The Current Summer 20

context over and over again. The word just
keeps expanding. Words like ‘good,’ or
‘wicked’ or ‘sick’ — these words get used all
the time and they just continue to get bigger in
terms of what they can refer to.”
One of the biggest variations in language
comes from spoken dialects and accents.
Words and phrases develop regionally,
and the people of those certain communities
become familiar and often protective over
them – like “pop” vs. “soda,” or “y’all” vs.
“you guys.”
“Dialects were historically only regional
because people were speaking them and not
writing them down,” Fedewa said. “And when
you start writing things, they begin to get more
standardized.”
Grace Rau is a junior studying professional
and public writing, and works in the Writing
Center at MSU. In order to interview and
prepare to work in the Writing Center, she
took a three-credit class in the fall of 2019
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32 SUMMER 2020
“We all had to take a class, a semester long
Writing Center theory,” Rau said. “One of
the things we touched on was not correcting
others’ dialects. We focused a lot on African
American Vernacular English, as well as the
southern accent because that’s kind of its
own dialect, too. But we really focused
on AAVE because it’s much more of an
oppressed dialect. [AAVE] has rules, it has
a grammar system – it’s just as complex
as standard English.”
While many students and professors are
learning and accepting dialects and different
grammar rules, older generations who took
grammar courses and grew up being taught
that standard American English was the
only way to sound professional can have
a hard time understanding why different
dialects should be regarded as so.
“It seems to be a really hard thing for people
to see,” Rau said. “My mom is a language
teacher, and I’m trying to teach her about this
stuff, and she can’t wrap her head around
it. Because some people have this idea that
standard English is the right thing to use
because there are rules and don’t see that
other dialects have just as many rules and
complex systems.”
Part of this gap in understanding is largely
due to social media and the Internet. People
express opinions and ideas in their own
voices, and this language can travel quickly
and reach a large group of people around
the globe.
“One of the weird things about the Internet is
that especially in informal spaces like Twitter,
Facebook, Tumblr or Instagram, even texting,
language is being used almost as if we were
going back to an oral form of language and
communication instead of a written one,”
Fedewa said. “Like how punctuation works
in texting, for example. We don’t really use
it in text messages, just like we don’t speak
punctuation orally.”
While kids on the Internet nowadays grew
up texting “lol” and “omg” to their friends,
older generations grew up writing letters
with no character limit and no need to
shorten phrases. And now, some people
are, accidently or not, saying “lol” or “omg”
out loud; a language that was designed to
fit entirely online is now seeping into oral
vocabulary. So, while texting has significantly
changed the language game, the Internet has
definitely exacerbated the change in certain
viral slang terms as well.
“We can see each other’s culture more now
that it’s on the Internet because so many
people have access to it,” Rau said. “So, 50
years ago, our parents and grandparents
probably weren’t exposed to so many dialects
on the level we are today with social media.
Unless they had friends in that community, it
was probably hard to even learn about them.
And now people on Twitter or Instagram are