Heinz Kloss revisited: National Socialist ideologue or champion of language-minority rights? - by T.G. Wiley in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2002, 154, 83-97
I came across this interesting article from T.G. Wiley. It’s about the work of Heinz Kloss – a prominent figure on the history of bilingualism and language policy in the U.S. You may have heard about Kloss’s major work, The American Bilingual Tradition (1977, 1998).
Heinz Kloss is one of the major scholars on American minority language policy, language rights, and language maintenance. His contribution includes a detailed account of language laws, territorial language policies, and other language-related primary data. Kloss’s scholarly work spans from the early 1930’s to 1987 (ended posthumously).
He was an interesting figure. He was born and raised in Germany then in the early 1930s he traveled to the U.S. and studied the language practices of German American immigrants. Later he expanded his scope of interest to other immigrant groups and language communities in the U.S.
Though the importance of his scholarly work is unquestionable due to the wealth of primary data he collected, his theoretical perspective and ideological standing has been extensively critiqued. This critique is typically based on two grounds: Kloss’s typology of multilingualism and his ideological perspective. In his article Wiley comments on the critique of Schiffman and Hutton. Schiffman analyzed Kloss’s typology and found that though Kloss did identify a number of linguistic variables relevant for language-policy, his perspective lacked predicative value. That is, Kloss failed to explain whether multilingualism is the outcome of the language policy, or if it develops contrary or independently of the policy (Schiffman, 1998).
Hutton’s analyzed the work of Kloss under National Socialism (the Nazi era). Hutton argues that it is important to consider a scholar’s ideological orientation since it greatly affects his/her alleged neutrality of scholarship (Wiley 2002). Hutton found that Kloss was affiliated with the German Foreign Institute during the Nazi era. In fact, Kloss provided information to the Third Reich on the number and language practices of German Americans in 1936-37. These were the years when the German Reich was interested in reuniting its people so they needed such information about Germans living outside the Reich.
Though later in his life Kloss distanced himself from the National Socialist period, Hutton argues that his early ideological perspectives can be traced in his later works.
What is striking in Kloss’s work is his distinction between racial minority and language minority status. Kloss argued that discrimination against language minorities was typically racial, not linguistic – while today it is widely understood that linguistic discrimination is connected to race, class, and other social discrimination (Wiley, 2002). That is, linguistic discrimination is never just about the language.
In the same line of thought, Kloss argued that language minority groups in the U.S. generally enjoyed tolerance-oriented policies toward language use and maintenance, and restrictive policies were only “isolated instances”. Clearly, Kloss focused on German immigrants, therefore he did not consider other people who had to face language and racial discrimination. Also, Kloss held the individual – not the state - accountable for heritage language maintenance: “… the non-English ethnic groups in the United States were Anglicized not because of nationality laws which were unfavorable toward their languages but in spite of nationality laws which were relatively favorable to them” (as cited in Wiley, 2002). He did not blame the state.
Maybe Kloss was right when he said that he was a “complicated young man with a complicated fate, in a complicated time”. I tend to believe that he remained the same in his later years. Regardless his past and his ideological orientation, as Wiley puts it, Kloss’s was an outstanding scholar because of the wealth of information he provided on the U.S. bilingual tradition. I highly recommend Wiley’s article. It is a very interesting reading and it gives a better understanding of how the current view of the U.S. bilingual tradition evolved throughout the past decades.
