The Nine Lives of "Linguistic Deficiency"

[Leila Monaghan]

This ended up much longer than I intended.  The executive summary is 
that there are a number of different kinds of linguistic differences 
that can be under certain circumstances be linguistic deficits, i.e. 
factors that lead to the unequal distribution of wealth and other 
resources.  These differences include biological differences between 
different language users, differences in socialization practices, 
differences in cultural practices and differences in the distribution 
of resources within larger societies.  Individuals most at risk are 
those with multiple differences from the expected norms.

As somebody who have taught linguistic anthropology to college students 
(including to would be teachers, some of my favorite students) and 
second grade, my instinct is both linguistic anthropologists and the 
education establishment miss important pieces of the puzzle.  The 
wonderful conversation here seems to be moving in the same direction 
but I’d like to step back for a minute and return to questions about 
the relationship between “language differences” and “language 
deficits,” i.e. when are language differences deficits and what were 
the mechanisms for making these differences into deficits?

Biological variation in language use:  I think it is important to 
acknowledge that biology is one factor in variation.  One of the 
clearest examples is how sign languages are the natural languages of 
Deaf people.  Despite all the efforts of a number of education systems 
to stop children from signing to each other, children gathered together 
will develop a sign language and use it with each other (this shows up 
particularly clearly in my dissertation on the New Zealand Deaf 
community but is a common story in Deaf communities around the world).  
  Children have trouble perceiving the language being used around them 
and develop forms in which they can communicate fluently. In this case, 
the biological difference is not related to “the language organ,” the 
mental ability to learn and create language but it does have a profound 
impact on the form that the languages being used takes.  While sign 
languages share many features of other languages, in other ways they 
radically different—“I see what you mean” is a literal statement for 
fluent signers.   Here “linguistic deficits” arise when this difference 
is not acknowledged and respected.  If Deaf children are expected to 
learn like hearing children, they do poorly, when they are taught in 
their own language, they do much better (one of the best examples of 
this is Barbara LeMaster’s work on the Irish Deaf education system).

There are also biological differences between people in their 
linguistic abilities.   Linguists are always careful to state “there 
are no groups of people without languages” rather than “no individuals 
without language” and it is a crucial distinction.   The idea that 
needs refuted among our students and when it shows up in wider debates, 
the mole that needs to be whacked, is that specific biological 
differences are related to racial or ethnic differences (a la Bell 
Curve).   This refutation will only to make sense to our students, some 
of who are on the front line of teaching, if we acknowledge that there 
is some biological variation among specific language users, and that on 
occasion these variations can be considered deficits.  The deficits 
that will concern them most are the ones relating to learning to read, 
particularly dyslexia.  While dyslexia does not usually affect speech 
production, it makes a major difference in relating spoken (or signed) 
language forms with written forms.  Facility with written forms is both 
what we value in universities and, to a certain extent, is judged by 
standardized testing.  While the current massive emphasis on such 
testing can distort the education process, the goal to get all children 
to the level where they can read and write fluently is absolutely 
appropriate.

Socialized differences:  The varieties of language that linguistic 
anthropologists are interested in are the socialized forms, the wide 
array of language behaviors that we learn from or develop with others.  
I think it is useful to acknowledge, however, that very different 
mental mechanisms (for lack of a better term) can produce linguistic 
results similar enough to be understandable to each other and that 
people with similar mental mechanisms can have entirely different 
language skills because of differences in their environment.   A 
remarkable example of how both the extent of differences possible and 
how these differences can be made similar shows up in the work of A.M. 
Baggs aka silentmiaow.

In “In My Language” she argues that her native language is one of 
feeling and physical sensation, and that only because she can write 
standard English is she judged as human.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc

In “Interview with Laura” she interviews her friend Laura about how she 
taught herself speech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAM95TntLTE

I’ve always thought Shirley Brice Heath’s “Children of Trackton’s 
Children” is remarkable as a case of specific upbringing negatively 
affecting the ability to use language.  In her “What No Bedtime Stories 
Mean,” a study of the different practices of white middle class, white 
working class and Black working class families, Heath relates practices 
to how children did in school.  It is a classic example of how 
community specific language practices affect school learning.  In 
“Children” she followed one of the children she had known from her work 
with the Black community, Trackton, to her lonely life in Atlanta and 
showed how her children, stuck in an apartment all day, were not 
getting socialized to the forms that she had learned herself as a 
child.  Language socialization in Trackton depended on being exposed to 
a wide variety of speakers and this system broke down when the mother 
and children were isolated from others.  The children adopted from 
Chinese or Eastern European orphanages that my sister has worked with 
offer other examples—they arrive in the United States behind their 
peers in a wide range of skills including linguistic skills.

Another aspect of socialized differences is the effect of specific 
methods of teaching on language and literacy skills.  The examination 
of specific reading methods is often left to second grade teachers and 
politicians worried about family values.  They shouldn’t be.  Every 
method has an ideology of language and specific practices attached that 
may or may not suit the linguistic skills that children have acquired 
previously.

Cultural differences:   The differences anthropologists and linguists 
are most comfortable with discussing are cultural differences or 
narrowly defined linguistic differences, differences in the structure 
of communities and languages.  Heath’s work, Ochs and Schieffelin’s 
description of white middle class, Kaluli and Samoan child rearing 
practices, and Labov’s arguments for the grammaticality of what he 
called Black English Vernacular are all classics and all shed valuable 
light on the patterning of language forms.  The ultimate explanation 
that these works give for why the kinds of systematic and normal 
variation found in the different cultures leads to unequal results 
within the schooling system is often that  “the dominant culture 
doesn’t recognize the validity of the other cultural practices.”  While 
this is part of the equation, and certainly comes into play with 
students who, for example, refuse to recognize the grammaticality of 
African American language forms, it doesn’t go nearly far enough in 
documenting the process of creating these inequalities.  For example, 
in her “What No Bedtime Story Means,” Heath doesn’t place the three 
town within the context of the rapid changes brought about by Southern 
school desegregation or the longer history of school segregation.

Socio-structural differences: I see understanding socio-structural 
differences as separate (though of course intimately related) from 
cultural culture differences because seeing cultural differences 
involves looking at specific practices within communities while 
socio-structural differences relate to the relations between groups and 
the relations of groups and individuals with larger states.  Under this 
rubric I would include the systematic oppression of groups under 
situations of genocide, slavery or apartheid.  Particularly important 
here are measures by one group to control other groups’ use of language 
including their literacy practices.  Pre-emancipation  Southern 
legislation forbidding the enslaved to read and write would be one 
example, current battles over what kinds of language can be used in 
schools in California would be another.  Work in language ideology 
often does an excellent job in analyzing these specific linguistic 
practices but to understand language use and particularly the 
acquisition of literacy skills, I think we need to look beyond just the 
linguistic practices and examine how the larger social organization, 
particularly the distribution of wealth and resources, impacts specific 
events.  Whether a family has stable housing or how regularly a child 
attends school has as much impact on that child’s education as the 
reading methods used or the larger ideologies of the school system.

Linguistic differences become deficits when they are used by societies 
to distribute resources.  Any one of the kinds of differences described 
here, biological differences, socialized differences, cultural 
differences or socio-structural differences can lead to lack of access 
to specific resources that require specific linguistic skills including 
literacy skills.  The most dangerous combination, however, is when a 
person has a number of these differences.  When I was teaching second 
grade, the student most behind all of his peers had multiple and 
disadvantageous differences—he was severely dyslexic, his mother wasn’t 
particularly literate, he was African American and more comfortable in 
African American Vernacular English rather than Standard English.  Just 
as we had gotten him to progress to writing short simple sentences and 
reading a few easy passages, his mother suffered a difficult pregnancy 
and pulled him out of school and he never returned.  I’m sure whatever 
literacy skills he did acquire would have been forgotten by the time he 
was re-enrolled in a new and different school.  An adult learner I work 
with had all the same disadvantageous differences and at the age of 32 
couldn’t read a single sentence of a reading test I gave him.

We need to expand our understanding of the social uses of language in 
both directions, to the smallest and most specific kinds of language 
practices and to the large socio-structural contexts that we all live 
within.
--
Leila Monaghan, PhD
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University
Ashton Mottier Hall
1760 E. 10th Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-9700
(812) 855-4607
monaghan at indiana.edu