[lg policy] Zimmerman trial: Rachel Jeantel's Language is English =?windows-1252?Q?=97_?=It's Just Not Your English

Tue Jul 9 14:44:08 UTC 2013

Rachel Jeantel's Language is English — It's Just Not Your English

 <http://www.reddit.com/submit>
771<http://www.policymic.com/articles/52697/rachel-jeantel-s-language-is-english-it-s-just-not-your-english/685823#comment-anchor>
 [image: rachel, jeantels, language, is, english, —, its, just, not, your,
english,]

Rachel Jeantel's Language is English — It's Just Not Your English

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 inquired<http://www.hlntv.com/article/2013/06/27/will-rachel-jeantels-testimony-determine-george-zimmerman-trial-day-4-fate?hpt=hp_c3>,
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.

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.

Some have rightly denounced the racism implicit in Jeantel’s
questioning, admittedly
unknown to West, who may well have been confused about her linguistic
background. But even well-meaning commentators aiming to vindicate Jeantel
have not quite gotten it right. Salon’s Brittney Cooper
wrote<http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/did_anyone_really_hear_rachel_jeantel/>that
Jeantel speaks her own “idiosyncratic” idiom that combines “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 — you might argue even
reinforces — the real injustice at the heart of her cross-examination.

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 explained<http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/28/rachel-jeantel-explained-linguistically/?iid=op-article-mostpop1>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.

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 — the practice of
prescribing rules governing language use that do not reflect the way that
people speak in practice — 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.

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.

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.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/52697/rachel-jeantel-s-language-is-english-it-s-just-not-your-english/685823

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its
members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or
sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write
directly to the original sender of any offensive message.  A copy of this
may be forwarded to this list as well.  (H. Schiffman, Moderator)

For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to
https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/
listinfo/lgpolicy-list
*******************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20130709/bcd2a073/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list