Recently, a student asked me what an astrolabe was. After
I explained, she asked, “How it look?”
I’ve worked with students in diverse, urban schools for several
years. The students I’ve worked with have been at varying levels of
preparedness for success. It was not unusual to expend significant effort in
assisting a student on a project only for the student to never complete and
submit it, for instance.
However, perhaps the most irritating aspect of my
experience has not been anything done or said by the students, but rather my
colleagues’ attitudes regarding their students’ speech.
There is a standard dialect of American English, and
educators should teach it to students, as they do. Educated people speak a
certain way in professional settings. They don’t say, “How it look?”
Yet, it is also true that educated people do not look
derisively upon other ways of speaking. At least, they don’t if they are educated
about language.
Languages change. The variations in speech that are
frequently treated as irksome represent the very processes of language change that
created the standard ways of speaking. At one time, it was improper to use
singular “you.” You were supposed to use “thou.” At one time, it was improper
to pronounce disturbed as “dis turbd.” You were supposed to say “dis tur bid.”
In these instances, people began using the language incorrectly, and
eventually the incorrect usage became the correct usage.
People who complain about language change do so in a
dialect that is entirely composed of earlier mistakes. The mistakes they are
complaining about are potential elements of tomorrow’s standard dialect, the
dialect with which their future analogue will issue equally uninformed complaints
about language decay.
To assume that the English you’re used to is inherently
the proper way of speaking English is like imagining that the arrangement of the clouds
the first time you saw them is the proper arrangement of the clouds. It’s like
imagining that they were improperly arranged before that and will be improperly
arranged forever thence.
Furthermore, at no time in a language’s evolution is it
spoken in a uniform manner. There are always different accents and different
dialects. The standard accent or dialect is whichever one is spoken
by powerful or influential people. It is not the correct way of speaking
because of any properties of the accent or dialect. Its preeminence is arbitrary.
This isn’t to say that students should not be taught
“proper” English. They should. It will help them navigate professional
settings, and a society ought to have a set of common linguistic guidelines to
which to refer.
On the other hand, when one recognizes the arbitrary
nature of what constitutes the standard ways of speaking, exasperation with the
fact that other people speak differently than you is revealed to be absurd.
People who derive a sense of superiority from having been born to speakers of a
standard dialect ought to be as stigmatized as racists. Just as with racists,
their sense of superiority is both unwarranted and pernicious.
It is a badge of education to recognize variations in speech;
it is a badge of ignorance to find them vexing.
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