[Linguistic Anthropology] Listening to Prescriptivists

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Ron,

Thanks for the description of the Ohio speaker. His comment really struck
me, the first time I watched AT. Just to make sure, is my interpretation
that he finds Midwestern speech "boring" similar to your own interpretation?
Might have relied on some paralinguistic cues for this.

We seem to be back to some of our recent threads on prescriptivism. My
posting this on our blog was partly an attempt to make some of those threads
a bit more public. Of course, I have no claim of being representative of the
list. But shifting these threads to the blog could allow others to enter the
discussion.

BEV deniers seem to abound, especially among those prescriptivists whose job
implies some evaluation of speech patterns. A friend of mine, an
African-American professor from Howard, spent a good amount of time
complaining to me about African-American speech and almost got angry at my
suggestion that BEV might be as worthy a language variety as any other. The
similarities with Bill Cosby's attitude are striking.
In fact, there's surely an ethnography of an African-American community
which shows how this specific attitude toward language is embedded in
cultural and social processes. It even reminds me of the intellectualism of
Bop/Cool Jazz by opposition to Louis Armstrong's Vaudeville-linked Hot Jazz.
Some African-Americans still want the world to know they are brilliant. For
those who already know so, it's hard to understand the attitude.
Maybe I'm being too Becker/labeling/stigma, these days.

To me, what's disconcerting is that I'm convinced that teaching people to
distinguish appropriate contexts for different language varieties is a
better strategy than trying to change people's language habits. Should look
for references but a friend of mine once told me about a French teacher in
Southern France who, instead of telling students how to speak "proper
French" (or Touraine French), teaches Standard French as something of a
second language. Given the semi-diglossic situation among Québécois, I've
always been convinced that such a strategy would work well, here.

Thanks again!

On 3/29/07, Kephart, Ronald <rkephart at unf.edu> wrote:
>
>  On 3/29/07 12:15 PM, "Alexandre" <enkerli at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Why do Michiganders think they speak the most "correct" form of English in
>
> the United States? This one sounds quite close to a comment made by a
> Midwesterner (probably a Michigander, actually) in the movie American
> Tongues <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303637/><http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303637/>. Can't remember the exact
> quote (maybe it's YouTubed) but the gist of it was that "In the Midwest,
> the
> way we speak is pretty boring." Yes, something close to Standard American
> English. But not as an elevated dialect of the language. More as an
> umarked
> variety with nothing fun to it.
>
> Coincidentally, I just showed this film in my class. The speaker is from
> Ohio, and also describes his speech as "middle-of-the-road, straight out
> of
> the dictionary, no accents, no colloquialisms," and so on. Of course as
> you
> suggest, the distinguishing feature of this dialect is that there are no
> "marked" features, such as you find in Appalachian, or African American,
> or
> some varieties of new York or New England. "Standard" English is really
> defined by what it lacks, rather than by what it actually is. If it lacks
> rules that tense the vowel in *egg* or that delete r's in *park the car*,
> it's
> more likely to sound "standard."
>
> This semester by the way I'm struggling with an African American student
> who
> is one of the Black English deniers. She virtually took over my class to
> denounce our workbook's suggestion that "*Is it *a Miss Smith in this
> office?"
> means "*Is there...*"  She's a non-traditional student in the College of
> Education, which means she is or is destined to be a teacher. We're all
> doomed.
>
> Ron
>



-- 
Alexandre
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
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