Linguistic Natural Selection
The evolution of San Diego's language
By Griffin Flowers
By Griffin Flowers
Walk around San Diego and you will see a sunny city situated in the coastal desert region; it is currently home to nearly one and a half million people. Walking around today’s San Diego, the first and most common language you will notice those one and a half million people using is English. You will hear people using it to speak with their friends, families, and coworkers; you will see it on billboards and advertisements; and you will read it on signs and in local newspapers. According to “Languages Fill the Melting Pot,” a Union Tribune article written by Leslie Berestein, Spanish is second to English in San Diego and approximately 661,000 San Diegans speak it at home today. That’s nearly half of all San Diego’s residents. Today, you will hear Spanish spoken in public while walking around in San Diego, though not as commonly as English. You will also see it written on some signs, though it’s almost always underneath an English translation. You might also hear some of the less prominent, yet still present languages of twenty-first-century San Diego, such as Tagalog, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Korean.
It is difficult for some people, especially those who, like me, don’t regularly speak another language in their everyday life, to imagine a San Diego without English or Spanish or the other languages that have become so familiar to today’s residents. If people such as myself are not frequently exposed to a large variety of languages, it’s easy to forget that English isn’t the only language here. However, English, easily the most used language in modern San Diego, is relatively new to the San Diego area; it’s been here for barely more than two centuries. Spanish has been here a little longer, but not by much. The truth is that a variety of languages, not just the ones we see and hear today, have made their way to San Diego throughout history. Some have risen to prominence, both in the city and in the world, while others have plummeted to extinction, or very close to it. To gain an understanding of the languages that San Diego has been home to over time, I started at the beginning. I searched for the very first people known to reside in what would become the city we know today. This brought me to a timeline on the San Diego History Center’s website that gives an overview of the major events that have occurred in San Diego as far back as historical studies can tell us, including the arrival of different cultural groups in San Diego. The first people to inhabit the land that is now San Diego migrated as hunting people from Northeast Asia. They travelled along the Bering Strait, then went down the West Coast of North America, and finally arrived in San Diego approximately 20,000 years ago. With these first occupants came the first languages to be spoken in San Diego. The earliest language known to be used in San Diego is Yuman, also known as Quechan, which was spoken by a group living in what is today known as La Jolla about twenty-one centuries ago in 1000 BCE. To gain more information on Yuman (as well as the other Native American languages spoken in San Diego), I consulted a website called “Native Languages of the Americas”. The website, run by a linguist and a linguistic preservationist, is dedicated to the continuation and survival of Native American languages through education. It writes about several different languages that were and still are spoken by the indigenous people of North and South America and the groups and tribes that they come from. Through this website I learned that Yuman is not commonly spoken in the present-day; only about three hundred people, most of them elders, still speak it. Around the same time that Yuman was being spoken in La Jolla, other tribes called Diegueño and Kamia were living in central and eastern San Diego. The Diegueño and Kamia, more commonly known as the Kumeyaay, spoke the Kumeyaay language. Like Yuman, Kumeyaay has lost much of its prominence as a language and is only spoken by a couple hundred people in southern California and Mexico. By the eleventh century, the Kumeyaay had moved and were living in what is now Mission Valley, San Diego River Valley, and Ensenada. Yuman groups had since relocated to northern San Diego, along with a group of Shoshoneans. The Shoshoneans spoke the language Shoshoni, or Shoshone. Shoshoni speakers are more common and the language is less endangered than Kumeyaay or Yuman; there are more than a thousand speakers and it is being taught to children, meaning it is not likely to go extinct any time soon. There were also three additional cultural groups (and languages) in the San Diego area at this time. Using a map on display at the Museum of Man in Balboa Park, I was able to find where in the San Diego area these three tribes were living. The Luiseño lived in today’s North County and spoke Luiseño, a language now nearly extinct and only spoken by a few dozen elders. The Cupeño inhabited land near Warner Springs and spoke Cupeño, a language, like Luiseño, that today has only a few dozen elder speakers. The Cahuilla lived east of Mount Palomar and spoke Cahuilla. Cahuilla is another language close to extinction and has even less speakers than Luiseño or Cupeño, most of them also elders. It was not until the sixteenth century that the first speakers of a European language arrived in San Diego, beginning with the Spaniard Juan Cabrillo arriving in Point Loma by boat in 1542. The arrival of Cabrillo also marked the arrival of the Spanish language in San Diego. Spanish spread in San Diego as more speakers arrived in the newly conquered land and Spanish missions were established. Since its introduction to San Diego and the rest of the Americas, Spanish has evolved into a different dialect; it arrived in the form of the European dialect of Spain and has since developed into the Hispanic dialect that inhabits San Diego and many other parts of the Americas today. Spanish remains a prominent language in San Diego and its culture to this day, with nearly half of its population using it on a regular basis.
After Spanish came to San Diego, other languages from Europe and Asia began arriving in the area over the next couple of centuries. Russians began colonizing the northwest coast in 1768, but their language has not had a profound effect on San Diego or its history. French ships arrived in San Diego in 1786. The English language, now the most prominent, commonly spoken language in San Diego, arrived with the British by boat in 1793 as well as from the United States in 1800, also by boat. English spread in San Diego and the rest of the west coast as routes were established to the area from the other side of the United States, beginning with Jedidiah Smith’s route from Salt Lake City in 1826, which made it much easier for people from the U.S. to travel to San Diego. More Americans began moving and migrating to San Diego in the 1840’s, sparked by the Gold Rush, which brought many to the west coast in the hopes of finding gold. San Diego was made a part of the United States when California was made a state; many of its residents were English-speakers by this time. There was also a population of people who spoke Chinese who, by 1875, were prominent enough to establish Chinatown in the San Diego area. The Vietnamese language also came to San Diego much more recently, when refugees from Vietnam were being housed in San Diego beginning in 1975. So while you're walking and looking around the San Diego of 2014, keep in mind that the words and languages you hear are not, never have been, and never will be set into this place forever. Languages travel with people and with cultures. In addition, they go through their own forms of evolution and natural selection. Some languages spread and grow while others are pushed aside and left to shrink into near obsolescence. |