Once I had the opportunity to verify by myself the real meaning of the concept of acculturation. A friend of mine that is Austrian had spent one year in Brazil, living in a southern city where some of my relatives live. We met a couple of times during her exchange study year, because she was close to my family. In the end of the program - in which there were around 15 high-school students from Austria - they all met in the airport to go back to their home country. This was the opportunity: I went to the airport to say goodbye to my friend and witnessed a surprising phenomenon.
Each of the young Austrians went to a different state of Brazil. And all of them were immersed not only in the Portuguese language, but also in the culture. I could see that they were opened to the local culture in a way that each of them reassembled the people of those different states. As I knew about the culture and accent of each of them, I was astonished by the similarities that each of them acquired, from the way of speaking to the cultural views and habits of communities in which they were immersed for one year.
Their acculturation included the taste for music, for food, the likes and dislikes about celebrations, about what to do in the free time and so on. For example, one of the girls was in a small town of the state of Minas Gerais, and she was incredibly speaking and looking like a "mineira", calm, contemplative and kind of hippie. The boy that went to a small city in the state of São Paulo, was all about rodeos and Brazilian Country music (Sertanejo). The girl that went to the northern part of Brazil, the city of Natal, had like the others her strong accent in Portuguese and was all about sports and leisure related to beaches and dunes, seafood recipes and northern songs and traditional dances.
But what most chocked and, at the same time, interested me was that each of them have had a so extreme experience of immersion and acculturation in different places that they were sure that their own experience reflected the true Brazil. I was lucky to have the chance to see them discussing about which was the real Brazil. At that moment, my friend was also observing, maybe because she had the chance to travel a little through the country and meet with people from other states, what made her more aware of the diversity within the country. Maybe her intellectual maturity and the interest in the country as a whole made her understand that each experience was unique and necessarily different from the others.
At the opposite extreme relies the Alberto experience, described by Schumann (1976) in the article Second Language Acquisition: The Pidginization Hypothesis. Schumann studies the way a 33 year old Costa Rican named Alberto relates to the American environment to where he moved. He relates mostly by denial: he does not show interest in learning English. He works and lives only with Spanish speakers and listen to Hispanic music. So, the few times she needs to speak in English, he uses a mix of works in English adding to them grammar rules from his mother tongue. Alberto evidenced very little linguistic development during the 10 months during the observation research upon him. This use of language with poor vocabulary and the overlapping of mother tongue grammar over foreign language is called Pidginization.
The Pidginization Hypothesis "predicts that where social and psychological distance prevail we will find pidginization persisting in the speech of second language learners" (p. 406).
Pidgins are always second languages, used mostly for communication. Pidginization produces an interlanguage that is simplified and reduced. However when this blend of languages becomes more complex, a creole language may occur, such as the Haitian Creole, mix of French and Western-African languages used by the African people brought to Haiti as slaves.
That's a really interesting story about the Austrian students. I hadn't ever thought of acculturation being variable but after reading this, it makes perfect sense in a country as large (in both area and population) as Brazil that the language learners could become acculturated in the unique cultures there. Comparing this to the Alberto case, maybe it helped them that these Austrian students went to a place as different and distant as Brazil. There's always been a large Spanish speaking population in California, perhaps those students felt more need to learn the target language than Alberto did. Very interesting!
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