The following is forwarded from Johanna Rubba:
________________________
- 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
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
|