The Nine Lives of "Linguistic Deficiency"

[Kephart, Ronald]

On 9 Feb 2007, , at 9:19 PM, Harold F. Schiffman wrote:

> ...Whether we like it or not, knowledge and skill with "standard" language and
> orthography has "cash value", and trying to teach teachers-to-be that it's
> just "all ideology" won't get far with them.
> 

This issue is somewhat parallel to what I do with the "race" concept in my
classes. I deconstruct the biological notion of subspecies, showing that
it's not a biologically valid taxonomic category. Then I point out that
"race" is another term for "subspecies"; therefore, "races" are not valid
biological taxa either. Human "races" then are elements of of a folk model
of human variation that reflect socially and culturally constructed
ideologies, if you will (cliché), but that are not biologically real.

Having said that (cliché encore), I then process to point out that races,
despite not being biologically real, do have real-life consequences for the
real lives of the real people assigned to them (in the US, by the
hypodescent rule). These consequences may begin before birth, with mothers¹
systemically different likelihood of access to adequate prenatal care, and
continue on thruout life.

I think a similar case can be made for language difference. The consequences
of being raised speaking a non-standard dialect are real, even if the
alleged differences in linguistic worthiness between it and the standard are
not. The difference of course is that for the most part you can¹t really
learn your way out of a hypodescent group, while you can learn any number of
new dialects and languages for use in the appropriate contexts. But only to
a degree, because as I think Walt Wolfram and others have suggested,
linguistic discrimination is mostly not really about language; it¹s about
the people we dislike or are suspicious of for whatever reason. Walt
presents this  nicely in American Tongues: we favor urban folk over rural
ones; middle class over working class or poor; ³white² over ³black² (heaven
help you if you¹re a poor, rural African American).

So what I try to convey in my classes is that we use dialect as metonyms for
the people who speak them. We can¹t (usually) say we don¹t like you because
you¹re black, or from the Appalachians, so we say we like you but you just
need to learn to talk like us for us to fully accept you, build decent
schools for your children, pay you adequately for your labor, and so on.

Years ago, when foreign languages were still housed along with English here,
we were searching for a new French professor. One of the applicants was an
African American woman from somewhere in the south. During her campus visit
a number of people spoke with her in French and certified that she was
near-native, with perhaps a touch of West African (she had studied in one of
the Francophone countries). Toward the end of her interview with the search
committee, which of course had to be in English, she asked whether ³you have
anything else you want to aks me.² Holy crap, she said ³aks²! The white male
English profs didn¹t like that at all, and altho she was interviewing to
teach French, not English, she got (dare I say it) the axe. As the lone
linguist I was outraged, but at that point in my career my outrage counted
for nothing.

So... Who is at fault here: the candidate for saying ³aks² instead of ³ask,²
or the sublimely ignorant professors of English who should have known that
³aks² is a dialectal variation of ³ask² (and a historically prior one at
that!), not an index of some kind of intellectual or moral incapacity? And I
should mention that this was an English department chaired at the time by a
person from India whose Indian English was virtually unintelligible!

Frankly, in my own small and feeble way, I¹d rather side with the wronged
candidate. But I do try to make this position clear to my students.

Sorry for the meandering...

Ron



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