Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

178 Language Diversity in the Classroomattend underfunded and overcrowded schools’ (Baugh (2004: 316). This,in combination with other social and political issues, ensures ongoingeducational underachievement.The language-dialect debate threw up some interesting discussions. Itis clear that while classifying Ebonics as a separate language is notgenerally endorsed by linguists (see Baugh, 2002, 2004), this hardlyimplies a diminished concern for the speakers of Ebonics-as-dialect.Baugh (2006: 97) reminds us that a good case can be made for‘educational policies targeted to the needs of nonstandard-dialectspeakers’. Relatedly, the term ‘dialect’ has no pejorative connotations inthe eyes of scholars. Some of those who argued for Ebonics-as-language,however, accepted the broadly held popular belief that ‘dialect’ doesmean a language form that is inferior, incomplete or inaccurate, and theyhave typically been motivated by well-intentioned concerns for the statusof Black English. Hence the impulse behind the label of ‘language’, butalso the inference that proponents of that label are not well-informedlanguage scholars. Thus, as Steigerwald (2004: 12) points out, the claimsof those who argue for Ebonics-as-language arise from ‘the intersectionof nationalist [sic] politics and sketchy linguistic science’. Of course, notbeing a linguist hardly means that one must forfeit one’s opinion, but it isimportant to realize that arguing from conviction is not the same asarguing from evidence. The coexistence of the two perspectives caneasily lead as we know very well from many debates in many arenas oflife to misunderstanding and conflict, difficulties that can arise fromlack of awareness or, more worryingly, from willful neglect or ignorance.Wolfram’s (1998) report that he has often been asked if he ‘believed’ inEbonics is telling in this connection.One linguist, however, has proposed that Ebonics might be similar toScots, which some see as a dialect of English, others as a language in itsown right. Both varieties, Fasold (2006) suggests, are more or lessequidistant from standard English. The question then becomes, as it doesin other debates over language-versus-dialect status, a political one (seeEdwards, 1985, 1994a), and actual degrees of difference, or invocations ofmutual intelligibility, recede in definitional importance. 2 Linguisticallyspeaking, Fasold’s argument is not a strong one, but his intention is clear,and derives from his concern that ‘dialect’ has negative connotations,and that ‘standard’ can have unfairly positive ones. To most people, alinguistically unexceptionable statement like, ‘Ebonics is a nonstandarddialect of English’ means that BEV is an inferior variant. And, as Fasold(2006) goes on to clarify, while the term ‘standard’ involves distinctionsthat are non-pejorative to linguists, arising as they do from historical and