Language in the real world

Key areas covered include animal communication,phonology, language variation, gender and power, lexicography, translation, forensiclinguistics, language acquisition, American Sign Langua

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Language in the Real World: An introduction to linguistics challenges the traditional

approaches taken to linguistics to provide an innovative introduction to the subject Byfirst examining the real world applications of core areas of linguistics and then address-ing the theory behind these applications, this text offers an inductive, illustrative, andinteractive overview for students Key areas covered include animal communication,phonology, language variation, gender and power, lexicography, translation, forensiclinguistics, language acquisition, American Sign Language, and language disorders Eachchapter, written by an expert in the field, is introduced by boxed notes listing the keypoints covered and features an author’s note to readers that situates the chapter inits real world context Activities and pointers for further study and reading are alsointegrated into the chapters and an end of text glossary is provided to aid study.Professors and students will benefit from the interactive companion website thatincludes a student section featuring comments and hints on the chapter exercises withinthe book, a series of flash cards to test knowledge, and further reading and links to keyresources Material for professors includes essay and multi-choice questions based oneach chapter and additional general discussion topics

Language in the Real World shows that linguistics can be appreciated, studied, and

enjoyed by actively engaging real world applications of linguistic knowledge and ciples and will be essential reading for students with an interest in language

prin-Susan J Behrens is Professor of Speech–Language Pathology and Audiology at

Marymount Manhattan College

Judith A Parker is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Mary

Washington

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Language in the Real World

An introduction to linguistics

Susan J Behrens and Judith A Parker

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by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter

invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any

information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Language in the real world / [edited by] Susan J Behrens and Judith A Parker – 1st ed.

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

ISBN 0-203-83981-1 Master e-book ISBN

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1 Language Variation: Students and Teachers Reﬂect on Accents and Dialects 11Susan J Behrens and Rebecca L Sperling

2 Speech Communities: Language as a Mediator of Messages and

Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth

3 Teaching Pronunciation: Using Phonology in the ESL and Foreign

Joanna Labov

4 Lexicography: What Dictionaries Reveal about Language and Dictionary

Paul D Fallon

Mary Boldt and Esperanza Roncero

Nan Decker

7 The N-Word, the F-Word, and All that Jazz: Race, Sex, and Transgressive

Carmen Gillespie

8 Language, Power, and Sexual Assault: Women’s Voices on Rape and Social

Judith A Parker and Deborah Mahlstedt

Diana Boxer

10 Linguistics as a Forensic Science: The Case of Author Identiﬁcation 180Carole E Chaski

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IV: Forms of Language and Communication 205

11 First Language Acquisition: Developing Native Linguistic Competence 207Janine Graziano-King and Helen Smith Cairns

Miako Villanueva, Deanna Twain, and Laura Leigh Wood

Wyatt A Mangum

Ann D Jablon

15 Analyzing Narratives: An Example of Cross-Cultural Research Methods 297Cecile L Stein

16 Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics: Contributions to Understanding

Yael Neumann, Linda Carozza, and Anastasia Georgiou

17 Language of Children with Autism: The Two Worlds Underlying Verbal

Marion Blank and Mary Beth Cull

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Nan Decker

4 Lexicography: What Dictionaries Reveal about Language and Dictionary

Paul D Fallon

Nan Decker

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7 The N-Word, the F-Word, and All that Jazz: Race, Sex, and Transgressive

Carmen Gillespie

Wyatt A Mangum

Ann D Jablon

15 Analyzing Narratives: An Example of Cross-Cultural Research Methods 297Cecile L Stein

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3 Teaching Pronunciation: Using Phonology in the ESL and Foreign

Ann D Jablon

Marion Blank and Mary Beth Cull

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The publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material:

Company Adapted and reproduced by permission from The American Heritage ary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.

Diction-Shonna L Trinch, “Managing euphemism and transcending taboos: Negotiating the

meaning of sexual assault in Latinas’ narratives of domestic violence,” in Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 21:4, Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001,

pp 567–610, Table 1: “Spectrum of directness for Latina women’s reference to sexualviolence”, pp 582–583

“Red” from the New Oxford American Dictionary (2005) and “Explode” from Oxford English Dictionary (1989), edited by Simpson J and Weiner E By permission of Oxford

2004, used with permission of C Lucas and R Hogue

The British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) manual alphabets.http://www.ﬁngerspellingalphabet.com/graphics/asl_ﬁngerspelling_alphabet.pdf

Gary, N E (1992) “Activities and behavior of honey bees,” in The Hive and the Honey Bee, ed Joe M Graham Dadant and Sons, Hamilton, ILL.

“Replot of von Frisch” (1967) Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees by Karl von Frisch, translated by Leigh E Chadwick,

pp 64,296, Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright

Stein, C (2004) Narratives of Bhutanese and rural American 7-year-old children: Issues

of story grammar and culture Narrative Inquiry, 14(2), pp 369–394 Produced with

kind permission by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.www.benjamins.com

Every eﬀort has been made to trace the copyright holders but if any have been ently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements atthe ﬁrst opportunity

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Susan J Behrens, Ph D., Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders,

Mary-mount Manhattan College, New York, NY

Marion Blank, Ph.D., Co-director, Developmental Neuropsychiatry Program, Columbia

University, New York, NY

Mary Boldt, Ph.D., Associate Professor of German, York College of Pennsylvania, York,

PA

Diana Boxer, Ph.D., Professor of Linguistics, University of Florida at Gainesville,

Gainesville, FL

Linda Carozza, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Assistant Professor of Speech, Communication

Sciences & Theatre, St John’s College, Staten Island, NY

Helen Smith Cairns, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, Linguistics and Speech and Hearing

Sciences, the Graduate Center, and Linguistics and Communication Disorders, QueensCollege, the City University of New York, New York, NY

Carole E Chaski, Ph.D., Institute for Linguistic Evidence, Inc., ALIAS Technology, LLC,

Georgetown, DE

Mary Beth Cull, Developmental Neuropsychiatry Program, Columbia University, New

York, NY

Nan Decker, Ph.D., senior linguist, Logovista US, Inc., Belmont, MA.

Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth, Ph.D., Director of Doctoral Programs in Multilingual,

Multicultural Studies, New York University, New York, NY

Paul D Fallon, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Mary

Washing-ton, Frederickburg, VA

Anastasia Georgiou, M.S., CCC-SLP, Jersey City, NJ.

Carmen Gillespie, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, Bucknell University, Lewisburg,

PA

Janine Graziano-King, Ph.D., Associate Professor, English, Kingsborough Community

College, the City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY

Ann D Jablon, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders,

Marymount Manhattan College, New York, NY

Joanna Labov, Ph.D., Clinical Assistant Professor of TESOL, Steinhardt School of

Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University, New York, NY

Deborah Mahlstedt, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies, West Chester

University, West Chester, PA

Wyatt A Mangum, Ph D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of

Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA

Yael Neumann, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Communication

Disorders, Queens College, City University of New York Queens, NY

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Judith A Parker, Ph.D., Professor of English and Linguistics, University of Mary

Washington, Fredericksburg, VA

Esperanza Roncero, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Spanish, Hartwick College, Oneonta,

NY

Rebecca L Sperling, Ph D., Associate Professor of Social Work/Sociology, Marymount

Manhattan College, New York, NY

Cecile L Stein, Ph.D., Adjunct Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences and

Disorders, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, NY

Deanna Twain, Adjunct Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders,

Mary-mount Manhattan College, New York, NY

Miako Villanueva, Ph.D., Instructor, Department of Linguistics, Gallaudet University,

Washington, DC

Laura Leigh Wood, MA, St Louis, MO.

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JP: For Gladys B Parker, my beautiful mother

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Language in the Real World: An introduction to linguistics is a diﬀerent kind of book

It approaches linguistics by examining how the various branches of the discipline areput to use in the real world This book oﬀers an introduction to the traditional areas

of linguistics and linguistic analysis in an inductive, illustrative, and interactive way

by examining and telling stories about real world applications This text conveys theimmediacy and enjoyment of reading about and studying linguistics and conductingresearch into language The book’s tone is one of discovery as readers become morelinguistically aware as they work through the chapters

Most traditional linguistics texts first lead students through linguistic theory, withapplications relegated to the final few chapters Many of these texts reflect a belief thattheory must precede application and inform the work of beginning linguistics study.Other texts that focus on the application of linguistics seem narrow in scope, oftendirected to the specific needs of a different population: teachers of English as a Second orForeign Language Our text challenges these beliefs and practices From our experiences

in the classroom, and commitment to student-centered, authentic tools for learning,

we have developed a text that takes a more inductive approach to uncovering linguisticphenomena Readers do indeed encounter linguistic theory, but they do so in ways thatembed theory in everyday phenomena

In some courses, this textbook will stand on its own, satisfying the needs to engagestudents in metalinguistic study and the examination of linguistics The book will servewell, and be especially exciting to, students new to linguistics, with its richly variedchapters covering introductory and more advanced levels; its helpful interactive exercises;and the resources both in the book and on the book’s companion website Linguisticsprofessors might also choose to use one of the many ﬁne traditionally oriented texts onthe market in conjunction with our text to help students connect real world events andissues with the many facets of language study

One of the strengths of this book is the variety of approaches to the study of language.Each part has a broad introductory chapter followed by chapters that narrow in focus.While broader chapters provide an overview to readers, other chapters present a particu-lar aspect of a ﬁeld of linguistics No text covers everything; our chapters are carefullychosen and arranged to give readers many ﬂavors of what the title promises: language

in the real world

In addition, each chapter is written by a scholar or group of scholars who share theirexperiences of linguistics While this format oﬀers readers a variety of voices acrosschapters, we (the editors) have worked to ensure a consistency of level and style to makethe reader’s experience of the book smooth

Who This Book Is For

Our book aims to reach two main types of readers: students studying the discipline oflinguistics and those in related ﬁelds that are informed by language issues Readers mightencounter this book because they have chosen Linguistics as a major or minor Then

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again, they might be engrossed in a subject that intersects with the material in thistext—language in its real world applications—and yet might not have taken a tradi-tional linguistics course Readers might be English majors, Modern Language majors,Philosophy majors, or Performing Arts majors who are interested in language in itsspoken and written forms; or studying Psychology, Sociology, or Anthropology: thesciences of our species All these areas are informed by language and constructedthrough the application of language As a discipline that touches on so many other ﬁelds

of study, and has so many manifestations in human interaction, linguistics should beintroduced to students as a real world phenomenon

Speciﬁcally, this text will beneﬁt students studying the following areas:

14 Communication Sciences and Disorders

We, the editors, each have over 20 years of teaching experience We have seen againand again that most students get excited about linguistics when they can relate it todaily encounters and when they explore linguistic knowledge and principles throughreal world applications Our philosophy is that linguistics can be appreciated, studied,and enjoyed by actively engaging in real world applications of linguistic knowledge andprinciples

What Readers Learn from This Book

The lessons readers will be engaged in when they work with this book are two-fold.There is the discovery of linguistics, a discipline devoted to uncovering how language

is structured and used to communicate meaning But this book goes beyond what isalready available in linguistics texts; its other lesson is that language is everywhere, and

we all beneﬁt from a keener awareness of language and its application And while areader might be immersed primarily in one discipline, he or she will beneﬁt from a morecomprehensive look at language applications in many areas

This text covers up-to-date issues of language and its applications, as seen from theviewpoint of our many contributors To take just a few examples, readers will learn abouthow linguistics applies to crime work in forensics; how the novels of Toni Morrison oﬀer

a linguistic view of our culture; what autism is and how the notion of the autisticspectrum evolved; what is beneﬁcial and frustrating about machine translation software;and how linguistic analysis reveals the power dynamics of telling sexual assault narra-tives in diﬀerent contexts

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How to Read This Book

Organization of the Text

The length of the text is designed for a single semester’s course of study The order ofchapters takes the reader thematically through the various applications of linguistics;furthermore, each part leads oﬀ with a chapter that is broader in scope than its com-panions, with the subsequent chapters in that section focusing in more detail on anotheraspect of the theme of that section Given this design, readers can get an overview ofrelated areas in linguistics by choosing to read initial chapters in each part, and thengoing back to explore the rest of the part in more depth

Since our book is designed to inform readers in various areas of study, we supplementour table of contents with one that lists the traditional areas of linguistics (phonology,morphology, semantics, syntax, and discourse) and the chapters that cover these areas

in some depth In addition, our chapters use examples from many languages other thanEnglish, including American Sign Language (ASL)

The parts are organized in such a way that readers first encounter a real worldphenomenon they all share: being in school, especially in a new century of globalizationand diverse communities (Part I: “Language, Education, and Cultural Change”) Thebook next presents another section of real world language use familiar to students:books! In this case, dictionaries, novels, and how translators work (Part II: “Literature,Translation, and Computers”) From there, the textbook goes into more specializedaspects of language use In Part III (“Language, Power, and Identity”), we read aboutlanguage analysis and what it reveals about the language user in different social contexts.Part IV (“Forms of Language Communication”) turns to what different communicationforms look like, in young children, users of a signed language, and even in honey bees

We end with Part V (“Language and Communication Science”), the most specializedsection of the text, exploring communication science as it assesses language develop-ment, disorders and diﬀerences Yet even in Part V, readers from many disciplines willbeneﬁt from examining language in its clinical applications

Organization of the Parts

Part I, “Language, Education, and Cultural Change,” takes readers into the classroomand examines attitudes towards language diversity by college students and teachers(Chapter 1) Emotions that arise from language diﬀerences across cultures are nextexplored (Chapter 2) Part I ends with a look into the philosophy and phonologicaltraining of a teacher of pronunciation to both English as a Second Language (ESL)students and native language learners (Chapter 3)

Part II, “Literature, Translation, and Computers,” starts with an exploration of thing very familiar to college students, the dictionary, and uncovers new connectionsbetween such a reference tool and human language, speciﬁcally how dictionaries pre-serve and document linguistic trends (Chapter 4) We then look at how translators work,both the human and the machine type (Chapter 5 and Chapter 6) Part II ﬁnishes with

some-a discussion of potentisome-ally inﬂammatory, transgressive language in literature, focusing

on Toni Morrison (Chapter 7)

In Part III, “Language, Power, and Identity,” we turn to how linguistics is used toexplore ourselves and our identity, with chapters on the language and beneﬁts of tellingsexual assault narratives (Chapter 8); a look at naming practices speciﬁc to gender(Chapter 9); and a discussion of the legal applications of linguistics, in a chapter onlinguistics as a forensic science (Chapter 10)

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Part IV, entitled “Forms of Language and Communication,” looks at how we acquireour native language (Chapter 11) Next we consider American Sign Language (Chapter12) Part IV ends with a discussion of the latest ﬁndings from an expert on bees andprobes our notions of what language really is (Chapter 13).

Part V, “Language and Communication Science,” turns to the clinical side of guistics, with a look at how speech–language therapy puts the ﬁeld of linguistics to workfor people with language disorders (Chapter 14) Part V then looks at the role ofchildren’s narratives and storytelling in our lives via a cross-cultural application of adiagnostic paradigm (Chapter 15); an in-depth look at how linguistic research can beemployed to study the aging brain (Chapter 16); and discussions of language traits inchildren on the autism spectrum (Chapter 17)

lin-Key words appear in bold in each chapter and are deﬁned in a glossary at the back ofthe book The glossary, in turn, uses a co-indexing system to alert readers to thosechapters that discuss a given term in some depth

The Organization of Each Chapter

Each chapter begins with a short list delineating the key points to be discussed Thenfollows a quotation from an outside source that can only be fully appreciated by workingthrough the chapter Next is a note from the contributor to the reader, explaining how he

or she became involved in the area being introduced and why linguistics has been acompelling force in this work In-chapter exercises throughout are interactive and takethe reader further in his or her engagement with the material Some of these exercisescan be worked out in class, while others call for library or Internet research, or evenfieldwork, and are more suitable as assignments outside of class In addition, many ofthe exercises have companion comments that can be found on the book’s companionwebsite Sometimes serving as an answer key, or a debriefing narrative, these commentsallow the reader to process the exercise, but without interrupting the flow of the text.Finally, each chapter includes a concise list of resources cited and additional sources forfurther exploration, such as websites and contact information for relevant organizations

How to Read the Book

The book can be approached in several ways, depending on the readers’ interests, poses, and level of familiarity with the material The first chapter of each part can beread for an overview of the various areas of linguistic application, and then readerscan go back and read each part in full Readers can approach parts in an order differentfrom how they appear in the book, depending on the students’ discipline Readers inboth linguistics and other disciplines, ultimately, benefit from working through theentire book The text tells a full story of linguistics and language in our world, and whilereaders can customize the book by rearranging the order of chapters and parts, wehope that all readers engage in the book as a whole To do so is to better understandthe ways language is around us and develop keener critical thinking skills about thoseapplications

pur-In other words, while the different parts have been carefully constructed by theme,the chapters have also been written to hold up independently and work with a differentarrangement of companion chapters The overall effect, however, is a cumulative one.While students in different fields of study may choose to rearrange the table of contents

to suit them, the book is a uniﬁed product

Those in the following disciplines might want to enter the book in the followingways:

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While most linguistics courses tend to work with more traditionally oriented texts, ourexperience with many students over the years is that a companion book of applicationsgoes far to contextualize the theory students are learning For linguistics courses oﬀered

in departments that do not have a major in the discipline, our text would functionequally well, or perhaps better, as a primary text Students studying linguistics wouldﬁnd all sections relevant and can read in the suggested order or in an order morecustomized to the organization of the course An alternate table of contents is includedspeciﬁcally for linguistics courses, so readers can select chapters as they relate to thetraditional areas of linguistic study: phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, anddiscourse, as well as subdisciplines of linguistics Graduate students in linguistics wouldalso encounter a full, rich array of career possibilities in linguistics Pondering what one

“does” with a degree in linguistics? Here are many portraits of linguistics working daily

General Education/Liberal Arts/Composition

Readers who are interested in a more general view of language, perhaps for a GeneralEducation or composition course, would encounter language in its broadest applica-tions and ﬁnd many exercises throughout the book that ask for written critiques ofthe issues being covered These readers may choose to read these chapters ﬁrst, to get

an overview of language in real world situations In this case, readers would ﬁrstencounter students and teachers reﬂecting on attitudes towards language variation(Chapter 1); then move to a discussion of dictionaries (Chapter 4); a linguistic analysis

of narratives in a much diﬀerent context (Chapter 8); how language is acquired inchildhood (Chapter 11); and the diagnosis and treatment of speech and language dis-orders (Chapter 14)

Communication Arts and Theory

Those studying Comm Arts and theories of communication would beneﬁt from anexploration into other aspects of communication, such as sciences and disorders Thesereaders might want to start with Part V From there, Comm Arts students could delveinto the many other ways that linguistics sees communication and interpersonal inter-actions by going back to the suggested order in the Contents

Education

Readers studying Education would certainly need to understand language in all itsfacets These readers might start with Part I, and read Chapters 1–3, as they relate toteaching and cultural diﬀerences They could then go to Part IV and read about language

in diﬀerent forms: native acquisition of linguistic knowledge, American Sign Language,and how honey bees communicate as a contrasting view on human language Continue

on to Part V, for teachers of all age groups need to understand the nature of tion, its norms, range of diﬀerences, and impairments

communica-English

English majors will already love language This book can broaden a student’s thinkingabout written and spoken language We suggest ﬁrst reading Part II, covering dictio-naries (Chapter 4); how translators build bridges between languages (Chapter 5); issues

of parsing syntax in machine translation (Chapter 6); and the use of transgressivelanguage in popular culture and literature, speciﬁcally Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved

and Jazz (Chapter 7) From there, read the remaining chapters in order to see the full

picture of linguistics at work

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Readers studying Philosophy and specializing in the Philosophy of Language, Logic,

or Artiﬁcial Intelligence will ﬁnd much to learn from this text They could read thetext in the given order or look at our Alternate Contents and explore the subdisciplines

of linguistics

Gender Studies

Many programs in Women’s Studies and Gender Studies have been established since the1980s Students in these programs need to understand the linguistic dynamics of gender.These readers could start with Parts I and III, then return to the given order of the book

Psychology and Social Sciences

Readers in these ﬁelds are already studying cognition, behavior, systems, and norms.Language is intrinsic to all these issues Such readers might start with Parts I and III,sections that cover a broad range of topics about language as a social marker and as amarker of identity; then proceed with the book as it is arranged

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Those in the ﬁelds of communication, speech, language, and hearing sciences also dealwith issues that would be informed by our text Start with Part V (Chapters 14–17) andread about speech–language pathology, psycholinguistic research into the aging brain,and about Autism Spectrum Disorders From there, go back to Part I and explore thefull range of language applications

Service-learning and community partnerships are taking hold in education Some

of our chapters, and exercises within chapters, supply faculty planning service-learningunits with ideas for interaction with community groups

lin-We also represent colleges and universities from many parts of the United States lin-Wework in diﬀerent ﬁelds informed by the science and art of language Fittingly, through-out the book, multiple languages and cultures are represented as readers explore the

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many facets that make up our real worlds, our common experiences, as well as ourunique experiences Some of us continue to work primarily in the classroom; others arenow in private practice or researching fulltime, but we are all familiar with the collegeclassroom and have demonstrated an aﬃnity for communicating complex materialclearly and with enthusiasm to undergraduate students This text is the next best thing

to our visiting your classroom and engaging you in discussion about our work, aboutlinguistics, about language as it lives all around us

The Companion Website

A book such as this one calls out for an interactive, up-to-date website The real worlddoes not slow down While our text is up to date as of its publication, the companionwebsite allows readers to work beyond the printed page in each chapter Professors andstudents will beneﬁt from the interactive companion website that includes a studentsection featuring comments and hints on the chapter exercises within the book, a series

of ﬂash cards to test knowledge, and further reading and links to key resources Materialfor professors includes essay and multiple choice questions based on each chapter andadditional general discussion topics

Our Thanks

As editors, we would like to extend our gratitude to the following people for their supportand eﬀorts on behalf of this book: our valued contributors, all of whom were trueprofessionals and true to the book through the long process of seeing it come to life; ourRoutledge editors in England: Louisa Semlyen, who started the ball rolling with anenthusiastic response to our prospectus; and Nadia Seemungal, who took up the day-to-day dealings with us once the organization was in place and became our troubleshooter,sounding board, and supporter; Ursula Mallows, Samantha Vale Noya, and Eloise Cook

in England for attention to detail; Russell George at Routledge for work on the panion website; Ivy Ip in New York for supporting the project in our home town; allanonymous reviewers at Routledge, for your very detailed and constructive commentsand respect for our work; Ann Marie Tevlin Peterson, a valuable reader and shaper inthe early stages of this book; our professors at Queens College and Brown University forhelping us get to this point; our families, for putting up with LRW talk over breakfast anddinner (as well as extended editor-to-editor calls between NY and VA): thank you,Gladys, Geoﬀ, Habiba, and Tony; our colleagues at University of Mary Washington andMarymount Manhattan College for similarly listening to our tales and tolerating us

com-on days we were in a “book head”; Radmila Dym at Marymount; Tanya Budilovskayafor valuable help with references; Katharine Thomas for her work on the website andErika Troseth for organizing our glossary; anonymous reviewers; Antonio Barrenechea,Christofer Foss, Warren Rochelle, Patricia Towle, and Stacey Schlau; and of course ourstudents: This book is for you We wanted to get you the best book possible, and werealized a few years back that, with a deep breath and several-year commitment, we could

do that We want to share our love of language and linguistics, and we want to show youhow it matters, how it is not just a theoretical subject you study to fulﬁll a requirementand then move on We both have devoted most of our adult years to linguistics, and evennow, see ourselves, other linguists, and the Linguistic Society of America moving beyondacademic walls to talk, write, and teach about the value of linguistics and understandinghow language works in our world Hopefully, for many of you reading this right now, asyour exploration begins, it will similarly take you to amazing places

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In Part I, we start out by examining the attitudes about language variation held byteachers and students The real world includes the classroom, and the language behaviorand expectations we bring into that classroom Chapter 1, by Susan J Behrens and Rebecca

L Sperling, introduces the idea of accent and dialect They use this information aboutlinguistics to illuminate what happens in the classroom when speakers of the standard andnon-standard dialects of English make assumptions and limit access to voice MiriamEisenstein Ebsworth, in Chapter 2, continues the conversation about differences, this timeregarding pragmatic norms, and she widens the exploration to communities and cultures incontact, sometimes living side by side in the same city We ﬁnish Part I with a view into theworld of a pronunciation teacher Joanna Labov discusses the training involved in helpingstudents learn the phonology of another language, and why it is important to us all tounderstand such a process

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1 Language Variation Students and Teachers

Reﬂect on Accents and Dialects

Susan J Behrens and Rebecca L Sperling

This Chapter Explores:

So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language Ethnic tity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language Attacks on one’s form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment.

iden-Gloria Anzaldúa, 1999

AUTHORS’ NOTE TO READERS

We are professors at the same college but in different departments, who collaborate to teachabout issues of diversity Rebecca Sperling (RS), a social worker, designed and teaches acourse called Valuing Difference, using categories such as ethnicity, culture, class, race,

gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, nationality, religion, and language to reﬂect onsocial mechanisms that both construct and replicate socio-economic and political power,and oppression Susan Behrens (SB), a linguist, teaches Language and Culture, an examin-

ation of the intersections between societal constructs and language forms We began ourcollaboration more than ten years ago, and, with our students, continue to examine thematerial presented in this chapter In our classrooms, we encourage students to reﬂect ontheir use of language, attitudes about accents, dialects, the use of supposedly ungram-matical forms, and language usage in the world around us We ask our students to challengetheir years of exposure to the prescriptive approach to language study most commonlyembraced in educational settings And we collect words of our students, through free-writings and journal entries, tracking changes in attitudes Here we try to give you a sense ofour classroom work As you read through the chapter, we ask you to refer to and workthrough the interactive, ﬁeldwork-like exercises we include, and keep track of attitudes younotice (others’ and your own) about the issues we raise

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SB: I became interested in the ﬁeld of language diversity while in high school A NewYorker, I moved to central Connecticut and became the target of mockery by classmateswho disliked my pronunciation of various words, or claimed not to understand me In fact,these experiences were partly responsible for my choice of linguistics as a major incollege.

RS: Though several other aspects of diversity were quite important to me when I was young, Idid not pay much attention to language until years later, when I ﬁrst began teaching aboutdiversity I don’t think this is unusual for those of us who unquestioningly embrace thepractice of speaking “proper” English, and do it with some success, as I did After all, Ireaped many rewards for writing and speaking “well.” It was not until I began thinking aboutthe concepts of “power” and “privilege” that I could even entertain the notion that, through-out my life, I had eagerly conformed to a way of writing and speaking that somehow hadbeen determined by someone to be the “best,” at the expense of others

Introduction

It is a basic principle of linguistics that language changes This is true when groups of

people are separated Speakers may be separated across time, resulting in historiclanguage changes They may be separated geographically, leading to localized lan-guage diﬀerences; groups may also be separated socially And language, while largely

a biological faculty, is shaped by our surrounding speech communities Hence, we

“sound” most like our family, friends, and neighbors, locating us in a culture, place,and time

Another linguistic principle is that varieties of language are equally eﬀective tion systems All natural dialects are regular and logical However, just as with factors such

communica-as race, clcommunica-ass, sexual orientation, gender, and age, societies create a hierarchy of ability Societies do this for language forms as well

accept-There are real world consequences to having such hierarchies where elevated value isplaced on one form that is then believed to be more intrinsically “normal” or “correct”than other forms Those people associated with the normal category are rewarded ﬁnan-cially, socially, and emotionally; and those who fall outside the norm are dis-enfranchised Conformity to the so-called normal has a pay-oﬀ, and those who conformdevelop a vested interest in protecting and perpetuating the hierarchy

The most highly valued language form is called the standard language For English, it would be termed Standard English (SE) or Standard American English (SAE) A main

enforcer of this form is the educational system We are aware of this clash between theview of linguists that all native language forms are valid, and the aspect of our job asteachers that reinforces the value of the norm When we grade papers, coach oralpresentations, and even choose which student to call on and listen to in the classroom,who to give credence to, we are acknowledging users of this standard language over users

of other language forms This approach to language is called prescriptive By extension,

we decide who graduates successfully from an educational institution and who does not;and who gains power in society, and who does not have an equal opportunity tosucceed In fact, we’re embracing and modeling adherence to the hierarchy

Discuss the competing issues raised by the notion that (1) all language forms are

Exercise 1

equal, and (2) teachers place value on one language form over others

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The Classroom

Linguists and educators such as Shirley Brice Heath (1983) and Jack Richards andCharles Lockhart (1994) have documented the types of language behavior teacherstend to use in the classroom: teacher-talk For example, teachers mainly ask questions.Further, we usually ask questions without true information gaps, in that we alreadyknow the answers Studies on teacher-talk recognize the gatekeeping function ofteachers, who choose which students to call on and validate, how long a student’s turnshould be, and what is considered the “correct” answer or an “appropriate” question toask of the teacher

As a microcosm of how beliefs and practices about language operate, the classroom is

an appropriate setting for research into the issues of language attitudes and their impact

on education and learning We have conducted research for the last 10 years, obtainingstudent reactions to accent and dialect variation and their responses once exposed tolinguistic principles that challenge their attitudes

We gather student comments before and after we discuss the linguistic views oflanguage variety In the beginning, we ask our students, through free-writing exercisesand journal assignments, to write candidly in response to the following prompts:

• Tell about a time your language was noticed

• Describe what “good English” is to you

• What verbal behavior is annoying to you?

Some of the verbatim quotations from our students tell us something distinct about howour students see themselves and others in the classroom and the world around themthrough their language attitudes

Student Quotations (verbatim)

“Coming from the South and speaking with a heavy Southern accent, I wouldfeel different I am a little doll that people can play with My friend has begun

to ‘play’ with me and try to get me to say certain things for her amusement

At ﬁrst, I enjoyed the attention; who wouldn’t? I have begun to feel like a minority.Many are constantly amused by the way I talk as if it is funny This is me Ijust wish that people would take me more seriously and listen to the things Ihave to say rather than interrupt my every thought with, ‘Oh, wow, I could just listen

to your cute voice all day.’ Notice there was a comment on my voice, not mythought.”

“While I always knew accents were not indicators of intelligence, I somehow stilljudge people based on their speech patterns.”

“For many years in grade school and high school we are taught that there is a proper

or correct way to speak.”

“In New York, people have stopped me while I am talking to tell me that I have a

‘cute’ accent, or they notice me saying ‘ya’ll.’ I had a teacher once say that shethought it sounded uneducated to say ‘ya’ll.’ ”

“I mix up words because of Italian grammatical forms People make fun of me Plus,every day I get picked on because of my accent I’m insecure about the way I speak,and I know I always will be.”

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“I think people with Spanish accents are so cute Sometimes it’s really frustratingwhen I can’t understand someone because their accent is so heavy.”

“Some kids (in DC) don’t really use good grammar Some people call it Ebonics Idon’t like that word because it sounds stupid, it’s like trying to cover up the fact thatsome children are not getting a proper education.”

“People say to me, ‘Wow, you have such a different accent.’ It’s like my accent hasbecome who I am here.”

“I never knew I had an accent! Because I sounded like ‘everyone’ else around me.Then I moved to college.”

“I do not think that there should be a right or wrong, but there is a line that should

be made when involved in education I had a professor here who spoke very poorSAE (Standard American English) and wrote it even worse It would take half of mytest time to decode the questions he was saying This was quite frustrating becausethat language barrier existed and my grade was on the line I did realize that I wasbeing somewhat selﬁsh.”

“I know that in a way (my accent) does give away that I am not ‘fully American.’ ”

“We should not compromise the English language.”

Now you try it

Ask ﬁve people to identify ﬁve linguistic behaviors they dislike For example, are you

Language vs Language User

We notice that some of our students respond to the prompts in Exercise 2 not withstatements such as “I can’t stand it when a speaker uses double negatives” but ratherwith something like “I hate people who use double negatives.” Each illustrationexpressed in the latter fashion suggests that there are ramifications to our societal atti-tudes about different language forms The difference between an expression of distastefor a language event and a negative evaluation of the speaker of that linguistic form is adistinction that is very easy to overlook, but it is a very significant difference

As illustrated in the opening quotation by Gloria Anzaldúa, people experience back about their language use as commentary on aspects of their personal identity, as avalidation or critique of their cultural and/or familiar heritage, class, ethnicity, etc Theease with which people merge their opinions of language with attitudes about thelanguage user, and the marginalization or privilege aﬀorded that user as a result, is astrong reason to uncover people’s feelings about language usage, and to make the dis-tinctions explicit At the same time, as people comment on the language of others, theyposition themselves as language users as well

feed-While language biases have consequences within the contexts of each individual’simmediate social exchanges, perhaps more importantly, they have collective, long-term

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social consequences Sociologists use the notions of “private” and “public” issues tomake thematic connections that explain how the lives of individuals are shaped by thesocial and historic contexts in which they live Self-esteem, family and peer culturalacceptance, and social class mobility, for example, are all intricately entwined with howsome forms of language are socially valued while others are not In fact, renownedsociologist C Wright Mills (1959) has suggested that any of us who wish to gain insightinto the circumstances of our own lives must develop a “sociological imagination” inorder to see our individual beliefs and actions, in some part, as reﬂections of the socialand historical contexts in which we operate When we can imagine our own behaviors as

a sample of larger social and historical macro-dynamics, we gain some ability throughsuch recognition and understanding to change things Linguistic dynamics in the class-room, where unconscious language attitudes can easily interfere with learning, can bemade conscious

Standard and Non-Standard Accents: Regional and Social

Talking about language variation leads to the question, “Variation from what?” How does

a particular language diﬀer from speaker to speaker? One way is by a speaker’s

pro-nunciation, called accent Accent is the system of a speaker’s phonology: how that person pronounces his or her phonemes, the consonants and vowels of a language, and

how those phonemes interact with one another Accent variations are not random: there

is a system to all accents, a regularity that linguists document This approach to language

is termed descriptive, a cornerstone of linguistics.

Linguist William Labov, in the 1960s, sought to document the variation within onegeographical locale (reported in Labov, 2006) He initiated a real-world-type method-ology of obtaining accent data from speakers of different socio-economic groups Heapproached clerks in three different department stores in New York City and, usingphonetic notation, noticed the way people pronounced the phrase “fourth floor” inresponse to a carefully worded query for a product (The /r/ phoneme after a vowel wasthe target linguistic variable he was interested in.) He had the speakers repeat the phrase

by pretending that he did not catch the answer, thus obtaining a casual (informal, lessmonitored) and then more careful (stylistically formal) utterance He chose threedepartment stores that reﬂected three diﬀerent socio-economic strata of the city: work-ing class, middle class, and upper class What he discovered was that the higher percent-age of post-vocalic /r/ utterances was associated with the higher socio-economicspeakers The speakers at the store whose target shopper was working class had thefewest post-vocalic /r/ instances Labov thus documented a positive correlation betweenthe more standard forms and the higher socio-economic demographic

Is there a right vs wrong way to pronounce a word? The “normal” accent in Labov’s

study, which would include the pronunciation of the /r/ phoneme, is called the standard

accent and is termed unmarked by linguists In other words, it is a variant that we have

been conditioned to treat as normal or neutral and not recognize the privileged status it

represents Not pronouncing post-vocalic /r/ phonemes would be linguistically marked,

that is, more noticeable because it is a deviation from the norm

The unmarked forms are valued more in mainstream aspects of society Indeed, using

an unmarked accent gives the impression of being more formal Since the academicworld values and prescribes standard forms, sounding standard also gives listeners theimpression of the speaker sounding more educated (note the circular reasoning here).The reverse, of course, can be true: that speakers with many marked forms sound bothless formal and less educated

However, the connotations of using marked forms can go further than that As we

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said earlier, talking about someone’s language use is a code for talking about the speaker.

We might say such a speaker is not only lacking in education (didn’t she pay attention inschool?) but, more seriously, also not able to be educated; that is, unintelligent

Find recordings of speakers with different accents, or tape people you know

Exercise 3

who have different accents reading a passage from a book You can ﬁnd accentedEnglish samples at http://accent.gmu.edu/ Play these audio samples for people inyour daily life and ask them to

• guess what the speaker looks like

• guess what the speaker does for a living

Ask why they answered the way they did Do you notice patterns in the listeners’answers? What might this exercise indicate to you about the language attitudes ofyour speech community?

Standard and Non-Standard Dialects

Language users do not simply differ from one another by their pronunciation of words.They also differ by grammar, verb endings, slang, and idiom use A certain speaker fromNew York City might say “idear.” She might also say she “waits on line for coffee everymorning,” that she “don’t like to wait long,” and that “me and my family are going to

make a party soon for a friend tying the knot.” This speaker has a non-standard dialect.

How is dialect diﬀerent from accent? Many use the terms interchangeably, but

lin-guistically an accent is variation at the pronunciation level while a dialect is variationmanifested at more than one language level The examples above showed our speaker

using a preposition that varies from the prescribed norm (wait on line, not in line); a

non-standard conjugation (she don’t); objective case pronoun in the subject position

(me instead of I); a non-standard verb usage (make a party); and a idiomatic expression

(tie the knot)

While the example above illustrates a regional dialect, other demographics are ated with our language use Our age, gender, ethnic group, class, and any non-Englishlanguage influences in the home will also affect our dialects Language users tend to haveaccess to a range of dialects, and we are pretty good about making language choices thatallow us to fit in with varying social circumstances We also have a pretty good ability toviolate the norms when we want to for specific effect

associ-Go back to the accented speakers you found in Exercise 3 Did they also display

Exercise 4

grammatical and vocabulary choices that differ from your own? What aspects oftheir speech could be labelled “accent” and what was “dialect”?

Let’s return to the idea of an (ostensibly) unmarked, normal, socially unnoticed way of

using our language Linguists call this variety the standard dialect; the world of

educa-tion calls it the standard language This is the variety of a language that is valued by mostmainstream aspects of society, so much so that many would not call it a variety or a

dialect at all; it is commonly considered the language, and varieties and dialects are those forms that deviate from the standard Linguists, however, consider all varieties of a language as dialects of that language family and the standard language as one of these dialects.

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Linguists also consider all dialects to be communicatively eﬀective, regular, and logical.Despite this, the standard language is the power dialect, the preferred dialect, chosen foruse in print, on the air, and in the classroom.

Speaking a dialect that closely approximates the standard dialect is usually associatedwith middle class and upper class socio-economic groups So, simply through the act ofspeaking, we convey our social class and concomitant status to those who recognize theearmarks Bourdieu, a French sociologist, discusses the concept of linguistic behaviorhaving a market value (Bourdieu and Thompson, 1991) Our language choices denotequalities that are valued and can be exchanged for social prestige The standard languagehas a high market value, especially in formal situations, school and the workplace amongthem According to Bourdieu, for successful performance in mainstream aspects ofsociety, standard language forms constitute our society’s valid linguistic currency Giventhis, those who question the arbitrary nature of the standard risk ﬁscal compromise.For many people, the main factor that inﬂuences the acquisition of the standarddialect is the amount of standardized education to which they are exposed In fact,educational systems are the main conveyor of the message that standard = right andgood, and non-standard = inferior and wrong Outside of a linguistics book or class, werarely encounter the messages highlighted in this chapter describing the social construc-tion of privilege via the institutionalization of preferred language forms As a result, it isoften hard (even for those of us who understand this clearly) to believe that the standardlanguage is simply a dialect, one of many fully functioning dialects of English

There is an educational bias towards the standard forms of a language, largely becausethose controlling systems of education decide on the rules The dialect of those inhabit-ing academic institutions has been elevated and codiﬁed to be the proper form of thelanguage Those who come from a middle or upper-middle class background use ahome language already close to, or at, the standard The transition to school dialect ismuch easier for them (because it is tailor made), compared to those accustomed to usingnon-standard forms at home and having to convert to the standard at school Thosewhose ﬁrst language is not English, and those from working class environments where anon-standard dialect form of English is often spoken, have to work harder to be success-ful in educational institutions in the US because they have two simultaneous tasks, one

to learn content and the other to change their form of expression to the standard

African American Vernacular English

In the 1990s, linguistics as a discipline appeared in the news over issues of what languageforms students should, could, and must not use in the classroom In 1996, the Oakland,California School Board put forth a resolution that the home language of the majority of

their African American students was not Standard English (SE) but instead Ebonics, a

language form stemming from the languages of the West and Niger-Congo areas ofAfrica Further, the school system proposed to instruct their teachers in the languagediﬀerences between the two forms to help the teachers better educate the students andlift test scores for the African American students in the school district

Their resolution was met with a social outcry Students were quoted as being appalledthat their school claimed they didn’t speak English Parents were outraged that teacherswould be trained to teach in Ebonics and withhold Standard English from their children.All of this was a distorted view of the situation, but it highlighted the strong connectionpeople make between mastery of the standard language and educational and economicbeneﬁts In response to the outcry, the Oakland School Board reworded its originalproposal to emphasize the goal of proﬁciency in Standard English and de-emphasize theview that Ebonics was a language separate from English

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Theresa Perry, in a very sane book co-authored with Lisa Delpit and entitled The Real Ebonics Debate, writes:

The members of the Oakland school board had it right in their initial resolution whenthey affirmed the importance of fluency in Black Language and Standard English Theyknew that fluency in the standard code can never be the singular goal if, and this is a big

if, our schools are to participate in the creation of the next generation of American scholars, preachers, dramatists, writers, blues men and women—African-American leaders

African-(Perry, 1998, 15)

Further, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), a national association of linguists,issued a position statement that applauded the Oakland move and aﬃrmed the need forteachers to meet students where the students are linguistically

Ebonics was not a new term in 1996 The term was coined in 1973 by psychologistRobert L Williams; linguist John Baugh had already written extensively, before Oakland,about language forms whose inﬂuences can be traced back to slavery, calling theselanguages Ebonic (cf Baugh, 2000) Linguists had already documented a variety ofEnglish spoken widely in urban working class areas, usually—but not only—by African

American users, termed alternatively African American Vernacular English (AAVE),

Black English, or African American English (AAE) William Labov wrote about thelanguage form’s logic and systematic nature in 1970 There is disagreement amonglinguists as to whether this variety of English is a dialect or constitutes a separatelanguage The original Oakland resolution took the latter view, fueling the ﬁre of theensuing criticism But the distinction between two dialects of the same language and twoforms that should be labeled separate languages is a social and political matter morethan a linguistic one Mutually comprehensible language forms such as Danish andNorwegian are considered separate languages, while the “dialects” of Chinese are so

diﬀerent as to be mutually incomprehensible Yet they share a writing system and anational identity, and those criteria go into their label of “dialects.”

Just as the term “Ebonics” did not ﬁrst arise with Oakland, the idea of teachersmeeting non-standard English users’ linguistic needs did not ﬁrst surface with this case

in California Almost two decades before Oakland, the schools in Ann Arbor, Michigan,were challenged to build a bridge between the language form of their African Americanstudents and the language of the classroom, Standard English In this 1979 case, how-ever, the plaintiﬀs were the African American families of the school children, bringingcharges against the school board that teachers were not knowledgeable about the child-ren’s home variety of the language and their culture The judge overseeing the case ruledthat the schools were remiss in not overcoming the barriers between the children’s homelanguage variety and the Standard English of the classroom His proposed plan for theschool board, however, “fell far short of the mark” in breaking down these barriers,according to scholar Geneva Smitherman (1998: 169)

The publicity of the Oakland resolution seemed to put the term Ebonics, and theissue of tolerance for non-standard language forms, in the national media and conversa-tion for the ﬁrst time Yet linguist Wayne O’Neil, writing in The Real Ebonics Debate,

says, “Language prejudice remains a ‘legitimate’ prejudice; that is, one can generally saythe most appalling things about people’s speech without fear of correction or contradic-tion” (1998: 42)

The Ebonics story helps us make our point that the boundaries of the educationalsystem reinforce the hierarchy of racial, ethnic, and class structures

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Read the original Oakland School Board resolution at http://www.jaedworks.com/

Exercise 5

shoebox/oakland-ebonics.html (DeVoto 1997) and the amended resolution athttp://linguist.emich.edu/topics/ebonics/ebonics-res2.html Now ﬁnd three dif-ferent media reports on the Oakland resolution Compare the overall mediacoverage of the Oakland resolutions and look for quotes from linguists in thenews Now read the position statement of the Linguistic Society of America athttp://www.linguistlist.org/issues/8/8–57.html#1 Draw up a side-by-side com-parison chart of the points the media and the LSA are making

Bilingual Education

In 1998, another linguistic item appeared in the news: California millionaire Ron Unz,not an educator, linguist, or even a parent (but instead a failed candidate for governor),was spearheading a move to block government funding going to bilingual education.The largely native Spanish-speaking school population of California had been beneﬁtingfrom a law that provided education in a child’s ﬁrst language Unz rallied support for amore stringent policy that moved students into English-only classrooms sooner byportraying these children as living in a non-English ghetto, kept from the rewardsgarnered by Standard English users His bill was passed, and a similar bill was sub-sequently passed in Arizona in 2000 These two examples highlight the tremendoussupport Standard English has in many areas of the education world Be it pitted against adialect of English (Ebonics) or of a non-English language (Spanish or other nativelanguages), Standard English should prevail

Writing Practices in College

The gatekeeping role of the teacher demands that he or she require Standard Englishforms in students’ writing Grading rubrics used in college writing courses will mostlikely factor “grammatical sentence structure” into an evaluation of a paper’s grade.Such a rubric is oﬀered and discussed by Pfeifer and Ferree, in a journal article aimed atteachers entitled “Tired of ‘reeding’ bad papers” (2006) Their suggested rubric containsseveral criteria on a 1–5 scale, 5 being the highest Under Criterion 3, Sentence Fluency,

1 out of 5 points is awarded “for lack of sound sentence structure,” while a full 5 pointsare given when “sentences are clear and the paper is easy to read” (p 140) Non-standardgrammar is equated with unclear and unreadable sentences

Criterion 4 is Proof Reading A paper will receive 3 out of 5 points when “a fewproblems with grammar and punctuation cause the reader to stumble or pause now andagain.” A mere 1 out of 5 points is awarded when the paper is “replete with grammaticalerrors and misuse of punctuation” (p 141) A teacher, then, is unable to read or ﬁndclear thoughts in a paper with “ungrammatical” sentences (Sample rubrics can befound at http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?screen=NewRubric&section_id=5#05.)The ramiﬁcations of this reduction in grade are vast in terms of progressing in theeducational system Consider these three:

• A student who has not mastered Standard English will not, by these guidelines, everreceive an A on a paper

• Scholarship awards will be limited Access to higher levels of education will becompromised

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• The student’s chances of support by a mentor are lessened.

It is ironic that we spend so much time shaping our linguistic selves to conform to thestandard language when in fact Standard English is highly irregular It is also ever-changing

Standard English: Irregular and in Flux

Despite being the privileged dialect, Standard English is pretty messy Remember having

to memorize all those irregular plurals and verb tenses? The most irregular words inlanguages tend to be the oldest and most common words For English, consider the verb

to be We have irregularity in the present tense, the past, and little phonetic similarity

between the inﬁnitive be and forms like is, are, am, was, were At least there is some family resemblance with been and being Speakers of dialects that use a more regular system, such as the unconjugated I be, you be, she be, tend to garner negative social

reactions, i.e are negatively marked Just as their language is negatively marked, soare they

Another irregularity in Standard English can be found in the pronoun system The

adjectival possessives are mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, and theirs Notice mine is the only

form without a ﬁnal “s.” Dialects that smooth out the irregularity and use mines

gener-ate another stigmatized form One more example of the irregular nature of Standard

English involves re ﬂexive pronouns To create reﬂexive pronouns, the rule appears to

be: take the possessive pronoun and add “self” or “selves.” So we get “myself/ourselves,”

“yourself/yourselves,” “herself,” and “itself.” Following this pattern, we should also get

“hisself” and “theirselves.” While these forms are found in non-standard dialects, theyare negatively marked; the Standard English forms break the pattern and use the object-ive case pronouns “him” and “them” as the roots of the reﬂexives In other words, what

we label as standard is not always regular.

Some standard language users will take pride in having mastered all the irregularities,and might express annoyance at speakers who, supposedly, have not made the eﬀort Wecould imagine that teachers, who got ahead partly by mastering Standard English, fallinto this category

Consider the following sentences:

Exercise 6

1 Everyone wants their life to be easy

2 None of these books are available on-line

3 I promise to never waste money again

4 Who did you give that gift to?

5 Keep this secret between you and I

6 Either Nancy or myself will handle the problem later

7 I am taking two less courses this term

8 We will vote for whomever lowers taxes

Now, in small groups, judge the sentences above for structure and clarity Ask threefriends or family members, and three professors at your college to judge the sen-tences Ask them to discuss the grammatical structure, clarity, and logic of eachsentence Do you see any differences in the answers given by the two groups ofinterviewees? Now consult style guides from the 1960s (or earlier) to the present toinvestigate any change in the standard usage of these aspects of English

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These sentences are all non-standard in some way Yet they might sound ﬁne to you This

is because the standard language is always in ﬂux For example, it used to be grammatically

“correct” to use the masculine singular pronoun to refer to “everyone”: Everyone wantshis life to be easy In the 1970s, that usage started to be called sexist Now somestylebooks require the non-sexist “his or her,” while many speakers use the plural pro-noun “their.”

Social Indicators and Markers

Some deviations from a standard form are acceptable, even neutral, in societal terms and

do not raise social eyebrows: choosing between the two pronunciations of the word

“either,” for example, may or may not have social implications for a speaker; the same istrue of choosing one of the two pronunciations of the word “often.” Your choice mightconvey some information about your social identity, but nothing that is highly marked

These varieties are called social indicators Choosing among other varieties, however, might have largely negative associations, and these linguistic variables are called social

markers We say the pronunciation “aks” rather than “ask” is socially marked, as is the

use of “don’t” for the third person singular (“she don’t”), double negatives, and what are

called double modals (“I might could do that,” a form found among some speakers in

the southern US) There are a few social markers that have positive connotations: using

“whom,” for example

The social status of the user in ﬂuences the acceptance of a usage The phrase “between

you and I” is one that can be heard frequently in educated circles If we wanted to play

“gotcha,” we could say that the use of the pronoun “I” in the objective position in thisprepositional phrase is non-standard; however, this construction seems to carry overtprestige because (1) educated people tend to use it, and (2) “I” is perceived as morecorrect than “me.”

an example of overuse of “whom”: we saw a t-shirt proclaiming, “I am for whomeverbeats Harvard.” The “whomever” usage is non-standard in this sentence since the pro-noun is the subject of the predicate ‘beats Harvard.’ Such overuse of supposedly correct

words, pronunciation, or structure is called hypercorrection If you don’t quite know

the way “whom” should be used, but believe that it is more prestigious than “who,” youmight indeed overuse it

If hypercorrection stems from linguistic insecurity, which speakers tend to be themost insecure? Remember that W Labov found that the middle class speakers heexamined increased post-vocalic /r/ pronunciation more frequently than the otherpopulations in conditions where they were made more aware of their own speech

In other words, they were hypercorrecting, using a greater number of post-vowel /r/phonemes in their more formal, conscious pronunciations of words than did the upperclass speakers, and importantly, more than one would expect from their other pronunci-ations (This is a slightly diﬀerent meaning of the term hypercorrection as reﬂected inthe “whomever” usage, where the result was a non-standard form.)

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We are all inconsistent in our language attitudes A teenager might be correctedfor saying that he or she “just graduated Bryant High School” (where did the prep-osition go? Don’t we “graduate from” a school?), but a business manager could saythat this year’s budget “will impact the new project.” Would the businessman “getaway” with using “to graduate” in the transitive sense? Would the teenager beadmired for using “impact” in the corporate sense? Both verbs are being used as

transitive verbs, in that these usages allow a direct object to immediately follow the

verb Both usages are relatively new, for these verbs were originally intransitive verbs

and couldn’t be followed by a direct object These usages, however, do not generallyhave the same social impact on listeners because of the age and social context ofthe user

Let’s look at another example of where one speaker can get away with non-standardusage and another cannot: the non-standard usage of double negatives A student in afreshman composition course would never get away with writing the sentence “Thecharacter in the play did not do nothing to inﬂuence the plot.” A politician, however,could easily use the double negative in “It is not without regret that I announce myretirement.” Some double negatives are acceptable, it seems You might argue thatthese two phenomena are diﬀerent: the student’s double negative signals a negativemeaning (and hence is illogical, following the logic that two negatives equal a posi-tive), while the politician’s use of two negative words in the same sentence results in

an intended (and logically) positive meaning Both sentences, however, contain twonegative words that suit the purpose of the speaker Since the linguistic phenomenon

is held constant in these two examples, then, the inﬂuential variable must be thelanguage user

Other Ways We Vary Our Language—and Why

While the chapter so far has focused on society’s privileging of standard language

forms, in reality we all vary our language, and we all should We talk and write diﬀerentlydepending on such factors as our regional inﬂuences, our level of education, andeven the language use of our family and peers And we continue to make choices aboutour language each time we use speech—or writing or signing or instant messaging—based on the people with whom we are communicating, the purpose of the exchange,

and sometimes even the time of day Style is a linguistic parameter we saw manipulated

by Labov Style is the level of formality we decide upon for our communication.Style encompasses a continuum of choices, from informal and relaxed to levels offormality that terminate in a frozen style, much like a politician or keynote speakeraddressing a large audience Style consists of choices at all levels of language: what

vocabulary we select; our use or non-use of grammar-bearing morphemes such

as possessive /s/ or third person singular /s/ or past tense vs past participle (“Ihave went” vs “I have gone”); syntactic decisions such as single vs double negative;and use of simple, compound, or complex sentence types In the informal style,

we might say, “Hey” when greeting someone; formally, we might say, “How are youtoday?”

Vocabulary associated with the informal style is called slang Slang also tends to be

associated with use by younger members of the population In interactions with peers,which would mainly occur in intimate settings, informal style is deemed to be appropri-ate Slang works to both solidify group identity and exclude outsiders If you “get” theslang, you belong; if you don’t, you’re an outsider

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Look up terms in a slang dictionary, such as the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American

Exercise 7

Slang and Colloquial Expressions (4th edn.) (Spears, 2005) or urbandictionary.com.

Discuss in a small group the terms you are familiar with, and try to deﬁne theunfamiliar terms Compare your answers

Correspond with a student at another school Collect slang and other words that the

Exercise 8

student believes are speciﬁc to his or her school alone

Jargon, like slang, works to include and exclude Jargon is the vocabulary associated with

a ﬁeld of study or occupation Hence the terms “legalese” and “medical jargon,” lary that might be hard to decipher if we are not in the ﬁeld In fact, this book isconveying linguistic jargon right now!

vocabu-Guess what ﬁeld these terms are from and try to deﬁne them

S = the Setting: time and place of the communication event

P = the Participants: participants could also include those not directly involved

in the communication but present at the time, and even non-human orinanimate entities (one’s pet, a family portrait)

E = the End result of the event: what the language user wants to result from theevent

A= the Act order: the order of turns or other linguistic units, e.g who goes ﬁrst,what is said ﬁrst, etc

K= the Key or emotional tone of the event

I = the Instrument(s) used: if the communication is speech, signing, writing,e-mail: and if it is being conducted in the standard dialect, one’s nativelanguage, second language, etc

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N= the Norms of the community as to how such communication usually happens:

is this communication event adhering to or breaking the norms?

G = the Genre of the communication event, the type of event it is: is this event a

lecture, discussion, story-telling event, joke-telling, gossip?

Source: Adapted from Hymes, 1974

It is pretty amazing to think that, given all these variables, we can so quickly makesocially appropriate decisions about our language choices, or purposefully choose toviolate the social norms Everything we do, linguistically, sends a message about our-selves to the world

Conclusion

Let’s return to the classroom of SB and RS Once we have worked together with theconcepts presented in this chapter, we ask our students to free-write in their journalsabout their language attitudes Some quotations are given in the box below

Student Quotations (verbatim)

“I used to think some people’s different speech is funny But now my attitudetotally changed It’s not funny The different aspects of it is what makes it interesting.”

“Language is a system of advantage and disadvantage that can disenfranchisepeople, so why don’t we study this in mainstream education the way we do racism?”

“I am proud that my accent shows who I am and where I am from.”

“I do not want to be the person from nowhere.”

“For the ﬁrst time, I actually thought about what impact language has on others’lives.”

“This topic can change attitudes about language in society because, by educatingpeople on how and why different people talk the way they do, people may be moretolerant of others who speak differently and not judge them on the way they sound.”

“A professor I had last year had an accent and often it would be hard to stand him However, I made it my responsibility to listen as carefully as possible towhat he was saying.”

under-Some of our students agree with Anzaldúa: that they are their language and that tocriticize a language form is to take a stand against the speaker Some students begin tosee that a standard language form perpetuates the continuation of a hierarchy, anotherway to judge groups of people having nothing to do with communicative eﬀectiveness.Others continue to express the concerns they raised at the start of the exercise: that a loss

of a standard will lead to a loss of communication

We hope that the concepts and issues we have raised in this chapter compel you to

reﬂect on and continue to develop more complex understandings of social, political, andeconomic dynamics embedded in language use and language norms, e.g cultural iden-tity, ﬁnancial mobility, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion As informed participants, better able to understand the consequences of language norms and attitudes (for ourselves

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and others), you have the ability to make conscious and purposeful language choices, as both speaker and listener We hope this is your experience.

What do you think? Take our Language Sensitivity Survey: Free-write on any changes

Exercise 10

you notice about your views towards language diversity after reading this chapterand completing the exercises There may be no substantial changes There might besome confusion for you about what you think Just notice your thinking, especially

as the semester continues and you talk to others about this class

References

4Teachers.Org (2009) RubiStar [Internet] Available from: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?screen=NewRubric&section_id=5#05 [Accessed June 10, 2009]

Anzaldúa, G (1999) Borderlands/La frontera San Francisco, Aunt Lute.

Aristar, A R (1997) LSA resolution on Ebonics [Internet], The Linguist List Available from:

http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/8/8–57.html#1 [Accessed June 10, 2009]

Baugh, J (2000) Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic pride and racial prejudice Oxford, Oxford

Uni-versity Press

Bourdieu, P and Thompson, J B (1991) Language and symbolic power Cambridge,

Harvard University Press

DeVoto, J A (1997) Oakland school board Ebonics resolution [Internet] Available from:http://www.jaedworks.com/shoebox/oakland-ebonics.html [Accessed June 10, 2009].Fiske, R H (2009) The Vocabula Review [Internet] Available from: http://www.vocabula.

com/ [Accessed June 10, 2009]

Grammar Blog (2009) Grammar Blog [Internet] Available from: http://www.grammarblog.co.uk/ [Accessed June 10, 2009]

Heath, S B (1983) Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and rooms Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

class-Hymes, D (1974) Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach Philadelphia,

University of Pennsylvania

Labov, W (1970) The study of nonstandard English 8th edn Illinois, National Council of

Teachers of English

Labov, W (2006) The social stratiﬁcation of English in New York City 2nd edn Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press

The Linguist List (2009) Resolution of the board of education adopting the report and recommendations of the African-American task force; A policy statement and directing the superintendent of schools to devise a program to improve the English language acquisition and application skills of African-American students [Internet] Available

from: http://linguist.emich.edu/topics/ebonics/ebonics-res2.html [Accessed June 10,

2009]

Mills, C W (1959) The sociological imagination Oxford, Oxford University Press.

O’Neil, W (1998) If Ebonics isn’t a language, then tell me, what is? In: Perry, T and Delpit, L

The real Ebonics debate Boston, Beacon Press.

Perry, T (1998) ‘I’on know why they be trippin’’ In: Perry, T and Delpit, L The real Ebonics debate Boston, Beacon Press.

Perry, T and Delpit, L (1998) The real Ebonics debate Boston, Beacon Press.

Pfeifer, H L and Ferree, C W (2006) Tired of “reeding” bad papers? Teaching research andwriting skills to criminal justice students Journal of Criminal Justice Education 17(1),

pp 121–142

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