The following is forwarded from Johanna Rubba:

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- Labov reports that dialect differences are increasing in the US, not 
decreasing, based on his Northern Cities Vowel Shift studies. I think 
there is a mixture. My CA students are certainly getting ever stronger 
in their local dialect, esp. as concerns the vowel shift, the 
affrication of alveolar stops, omission of nasal consonants in a final 
syllable ending in /t/, etc. (This last leads to spellings such as 
"dominate", "pregnate" and the folk etymology "a bandit warehouse" for 
"abandoned warehouse".) On the other hand, I am amazed when I hear 
interviews with young people from around the USA on the radio and they 
all sound like they are from CA. Perhaps, on the one hand, pop culture 
influences youth speech, while at the same time the trends of change in 
the surrounding community compete. Which wins may depend on the 
person's preferred identity -- a cool teenager or a local, loyal to 
her/his community. (And by the way, the dialect of the royals is no 
longer the standard in Britain. Educated Brits speak a dialect to which 
many lower-class features have percolated up; I believe this dialect is 
called Estuary English. The speech of the royals is considered pompous, 
archaic, and somewhat silly by a lot of English people (source: 
Bailey's "Images of English" and personal experience).

- Once again, I have to debunk the popular notion that class is the 
basis for dialect prestige in England, while other factors are at play 
in America. Class is _extremely_ important in attitudes towards 
language in the USA. Middle-class English is the prestige dialect in 
the USA. People of various ethnicities are much more acceptable when 
they speak it. Think of Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, various Latino/a 
members of CA government and reps of CA to Congress; I'm sure there are 
Asian and Native American examples too (Yo Yo Ma?). Think of how 
various ethnicities speak in TV commercials and (when playing 
middle-class people) in the movies (e.g., "Crash"). Surveys of 
attitudes towards language along the lines of Hairston's consistently 
show that "status markers" (that is, socioeconomic status) trigger the 
most negative responses. Items that are considered incorrect by writers 
of school grammars but that are prevalent in middle-class English, such 
as loss of "whom", "between you and I", "feel badly", subject-verb 
'disagreement', etc. elicit fewer negative responses and often are not 
even noticed as "errors."

Even when considering regional dialects, there is plenty of testimony 
to the effect that people who speak a Northern, middle-class variety of 
English are more acceptable in the workplace. Many, many white people 
from all over speak working-class dialects of English that are 
non-standard, with such features as "I seen" for past tense, "s/he 
don't", etc. Rural dialects of the Ozarks, the Appalachians, and the 
"Oakies" of CA's Central Valley are low-prestige dialects, as are 
Brooklynese and Boston-area working-class dialects, all of these  
spoken by whites.

Ethnicity is certainly involved, but the most objectionable speakers 
are those who combine ethnicity with an ethnic dialect. People often 
notice and disapprove of the speech of pro athletes who are black, in 
spite of their talent, celebrity, and wealth; at the same time, black 
opera singers, politicians, businesspeople, TV characters, and so on 
elicit few to no objections for their speech. Bill Cosby embodies this 
prejudice -- his own English tends strongly towards middle class 
(except perhaps in some of his early comedy routines), and he is one of 
the major Black English bashers. Take away the ethnically-idenitifiable 
dialect, and you have a much more acceptable person.

Numerous commentators have pointed out that "classless America" is a 
myth. It probably descends from the Founders' desire to emphasize the 
differences between the USA and England, but they weren't exactly 
paragons of classlessness themselves (reserving the vote for landed 
white males, for example).

Johanna Rubba, Assoc. Prof., Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93047
Tel. 805.756.2184
Dept. Tel. 805.756.6374
Home page:
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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