Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Critical Language Awareness 225
students. Not only did the course fail to have a lasting impact in this particular
case, I believe the course may have been responsible for perpetuating
the racist language ideologies it was meant to counter. I uncritically
showed the fi lm, American Tongues, during one of my sections. The fi lm,
although somewhat outdated, is ideal for exposing teachers to linguistic
diversity in the United States. It not only is an excellent introduction to
language variation but it also provides several examples of linguistic,
racial and regional discrimination (see Ball & Alim, 2006).
After discussing Black language at length, the fi lm cuts to an interview
with one of the foremost sociolinguists in the fi eld, who concludes, somewhat
apologetically:
Let’s face it. There are certain consequences for not speaking a standard
dialect. For example . . . you may have certain limitations in terms
of the job market. If you don’t wanna deal with the negatives, it may
be very helpful to learn a standard dialect for certain situations. It may
not be fair, but that’s the way it is. (Walt Wolfram)
It is clear from this example that the American sociolinguistic establishment,
by and large, has been complicit in speaking from a position of privilege
that depicts speaking a ‘standard dialect’ as a simple question of
individual choice and not one that is inextricably linked to a whole complex
array of social, cultural and political issues. Sociolinguists, like teachers,
are also clearly not immune to the broader circulation of discriminatory
language ideologies, nor do they always recognize their own racism and
privilege. 2
Another question arises: Given that this sociolinguist, like many
others, has devoted his entire life to the study of marginalized language
varieties and has worked tirelessly in disadvantaged communities, why
would he refer to himself as a racist in his own work? Clearly, he was
trying to call attention to the need for a kind of ethnosensitivity (Baugh,
1983) in sociolinguistics that would be needed in order to unpack the
subtle nature of covert racist practices in our fi eld (Morgan, 1994).
Toward this end, it may be useful to consider the teacher’s and sociolinguist’s
strikingly similar comments from the perspective of gender and
sexuality.
To begin with, we can imagine a White teacher telling her Black
students:
Sorry, Black children, in order to succeed in this world, you must
adopt a way of speaking that is modeled very closely upon White
linguistic norms and ways of speaking, also known as ‘standard
English’. It may not be fair, but that’s just the way it is.
Again, this might not seem ‘racist’ at all, but the problem with this
statement – which I take to be the underlying guiding principle of most