Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Chapter 8Evaluative Reactions to theLanguage of DisadvantageLanguage Attitudes and the Minority-group ReactionOne of the most poignant aspects of the social evaluation of language isthe widely reported tendency for nonstandard speakers to accept andagree with unfavorable stereotypes of their speech styles. Labov (1976)found, for instance, that those whose speech includes nonstandard orstigmatized forms are typically their own harshest critics. This is anexample of what Lambert et al. (1960) called the ‘minority-group reaction’,in which the perceptions and stereotypes of the ‘mainstream’ are acceptedby those outside it. The reaction is, of course, a particular linguisticmanifestation of the much broader interplay between social dominanceand subordination. It is important to note, however, that social relationshipsare dynamic, and that language matters often provide a usefulperspective on change. The black respondents to whom Labov spoke inthe 1970s are not the same as those interviewed by Ogbu (1999) ageneration later (see below). As we shall see, their linguistic attitudeshave become more complex: they continue to believe that ‘white talk’ is‘proper’, and that Black English Vernacular (BEV) is not, but there is apride in the use and the ‘solidarity functions’ of their vernacular that wasnot felt or, at least, not expressed, in earlier investigations. 1In 1960, Lambert et al. introduced the ‘matched-guise’ technique, amethod of investigating reactions to speech variants. Judges evaluate arecorded speaker’s personality, along any dimension of interest, afterhearing him or her read the same passage in each of two or morelanguages, dialects or accents. The fact that the speaker is, for all ‘guises’,the same person is not revealed to the assessors (who typically do notguess this). Since any potentially confounding variables (pitch, tone ofvoice and so on) are, of course, constant across the ‘guises’, the ratingsgiven are considered to more accurately reflect stereotypic reactions tothe language variety per se than would be the case if separate speakersof each linguistic variant were used. (For a brief discussion of some of the146