Narratives of Immigration and Language Loss

Thompson draws on scholarship from linguistic anthropology, education, history, and psychology to analyze her interviews with 35 German Americans (ages 61–95) from two rural Midwestern counties about their early lives. She asked her subjects about their families of origin and ethnic and linguistic identity, and how their own origin narratives influence their views about current immigration from Latin America. The 1918 mob lynching of Robert Prager, a young German immigrant accused of having socialist beliefs, in Collinsville, Illinois, thirty miles from the communities of Thompson's study, serves as the poignant opening of the brief historical overview, which explains the dramatic cultural losses as a result of involuntary linguistic and cultural assimilation. As the granddaughter of a German American from Clinton County (the locale of her study), Thompson had unique access to her subjects. She uses her position as both insider and outsider to understand the connections between past anti-German hysteria and hostility against immigrants today. She offers an effective critique of the “monolingual paradigm” in American schools and calls for more “intergenerational transmission.” Based on the author's PhD dissertation in education, this study will be an important resource in a wide range of disciplines. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.