Chapter 14
Attitudes and Applications
Overt
and Covert Prestige:
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Overt Prestige
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Covert Prestige
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The standard variety in a community has overt prestige.
It is overtly admired and generally identified as a model of good speech.
Speakers who use the standard variety are rated highly on scales of
educational and occupational status.
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The term covert was introduced to explain the fact that
despite their official protestation, people value the vernacular varieties.
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It has to do with the variety taught in elocution
classes, regardless of the students’ native accents.
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Jamaican Creole “patois” is an excellent
example of a code which survives because it is valued as a marker of
solidarity. We can say that it has covert prestige since few black people admit
to outsiders that proficiency in patois is greatly admired, especially among
young British Blacks. Patois was faced with negative attitudes, and was
regarded as babyish, lacking proper grammar, careless and very relaxed. It was
seen as a deficient form of English that hampered educational progress.
Overtly negative attitudes towards
Patois reflect the depressed social position of the West Indian people in
Britain rather than features of the language itself. The West Indians came to
work in Britain in the fifties and sixties, but had low status jobs. However,
they thought that their children will have a better chance, especially when
they receive British education. However, by the eighties, the West Indians
still engaged in low status jobs, and their children did even worse than the
other immigrants’ kids at school. Teachers blamed the children for their
Patois. But there is nothing linguistically inadequate about patois. In fact,
patois is a language that has distinctive pronunciation and complex grammar. It
has its own literary material.
Therefore, the comments about patois were based on ignorance and
prejudice. It is the fact that Patois is being used by West Indian children
“low-class” that determines attitudes towards Patois. This was clearly
demonstrated in a study to evaluate five children whose speech was heard on a
tape. The listeners rated the middle-class speakers as more intelligent than
those who belonged tot eh low class. Yet one of the West Indian children spoke
twice on the tape, and the listeners mistaken the child for a middle class
child only because he used another variety rather than “Barbadian” (West Indies
accent). So the same child was evaluated as more intelligent when speaking in
the working class accent rather than the West Indies accent “matched guise
technique”. It is the associated social status that determines the people
evaluation
Attitudes to overtly valued varieties: Standard
English and RP
Standard English has an enormous legacy of
overt prestige.
It has been regarded as a symbol of
British nationhood.
For over a century it has been promoted
as the only acceptable variety in all official domains. By comparison,
vernacular dialects of English are down-graded. The political and social basis
of these attitudes is clearly evident when we remember that the elite consensus
until the 18th century was that English is an inferior language and
less eloquent than Greek and Latin. Prestige codes emerge by social consensus
and owe nothing to their intrinsic linguistic features.
While there is a general agreement on
the inferior status of vernacular dialects, many people are surprised to find
that standard accents of English are so highly regarded by those who don’t sue
them. This can be seen in reactions to RP in England, where people rate
speakers of RP as more intelligent, industrious and self-confident than
regional accented speakers, even when the raters are speaking regional
dialects. On criteria of communicative effectiveness, social status and general
pleasantness, RP is rated on top of other regional accents. People who use RP
accents are taken more seriously. Women speaking with RP accents are rated as
more competent, less weak, more independent, adventurous and more feminine than
non-RP speakers. Even outside Britain, RP is the favorable model in other
countries where English is used like Singapore and New Zealand. When other
regional accents emerged in New Zealand, the school inspectors’ reports became
less admiring and more critical. The New Zealand accent was regarded as
corrupt, degraded and hideous, as the inspectors’ had British origins.
However there was a minority of New
Zealanders who took a different view of RP, objecting the adoption of refined
upper-class vowels.
Attitudes to AAVE:
Critics assume that AAVE use reflects
ignorance rather than choice.
Much media use tends to confirm the
negative attitudes to AAVE. Given the masculine sound difference between /ask/
and /aks/, and the lack of logic in arguing for a particular pronunciation on
the basis of a written form, it is ironic that “ask” has been a focus of
comment. This is typical of the kind of comments on AAVE use.
African American newsreaders and movie
stars tend to use SAE while sports celebrities and entertainers use AAVE. AAVE
is a prime example of a language variety which is called politically hot,
constantly labeled and re-labeled. Ex: “Negro Dialect, Substandard Negro
Dialect, Ebonics, Black English, Vernacular Black English, African American
Vernacular English. Many African
American parents were unconvinced of the benefits of using AAVE. Their letters
to the newspapers and other shows expressed fears that AAVE use in schools was
a strategy for preventing their children from educational success. On the other
hand, other African American people believed in giving the importance to AAVE,
and resisting the attempts of the majority to impose SAE on everyone. Adopting
SAE seems a betrayal of their home dialect. The issue has become too
politicized in order to make a wider verbal repertoire. The Ebonics debate of
the 1990s thus re-ran the familiar arguments about the social disadvantages of
using AAVE. The argument was: if you use AAVE you won’t get a good job.
The argument implies that children using
SAE will get better jobs. This is the fallacy. Because the U.S. employment
statistics have proven that ethnicity not language is the primary basis of
discrimination. Moreover, African Americans who succeed are often mistaken for
service personnel in public places. The problem here is racist attitudes not
linguistic deficit or dialect differences.
Attitudes to Vernacular Forms of
English:
No one uses 100% vernacular or
non-standard forms. When people talk of non-standard English they are referring
to the fact that particular linguistic forms occur more often in the speech of
one group than another. Changes like substitution of /d/ for /ð/, or omission
of verb “be” in sentences like “she not here” are features of vernacular
dialects. But the people who use such features also know and use the standard
forms. They simply use fewer standard forms than those who come from
socio-economic or ethnic groups. The reason of the survival of vernacular forms
is attitudinal. Everyone increases their use of standard forms as the context
becomes more formal. This means that middle class children are unlikely to use
vernacular forms at all when they are asked to read aloud, whereas children
from low class may use some vernacular forms. The use of vernacular forms is
clearly patterned and systematic not random. Vernacular forms express the
friendliness and relaxed attitudes. The reason of condemning the vernacular
forms is also attitudinal not linguistic. Children who use vernacular forms are
not disadvantaged by inadequate language. They are disadvantaged by negative
attitudes towards their speech – attitudes which derive from their lower class
association in people’s minds. These attitudes have unhappy educational
consequences.
Sociolinguistics and Education
Vernacular dialects and educational
disadvantage:
Many sociolinguists debated over the
educational implications/ meanings of speech. The best known example is the
part in which sociolinguistics have played in debates over the place of
vernacular dialects in school, and the claim that children who use vernacular
forms are linguistically deficient or deprived.
It has been evident that children from
the middle class did better in school and had higher marks than those who
belonged tot eh working class. In English-speaking communities, successful
children tended to use standard forms while the speech of less successful
groups had greater frequency of vernacular forms.
Some sociolinguists argued that the vernacular
forms like Patois may act as a barrier to communication between children and
teachers. Others have interpreted the results for teachers and provided advice
and recommendations for classroom practice.
African American mothers argued that the
local school was not taking proper account of their children’s linguistic
proficiency and educational needs. A number of sociolinguists were called
“expert witnesses” to testify that the variety of English used by the children
was a dialect that is distinct from SAE with a distinct history and origins in
a Creole which developed on American slave plantation. The judge accepted their
testimony and ordered the school to take account of the children’s
dialect. The main barrier to these
children progress in school was the negative attitudes held by the teachers to
the children who spoke AAVE. To solve this situation, the teachers received
in-service training which involved helping the teachers to distinguish between
the children’s features of speech and reading errors. They also helped the
children to switch between AAVE and SAE.
Dialect differences can lead to
miscommunication, especially if vernacular dialect users do not hear a great
deal of standard dialect. In Ann Arbor, there is little evidence that children
who used the vernacular forms have trouble in understanding the English they
hear on TV and Radio or from their teachers. Children successfully understand
the standard language, and when they are asked to repeat a sentence they
translate it to the vernacular equivalents.
Ex:
“Nobody ever sat at any of those desks”
would be translated into “nobody never sat on no desses”.
Motivation and free choice are very
important factors in altering speech. Any attempts to alter children speech
into standard forms will not succeed if the children are not willing to do it.
Language Deficit:
Sociolinguistics has demonstrated that
claims that minority and working class children were linguistically deprived
were based on inadequate tests. Sociolinguistics provided evidence that these
claims are not true. For example, in order to know children’s extent of
vocabulary and grammar. Children were asked to complete a number of tests, in
addition to an interview. The tests and interviews were made by an adult from a
different social group from the child sometimes, and other times by a person
from a different ethnic group. Middle
class children did much better than the working class children who responded
monosyllabically. Sociolinguistics pointed out that the reason of change is
that the test supervisor, who is an adult using standard forms, has influenced
the performance of children in test. Middle class children were comfortable as
they are familiar with the middle class speech and the use of standard forms,
while the children of the working class felt themselves alienated, regarding
the test supervisors as governmental officials or teachers. The questions and
the language of the test-interview were also familiar to the middle class
children rather than the working class children.
At secondary level, sociolinguistics has
explored more specifically the difference of the vocabulary range of working
class and middle class children. Through reading secondary school books, the
middle class children knew more Greco Latin vocabulary items. Therefore they
had an advantage over the other children because Greco Latin words compose
around 65% of words learnt by reading secondary school text books. They also
had a better chance in succeeding in exams that require these vocabularies. However, the children whose families do not
practice reading have a range of vocabulary that is irrelevant to the secondary
school material.
So, the reasons why working class
children fail in school are the following:
1-
The
middle class criteria (including middle class standard forms of speech,
familiarity with vocabulary, and ways of interacting).
2-
Many
children who regard schools as middle class institutions rebel against them.
Therefore they resort to vernacular forms rather than standard forms. For
example, a study made in New York discovered that members of male gangs in
school were failing although they possess bright mental capabilities. Also, no
one of them had an advanced reading score, and the higher your status in the
gang the less standard forms you use and the lower you reading score is. The
most basic reason for this case is that they could not identify the school
values, and felt themselves as outsiders, and that the school will not
recognize their capabilities.
Glossary:
Overt ظاهر
Covert خفي
Linguistic deficit نقص لغوي
Gang مجموعة أو عصبة
Monosyllabic ذو مقطع واحد
Alienated يشعر بالغربة
Motivation التحفيز
Enormous legacy موروثات ضخمة ومتعددة
Entertainers مقدمو برامج الترفيه
Intrinsic linguistic features خصائص لغوية جوهرية
Consensus إجماع على رأي
Inferior status مكانة متدنية
Hamper يعيق
Chapter 14 is Analysing Discourse
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