“Dialectism” Linguistic discrimination and language teaching C. J. Harrison Département d’études anglaises et nord américaines Université Marc Bloch 2002 Keywords: linguistic discrimination; dialectism; EFL; France (higher education) Abstract Whereas racism, sexism, religious intolerance, unfair treatment of the disabled and so forth are all forms of discrimination that are in some sense ‘in the spotlight’, and that hence form the topic of ongoing debate, conflict and reform, there is yet another kind of discrimination which survives — even thrives — without attracting the same critical reassessment as its phenomenological siblings, and that is linguistic discrimination. This paper briefly explores the probable causes of this particular kind of prejudice, offers a hypothesis as to why it remains out of the public eye, and demonstrates the close parallels that it has with increasingly unacceptable discriminatory attitudes in other human interactional domains. The paper is addressed specifically to EFL teachers. It suggests that a clear awareness of the distinction between linguistic fact and unfounded prescriptivist folly is an essential element of the professional credentials of an EFL teacher, and is indispensable to the rounded formation of an appropriate biculturalism in EFL students. The Problem That some people might — and many do — actively promote discriminatory attitudes is lamentable. Arguably worse however is the possibility that such discrimination be propagated unwittingly by otherwise well-meaning people. In the case of EFL teachers, particular vigilance is required, given the low profile of linguistic discrimination as a serious social problem, and the high resilience of nonsensical myths about language, even among educated people. Only the explosion of such myths about the nature of human language can lead language professionals away from the unintentional perpetuation of inappropriate attitudes that do nothing other than fuel prejudice and discriminatory behavior. Arguments over prescriptive attitudes have a long history. As early as 19BCE, Horace found it appropriate to assert, Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, cadentque Quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus Quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi1 but his was far from the last word, the dispute resting on a deep and perhaps insurmountable distinction between quite dissimilar psychological relationships to the global phenomenon of change, and to the validity of independent thought. But while this specific debate, on a purely academic level, may be futile, it has a less commonly acknowledged discriminatory consequence, which will be the focus of this paper. As EFL teachers, our manner of representing and referring to dialectal variation within English has a powerful influence on attitudes towards variation, the inculcation of which we contribute to either knowingly or not. Our representation is of crucial importance, as we are not just training automatons to mouth something that sounds like the English language, we are attempting to direct students towards a functional biculturalism. We hence train them in linguistic, literary, historical and cultural disciplines in order to open the way for them to position themselves either as a functioning part of the Anglophone world, or else as a valid representation of that world within their native education system, should they themselves end up as teachers. Attitudes towards the manifold variation within English play a central role in this training, and as the nature of English and the Anglophone world changes, so this type of concern becomes ever more important. As an illustration of the problem, I would like to offer the following excerpt from a class exercise conducted with second year DEUG2 students at a French humanities University. Having listened to a recording in which black Americans from disfavored neighborhoods were interviewed, the students were given various extracts (printed) and were asked to comment on them. The actual question was as follows, 1 “Many a word long disused will revive, and many now high in esteem will fade, if Custom wills it, in whose power lie the arbitrament, the rule, and the standard of language.” Ars Poetica 90 (trans. E. H. Blakeney) cited in Crystal & Crystal, 2000, 8:36 (p.46). 2 The "Diplôme d'Etudes Universitaires Générales" – roughly equivalent to a B.A. in the anglophone university system. 1) Each of the following utterances presents features of grammar or pronunciation worthy of comment. particularities and explain them drawing on your knowledge of syntax and phonetics. a) b) c) d) e) f) g) h) i) Single out the You’ve got to really keep telling them maybe tomorrow… And the government say they do the best they can… …a can of carrots, a box of oats, and the rice. …for two weeks off of my income. Fanciest meal? I never had a fancy meal. It’s just something to think about when I wake up. Do I get something to eat? The baby is being starved. If there is an economic boom, it isn’t happening here… Thank the Lord we got what we got today. The students concerned were in their second year of linguistics and English courses, and hence should have been in a position to offer plausible linguistic hypotheses regarding the phrases, as instructed. The majority of students 3 however responded to the above question in terms of errors: grammatical or phonological mistakes made by those too ignorant to know better — the result of poor education or of the generally low social desirability of the speakers. For example, [In response to ex. e)] “The boy does not speak English very well. He should say: “I’ve never had” instead of “I never had”. And like his predecessors his pronunciation is not proper.” [In response to ex. f)] “Now, this boy has a horrible pronunciation. It seems to me he speaks another language. His pronunciation is not correct at all, for example: “do I get” becomes [du… аˆ gæt] or “something” is heard as a completely different word [ѕ√m\n].” Not all responses were overtly negative, but significantly, even many positive replies showed the same bias: [In response to ex. a)] “… the lady speaks a perfect British English or at least pronounces every single word properly.” This last example is especially noteworthy, as the speaker in example 1a was a middle-aged African-American female, speaking with a highly Midwestern-ized US accent, which was identified as “a perfect British English [my emphasis]” by the student, presumably as it contrasted with the “awful” accents of the younger AAEV speakers, and hence, being more “correct”, or “better formed” was necessarily assimilated to British, ideologically equivalent to correct. The qualification immediately following (“...or at least...”) shows up clearly that the student may in fact have had doubts about the regional origin of the woman’s accent, but asserts that even if it is not British, it has the same characteristics — i.e. the words are pronounced “properly”. So great was the mindset towards this kind of socio-linguistic prejudice that even the perfectly standard expression in ex. g) — The baby is being starved — was assumed to be erroneous by many students, who went to great pains to identify an error, even though there is absolutely nothing anomalous, nor even dialectally specific about the utterance4 . It should be clear that the phrasing of the question in no way biases the students towards this kind of treatment of the data. What we are seeing is a reflex of deep-seated dialect prejudices, probably with roots in French normative standards (Castellotti & de Robillard, 2001), but undoubtedly aided and abetted by the way in which the educative standard of RP (or BBC) English is presented in the context of the French university system. Subsequent class discussion resulted in many students backing away from the prejudice evident in their replies, which suggests that their answers were more in the vein of socially constructed linguistic performance (Shuck, p.c.), than deeply considered opinion. But this is precisely the danger. Such routinized, unexplored biases can easily become principled bigotry where nothing is put in the way of their ritualisation and calcification. Such attitudes are present in all societies and exert formative pressure on children in their own sociolinguistic milieu long before they reach University, but in the context of tertiary EFL teaching there is a window of opportunity to resist the importation of such prejudice into the mastery of a new cultural identity, and I am suggesting that this is a serious pedagogical responsibility for EFL teachers; propagation of bigotry presumably not being on the global agenda of serious tertiary educational institutions. The sum total of EFL instructors’ representations and reactions regarding language use and variety comprise an explanatory construct upon which students passively draw, not necessarily in their mastery of grammar, lexis, or pronunciation, but in their sociolinguistic attitudes: attitudes that will be woven into their speech rituals and routines, and which will hence color their anglo-identity. As English truly becomes a “global language” (Crystal, 1997), attitudes like those witnessed in the class responses alluded to above are increasingly inappropriate, and we would be doing our students an ever-worsening disservice in not raising their awareness to how they are positioning themselves in the adoption of such beliefs. 3 The author saw some 75 answers to this question, of which easily 90% contained some manner of value judgement. Precise figures were not kept. 4 It was included to try to illicit comment on the use of the passive, rather than the active alternative “This baby is starving”. What should therefore be given priority for EFL teachers is a clear understanding of the reality of the phenomenon that we treat — i.e. of language structure and function — and for our students, an awareness of the full implicature of whatever attitudes they adopt, their evidential basis (or lack thereof), and the social positioning consequences of harboring them or expressing them. Awareness, not censure, to allow students to make an informed decision regarding their own attitudes, but — and this is the crucial point — awareness of something that approaches accuracy, rather than of tired prescriptive nonsense that is all too often visible in discussions of, and pedagogical approaches to language, particularly regarding linguistic variation. Tired Prescriptive Nonsense The standard prescriptive folktheory about language variety can be represented with something like the diagram in figure 1. The solid box around the standard form can be taken to indicate both its status as “a real language” and moreover, its rank as a privileged or preferred form. The dotted boxes above the dialect forms are intended to indicate that such variants are occasionally afforded the status of real, valid languages by certain individuals, but more commonly not; and the complete absence of boxes above the other forms is meant to show Figure 1 — Folk theory of language varieties the popular conception of their status as non-systematic, invalid or otherwise degenerate aberrations. In general, vertical position in this diagram equates with perceived worth, desirability or validity. This kind of folk model is discussed by Milroy & Milroy, who summarize the common misconceptions about linguistic variation in three generalizations, 1. 2. 3. That there is one, and only one, correct way of speaking and/or writing the English language. That deviations from this norm are illiteracies, or barbarisms, and that non-standard forms are irregular and perversely deviant. That people ought to use the standard language and that it is quite right to discriminate against nonstandard users, as such usage is a sign of stupidity, ignorance, perversity, moral degeneracy, etc. (Milroy & Milroy, 1999, p. 33) Milroy & Milroy’s work is an in-depth discussion of many aspects of this question. In what follows, I would like to slice the same question in a slightly different way, and explore particularly the fact that the caricature presented in figure 1, 1. 2. 3. applies a value hierarchy to what is in reality simply difference; depends upon normative standards derived from written language, and applied quite inappropriately to the spoken code; licenses a discriminatory attitude that is a brother to racism, sexism, religious intolerance and so forth, but which, unlike these unacceptable attitudes, is not only tolerated, but even actively espoused, often by people whose voice carries considerable social weight (Pinker’s “language mavens”; Pinker, 1994). A clear comprehension of the non-validity or inappropriateness of each of these three points should be an overt inclusion in any EFL teacher training course which holds integration into the socio-political climate of modern world English as a serious goal for its students (and indeed its students’ students). Let us begin with variety in English, and the fact that difference does not automatically imply hierarchy. Modern English To put this discussion in context, let us consider some statistics. According to the current Ethnologue5 database, English is spoken in 105 independent nations, forming a speaker population of approximately 508,000,000 people of which just over half (341,000,000) speak English as a first language. This seems to be a very cautious estimate, however, as other sources put the present number of competent English speakers (L1 and L2+) as high as 1,800 million. The detailed and balanced discussion in Crystal, 1997 (pp. 53-63) suggests a middle-of-the-road estimate at around 1,200 million. Figure 2 shows a graphical representation of Crystal’s statistics. 5 http://www.ethnologue.com/home.asp There are no clear figures on regional variations, but at least two of those countries (the UK and the US) show in addition considerable internal dialectal variation, easily rendering the number of distinguishable dialects6 of the language into the hundreds. In the light of this, how one could seriously maintain an attitude such as that espoused in Milroy & Milroy’s first point above (“[t]hat there is one, and only one, correct way of speaking and/or writing the English language”) is a priori difficult to comprehend, but some further statistics will render it even more so. Let us extend Milroy & Milroy’s point by adding the plausible detail that “the one correct form” of English (and we will return to the problematic notion of “correct” itself below) be “RP”7 . This is an attitude likely to be developed by a French EFL student, as RP remains the educational standard adopted in France. Both Milroy & Milroy (1999), and Crystal (1997) point out that RP English is used by less than 5% of the English-speaking population of Great Britain — less than 3 million people. In comparison to the estimate of English use in the world, this equates with one quarter of one percent of English speakers. If this were deemed the only “correct” form of the language, then 99.75% of those of us who speak English as a first language would be struggling under the constraints of a degenerate dialect... Language standards The selection of a standard linguistic form — be it in an educational or administrative (governmental) milieu — is essentially motivated by consistency. In educational terms, a standard is taught such that assessment can be facilitated, and to avoid the considerable complexities of trying to juggle the hundreds of dialect forms that a language like English has. No teacher can seriously be expected to be conversant with the entire dialectal range of English, nor any student to internalize it, and hence establishing a standard allows a specific set of requirements for both teachers and students to be (comparatively) easily specified. In governmental terms, a similar condition exists for the facilitation of legal and administrative communication, although of course at the level of national organization the Figure 2 — Distribution of the majority of English speakers in the world selection of linguistic standards is in (L1 and L2 conflated) superimposed over Kachru’s (1986) “inner circle” addition a tremendously politicized and “outer circle” distinction. Figures indicate millions of speakers. undertaking involving questions of Source: Crystal (1997) nationalism, and asymmetric social privilege, which we will not explore here. Crystal (1997) provides a succinct yet comprehensive overview of such questions with regard to English. Pennycook (1994) provides an in-depth sociohistorical analysis of the “cultural politics” of English which raises many uncomfortable questions that authors such as Crystal tend to overlook. Max Weinreich gave us the succinct observation that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The national languages of countries are inevitably those of the ruling class(es) or nationality(-ies), who are, in addition, the ones who control the military and economic power. Governments generally choose national languages (or else impose them, even if they are never specifically established by law, as is the case for English in both England and the US), and governments come to power if not through established consensus anchored in sociopolitical history, then through military force. The spread of languages around the world throughout history parallels the spread of invading and conquering (“colonizing”) armies, and the establishment of military and/or economic hegemony over the conquered peoples and territories. The spread of English is no exception, riding initially on the shoulders of the British Imperial Army, then on a series of monumental historical events with economic import (most notably the Industrial Revolution, the American War of Independence, and the US-lead explosion of information technology), and more recently squarely on the back of the American military-economic juggernaut. “Correctness” The selection of a standard is motivated on practical grounds, and in itself is not problematic. The problem is the attitudes that accrete to that standard once it is put in place. Once established, there seems to be an irresistible tendency 6 My phrasing here begs the question of the separability of “varieties”. Standard conceptions treat “dialects” as discrete and thus countable entities, but even the most cursory investigation of dialectal and sociolectal variation shows such a position to be untenable. Although this particular point represents another important and common misconception about language and language variation, it will not be discussed in the present paper. 7 RP is not a dialect; it is a sociolectal phonological (pronunciation) system. This important distinction is however rarely rigorously reinforced, such that “RP” tacitly comes to function as a label for a full (imaginary) dialect, ineluctably assimilated to “correct” English. for the standard to become the “best” or “correct” form of the language, while all other dialects take second place, and may fall even lower, as indicated in the diagram in figure 1. The seeds of this kind of attitude are already visible in the simple fact that language standards in the educational milieu are invariably adopted from national models. Thus, the educational standard inherits the politicized asymmetry that allowed the particular dialect to get established as a political standard in the first place. Once a dialect achieves the status of a national language, many socio-economic opportunities become inextricably tied up with command and mastery of this code. The standard becomes a “badge” (Nettle & Dunbar, 1997; Dunbar, 2001), and those who do not exhibit the right badge are not allowed entry into certain in-group restricted domains. [...] the most coveted place in the pyramid and in the system was only available to holders of an English-language credit card. English was the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elitedom. (Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1985, speaking about education in Kenya) This kind of social discrimination is commonplace, and has been a part of the human condition for hundreds of thousands of years (Nettle 2001). Where it becomes particularly divisive, however, is where this badging inherits a specious moral justification, and becomes not just a club membership phenomenon, but is rather interpreted as an indication of natural order. That is, where “correct grammar” (the most usual expressive form of this kind of complaint in the mouths of the linguistically naïve) takes on motivational, intellectual and even moral dimensions. The former British minister Norman Tebbitt made this astounding leap (stumble?) of logic quite overtly when he stated, “If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people turn up filthy ... at school ... all those things tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards, there’s no imperative to stay out of crime.” (cited in Graddol & Swan, 1988, p.102) For Tebbitt, therefore, and sadly for millions like him, grammar is equated directly with moral and social responsibility. Furthermore any difference from the accepted grammatical “standard” is ineluctably a degeneration, and signs of grammatical degeneration are unambiguous warnings that social disintegration, crime and immorality are soon to follow. Such an opinion is nothing more than infantile in its illogical alarmism. For one thing, the conception of “grammar” inherent in such proclamations is superficial, inconsistent and even selfcontradictory (see Milroy & Milroy, 1999, ch. 5 and Pinker, 1994, ch. 12 for detailed treatments). We will consider this further in connection with the spoken/written difference, below. Secondly, difference from the standard is automatically equated with degeneration, even though the normal semantic scope of the notion difference necessarily also encompasses improvement. But more importantly, such a view conceives of variation simplistically along a single axis such that any two variants must perforce be ranked one against the other. Were the phenomena of human language — or indeed any observable natural phenomena — thus reducible to valid description along single axes, the task of the scientist would be greatly facilitated. In reality, there are no such single axes. The understanding of the phenomenon of linguistic variation implicit in such a view is simplistic in the extreme, and when maintained by those generally capable of abstract reflection, can only be indicative of a lack of such reflection with respect to the phenomenon in question. As Thomas Hardy put it 8, “[p]urism, whether in grammar or in vocabulary, almost always means ignorance.” For instance, few francophones would be likely to interpret the abolition of the tu — vous distinction in modern French as an improvement to the language. Standard English on the other hand lacks this distinction, and dialects that seek to re-establish9 it, with “you” as the singular, and forms such as “y’all” (Sth. US) or “yous” (some dialects of Britain, Australia and N.Z.) as the plural are quite universally regarded as degenerate, and those who use them, less educated or less intelligent, even though they are in fact recreating quite a functional and cross-linguistically attested meaning distinction which is simply lacking in the standard dialect. Far from groping about in an agrammatical haze, speakers who use y’all or yous are in fact using a finer-grained and more expressively specific version of English than the standard. If the standard dialect is somehow superior for suppressing this distinction, is English therefore globally superior to French, (and the myriad other languages that maintain a number distinction in 2nd person pronouns)? Of course not! The difference is merely a difference, not an index of merit or value. Y’all and yous are non-standard, simply because they do not form part of the dialect of English which is currently taken as standard. This banal truism underscores the important fact that the dialect currently accepted as “standard” English (and in fact this varies dependant upon one’s location in the world, but let us pretend that we can talk about a standard dialect of English for the moment) has this status not because of any inherent structural features of the dialect itself, but because of meaningless socio-political accident. The vulgar, debased, degenerate non-systematic, vile, morally defunct dialect of that once most noble language Latin, spoken by the uneducated and culturally impoverished masses in the Gallic provinces… became modern standard French… Norms are historical accidents, and the fates of individual dialects can and do change under the influence of forces that have nothing whatsoever to do with the internal structure of the dialect itself. Those who champion the moral supremacy of “correct grammar” are in fact engaging in a much less benign dialogue, and that is the maintenance of authoritarian social control. Language standards, as we have noted above, are directly linked with prevailing governmental, and hence by extension, legal and often religious authority. The standard 8 in William Archer, “Real Conversations” cited in Crystal & Crystal, 2000, 8:35 (p.46) 9 ‘re-establish’, as English did have this distinction – thou vs. you – up until about 400 years ago. dialect thus comes to represent that authority — often directly, for it is within that dialect that laws are drafted, and that the hallmarks of social structure and control are invested and expressed. Variation from the standard is hence interpreted, by those who consider themselves to be within the privileged group, as an attempt to pervert that authority, and hence as a kind of social dissidence. It is a short step from dissidence to moral subversion, general undesirability, lack of intelligence and so forth: a short step, but one that must perforce be taken with eyes firmly closed, and intellectual capacity disengaged. It is one thing to be in favor of social cohesion, legality, judicial stability, and so forth, but quite another to assume that anyone who speaks differently is necessarily committed to the destruction of all that society holds dear. In fact, the parallelism is nothing short of preposterous. But perhaps more important to the whole question of what causes such moralistic misinterpretation of linguistic variation, is the fact that most people have little or no idea of what they are talking about when they use the word “grammar”, basing their judgements on poorly understood prescriptive rule systems derived from written language, and applied, usually quite inappropriately, to the spoken code. It is to this aspect of the problem that we now turn. Written versus spoken language When the majority of people speak about “grammar”, they are referring to a hazily understood and heterogeneous set of “rules” that they have acquired in dribs and drabs through their schooling, and from their linguistic models, often including articles in the popular media written by self-proclaimed usage experts, or indeed whole books published by the same. Such things normally take the form of proscriptions: Don’t end a sentence with a preposition, or else as ossified corrections ‘May I go’, not ‘Can I go. This kind of “grammar” is little other than a random set of logically disjunct regulations, many of which have no historical, rational, linguistic or communicative justification, and which are invariably derived from written language forms, and then applied piecemeal to speech. The proscription on ending a sentence with a preposition is in fact a fine example: this is something that English writers — and presumably speakers — have been doing for as long as English has been a recognizable language, and has only come to be a “rule” because of a pedantic interpretation of the Latinate grammatical term “preposition”, which seems to dictate a word-order restriction on their occurrence (pre + position). But the fact is that this grammatical term was evolved for Latin, which is the ancestor of Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese etc.), and its original sense is not and has never been adapted to the description of a Germanic language such as English, where so-called “prepositions” interact with verbs, and can frequently end up in sentence-final position. Winston Churchill is attributed with a fine demonstration of the nonsense of this so-called rule when he rejected a correction on this very point by saying: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put!” The false transfer from the written to the spoken domain is made possible by two further misconceptions about language; namely (a) that spoken language is merely the oral reflex of written language; and (b) (implicit in (a)), that it is written language that is primary, with the spoken form as a messy and imperfect reflection. While recording child language data in 1989, I chanced to capture some of the parents’ speech on tape. The child’s mother, an educated upper-middle-class white speaker of a high-status sociolect of Australian English, upon seeing the written transcripts of her own speech, was disinclined to believe that she spoke in the fragmentary, saccadic, repetitive manner that characterizes all unplanned utterances, preferring to think that I had mis-recorded or mis-transcribed her production. Despite being an intelligent and educated woman, her emotional response — one of affront that she would speak “so badly” — threatened to override the obvious facts that, 1) I knew what I was doing, and 2) would have no reason to alter the data. Her personal conflict between these two responses was quite palpable, and stands for me as an excellent example of the degree to which intellectual rationality is but gossamer in the face of emotionally-based beliefs regarding language. That most people are completely unaware of the real nature of spoken language is symptomatic of a pervasive and perverse conception of “correct grammar” as being that which is seen in print. What people actually say, and what they think they say are radically different, and transcripts of people generally judged to be “good” or “correct” speakers of English are equally full of the fragments, false-starts, hesitations and redundancies that they themselves might overtly reject as signs of “poor grammar” (and by extension moral aberrance, social undesirability and so forth). But in reality nobody speaks spontaneously like a book, and those that try to merely end up sounding stilted and unnatural. Unplanned spoken language is quite unlike planned written language. Furthermore, historically, statistically and developmentally (both in evolutionary and ontogenetic terms) it is spoken language that is in all senses prior. Writing is comparatively rare across the world’s languages, quite recent in terms of human linguistic endeavor (4 — 5000 years for writing; perhaps as long ago as 500,000 for speech, according to endocranial cast research, see LeMay, 1976), and entirely derivative of the spoken code. The derivative status of writing is evidenced in the language itself, for instance in the fact that English has the term “illiteracy” for those who do not control the written form of their native (or primary) language, but who can speak and understand it. There is no corresponding term for the reverse situation however because it simply does not occur. One can fail to develop the secondary skill of writing while in full control of the primary spoken form, but one cannot natively master the second without the first10. The fact that the written code has come to epitomize prescriptive standards of well-formedness is understandable, given the permanent nature of written text. It is this permanence, in contradistinction to the ephemeral nature of speech, 10 The reverse of illiteracy would be a native ability to both read and write the language, but not to speak it, nor to understand it when spoken. Pathological conditions approaching this constellation of abilities (non-fluent aphasia, pure-word deafness, or congenital hearing disorders) are not valid examples. Illiteracy is the result of hindered learning opportunities, and is hence environmental. Pathological approximations of the reverse condition would be physiological and not amenable to reversal, whereas through training and attention illiteracy is able to be overcome. that allows the written code to function as a stable reference — a necessary precondition on the establishment and maintenance of linguistic authority. But even if it is understandable, it is still manifestly inappropriate, and deserves to be understood as such. Those who wield prescriptive rules as weapons of social judgement are normally quite easy targets for ridicule, as they themselves produce manifold unchecked examples of the very things they profess abhorrence for in their own speech (perhaps not in writing, but certainly in speech...), and moreover because they stand entirely incapable of defending their assertions on anything but the most flimsy of emotive bases. We have considered difference as difference, and the written spoken distinction, and seen how these are both mishandled by pedants to produce quite unsupportable hypotheses regarding linguistic variety and performance. But there is one sense in which all of this grows sinister. We have already touched upon it above, but I would like to turn now to the overlooked fact that, despite being mysteriously shielded from the increasing social awareness that has turned spotlights upon racism, sexism and religious intolerance, linguistic discrimination — dialectism — is precisely the same kind of animal, with the same kinds of unjust social and interpersonal consequences. Dialectism Discrimination is the application to an individual or to a group the results of an invalid association of accidental features with non-accidental features and their subsequent generalization. Responses to individuals as individuals may be negative or positive, but without the individual being assimilated explicitly or implicitly into a generalized group, we cannot speak of discrimination. Groups themselves are normally identified on the basis of characteristics that may well be phenomenologically accurate, and judgmentally neutral (physical attributes for gender, race, and age, for instance), but additional non-empirical attributes — behavioral, moral, intellectual, motivational — quickly inhere based on nongeneralizable individual experience and hearsay. Other members of a group identified by valid (physical) cues are then attributed quite probably invalid — or at the very least unattested — behavioral characteristics drawn from the group stereotype. The generalization of accidental characteristics is dependent upon the ignorance of the judge towards the real nature of the individuals being generalized over. Familiarity with a group — that is, detailed and specific knowledge of a large number of individual exemplars — hinders the propagation of simplistic generalizations. Hence the imperviousness of one’s own group to negative stereotyping. Conversely, detailed knowledge of isolated exemplars is generally insufficient to block stereotyping, producing characteristic contradictory declarations which condemn a whole group, but in the next breath selectively exonerate one member of that group because the speaker happens to know him. An actual act of discrimination emerges, in a particular and new encounter, when the identification of any valid group characteristic in an individual leads to all of the other characteristics of the group being automatically attributed to him individually, even in the utter absence of any further evidence for their applicability. This kind of automatic feature association, although a natural part of human classificatory behavior (see Lamb, 1999, Ch. 12 for a discussion of this kind of process in linguistic processing) deriving directly from the most basic functioning of our brains (see for instance Ch. 30 of Kandel et al., 1991, for a detailed treatment of the integrative and creative aspects of visual perception), is neither valid nor acceptable, as at a behavioral level it is a process that is completely open to introspection and modifiable through intelligent reflection; absent in the case of sweeping generalizations. Specific examples of this false logic are easily seen in sexist judgements (Mary is a woman; women are no good at technical things; Mary is no good at technical things), racism (Jamal is a young black man; young black men belong to violent gangs and take drugs; Jamal is (probably) a violent, drug-taking gang-member) etc. These kinds of discriminatory attitudes are entirely unacceptable in modern society, and their unfair ramifications are immediately obvious (Mary won’t get the job, even though there is no evidence to suggest that she is not the best candidate; Jamal will be favored by the police as a suspect, despite the existence of equally plausible white suspects). But it is the purpose of this paper to point out that precisely the same logic is at work in the sequence: John says “I ain’t”, and “yous” (i.e. his “grammar” is “bad”); people who use “bad grammar” are stupid, uneducated, untrustworthy, etc.; John is stupid, uneducated, untrustworthy etc. It is the author’s impression that whereas the first two syllogisms above are quite universally unacceptable, the third is much more likely to be tolerated, and even defended by otherwise apparently intelligent people. Consider, for instance the outraged proclamations of an Irish reader, who contributed the following to her local paper’s editorial column (quoted in Milroy & Milroy, 1999, p.31, my underlining), For many years I have been disgusted with the bad grammar used by school-leavers and teachers too sometimes, but recently on the lunch-time news, when a secretary, who had just started work with a firm, was interviewed her first words were: ‘I looked up and seen two men’ etc. It’s unbelievable to think, with so many young people out of work, that she could get such a job... I hope the reader would agree that the following slightly modified version of this outburst would never have been published: For many years I have been disgusted with black school-leavers and teachers too sometimes, but recently on the lunch-time news, when a secretary, who had just started work with a firm, was interviewed it was clear that she was black. It’s unbelievable to think, with so many young people out of work, that she could get such a job... Why is it that the original is not only tolerated, but even deemed worthy of dissemination, while my slight modification is unquestionably unacceptable? Why is dialectism OK? Nettle & Dunbar (2001) offer an analysis of the evolutionary need for group identification, and a very plausible hypothesis (“the freerider problem”) to account for the importance of “in-group” identity, and the suspicion afforded “out-group” individuals. Discrimination of all kinds can be traced to this or similar fundamental drives with evolutionary roots in social cohesion. Modern human societies, however, have largely surpassed these drives in nearly all dimensions. Social and geographic mobility, racial intermixing, changing gender roles, high-speed long-distance transport, communications and sheer population have made instinctive group discriminatory behavior of questionable value. Progressively, such discriminatory behavior has been identified and rejected, at least overtly, in one domain after another. At present, racism has become generally unacceptable in many societies. Sexism is following suit, certainly in the English-speaking world, as well as in many European countries. Discrimination against the disabled has also received growing attention in recent decades, and although we still undoubtedly have a long way to go in all of these domains before we can even think about being self-congratulatory, the fact is that awareness of anti-discriminatory thought and behavior has arisen, and is in full expansion. The reason that it has not yet encompassed the linguistic domain is in all likelihood due to a significant difference between language, and most other realms in which discrimination has so far been identified and is being combated. Wieviorka opens the introduction to his 1992 compendium Racisme et Modernité with the question Le racisme, estil moderne? (Is racism a modern phenomenon?) to which he replies, citing Delacampagne (1983) that the majority of writers on the subject think that it is; emerging in the 18th century as a consequence of the formalization of modern scientific enquiry directed toward the human condition. But what Wieviorka and Delacampagne are referring to is not in fact the beginnings of race discrimination itself, but rather the beginnings of, on the one hand, the application of scientific tools to the promotion and justification of racist ideals (as epitomized in the Nazi efforts to scientifically establish the supremacy of the mythical Aryan race) and hence its formalization as a concept, and moreover its lexicalization; and on the other hand, the beginnings of organized resistance among disenfranchised groups. The resistance, particularly to institutionalized racism (such as the former apartheid régime in South Africa) is derivative of and dependent upon in the first instance power shifts (Frederickson, 1992), and subsequently attitudinal alterations in both the disenfranchised and the privileged groups to fuel, maintain and renegotiate roles and status. Although different in superficial detail, sexism is phenomenologically identical at the most fundamental level (Fouque, 1992), and its renegotiation is dependent upon precisely the same kinds of power and attitudinal shifts. In questions of language, we again witness precisely the same question of power: those who speak favored dialects are privileged in terms of social mobility, job opportunities, public voice and global acceptance. But in terms of language, few have yet risen up to challenge the prevailing dominant ideology in most societies. And this is surely because unlike race, gender or physical state, dialect is deemed modifiable. Under most circumstances, one is not able to change any of the valid physical identifiers that allow group classification: gender, racial characteristics, physical characteristics. Modern surgical procedures force a minor qualification of this point, but surgical alteration remains expensive, risky and limited to a very narrow slice of the world’s population. Linguistic behavior, conversely, being behavioral rather than physical, is under the direct control of the individual, and hence can be altered. The rejection of sexism, racism and discrimination against the disabled stands on the unacceptability of condemning someone to lesser treatment on the basis of an immutable aspect of their person. The reason this has not often been extended to linguistic behavior is because the latter is not immutable. This perhaps unfortunate fact, combined with the persistence of misinformed attitudes regarding the nature of “grammar” and the implicature inherent in “bad grammar” which we have discussed above, shields dialectism from the same sort of challenge that its sibling discriminatory tendencies are currently undergoing. But the reality is that one’s natural speech patterns are just as much a part of one’s character as one’s physical appearance, gender, style of dress, religion, cultural awareness and tradition and so forth. That some of these characteristics can be altered in no way mandates that they must be. The global denigration of any non-accidental characteristic rides on a nonsensical mono-axial ranking of difference which we have already rejected above. Whether such differences pertain over mutable or immutable characteristics is entirely irrelevant. It is the fallacy of hierarchicalizing variation that invalidates any ‘conform or perish’ style arguments, regardless of the domain in which the conformity is being required. That some people hold onto a kind of group-badging behavior more appropriate to our Neolithic ancestors than to modern human society, and thus insist that all than can be changed must be changed in order to fit with the dominant group, is little more than a sad throwback to pre-cognitive man. This anachronistic behavior is thankfully now meeting resistance where its judgements condemn people for that which they cannot change, but should equally meet resistance where its judgements require people to change that which they do not wish to change. Dialectism is kin to discrimination in all its forms, and should no more be tolerated than any of its other reflexes. In 1964, Halliday, McKintosh & Strevens made the same point in the following terms: A speaker who is made ashamed of his own language habits suffers a basic injury as a human being: to make anyone [...] feel so ashamed is as indefensible as to make him feel ashamed of the colour of his skin. (Halliday et al. 1964, p.105) And the relevance for EFL teachers? In closing, I would like to reign-in the universal scope of the preceding commentary, to return to the specific context of EFL teaching. For the EFL teacher, the implications should be clear. Although the adoption of a standard dialect for teaching is justified and reasonable in practical terms, it in no way implies the superiority or greater desirability of the dialect chosen. Just as the tolerance or propagation of racism in the classroom is abhorrent and contrary to the aims of higher education, so the tolerance or propagation of ‘dialectism’ in the context of current anglophone society is equivalently inappropriate and threatens to condemn students to outmoded and socially dysfunctional attitudes in an increasingly multinational anglophone world. EFL students need to be prepared for the reality of variety in modern English, rather than condemned to parroting the social discriminatory attitudes of a bygone era. That language-based social asymmetry exists — alongside its racial, gender and disability-based siblings — is not in question. That it continues to go unchallenged however is unacceptable, and the importance of the EFL teacher’s role in undermining this bastion of social discrimination cannot be overemphasized. References: Castellotti, V. & de Robillard D. (2001) Images de la variation du français: dominantes et harmoniques, changements. 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