Language Prejudice

We often make snap decisions about character and intelligence based on our language biases. Decisions that can at times have devasting consequences.

Language Myth # 17

They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City

Southern pride falters in the face of linguistic stereotyping … and New Yorkers are uncharacteristically abashed about their accents. Regional residents buy into the idea that something’s wrong with their dialect, reports Dennis R. Preston. (The research cited in this essay was first published in 1999.)

Imagine this. You have persistent bad headaches. Aspirin and other miracle products don’t make them go away. Your family doctor decides it’s time to have a specialist’s opinion. He hasn’t said the words, but you turn the terrible possibility over in your mind –‘Brain tumor!’

You appear at the New York City office of Dr. N.V. Cramden, Brain Surgeon; you sign in and await the beginning of the process that will reveal your fate. Cramden approaches and speaks:

‘Hey, how’s it goin’? Rotten break, huh? Ya got a pain in da noggin’. Don’t sweat it; I’m gonna fix ya up. Hey, nois! Ovuh heah! Bring me dat watchamacallit. How da hell am I gonna take care of my patient heah if you don’t hand me dem tools? Dat’s a goil.’

You still have your clothes on (it’s a brain surgeon’s office, right?), so you just head for the door, stopping at the front desk and tell the receptionist that someone in the examining room is posing as Dr. Cramden. Maybe you never return to your trusted family doctor, since he or she has sent you to a quack. Whatever your decision, you do not continue under the care of Dr. Cramden.

Linguists know that language variety does not correlate with intelligence or competence, so Dr. Cramden could well be one of the best brain surgeons in town. Nevertheless, popular associations of certain varieties of English with professional and intellectual competence run so deep that Dr. Cramden will not get to crack many crania unless he learns to sound very different.

A primary linguistic myth, one nearly universally attached to minorities, rural people and the less well educated, extends in the United States even to well-educated speakers of some regional varieties. That myth, of course, is that some varieties of a language are not as good as others.

Professional linguists are happy with the idea that some varieties of a language are more standard than others; that is a product of social facts. Higher-status groups impose their behaviors (including language) on others, claiming theirs are the standard ones. Whether you approve of that or not, the standard variety is selected through purely social processes and has not one whit more logic, historical consistency, communicative expressivity or internal complexity or systematicity than any other variety. Since every region has its own social stratification, every area also has a share of both standard and nonstandard speakers.

I admit to a little cheating above. I made Dr. Cramden a little more of a tough kid from the streets than I should have. The truth is, I need not have done so. Although linguists believe that every region has its own standard variety, there is widespread belief in the US that some regional varieties are more standard than others and, indeed, that some regional varieties are far from the standard – particularly those of the South and New York City (NYC).

Please understand the intensity of this myth, for it is not a weakly expressed preference; in the US it runs deep, strong and true, and evidence for it comes from what real people (not professional linguists) believe about language variety. First, consider what northern US (Michigan) speakers have to say about the South:

(Mimics Southern speech) ‘As y’all know, I came up from Texas when I was about twenty-one. And I talked like this. Probably not so bad, but I talked like this; you know I said “thiyus” [“this”] and “thayut” [“that”] and all those things. And I had to learn reeeal [elongated vowel] fast how to talk like a Northerner. ’Cause if I talked like this people’d think I’m the dumbest … around.
‘Because of TV, though, I think there’s a kind of standard English that’s evolving. And the kind of thing you hear on the TV is something that’s broadcast across the country, so most people are aware of that, but there are definite accents in the South.’

Next, consider NYC, which fares no better, even in self-evaluation, as the American sociolinguist William Labov has shown. Here are some opinions he collected in the mid 1960s:

‘I’ll tell you, you see, my son is always correcting me. He speaks very well – the one that went to [two years of] college. And I’m glad that he corrects me – because it shows me that there are many times when I don’t pronounce my words correctly.’

‘Bill’s college alumni group – we have a party once a month in Philadelphia. Well, now I know them about two years and every time we’re there – at a wedding, at a party, a shower – they say, if someone new is in the group: “Listen to Jo Ann talk!” I sit there and I babble on, and they say, “Doesn’t she have a ridiculous accent!” and “It’s so New Yorkerish and all!”’

Such anecdotal evidence could fill many pages and includes even outsider imitations of the varieties, such as mock partings for Southerners – ‘Y’all come back and see us sometime now, ya heah?’ – and the following putative NYC poem which plays on the substitutions of t- and d-like for th-sounds and the loss of the r-sound (and modification of the vowel) in such words as ‘bird’:

T’ree little boids sittin’ on a coib,
Eatin’ doity woims and sayin’ doity woids.

These informal assessments are bolstered by quantitative studies. Nearly 150 people from south-eastern Michigan (of European-American ethnicity, of both sexes and of all ages and social classes) rated (on a scale of one to ten) the degree of ‘correctness’ of English spoken in the fifty states, Washington, DC, and NYC. Figure 1 shows the average scores for this task.

Read on: http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/prejudice/attitudes/

Dennis R. Preston (University Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, MSU; Ph.D., UW-Madison) has been visiting professor at the Universities of Indiana Southeast, Hawaii, Arizona, and Michigan and Fulbright Senior Researcher in Poland and Brazil. He was Co-Director of the 1990 TESOL Institute and Director of the 2003 LSA Institute, both at MSU. He was President of the American Dialect Society (2001-2) and served on the Executive Boards of that Society and the International Conference on Methods in Dialectology, the editorial boards of Language, the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and the Journal of Sociolinguistics, and as a reader for numerous other journals, publishers, and granting agencies. His work focuses on sociolinguistics, dialectology, and ethnography, and minority language and variety education . His is perhaps best known for the revitalization of folk linguistics, particularly perceptual dialectology, and attempts to provide variationist accounts of second language acquisition. He has directed three recent NSF grants, two in folk linguistics and one in language variation and change and is invited frequently for presentations in both academic and popular venues. His most recent book-length publications are, with Nancy Niedzielski, Folk Linguistics (2000), with Daniel Long, A Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume II (2002), and Needed Research in American Dialects (2003). He is a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and will be awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2004. He is a recipient of the MSU Distinguished Faculty Award and the Paul Varg Alumni Award of the College of Arts and Letters at MSU.