LL-L "Language politics" 2010.08.06 (10) [EN]

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*L O W L A N D S - L - 06 August 2010 - Volume 10
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From: Paul Anisman <panisman at gmail.com>

Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2010.08.06 (05) [EN]



What Henry (and others) report, dealing with good/bad language, speech
disorders, etc., reminds me of a situation I recall here in the U.S. I'm a
product of the New York City school system, and also taught in the city
schools for the first half of the 1960s....and am certainly a native speaker
of NY City English. At that time, (and for many years prior to that time) in
order to get a license to teach, you had to go through a rigorous
examination that lasted two days....a written test, as well as at least one
interview. As part of the exam, you were judged on whether or not you "spoke
English correctly"....which, in essence, meant----did you sound like a
native speaker of NY City English (which is precisely what the vast majority
of the applicants were). If you did, you were in big trouble....since NY
City English was (and remains) a stigmatized brand of American
English....and if you spoke that way, you needed to "get fixed".

Here's how it went - during the interview portion of the exam, a Board of
Education examiner sat quietly in a far corner of the room, with a checklist
on which he kept a running tally of how frequently you uttered sounds that
were part of the normal phonology of NY City English. If you happened to
utter more than the absolute minimum, you quite possibly would have failed
the whole exam. I should add that there were only certain phonological
variables that the checklist dealt with. Examples would be: post-vocalic
/r/, (words like "car", "part", "quarter", etc.), realization of the open
back vowel (in words like "bought", "caught", and "more"), and the
realization of the "ae"-digraph (words like "man", "half", etc.). Actually,
in a word such as "quarter", the guy with the checklist could nail you three
times....once for the first vowel, and once for each postvocalic /r/. He
must have had a ball! BTW - I apologize....cannot do any phonetic symbols on
my machine.

College students who were preparing to become teachers were aware of this
process, as were their instructors. If you were among those preparing for a
teaching career, you were given a "pedagogy test", early on. It was a dry
run of the "person with the checklist". If you didn't do well....meaning
that you sounded like a native speaker of NY English, you were told that you
needed to sign up for a special course, whose sole purpose was to train you
how NOT to sound like a New Yorker, and hopefully, to sound like, say,
someone from the midwestern part of the country....and to sound "correct"
for the interview portion of the licensing exam.. After the exam, you did
whatever you wanted. Most folks went back to their normal NY speech as soon
as they walked out of the teaching license exam....and resumed their
existence as native speakers of NY English for the remainder of their
lives....and G-d bless all of them.

As to whether or not this process still exists in NY City, I have no
idea....having left the school system in 1965. I kind of doubt it, but maybe
someone in the group can bring us up to date.

--Paul
Maryland U.S.



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