Icca

This has been bumping around in my head for a while, but I've only been pushed to write about it today.

Everyone speaks a different dialect, and everyone is fluent in that dialect.* Everyone. Things that sound funny in one dialect, such as what we consider our standard dialect, are not necessarily "ignorant" or "uneducated."

We decide that people are uneducated when they speak with a heavy non-standard English accent because we teach our standard dialect in schools, and we use it in formal writing. However, people who have strong identities with their home region or culture are more likely to avoid using the standard dialect, even though they may have learned that their way of speaking is "incorrect." I'm not going to touch on all assumptions made based on dialect, and there are quite a few, but rather focus on issues of intelligence and education levels as percieved by dialect.

I am writing mostly on classism and racism in regard to dialect, and the US Politics section is more of an introduction, so if you're unfamiliar with US politics, you're not missing much if you skip it, but it should be quite accessible.

re: US Politics

One of the biggest things that got on my nerves during the presidential election was how even the people defending Sarah Palin from sexist attacks, even though they did not support her politics (which is honorable and I really praise everyone who stood up for a candidate they did not support in the face of unfair treatment), still made fun of her accent. And okay, perhaps that's not one of the biggest things, but it did bother me a lot. She speaks her local dialect. She is not from the midwest. She sounds a little funny to you. She sounds normal to herself and everyone around her. It's othering to make her somehow less for speaking the way everyone in her language community speaks. Edit: I've been corrected on this. Please see the comments.

This same attack is used on Bush. Goodness knows he makes a number of linguistic errors (easy to find on the internets!) but his pronunciation of 'nuclear' is a normal dialectal thing. I used to say it that way, which is odd considering where I grew up -- I'm pretty sure I picked it up from TV -- and I know plenty of people who pronounce it that way. It's just a dialect thing, not an ignorance thing. People transpose letters in words all the time -- consider "comfortable." In all dialects I've heard spoken this word is usually pronounced "comfterble," even though the r should happen before the t! (Not that pronouncing it 'com-fort-a-ble' is wrong in those dialects, it just sounds stilted.)

Politicians are expected to take on what was basically arbitrarily decided as the standard dialect. Bush and Palin are supposed to speak with a perfect midwest accent. I feel like I remember Bill Clinton switching between accents, too, but I could be mistaken. This is 'normal' and 'right' but if a politician from the northeast were to assume a southern drawl when visiting Texas, people would see that as 'fake' and even 'condescending.' This says a lot about how we feel about class, and how language and dialect determines which class you belong in. If you're not from the right region, you'd better educate yourself on the right way of speaking or else you're a dimwit!

Which segues nicely into the next section:

re: classism and racism

Generally speaking, most people feel it's wrong to make fun of a foreign-born person in the United States for having an accent. However, we do not seem to have a problem with labeling people uneducated or stupid for the same, provided they were born on US soil.

How many times have you heard that Ebonics isn't English? That black people just need to educate themselves and speak real English? Or, as I saw in a comment at Hestika today, a particular word is pronounced a certain way or else, where the particular word in question is a common example from BVE (Black Vernacular English)? Or even, "if they want to speak to me, they can speak real English?" I've heard these more times than I care to, and while I always speak up -- and use my credentials as a linguist to back me up -- it doesn't seem to stem the tide very well at all!

BVE and Standard English are both languages/dialects that have grammatical rules for sentence structure and pronunciation. But they are more different from one another than Spanish and Portuguese. What is perfectly grammatical in one is highly ungrammatical in another. Moreover, what is the prestige language in one language community might not be so prestigious in another. (Consider why people either make conscious efforts to change their dialect if they move to another part of the country or why they don't. Consider why they revert back to their native dialect when visiting home or why they don't.)

And sure, going through the school system, you're going to get the standard dialect taught to you, or at least you'll be taught in the standard dialect, and you'll hear it on the television. But imagine how hard it would be to learn to read and write and perform in school in any area if you were in a classroom where everyone was speaking a language related to yours, but still a different language! So here it's cyclical in nature. We say that people who speak this "language of the ghettos" are uneducated, we other them. But we don't teach to them, we teach at them, and we don't give people a social reason to want to learn, at least not one that makes sense during your first grade English classes.

But more than that, more than just which dialect is prestigious, which dialect will get you better jobs, it's a form of discrimination based on socio-economic class. It's not really a region thing, as communities all over the US speak BVE or a form of it. It's based not on the region where you grow up, but the conditions in which you grew up -- an inner-city white child is as likely to learn it as an inner-city black child, but it's still associated with blackness, and in turn associated with ignorance, poverty, lack of education, and a lack of a will to learn.

The difference between a dialect and a language is purely political. Serbia and Croatia basically speak the same language with a few minor difference, but their languages are considered different languages because there is a country's border between them. Spanish and Portuguese are more similar than standard English and BVE but no one questions that those are different languages. Yet China has mutually unintelligible dialects, but these are dialects because they fall within the same political borders. It's the same with English, and the sooner we realize that the sooner we can properly communicate with one another. And I think we all have a lot to learn.


*I understand that there are a few, very rare cases of a person who ends up switching languages while very young and as a result is a native speaker of neither, and thus does not have native fluency in any language. None of the examples in my post deal with people who would fall into that category.

I also am generalizing quite a bit and do not mean to speak for any individual's particular circumstances.