Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

The Language Debate 117overview by Smitherman-Donaldson, 1988). And this consideration, asmy earlier reference to Foster (1997) makes clear, is inextricablyintertwined with longstanding prejudice against black people. It is worthmentioning at this point that many features of BEV dialects areencountered well beyond the black community. Roy Wilkins, theexecutive director of the NAACP (and editor of The Crisis, the magazinefounded in 1910 by William Du Bois), made the point in 1971: BEV,he said, is ‘more regional than racial... more southern than Negro... [it] isbasically the same slovenly English spoken by the south’s undereducatedpoor white population’ (Wilkins, 1971: 78). The point wasconfirmed by the black academics interviewed later by Speicher andMcMahon (1992). Regrettably, it is also worth mentioning that, likeWilkins, they also tended see BEV as a restricted approximation to‘proper’ English; only a few considered it ‘a full linguistic system’(Speicher & McMahon, 1992: 391; see also Pederson, cited in the Globe &Mail, 1997). We shall see further evidence of this within-communitydisdain for the vernacular when we turn to the discussion of ‘Ebonics’.The demonstration that Black English is a fully formed medium makesa very strong case against linguistic deficiency theories in general. Thestudies undertaken by Labov and his American colleagues naturallyspawned many others, and it is fair to say that, in all instances whereinvestigations have been linguistically respectable, the falsity of the‘deficit’ view of nonstandard speech has been exposed. Where anonstandard variety differs widely from standard forms (as with somevarieties of West Indian English, for instance), then it approaches thestatus of a separate language, in which case there is little difficulty inviewing the system as merely different. 5 If, on the other hand, a dialect isnot hugely variant from the standard, then it follows that most of it isstandard. The ‘gears and axles of English grammatical machinery areavailable to speakers of all dialects’, as Labov (1976: 64) put it. His twovolumeoverview (Labov, 1994) provides an admirable summary of workon language variation and change, including buttressing replications ofsome of the early studies that I have reported here.The summary position, then, is this: any deficit view of linguisticbehavior is incorrect: no language, or language variety, has been shownto be more accurate, logical or capable of expression than another.Further, it is wrong to claim that some variations constrain basicintellectual or cognitive functioning. Rather, different language groupsand sub-groups develop speech patterns that differ in their modes ofexpression, vocabulary and pronunciation. (There is also the matter ofdifferent groups assigning different functions to language, something that