on tape, an understanding of the condition of the language begins to emerge. One indeed finds a good number of proficient and fluent speakers of Lithuanian in the Los Angeles area, of all ages, although not all members of the Lithuanian community have such abilities. In addition, even among the most proficient speakers, the language shows signs of being affected by its situation within an English-speaking society and in a culture rather different from Lithuania itself.

Research for this undertaking has essentially included three components. I spoke with several community members about their language use, focusing on how often and in what circumstances they spoke Lithuanian as opposed to when they used English, as well as on their their own evaluation of their proficiency in the language. The overwhelming majority of these individuals were born outside Lithuania. I also interviewed in greater depth Ms. Maryte Newsom, principal and director of the St. Casimir's Lithuanian School of Los Angeles, and also Dr. Liucija Baškauskas, a professor of anthropology at California State University-Northridge, who has written extensively on Lithuanian refugees, particularly those in Los Angeles, and has spent a number of years in Lithuania, both of whom are especially equipped to discuss the local language community as a whole. In particular, they evaluated levels of language proficiency overall and mentioned some notable differences between the local language and standard Lithuanian. Finally, eleven individuals were willing to offer translations into Lithuanian of ten short sentences, mostly pertaining to life in Los Angeles, to be tape-recorded. Here, too, most were born outside Lithuania, but three are Lithuanian emigres, two who emigrated recently and one in the 1940s.

Newsom says that, generally speaking, proficiency levels within Los Angeles' Lithuanian community may be considered in generational terms. Those born more recently, or whose parents were born more recently, and who are therefore farther "from the source," as Newsom refers to life in Lithuania in this respect, tend to have to strive that much more actively to maintain the same level of proficiency that come naturally to members of the Lithuanian community born in the 1940s and 1950s. This is the generation now most prominent in community life, conducting the Saturday school and organizing most social and cultural activities. The parents of this generation were adults when they left Lithuania, and so the children grew up for the most part in Lithuanian-speaking households. Consequently, they are most likely to retain a natural grasp of the language and its broader vocabulary.

Those born in the later 1950s and early 1960s, whose parents were more often children when they left Lithuania, tend still to show fairly strong levels of proficiency, if not quite so strong as those born the previous decade, according to Newsom. Their primary schooling will have been entirely in American schools, thus providing a greater push in the direction of English. By the late 1960s and the 1970s, moreover, children in the Lithuanian were being born of parents who had never lived in Lithuania. By that time, English unquestionably became the easier language to speak. Lithuanian proficiency may still be good in this generation, but Newsom observes that this depends on the amount of effort a family is willing to put into speaking the language; by the time the grandchildren of the post-World War II refugees were being born, it had become necessary to try to speak Lithuanian, where it had come naturally for the previous generation.

While for Lithuanian families that have been in the US for decades considerable effort is required to maintain the language, especially if one of the spouses is in fact not of Lithuanian heritage, both internal and external pressure may be brought to bear to make this effort. For Lithuanian parents, according to Newsom, maintaining the language becomes "almost a moral issue;" parents may "literally feel guilty" if they converse with their children in English. Certainly language abilities can deteriorate if not vigilantly maintained, even among members of the earliest generation of Lithuanian-Americans. One woman of this age group told me that, while she still holds strong social ties to other members of the community, she no longer spoke Lithuanian easily and had great difficulty remembering rules of grammar. She also relied to some extent on the help of a companion in following the Lithuanian spoken at a meeting which I observed. She had avoided speaking Lithuanian when she was younger, had married a non- Lithuanian speaker, and found herself with relatively few opportunities to use the language.

On a more external level, the use of Lithuanian is strongly encouraged at social functions within the community. At the aforementioned meeting at St. Casimir's, which concerned planning Lithuanian school activities, discussion was almost exclusively in Lithuanian, with English used only to refer to concepts for which there were no Lithuanian terms at hand, such as "McDonald's hamburgers," "vegetarian alternative," and "mad cow disease." One exception was a man who asked a question in English, specifically saying he was doing so for the benefit of those who could not easily follow Lithuanian, although he was pointedly answered in Lithuanian. One therefore appears to be at some disadvantage at such meetings if one's language is not fluent.

At more informal gatherings, language choice depends more on the language with which all present are most comfortable. When this is English, English predominates, although Lithuanian may be used somewhat reflexively. Newsom explained that she thought my earlier estimates of the proportion of English spoken at St. Casimir's were skewed by my own presence there, with much more English consequently spoken out of politeness.

Where one's children are concerned, on the other hand, ease and comfort are not always primary considerations, with conversation in Lithuanian enforced to maintain language skills. In families where one parent is Lithuanian and one is not, children may be enjoined to speak Lithuanian with the former and not to mix languages in either event. However, one parent, a physician, told me that she tends to speak Lithuanian with her children more as Saturday lessons approach and to be motivated by "guilt" to do so. She reported that conversation in Lithuanian was mostly restricted to mundane, "kitchen-table" topics, and that for more complicated subjects and "philosophical questions," English would be necessary. Language maintenance and use, then, varies greatly by household and family.

Among children and adolescents, on the other hand, conversation is almost invariably most naturally in English. Even at the Lithuanian school, conversation among students is mostly in English, and one therefore suspects that in informal social gatherings, even purely among community members, English is likely to be employed among the younger set. Exceptions may most often be found, first, in families whose parents are especially proficient in and dedicated to the Lithuanian language and therefore best-equipped to insist on and enforce the use of that tongue, and also in settings where "Lithuanian-ness" is extremely important, such as at the summer youth camps that meet mostly in the Midwest. There, according to Baškauskas, outsiders not speaking Lithuanian may be ostracized. Even there, however, English finds occasional use as a fall-back where a Lithuanian term does not readily come to mind.

Among the most recent Lithuanian emigres, however, there is more pressure to assimilate to the prevalent local language and culture; in the drive to learn English well enough to function in American society, Lithuanian may receive the short shrift. Moreover, this pressure is by no means entirely negative, as emigrating to the US and adopting elements of Western popular culture were fond dreams of many Lithuanians coming of age during the Soviet period, according to one recent emigre. In such families, while Lithuanian is still most natural, the use of English is likely to be encouraged for children in all settings, and Newsom reports even more difficulty persuading emigre children to speak Lithuanian than the American-born students at the Saturday school.

However, the recent wave of immigrants to the Los Angeles area also holds some promise of improving language maintenance within the community. The above-mentioned physician relates that she and her husband have made a policy of hiring recent Lithuanian emigres as gardeners, plumbers, and carpenters in maintaining and renovating their home. She says that as a result her family has found great opportunities to employ and sharpen their language skills. There is reason to hope, then, that this influx of immigrants will provide the local Lithuanian community with an additional degree of linguistic vitality, even if usages between the two groups are not identical, as will be discussed below.

As the Lithuanian language in the Los Angeles area has been spoken in a radically different linguistic environment than that of the main body of standard Lithuanian, not to mention a very different cultural milieu, it has inevitably undergone changes. The most obvious departures are in the lexicon, where a great profusion of English borrowing has occurred. This process is most noticeable and least avoidable where where American proper names or, as in the meeting described above, peculiarly American or Western concepts come into play. Such terms are likely to be rendered with the same pronunciation and intonation as in the standard American English in which most community members are fluent, with, in Newsom's words, "mental quotation marks" around them. A further distinction between the main body of Lithuanian on the part of the local community is a similar tendency in the former to import Russian borrowings in like circumstances of a lack of a Lithuanian term at hand. This tendency has been reported both by recent travelers to Lithuania and those who have become acquainted with recent emigres.

However, there is also a predilection noted by several interviewees to fit English words with Lithuanian morphology and employ them in the normal flow of a sentence. This process is most transparent in such nouns as chickenas or parking-lotas, but may also be found in more complex forms such as the diminutive boisukas 'little boy' or the gerund paparkint 'parking'. Newsom ascribes this habit to the earliest wave of immigrants to the area, who arrived in the 1930s, but some adult and adolescent respondents reported seeing this process in action more generally. It should be noted that Newsom and several other adults with whom I spoke expressed profound distaste for such language mixing, and one parent, when informed by her daughter that this mixing occurred at her summer camp, seemed rather displeased.

A linguistic domain where the influence of English is by all accounts more insidious and pervasive is that of syntax. While the typical word order of a declarative sentence in both English and Lithuanian is subject-verb-object, this ordering of elements is far more rigidly encoded in English grammar, with its lack of morphological case markers, and a similar rigidity of word order has begun to manifest itself in the Lithuanian speech of local community members. More profoundly, according to Newsom, standard Lithuanian is a highly verb-oriented language, with subordinate ideas in a sentence expressed through an elaborate system of participles and gerunds, while English, being much more noun-oriented, favors relative and other subordinate clauses. Likewise, a predilection for subordinate clauses at the expense of verbal adjectives and nouns has taken hold in American Lithuanian. Such heavily-used English subordinate clause-introductors as 'whoever', 'wherever', and 'however' have also made there presence felt, as reflected in the frequency of the corresponding Lithuanian relatives kaskas, kaskur, kaskiep, which are not commonly found in standard Lithuanian.

This syntactic shift presents itself in the shortest phrases in which the ordering of elements is different in English than in Lithuanian, such as noun genitive phrases and simple verb-object sentences. Among the criticisms Baškauskas mentioned receiving in her travels in Lithuania, where an aggressive language-purification movement currently holds sway, stemmed from her expressing the sentiment 'Thank you very much' in the Anglicized ačiu labai instead of the preferred labas ačiu.

Among the morphological and phonological changes in American Lithuanian, both Newsom and Baškauskas noted that the vocative case is on the verge of being lost completely, being replaced in most instances by the nominative. Newsom reports that there is in general a certain degree of confusion about preposition-case combinations. A striking phonological change mentioned by Newsom is a tendency to neutralize diphthongs, especially /au/ and /ei/, which frequently are pronounced [o] and [e]. Newsom and Baškauskas also both alluded to an Americanization of accentual patterns. On the other hand, one woman who recently traveled to Lithuania related that, while she had prefaced an address commemorating a school founded by her grandfather by apologizing for speaking Lithuanian "with a California accent," she was afterwards congratulated on her exceptionally pure Lithuanian pronunciation; evidently the language in Lithuania has been heavily influenced by Russian at the phonetic level, with consonants becoming harder in pronunciation. In this instance, then, the local version of the language is the more conservative.

The local Lithuanian language has also been Americanized in ways falling outside the purview of grammar. Baškauskas related that she was also chastised in Lithuania for for using the normal American pause-filler "ah/um," where standard Lithuanian employs nu for that purpose. In addition, local Lithuanian follows American English in its emotional expressivity, not only in its intonation but also in its interjections and expletives. Standard Lithuanian, on the other hand, tends to be rather flatter emotionally.

The third component of the present examination of the Lithuanian language in the Los Angeles area involved the active production of the language on the part of eleven individuals who were kind enough to translate some English sentences into Lithuanian while being tape-recorded. These sentences were in the main designed to reflect life in Los Angeles, with a particular eye toward what English borrowings might result in referring to such reflective items. Unfortunately, it is not possible at present to reproduce all of the responses given, due to the limitations of the recording equipment, the presence of background noise during some of the interviews, the tendency of some of the respondents to speak softly and rapidly, and my own far from perfect grasp of the language. While I have attempted in my transcription of the responses to adhere to standard Lithuanian orthography, I was able to do so only as far as I could follow the language. Accordingly, portions of responses of whose proper transcription I am uncertain are rendered in italics as phonetically as possible. It must also be pointed out that any seeming errors ascribed to the respondents, especially where vowels and word endings are concerned are in all likelihood due to my imperfect hearing and understanding rather than their imperfect usage.

Following, then, is a transcription of the more interesting or intelligible responses to each of the ten sentences given, with comments on the most noteworthy points of each set of responses. More general comments follow the section as a whole.

1. Where is the stop for the bus to downtown?

Most striking here is the range of derivational morphology attached to the stem sto- in naming the bus stop. One finds the respondents evenly divided on whether to mention the bus before or after the head noun, as well as disagreement on whether the genitive or dative should be used. The employment of deverbal forms seems restricted to those "closest to the source," to paraphrase Newsom. Also notable is the appearance of nugi as a pause-filler by the recently-arrived Ja, as per Baškauskas' experience in Lithuania.

2. How do I get to the airport?

Respondents were nearly evenly divided between using an impersonal construction with the dative man or the nominative pronoun aš. The most vexing problem with this set, as with the previous one, was determining whether the verbal form was as infinitive in -i or a participial form followed by the preposition i. A quite clearly said važiuot, then paused, and said važiuoti i lektuvo..., raising the possibility that the final vowel of the infinitive is in fact sometimes dropped. There is a wide range of vocabulary selection for 'airport', but only Ja seems to have happened upon a recent borrowing.

3. This food is terrible.

This sentence was chosen in the hope that it might evoke some especially expressive language, and possibly some slang. While the latter eventuality seems not to have surfaced except perhaps for the unknown šrida offered by Vas, some other items, including the verb smirda 'stinks' by Vi, the emphatic pronunciation labai neskonos by Vai, and the small laugh the word baisus provoked from L attest to the emotive potentialities of this sentence. Grammatically, the most interesting feature here is the optional status of the copula.

4. I like this apartment; I want to sign a lease/rental agreement for it.

Piesarskas and Svecevičius' Lithuanian Dictionary (1995) lists butas as an Americanism, but even the most recent arrivals to the US use the term, although Ju, the oldest interviewee, does not. A's apartmentas, of course, is certainly an English borrowing. Vi seems to assign buta to the feminine gender. For this sentence the impersonal-dative construction is favored by almost all the respondents. I, L, S, and Vai use norečiau in the subjunctive but pronounce it rather like [norečiu], apparently attesting to the reduction of /au/ in at least an unstressed, final position. C's gyvantičia may also be a subjunctive verb form.

5. He's looking for a full-time job.

This sentence was chosen because 'part-time' was specifically identified as an adjective directly borrowed into the local Lithuanian by a preliminary study conducted at the University of Southern California. Here, while S's regularos is clearly a borrowing fitted into Lithuanian morphology, the adjective 'full-time' does not make an appearance in any of the responses.

6. They live in Los Angeles.

Dobriumas et al. (1966) write, "Certain names are usually used without any attempt to adapt them to Lithuanian patterns: Atlantic City, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles... Such names are usually not inflected, but if one has to use, let us say, the locative case, one usually says, Rio de Janeiro mieste, Salt Lake City mieste, etc. (238)" C, then, gives a textbook response, and half the others likewise make no attempt to manipulate the name of the city, although Vi pronounced it "Los Ah-ngeles," suggesting the influence of Lithuanian articulation. The others do tailor the name to a Lithuanian declension, although not uniformly. I's version may also be found in the local Lithuanian-language radio broadcast on KTYM. Vas's response is striking in that it does not conform to English word order.

7. The Lithuanian school meets Saturdays at St. Casimir's Church at St. George Street and Griffith Park Boulevard.

This was certainly the least successful set of responses; while it was designed to test how local proper names are fit into Lithuanian, the sentence was long and intricate enough that respondents had difficulty remembering all of it. A, after a start, took the question sheet and read from it, and followed the English word-order strictly. Pronunciation of the street names followed English patterns, although a fair amount of language mixing within names is evident in some responses, especially that of Vas, and A's articulation of "bouljevard" seems to show a contamination by Lithuanian articulatory rules.

8. We drove/rode here from Santa Monica.

Since the name of Santa Monica easily corresponds to a Lithuanian first-declension feminine, most of the respondents viewed it as such. Perhaps for the other two, the name was so obviously local that it did not bear inflecting, although Vas for her part did put the name of Los Angeles in the locative case for sentence 6. Respondents were evenly divided on whether to put the adverb čia before or after the verb, while English would require that its counterpart occur after. The prevalence of the frequentative past tense, if I hear and understand correctly, is curious. The verb ending in some respondents appears to lack the final vowel, as may have also been the case with some infinitives in sets 1 and 2.

9. Her office is near the freeway, across from the Federal Building.

While a number of borrowings appear in this set, the most interesting item is the word greit-kelias, meaning 'freeway'; its component members are transparent enough: greitas 'quick, fast' and kelias 'road'. This compound is listed in neither Piesarskas and Sveceičius, nor in Martsinkyavitshute 1993, and one is sorely tempted to speculate that it was coined in America. Also of interest is the number of permutations that borrowing "federal" has undergone; only the most educated respondents were able to produce native words for the concept. In this rather longer sentence, as opposed to 3, the copula seems nearly mandatory.

10. I read it in an article in the Times/in the newspaper.

No attempt was made by any of the respondents to fit the local proper name "Times" into a Lithuanian structure, although Vas did inflect the name of the city, as in 6. Vas also showed the freest word-order. Neutralization of the diphthongs in the verb skaičiau was most pronounced in the youngest respondents, A, S, and Vas, where the word sounded more like [ske:čio], while the diphthongs were most clearly articulated by the oldest interviewee, Ju.

Even from this small sample, a few points are apparent. The most evident phenomenon, and the one toward which this exercise was most oriented, is that of the borrowing of English lexical items. Some patterns of borrowing emerge. As may be expected, local proper names present little if any possibility of replacement by native Lithuanian terms, and virtually no such attempts were made, beyond the occasional replacement of "Street" by gatve and the like. Somewhat more integration is apparent for terms expressing concepts which either have no direct Lithuanian counterpart, such as "federal," or where the Lithuanian term is not recalled by the speaker, as with "apartment" or "office;" in such instances, an English word may indeed be pressed into service with Lithuanian endings. While it is of course extremely dangerous to generalize on the basis of so few individuals, this latter phenomenon was more apparent in the two respondents who arrived in the US most recently. Most intriguing on the lexical level is the presence of such a term as greit-kelias 'the fast road', referring to freeways, which suggests an American coinage for itself and therefore holds out the possibility that the formation of such new lexical items is a productive process on this side of the Atlantic.

As for the other departures from standard Lithuanian mentioned above, while the interviewees' Lithuanian sentences tended to follow English word-order, the English sentences given them no doubt helped to suggest such a pattern; sets 1 and 8 indicated at least some flexibility in the ordering of elements. The sentences were of course too short to test whether subordinate clauses are in fact preferred to participles.

The sentences also did not involve to more arcane case relations. None of the respondents showed any difficulty employing the locative, genitive, dative, or accusative cases where appropriate. The prepositions that came into play were for the most part well-known ones easily recognizable as taking either the genitive or accusative. The vocative case was also not involved.

The neutralization of diphthongs mentioned by Newsom was in fact often apparent, especially among the younger speakers. A possible phonological phenomenon calling for further investigation is whether there is indeed a tendency to drop final unstressed vowels of verb forms, as appeared to take place in sets 1, 2, and 8.

Finally, as may be expected, those respondents nearer "the source," who were older or who had lived in Lithuania more recently, tended to speak more fluently and readily. Overall, however, the Lithuanian community in the Los Angeles area displays a considerable and even surprising degree of linguistic vitality, given its small size and isolated position. Its speakers show a substantial level of proficiency, fluency, and even creativity. The present study, nevertheless, cannot be considered in any way definitive or conclusive; on the contrary, much more detailed investigation of the local Lithuanian language is needed at all linguistic levels to understand how it has grown distinct from the main body of Lithuanian.

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For questions or comments regarding this page's contents, please e-mail C. Wilhelm via christopher.wilhelm@mayfieldsenior.org.