Prescriptivism

[Mai Kuha]

Beverly Flanigan wrote:

> Thus they sneer at locals who pronounce the next town [lENGk at st@r]
> instead of [laenkaest at r].  Now you've got me on a roll, and a bit
> off topic.  But this rigid prescriptivist mind-set is hard to
> change!

(I'm now departing from the original topic entirely, but...) This is
something I've been thinking about more than usual, without making any
progress, since July. At the time, I was still living in Bloomington,
Indiana, leisurely finishing a load of laundry one sunny Sunday;
meanwhile, across town, Benjamin Smith was fatally shooting Won-Joon Yoon,
driven by race-based hatred. Later I found out that Smith lived two blocks
up the street from me, so this act of violence was closer to home than
most.

I read in the paper that Smith had claimed that the source of his hate was
having had to take a course on the Holocaust; reportedly he resented being
made to feel guilty. All this leads me to wonder: could there be potential
Benjamin Smiths in my Language & Society courses? Is there some way for us
to be more effective in getting across the point about linguistic
discrimination-- or are their minds already made up? I have always assumed
that informing people about cultural and linguistic diversity helps them
become more open-minded, but now I realize I have no evidence for this
assumption. What do we really know about the attitudinal effects of
courses like these?

-Mai
_____________________________________________
Mai Kuha                  mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu
Department of English     (765) 285-8410
Ball State University