Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

150 Language Diversity in the Classroomfunction of language in contemporary American black and Chicanocontexts. A language or dialect, though it may be lacking in general socialprestige, may nevertheless function as a powerful bonding agent,providing a sense of identity. Indeed, it is a social and linguistic factthat any variety can be the voice of group identity, a central element in therevitalized ‘consciousness’ of nonstandard-dialect speakers.But the solidarity function of language the symbolic role oflanguage, that is to say, in the articulation of group identity is clearlynot restricted to situations in which earlier self-denigration has nowgiven way to admiration and allegiance. For we also observe adisinclination to alter speech styles on the parts of groups that seemnot to have experienced any sudden upsurge in group pride, and whocontinue to adhere to the larger society’s unfavorable stereotypes of theirspeech patterns: speakers of low-status dialects of urban British Englishare examples here. Can we put this down to a more generally liberalattitude towards speech variants per se? It is true that views are not asrigid as they once were. The linguistic variation to be found now in themainstream media is an indication of this, and an even more interestingdevelopment is the aping of non-mainstream behavior, attitudes andspeech style by certain middle-class constituencies (notably youngpeople: see also the discussion of ‘covert prestige’, below). But prejudicialviews obviously persist, even if their force has lessened in some quarters.The solidarity function associated with a common language style,even if it is nonstandard and non-prestigious, is powerful and general.Group identity is a known quantity, and in that sense, is safe. Attempts toalter one’s speech style, to jettison a low-status variant, or even to addanother dialectal string to the bow, on the other hand, are riskyundertakings. Failure may lead to a sense of marginality, a sense of notbeing a full (and fully accepted) member of any social group. As notedearlier, the Mexican American who abandoned Spanish for the socioeconomicrewards of English risked being labeled a vendido, a ‘sell-out’, alinguistic quisling. The individual who wishes to add, and not to replace,may also fall between stools. The maintenance of Spanish (language andculture) may exist uneasily alongside the acquisition of English,particularly in a world in which bilingualism is often a way-station onthe road to a new monolingualism, a world in which English increasinglythreatens other variants (see Edwards, 1994a).This sort of situation is not unrelated to that in which talking ‘posh’ isseen as affectation. Indeed, Bragg and Ellis (1976) reported the Cockneyopinion that if a child were to speak ‘posh’, friends would label him (orher, of course) as ‘a queer’. A generation earlier, Orwell (1941: 74)