Hating one's own speech

[s.t. bischoff]

Hello Eric,

I'm not sure if this is what you are interested in but...an undergraduate
student of mine did a case study within his own family regarding heritage
language loss. His family came from a Puerto Rican Spanish background and
his parents spoke Puerto Rican Spanish as their L1. He found that his
parents decided not to teach him and his siblings Spanish (the parents L1)
because they felt their variety of Spanish "wasn't the good kind" of
Spanish. The parents instead encouraged the children to learn "proper
Spanish" in school as an L2 (English being the children's L1 at this
point), which was an option for the children once they were in high school.
He wasn't able to come across anything in the literature that reflected
this, however. It is curious that the parents claim to have made a
conscious decision to not teach their variety of Spanish to their children
because they saw it as a non-prestige or low variety.

Regards,
Shannon


On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 3:10 PM, Eric Henry <Eric.Henry at smu.ca> wrote:

> A student asked me for some resources today on "people who hate how they
> speak." It got me thinking about the devaluation of nonstandard dialects or
> accents by standardizing language ideologies, and how they are adopted and
> reproduced even by the speakers themselves.
>
> A lot of the cases that came to mind though are more ambivalent than
> negative - that is, while the speakers may perceive their own speech to be
> problematic (especially in official or institutional interactions), they
> still maintain positive social value in other domains (the domestic or
> local sphere). I'm trying to think of any research on situations where
> speakers aesthetically stigmatize their own speech across the full range of
> interactional contexts. Any thoughts? Feel free to reply on or off list.
>
> Thanks,
> Eric Henry
>