Recently I was in a discussion group whose members were expert grammarians of the English language. It was an international group, so several spoke varieties of English from a region other than North America. The discussion was about someone's phrasing of ideas with expressions that many thought were either ungrammatical or non-standard. There were several ideas expressed, some rather vehemently, that the person's phrasing needed "fixing." So, I brought up the viewpoint that all kinds of dialects existed within a language and that some dialects achieve wider acceptance than others.
The idea of a "standard" English doesn't exist really. There are some conventions for writing that people agree on for professional standing in the larger English speaking communities of the world, but in a context other than professional writing, people rely on their spoken dialect to think in and express themselves with. Thus, their spoken dialect will surface in contexts other than the professional writing community, and should have equal footing in that context. A couple of others in the group were of this persuasion too.
One would have thought that a bomb hit. The notion that a "standard" English didn't exist certainly went against the grain of most of the contributors' training. I only vaguely remember hearing in the class in which I learned about the variationist approach to categorizing English that it was a minority viewpoint. But, with the venom that some of the group struck back for dismissing the idea that the conventions of written English should carry over into one's daily speech and be called a prestige dialect (many call it a power dialect), I quickly gathered how much of a minority the point of view really was. And these were the experts talking.
I am so glad to have had the course in sociolinguistics which taught the viewpoint of prestige English. It has helped me understand human thinking and communication so much better. Life doesn't get communicated in "standard" terms except in a professional world. Those who communicate otherwise have backgrounds in certain families, who have roots in certain regions, who have identities in certain countries, who all express themselves according to their marked phrasings. One good example is that I would never say, "God gave me you." It is ungrammatical to me. But when the smash hit song came out using those exact words, who was I to say, "I can't believe people are listening to a song that uses an ungrammatical sentence in it." Blake Shelton would just laugh all the way to the bank because a huge number of people didn't know or care about the song's grammatical properties.
So why is the notion of a "standard" English taught to every student in the schools across the world? Why should all students learn the discipline's written form used by its professionals and be taught that they also should try to speak this written version of professional English? It's not the truth about reality. Learning the prestige dialect for financial gain might be taught in schools. Even if students understand the correlation between hiring practices, amount of salary, and prestige dialect, it should still be left to them as to whether they want to learn such prestigious governance of a language (or power dialect). If they would rather take their chances using their home-grown dialect in the oilfields or the coal mines or the lumberjack industries, that's their business. Those industries have their own jargon anyway, very separate from the prestigious written dialect scribbled on a few papers in a course that would never apply to their way of making a living.
But, the world is full of people who want to control others through every means possible. Language is just one more way to exercise that control. Keeping people on a notch below them is a game people seem to want to play. Don't play that game with me, though. I will decide when I want to adopt the rules of the prestige dialect and when I want to express myself in the flavorful dialect of the region of the English speaking world I grew up in (a region, incidentally, that ends sentences in prepositions and uses "that" freely in substitution for "which")! I reserve the right to communicate with the audience who I know about (or about whom I know, if that is my audience) in the language they will understand best.
And the person who understands God Gave Me You will understand it whether or not its prestigious form is God Gave You to Me...
2 comments:
If ever there was doubt that public education is about teaching "standard English" so the kids can make a buck in their adult lives using it as the prestige dialect, you have hit the nail on the head. I don't think, though, that we are trying so much to control the kids by doing so, as to give them access to the prestige dialect so they can avoid being controlled by the elitists during their adult lives. But, then we are the elitists in their teen lives, are we not? And we sure do try to control them as teens. Cognitive dissonance, ya think?
Yes, it is, the way you state it. It might just be a paradox, though, because the teens are not going to change their beliefs or their behavior.
In Brave New World, the World Controllers designed all the citizens to be alphas. But, that didn't work because no one would do the menial work in society. So, they had to design alpha through epsilons. Likewise, we try to uniformly educate everyone to the same level. Teens resist it, shaking themselves out into an alpha through epsilon order of their own. The joke is on the system in place.
If for 50 years the system hasn't turned out an educated public, then the premise has a flaw in it. (This is reflected in language practice by the fact that dialects are as prevalent now as they ever have been even though a monumental effort has been made to make it otherwise.
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