<div dir="ltr"><h2 class="" id="header-title">Rachel Jeantel's Language is English — It's Just Not Your English
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Rachel Jeantel's Language is English — It's Just Not Your English </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span>Last week, Don West, defense attorney
in the George Zimmerman murder trial, asked friend of Trayvon Martin and
case witness Rachel Jeantel a strange question. “Are you claiming in
any way that you don’t understand English?” he </span><a target="_blank" href="http://www.hlntv.com/article/2013/06/27/will-rachel-jeantels-testimony-determine-george-zimmerman-trial-day-4-fate?hpt=hp_c3"><span>inquired</span></a><span>,
though she had been answering his questions in fluent English
throughout much of the previous day. Jeantel, who was born and raised in
Miami, insisted that she did, but West wasn’t convinced. He asked her
once more whether perhaps, because her first language was Creole
(transmitted to her by her Haitian mother), she had any trouble
understanding English.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>West was not alone. In the days that followed
Jeantel’s testimony, the internet was ablaze with comments about her
“poor English,” some of them willfully mean-spirited and others
prescribing well-intentioned solutions to the perceived problem of
widespread ungrammatical English. Well-intentioned or not,
ungrammaticality is not a problem that Jeantel had. We need to look
elsewhere to understand the strange phenomenon of being accused of not
speaking your own language.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Some have rightly denounced the racism implicit in Jeantel’s questioning, </span><span>admittedly unknown to West, who may well have been confused about her linguistic background</span><span>. But even well-meaning commentators aiming to vindicate Jeantel have not quite gotten it right. Salon’s Brittney Cooper </span><a target="_blank" href="http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/did_anyone_really_hear_rachel_jeantel/"><span>wrote</span></a><span> that Jeantel speaks her own “idiosyncratic” idiom that combines “</span><span>the
three languages – Hatian Kreyol (or Creole), Spanish, and English —
that she speaks.” Well, not exactly. Virtually anyone who was born and
raised in the United States can speak perfect English without
interference from any other language, no matter where their parents came
from. The suggestion that Jeantel’s language is peppered with influence
from Haitian Creole and Spanish implies that there is something off
about her English. There’s nothing wrong with speaking imperfect
English, but that doesn’t describe Rachel Jeantel, and to suggest
otherwise misses </span><span>— </span><span>you might argue even reinforces </span><span>— </span><span>the real injustice at the heart of her cross-examination.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>That there is nothing incorrect about the way Jeantel
speaks is not so much an opinion as an undisputed fact that any
authority on language could readily point out. I breathed a sigh of
relief last weekend when linguist John McWhorter </span><a target="_blank" href="http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/28/rachel-jeantel-explained-linguistically/?iid=op-article-mostpop1"><span>explained</span></a><span>
that Jeantel’s “English is perfect. It’s just that it’s Black English.”
What McWhorter calls “Black English” is a dialect spoken by millions of
Americans, and decades of linguistics research, much of it compiled by
McWhorter himself, attests that it is a robust dialect like any other,
with an internally consistent grammar and vocabulary. Many of those
millions of speakers speak exclusively African American English in their
communities, only to be taught from their earliest interactions with
American public institutions, as schoolchildren, that their dialect is
ungrammatical.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Jeantel’s English is not any more or less grammatical
than the Standard American variety spoken by Zimmerman’s attorney, but
unlike the defense attorney, she did not have the advantage of speaking
the dialect that is sanctioned by America’s dominant social stratum.
Linguists like John McWhorter fervidly oppose linguistic prescription </span><span>— </span><span>the practice of prescribing rules governing language use that do not reflect the way that people speak in practice </span><span>— </span><span>which
they hold to baselessly and arbitrarily privilege certain varieties of
speech over others. Linguistic prescription may be baseless, but it is
not arbitrary at all: Prescriptivism systematically and invariably
privileges the language of the already powerful.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the
Trayvon Martin case, which thrust the persistence of racism in America
uncomfortably into the spotlight, has continued to clumsily illustrate
the structural disadvantages encountered by millions of black Americans.
African Americans are victim not just to gross racial profiling, as was
Trayvon Martin, but also to linguistic discrimination, a
little-understood prejudice that springs directly from linguistic
prescription. Some forms of prescription, like rules against split
infinitives and ending sentences in prepositions, illogically impose
grammatical rules that do not naturally occur in language, but are, on
some level, harmless. Others, like our culture’s categorical repudiation
of African American English, have social ramifications easily as severe
as racial profiling. It can be awfully difficult to excel in school, to
succeed in the professional world, or to deliver credible testimony in
court when virtually every institution in your society operates with the
assumption that your language is fundamentally incorrect and takes it
as an indicator of your intelligence.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10a94dfb-a50a-211e-5563-87ce5a1d04c5"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10a94dfb-a50a-211e-5563-87ce5a1d04c5"></span><span id="docs-internal-guid-10a94dfb-a50a-211e-5563-87ce5a1d04c5">Many
have already pointed out that Rachel Jeantel was wrongly cast as
unreliable and combative last week because of her race, gender, and
size. We need to add language to that list. It is not because of her
flawed English, as some have suggested, but in spite of her perfectly
articulated English that Jeantel was discriminated against. Linguistic
discrimination is just one of many mechanisms that systemically
disadvantage African Americans in the U.S., but it is a crucial one.
There are few things so disempowering as being silenced for the language
that you speak. </span></span></p> <br></div><a href="http://www.policymic.com/articles/52697/rachel-jeantel-s-language-is-english-it-s-just-not-your-english/685823">http://www.policymic.com/articles/52697/rachel-jeantel-s-language-is-english-it-s-just-not-your-english/685823</a><br clear="all">
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