Hating one's own speech

Fri May 17 19:57:56 UTC 2013

A note on Galey's perspective, specifically "linguistic insecurity":
In my book "Hebrew and Zionism", I discuss different subject positions
of the early Hebrew speaker. Here is a short excerpt from the
"Afterword":
-----------
Different subject positions of the speaker of Hebrew have been discussed in this book: that of the proud speaker at the beginning of the genesis of Hebrew and that of the insecure speaker once the language was standardized. Both were instrumental in the ideology of the revival of Hebrew. The former enabled people to make the crucial step of changing their language, the other provided the rationale for the continued guidance of the speakers by ideological authorities and interests. This subject position has been harmonious with political subject positions of a person ready to accept the authority of national priority with little questioning.

The subject position of the insecure speaker is less dominant today. More and more authors openly ignore prescriptive rules, and the language of actual discourse, both official and intimate, gets broader representation, without the inhibitions of earlier generations. The polarization between the language authorities and the speakers is radicalized. The insecure speaker of olden days, still surviving and being reproduced, is now challenged by an emergent uninhibited speaker of a more liberated idiom.

The language planning authorities, primarily the Ministry of Education and the Academy of the Hebrew Language, are lagging behind. Despite some pronounced "openness", which leads to some leniency in ruling, the policies have not changed radically, and the system is still feeding insecurity and guilt into the speakers of the language. A language education plan which would take the new uninhibited speaker as the native role model for writing school grammars and for teaching good language practices would look very different from what we have now.
-----------------
A longer discussion inside the book is on page 130.
Best,
A long time lurker,
Ron Kuzar
================
On Fri, 17 May 2013 12:24:28 -0400
galey modan <gmodan at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> Hi Eric,
> 
> No research on people hating the way they speak comes to mind, but I'm sure
> if you search for the term "linguistic insecurity", whatever is out there
> will come up. Also relevant is the research on language shift looking at
> what happens when people devalue their language variety in practice, even
> if they may value it ideologically. Examples are Sue Gal's "Peasant Men
> Can't Get Wives" or Don Kulick's _Language Shift and Cultural
> Reproduction_.
> 
> best,
> 
> Galey
> 
> 
> 2013/5/17 daria schwalbe <daria.schwalbe at gmail.com>
> 
> > 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
> > > >
> > >
> >
> 
> 
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===============================================
                       Dr. Ron Kuzar
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                       University of Haifa
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