Hating one's own speech

[daria schwalbe]

Hi Eric,
'hate' is a very strong word. I did come across a variety of negative
attitudes expressed towards ones own language during my own feldwork among
the Yupik (eskimo) population of Chukotka (Siberia) and Alaska. Usually
these expressed discoursively in phrases which outline one form of speaking
being better, richer, more correct or, as Shannon writes, 'proper'  way of
speaking than the other. Explicitely, the negative attitudes towards
ones language (rather than way of speaking) are expressed through claims of
it being unneccessary, unsuitable, slow, hard lto learn, etc. There are
also cases of mockery of ones way of speaking (particular accent),  but
never directly "i hate the way i speak". i think you might find some
interesting cases in studies on urban migrant socieies, and also maybe
analysis of rap-texts. cheers


2013/5/17 s.t. bischoff <bischoff.st at gmail.com>

> 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
> >
>