Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

The Language Debate 111apart from these cases, however, we have to say that all normal adultspeakers know and therefore use their own dialect... perfectly. Nogrammatical form which occurs in any... dialect is an error: with theexception of those instances we have just listed, native speakers donot make mistakes. (Trudgill, 1975: 45)This has proved a difficult concept to accept in some quarters. MrsGrundy and the great host of lesser prescriptivists obviously reject it.And more broad-minded observers often concur with Amis’s (1990: 307)statement that ‘there is a right way of using words and constructingsentences, and plenty of wrong ways’. Teachers form an obvious grouphere; as Lippi-Green (1997: 131) and many others have pointed out, theyhave traditionally had strong views about what is correct and incorrect,and have been ‘firm believers in a standard language ideology’ thatunderpins those views.Many of Amis’s linguistic observations are humorous, but some areill-informed. It is not quite the case, for example, that ‘linguists andlexicographers’ have given ‘their followers leave to spatter their talk andprose with any old illiteracy or howler that took their fancy’, whileremaining, themselves, scrupulous adherents of ‘correct’ language ‘likea parson grimly preserving his own chastity while recommendingadultery to his parishioners’ (Amis, 1990: 308). This brings to mind thepolished standard of those who defend nonstandard variants, the cutglassaccents of those who go to the barricades for others. Hardlyheinous, of course, but interesting. It would be a mistake, incidentally, tothink that the late Sir Kingsley was simply a well-known specimen of the‘appalled of Tunbridge Wells’ species; he was always interested inmatters linguistic and, apart from reviews like the one I cite here, hewrote an interesting book on modern English usage (Amis, 1997).The acknowledgement that there are no ‘inadequate’ or ‘debased’dialects took longer to ripen within linguistics than did the parallelargument about language per se. Outside the academic precincts, itremains an idea whose force is rather weak. Few scholars are naïveenough to think that dissemination of enlightened linguistic thinking willquickly change social perspectives on the Black English Vernacular(BEV), Cockney or Joual. But linguists have interested themselves in thelanguage of disadvantage because the proponents of deficit-languagetheory and the advocates of compensatory education were once wellensconced within the hallowed groves.Investigations of disadvantaged language are also of great interestprecisely because they are a gauge of prejudice, and studies of BEV are