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<h2 class="">Banning Students’ Native Dialects</h2>
<p>The teaching profession in Britain, where I currently reside,
has very largely heard the sociolinguistic music: The facts of
linguistic diversity and language change are generally accepted,
teachers acknowledge most of the elementary facts about language, and
dialect differences are not viewed in the same light as hideously
disfiguring skin diseases. I had begun to think there was little danger
of the British teaching profession being disrupted by an outburst of
race or class bias masquerading as dialect purism comparable to the
awful <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Ebonics_controversy">Oakland “Ebonics” brouhaha</a> of 1996 (see my “Language That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” <em>Nature</em> <strong>386</strong>, 27 March 1997, 321-322).</p>
<p>But recently the Colley Lane Primary School in Halesowen, in the West
Midlands, sapped some of my confidence with a campaign to humiliate its
own students by denigrating their native mode of speech. The school
issued a list of <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/primaryeducation/10449119/Black-Country-phrases-banned-from-Midlands-primary-school.html">10 phrases that are to be banned from school premises</a>, banned simply because teachers think they represent features of the local dialect.</p>
<p>The dialect in question is that of the Black Country, a region of the
West Midlands to the north and west of Birmingham. You’ll be relieved
to learn that “Black” here has nothing to do with race. The area was for
a long time a center of coal mining and industrial activity, and the
associated griminess gave rise to the sobriquet.</p>
<p>Here is the list of putative local dialect features that the Colley Lane teachers have banned from their elementary school:</p>
<ol><li>“They was” instead of “they were.”</li><li>“I cor do that” instead of “I can’t do that.”</li><li>“Ya” instead of “you.”</li><li>“Gonna” instead of “going to.”</li><li>“Woz” instead of “was.”</li><li>“I day” instead of “I didn’t.”</li>
<li>“I ain’t” instead of “I haven’t.”</li><li>“Somefink” instead of “something.”</li><li>“It wor me” instead of “it wasn’t me.”</li><li>“Ay?” instead of “pardon?”</li></ol>
<p>The ignorance of English dialects displayed here is shocking. The
majority of the list covers features that are not local to the Black
Country at all.</p>
<p><em>Was</em> for <em>were</em> in the paradigm of <em>be</em> occurs in many nonstandard dialects of English, in America as well as Britain, and <em>ain’t</em> occurs in all of them.</p>
<p>The reduced-stress form of <em>you</em> that novelists write as <em>ya</em> (International Phonetic Alphabet [jə]) is not even nonstandard, only informal: In a sentence like <em>You can’t refuse a request like that, even if you want to</em>, virtually nobody pronounces the occurrences of <em>you</em> as [ju:].</p>
<p><em>Gonna</em> ([ɡənə]), as a verb of near-future temporal aspect, is
likewise found in most varieties of Standard English: Very few speakers
say [ɡoʊiŋ] in the sentence that is formally written <em>I’m going to do it</em>.</p>
<p>“Woz” seems to be just a pointless deliberate misspelling of a normal British pronounciation of <em>was</em> ([wɒz]).</p>
<p>“Somefink” for <em>something</em> is a nonstandard pronunciation, but
is just as familiar from other dialects such as Cockney as from the
Black Country: Labiodentals like [f] are substituted for interdentals
like [θ], and voiceless stops are inserted adjacent to nasals.</p>
<p>And finally, “ay” seems to be just the usual request for repetition
or confirmation that is spelled “eh” in representations of Canadian
English and pronounced [ei].</p>
<p>So nearly all of the items on the list are simply familiar features
of nonstandard dialects spoken around the world, some of them present
also in informal Standard English (the way the teachers doubtless speak
it).</p>
<p>What we are left with is the trivial matter of three pronunciations
of negated auxiliary verbs: In the Black Country, apparently, we find <em>cor</em> for <em>can’t</em>, <em>wor</em> for <em>wasn’t</em>, and <em>day</em> for <em>didn’t</em>.</p>
<p>So what’s the appropriate reaction to such small but clearly
nonstandard local dialect features? Should they be banned on school
premises?</p>
<p>Linguists have been here before. It was established in the 1960s,
through painstaking applied sociolinguistic research in Scandinavia as
well as the United States, that there is a clear outcome difference
between two strategies relating to local dialect speech: (A) strictly
banning the local dialect and insisting on the prestige standard in
class from the outset, and (B) accepting and welcoming local dialect
speech at first and then gradually transitioning students toward the
standard language over a year or two. The bottom line is that B was
found to work better than A. Children improve more, in all subjects,
under policy B. (Notice, I’m <strong>not</strong> advocating that we
should pretend nonstandard features are standard; I’m talking about what
empirical research shows is the most successful way of inculcating the
standard.)</p>
<p>Fifty years later, the Colley Lane Primary School in the English
Midlands shows us that educated people are often pretty clueless about
dialects of their native language, and that it takes a little while for
academic research on educational matters to have any real effect. In
fact, when it comes to language, the time taken for research to change
classroom culture and practices might be better measured in decades or
centuries than in years.</p><p><a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/?p=19555?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en">http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/?p=19555?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en</a><br>
</p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br>
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