I was sitting in front of a restaurant in a small town today waiting for my daughter to pick me up. She had to park a distance from the restaurant and was picking me up due to a disease that strikes my leg periodically and makes it hard to walk. While I was waiting on her, I stood leaning against a pole listening to people around me speak.
Several of the local townspeople were carrying on a conversation. I wasn't paying much attention to the topics they covered, but I was noticing their distinct country drawl. The pace of the speech and the lengthening of the vowels, like the long o sound and the short a sound, marked their dialect. A lot of people view that speech as stigmatized and further relate style of dress and type of job to their stigmatized speech in a way that is very condescending and disrespectful.
I admit that my first reaction to that variety of talking is not one of prestige, but then, if I think about it any length of time at all, I find it is merely another way of speaking and should not have a + or - prestige value attributed to it. Who am I who could render a judgment in the first place on people I don't know and whose lives I know nothing about?
I know people play games with language all the time, categorizing people as prestigious or intelligent or educated or poor or oppressed (and all the other value judgments that can fall neatly into categories) based on accent alone. They shouldn't. Period. I'm glad to have heard that variety of English today. It keeps me in touch with my beginnings and reminds me who I am at my core.
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