Ethnic Identity

 Because the US is a melting pot, an awful lot of us have a distinct ethnic identity related to our ancestry.  African-Americans of course refer back to their ancestors who were captured in Africa and brought to the Americas as slaves (though there are certainly some, like President Obama, who have very recent African heritage, but no ancestors who were slaves in the Americas).  Irish-Americans celebrate Saint Patrick's day, Mexican Americans (and those who like tequila) celebrate Cinco de Maio, and so on.

You can now get your DNA analyzed for further details on your ancestry.  I, not to my surprise, tested out at close to 3/4 English, with the rest a mix of German, French, Dutch, Irish, and Scandinavian.  Interestingly, I am not considered "English-American."  Although those who might be called English-Americans are not the majority in this country, they were the majority among our founders, and are still considered the default. ("We're real Americans, and everybody else is a modified-American!" Yeah. Right. Not in my view.)

But ethnic identity is more than one's DNA.  A big part of it is language and religion and food and customs.  People in the Middle Ages also had ethnic identity, though because they were exposed to other sorts of folks less than we are the topic came up less often.

The French in the Middle Ages liked to say that the French were best (big surprise) and mocked the Germans for not being as good knights or fighters as they considered themselves to be.  England after the Norman Conquest had clear demarcations between the French and the English (some of these "French" were genetically half Scandinavian, but that didn't count).  Italians always knew they were not German, and asserted Germans were bad.  Heretics, non-Christians (especially Muslims), and Greek Orthodox Christians were considered the Other by the Latin Christian majority.  Jewish communities focused on their religion and their family customs to maintain themselves among a sea of non-Jews, as they indeed have for three thousand years.

Language was one of the big markers of identity, as indeed it still is now.  The Norman French may have had a lot of Scandinavian DNA, but they were French because they spoke French.  Each region of medieval Europe had its own language.  Portuguese was like (but unlike) Spanish, which had similarities to Catalan, which was related to the Occitan of southwest France, which had similarities both to the French around Paris and to Provençal, spoken in southeastern France, which was similar to northern Italian.

Italian itself had (and has) many variants.  Sicilian is still almost its own language.  Latin, the language of the area around Rome (Latium), was the language spread by the Roman legions, but other parts of the long Italian peninsula had been speaking their own version of proto-Italian for centuries.  Hence Portuguese, Provençal, and the rest grew out of Latin in different ways, but the various regions of Italy had a long head start in diversification.

Then there's German.  The Rhine was and is the theoretic dividing line between Romance languages and Germanic languages, as it was the theoretic boundary of the Roman Empire of antiquity, but in practice the line was anything but sharp.  Alsace, now part of France and on the French side of the Rhine, went back and forth between school children being taught in French or in German in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as control of the region shifted back and forth.  Now Alsatian kids go to school in French but usually hang out with their friends in Alsatian, a German dialect.

Although the French of France today is derived ultimately from Latin, those who live in the modern French republic (and have ancestors going way, way back there) have Celtic ancestors from pre-Roman and Gallo-Roman times, and Germanic ancestors in the Franks who became the rulers of the region in  late antiquity.  The Franks gave their name to the country but dropped their German language like a hot potato once they settled in the Roman Empire.

Medieval Germany, like modern Germany, had dialects of its own.  Dutch (and Letzburg, still spoken on the streets of Luxembourg) and Anglo-Saxon are Germanic languages, as are all the Scandinavian languages except for Finnish.  Friend or foe could be determined in part by whether one was fluent in the right language.

Regional dialects are strongest if people don't move around much.  The "My Fair Lady" story is predicated on even different regions of London having distinctive accents.  Even now in Britain some regional dialects are considered low-class. In the US regional dialects are rapidly disappearing, due both to population movement and to people all watching the same movies, TV shows, and Tik-Tok videos in different parts of the country.

If the regional dialects are fading, there is still an assertion that one's heritage and food and way of life are the best.  One can get Maine lobster in Alabama and southern fried chicken in Maine, but everyone will tell you that those who "appropriated" their cuisine did a bad job with it.  This doesn't keep people from enjoying the ethnic dishes of other countries.  Pizza demonstrates that Anglo-Americans may have been instrumental in the US's founding, but Italian-Americans are keeping it going.

And I haven't even mentioned the indigenous Americans.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval language and social structures, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.