A Wicked Stupid Essay, Dude: An Amorphous Incitement to a Qualified Linguistic Relativism and an Admonishment of Grammatical Nazism

I had two conversations recently about accents prompted by a recent popular movie in which fun was poked at Boston accents. Within the last six months I had listened to Professor McWhorter’s Teaching Company course “The Story of Human Language,” and after having these conversations I was motivated to write about accents, drawing on what I’d learned from the course.

There are some linguistic truths which are obvious when stated, but which our attitudes betray us as usually neglecting. Some of the following are more or less relevant to a discussion of accents, but I’d like to begin by dumping these truths on the table, after which we can sort them out:

·        All spoken language is changing at all times.

·        Spoken language precedes written language.

·        The pronunciation of words varies across space and time.

·        The meaning of words varies across space and time.

The first assertion is difficult to wrap our heads around even if we recognize it to be truthful. That statement is unqualified. No spoken language is ever not in the process of changing—the manner of pronunciation of words and the meaning of words are always changing. The first and most liberating/disorienting consequence of this is that it shatters our preconceptions about the inviolability of the rules of our language.

The Romance languages of Europe—French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian—trace back to Latin. Between, say, 500 AD and today the Latin spoken in Europe gradually morphed into regional dialects of Latin, and then, ultimately, into descendant languages. During that process, lots of educated Europeans were profoundly bent out of shape by the degradation of their revered language. While it is easy to see this transformation as inevitable (it was), and to recognize that the defenders of Latin were fighting a losing battle, we are almost inescapably drawn into exactly analogous attitudes about the dialects of our own language. Who among my friends does not view Black English as an ignorant “deviation” from Standard English? Or roll their eyes when a person whose first language is Spanish uses a double negative? (“I’m not no…”.) Or hear a southern accent as indicative of lack of education? Again, obvious when stated, but almost uniformly neglected in practice, as reflected in our attitudes: there is zero necessary correlation between intelligence and dialect (or accent). None. Not even a little tiny bit.  

Short detour: We all have accents. There is no such thing as not having an accent. We perceive ourselves as “not having an accent” when we are surrounded by people who share our accent. When we travel elsewhere and all these people with accents start telling us we have an accent, we say, “No, I don’t! You have the accent!” This doesn’t make any sense. It is the same as saying, “There are no characteristics to the manner in which I pronounce words!” Or, more to the point, “I do not speak!”

An accent is simply a manner of pronunciation shared by a community of people. The confusion rests in the fact that we quite naturally perceive the manner in which we speak to be the standard (particularly if it happens to be regarded as the standard by people in positions of power and status within our society), and we sort of intuitively assume that an accent is a deviation from the standard. Nope. Well, I suppose it depends how you define accent. I suppose you could just go ahead and assign it the definition of “deviations from standard pronunciation.” That makes sense, since that’s how we use the word. Two points though—if we use language, we have a characteristic way of pronouncing things. This fact is obscured if we define accent as a deviation from the standard, as opposed to simply saying we all have accents, i.e. we all have characteristic ways of pronouncing the words of our languages. Second, as we are about to see, there is nothing special about the “standard accent,” as we might call it.

Back on topic: There is a correlation between our attitudes and our experiences. In other words, if the only time I encounter a southern accent is when I’m watching “King of the Hill,” my attitudes about people with a southern accent are likely going to be strongly affected by that experience. “People with southern accents are well meaning and backward looking.” Similarly with Black English. Is there any truth to our attitudes, though? I suppose we could say something like “Most southerners are ignorant, and although that is not a consequence of their accent, nor vice versa, there is a correlation, and therefore I’m not incorrect to perceive individuals with southern accents as probably ignorant.” You could say that. If you’re a really obnoxious jerk and assume most southern people are ignorant. More importantly, this obscures the reality that there is no necessary correlation. Preferable to simply dismiss our prejudicial attitudes about an association between accent/dialect and intelligence.

The third and fourth assertions up above (since we’re discussing language, isn’t that a redundant phrase, “up above”?) help us understand language change. Actually, they are just part of the process of the first assertion—all spoken language is changing all of the time, and that process involves change in meaning and pronunciation, and it takes place over time and space. What I wanted to get at though is that last part—space. Think of those Romance languages again. Imagine the map of Europe. (You can’t imagine it? You, with your intelligence-conveying standard American English dialect? Just teasing. Look it up though.) …What was I talking about?

Okay. It’s 500 AD. You’re an educated ecclesiastical figure reading Latin in your study, trying to distract yourself from masturbating and causing God to shed a tear. You get restless, stand up, and pace toward the window. You look out and observe your friend Giuseppe the peasant arguing with someone from out of town in what was once Latin, but you cannot understand what they are saying. After a moment, you realize the peasants are also having difficulty understanding each other. What the heck is going on?

Language varies over space. No language is uniform over time, nor is any language uniform over space. At any given time, a language is a bundle of dialects. Now, the terms language and dialect, and what distinguishes them, are actually a little fuzzy. What are at one time are considered dialects of a single language are often later called separate languages for geopolitical reasons—Moldovan and Romanian; Danish and Swedish; Ukrainian and Russian. We’ll go ahead and use the concept of mutual intelligibility though. English and German are different languages; Standard American English and African American Vernacular English (Black English) are dialects of English.

English and German are descendant languages of Proto-Germanic. Proto-Germanic went through the same process of morphing crudely outlined “up above” in regard to the Romance languages—from dialects to separate languages. So just to remind us--not in the past, nor in the present, nor in the future was there, is there, will there be any version of English that should be regarded as inherently superior to any other versions—maybe we like the way Shakespeare’s Early Modern English sounds, but there is no objective basis for considering one language or dialect superior to another—it’s a matter of taste at best, prejudice at worst, and it is mostly the latter. It should also be noted that the survival of particular languages is not the consequence of any inherent superiority.

The point I’m building up to is that the same principles hold for our assessments of currently spoken dialects. The traditional refrain is that a standard dialect is a dialect with an army. In other words, we associate dialects with things that have no necessary relationship to the dialect. Does a British accent convey refinement and intelligence to you? (Just say yes, don’t be difficult.) The reason it does has to do with history, not with any inherent superiority of individuals with a British accent to those who don’t possess such a magisterial manner of pronunciation. (We might go further and point out that the dominance of one group over another is only an accident of history as well and not indicative of any inherent superiority of the dominant group.) You know what it’s like—reverence for one dialect and contempt for another that is? It’s like how McDonald’s is a fancy restaurant in less wealthy nations. It’s relative, in other words.

If the South had won the Civil War and gone on to conquer the North, our standard dialect might be considered ignorant and the banter engaged in between Hank Hill and his redneck neighbors in the alleyway while they drink beer would be the epitome eloquence. If Germany had won World War II and gone on to conquer the continental US, perhaps a German accent would bring to mind statesmanship and solemnity as opposed to invoking…whatever a German accent invokes—fear of strange porn?

I have a friend with a strong Boston accent. No one knows where she got it since she didn’t grow up in Boston, so I was asking her where she might have picked it up. I was surprised that she was both aware that she had it and embarrassed about it. This is one of the consequences of our prejudices about dialects—a baseless sense of superiority among those who “don’t have an accent,” and a baseless sense of inferiority among those who do. Here’s the beautiful thing about all of this, and I mean this in a completely literal, nonjudgmental sense (or at least I’m pretending to): there is no correlation between dialect/accent and intelligence; there is a correlation between ignorance and the presumption that there is a correlation between accent and intelligence: the very notion that accents or dialects are indicative of intelligence is ignorant. Our prejudicial attitudes about people’s accents are just that—judgments that precede knowledge. At best they reflect the extremely partial "knowledge" gleaned from our parochial experiences, i.e. watching "King of the Hill."

That pretty much concludes the nearly coherent portion of this essay. A few other thoughts though. The second assertion is interesting in this way—we who have grown up in literate societies (ones that use alphabets anyway) are taught that letters make sounds. Letters do not make sounds. Letters (ostensibly) represent sounds. The idea that the written word and the pronunciation we are taught it conveys are somehow sacrosanct distorts our understanding of language. Look at the word Reading. No one is from “reeding”; they’re from “redding.” Now, English has borrowed a lot of words, so this isn’t just a story of language change. But look at just how distant the spelling of words is from their actual pronunciation:

• calendar (Don’t forget the “ar” after “d” rule—this one is such a freak we don’t even have a rule for it!)

• cough, though, plough, tough, through (off, oh, ou (as in ouch), uff, oo)

• schedule (skejwool)

How ignorant would you consider some who wrote, “I’m from Reeding, where we plou our streets even tho it is tuff.” Actually, that person is using writing in a more rational way than we are.

We have devised a burdensome quantity of torturous “rules” for reading and writing English, but this is a consequence of the written word being frozen (carved in stone, so to speak), while spoken language continues to change—all spoken language is changing at all times. If we were rational (that we are is another myth), we would revise our spellings of words to keep pace with changes in pronunciation. Why don’t we? I mean, why keep coming up with more and more rules? Contemplate your own attitudes, and listen to others speak about how other people write. We treat writing as if there is something inviolable or superior about the current conventions. The truth is there isn’t. In fact, that yokel from Reeding who hates to plou cuz it’s tuff—he (or she! I’m not sexist, women can be yokels too) is both more rational than us and frankly less stressed than us. I’d love to liberate myself from the burdens our language imposes on us, but I don’t. You know why? Because you’ll assume I’m ignorant. So I’m forced to conform and convey the irrationality of our written language while conforming to its preposterous rules.

Language is a means of expressing ourselves. The purpose of formalizing the rules of that expression should be to facilitate comprehension. Much of what we regard as inviolable or standard is simply superfluous excrescence, and such extraneous conventions in fact inhibit communication by causing us to spend an inordinate quantity of time flipping through dictionaries and style handbooks, and distracting us and our listeners or readers from the substance of our statements. The next time someone pronounces or spells a word incorrectly, ask yourself this: do I understand the substance of what they are saying to me? Language is a tool whose purpose is communication. Everything else is secondary—spelling, grammar, pronunciation. To become fixated on these things, particularly as indicative of intelligence, is really a profound and ironic sort of ignorance. It’s like attending a concert but being too distracted by the musician’s unorthodox strumming technique to hear the music.

Everything written above is pervaded by the relativism that Professor McWhorter’s course emphasized, a relativism which I gather to be the norm in the field of linguistics. I can’t resist noting that it does seem to me that there is a basis upon which to consider a language or dialect superior to another, namely its functionality to its speakers. Latin was bogged down with all sorts of complexities, complexities which the Romance languages shed. Now, I know the response, another fundamental truth in linguistics—all languages are complex. As the Romance languages shed some superfluous aspects of Latin, they developed other complexities. Professor McWhorter does state however that not all languages are equally complex, and discusses how impossibly complex languages spoken by handfuls of isolated peoples can be. (Counter-intuitively, the languages of advanced societies are the least complex, a consequence of being learned as a second language by large numbers of adults who do our progeny the thankless but commendable favor of stripping the language of the linguistic overgrowth.)

So I’ll end on that note: ambivalence about the categorical relativism of linguists. Are some languages better than others for reasons other than taste? I’m not ready to say no to that question despite not having figured out what the objective criteria are by which you would make such a judgment. Perhaps it’s functionality, perhaps not. What clearly isn’t based on objective criteria however are our attitudes about the correlation between intelligence and accent/dialect. I’m as susceptible to such prejudices as anyone else, but the reality is there is no necessary correlation between intelligence and one’s use of the words yo, y’all, wicked, or legerdemain.