Accents are an interesting thing.
[Southern accent] They can make people think you’re real darn dumb.
[British accent] Or they can make people think you’re posh and fancy.
And, unfortunately, for a lot of people, they can be the source of massive amounts of discrimination.
Accents, combined with other linguistic features, make up dialects of English. Discriminating against someone based on their dialect is called linguistic discrimination or linguicism.
So first, I want to talk about accents that come from a person learning a second language.
You see, humans are capable of hearing and producing an amazingly wide range of noises. But every language only uses a small portion of these. English, for example, has 26 letters that make 44 potential syllable sounds. The International Phonetic Alphabet, however, which is capable of representing any language in the world, has over a hundred letters with more than 50 different possible accents for those letters, leading to thousands of potential sounds.
So when you grow up only speaking one language, you stop listening for those noises that you never hear. When you’re born, you have the potential to learn any language fluently, but eventually, you get used to the noises of your language. That can make it really hard to properly hear the noises in another language, much less reproduce them.
I’m sure you know this if you’ve ever tried learning another language. I, for one, will never be able to speak French with the same accent as a native speaker – I’ll always have an American accent.
But where this gets discriminatory is when we associate dialects with intelligence.
Take, for example, someone who came to the US from Mexico and learned English a little later in life. This person would probably have a Mexican accent in English, and unfortunately, these accents are heavily stereotyped in the US. This person would probably be viewed as less intelligent, be judged as coming from a lower socioeconomic class, and be more likely to be called an illegal immigrant or not an American, the list goes on and on.
But this is a person who has learned a second freaking language. That’s impressive in and of itself. And it’s not their fault that they speak with an accent – it’s nearly impossible to achieve native-level fluency when learning a language late in life.
Regardless, I would argue that Mexican-accented English is its own unique, completely valid dialect of English. If you were to study this dialect, you would find that it has its own rules and structures just as “standard” English does – based on the features that Mexican Spanish speakers tend to bring with them into English.
“But Riley, this leads to the degradation and the destruction of our language if we let Spanish speakers influence English!”
I’m sorry, that’s just not true. For one, what you think of as “Standard English” was not standard just fifty years ago. If you don’t believe me, pay attention to how you and your parents use slightly different words and ways of phrasing things. Go a little bit further back, a few hundred years, and you get to Elizabethan English, which is barely recognizable to many. Go back a thousand years and you’ll find Old English – a completely different language that sounds a lot more like German (which is where it came from).
For instance, in 1066, the Normans invaded England, and because of that, we now share a huge amount of our vocabulary with French. Table is table. Nation is nation. Government is gouvernement. French influenced English heavily a thousand years ago, and I don’t see you reverting to pre-French-influenced English.
For example, this is the first page of Beowulf, a poem written in Middle English some time between the 8th and 11th century. Can you read any of it? If you were a true linguistic purist, you would revert your language usage back to this “true” form of English, wouldn’t you?
Let’s take a look at just one short line in this. [“Þæt wæs gōd cyning” is displayed on the screen] Honestly, I don’t even know how to pronounce that, but do you know what it means? The modern translation is “That was a good king,” so obviously, English is always changing.
And I have one last point on the validity of these non-native-English-speaking dialects. I don’t think you would say that British or Australian or New Zealand accents are “not real English,” considering that these are largely English-speaking countries. However, three countries – India, Pakistan, and Nigeria – all have larger English-speaking populations than the UK. I would argue that the dialect that Indians, Pakistanis, and Nigerians speak with is equally as valid as an American or British accent, given how many people speak with it.
Now secondly, I want to talk about the accents that native speakers can have. African American Vernacular English, also known as Black Vernacular English, or AAVE or BVE, is often viewed as a “lower” form of English. People who speak it are viewed as less intelligent and can be denied jobs or denied entry to universities based on the way that they talk.
Obviously there is a long history here with black people being denied the right to an education, but that doesn’t mean that BVE is inherently less educated. In fact, as with all other dialects, it has very specific rules and structures that must be followed. And, in many ways, it’s actually a more conservative form of the language that adheres more closely to what English used to be.
The most popular example of this is the word “ask,” which in BVE is pronounced “aks.” In Middle English, which Chaucer wrote in, “aks” was the accepted way of saying this word. That later changed in the “standard” form of English, but didn’t change in BVE.
The problem with what we called the “standard” form is that it is always made by whoever is in power at the time. If there are two major dialect groups, but one is the working class and the other is the ruling class, it’s the ruling class who gets to make the dictionaries and decide what is “right” or “wrong” to say.
This is called prescriptive linguistics – saying that there is a “right” or a “wrong” way to say or write something. Another method for understanding language is descriptive linguistics, which works only to describe what people are actually saying or writing in real life.
For instance, a prescriptive dictionary might never include the word “sexting” because that is a modern word that was completely made-up, and it isn’t “correct” English to use. But if you read this prescriptive dictionary and then go try to interact with English speakers, you would find that there’s a lot of words you don’t know. A descriptive dictionary, on the other hand, would include the word “sexting” and anything else that people are using, whether it’s “correct” or not.
And lastly, if you’re a native English speaker and you believe that you speak perfect, proper English all the time, I have some bad news for you. Everybody does something called code-switching. This is using a different dialect based on your situation.
For example, would you talk to your boss the same way you would talk to your best friend? Would you talk to your lover the same way you would talk to your parents? No. We use different dialects depending on who we’re talking to. It might not be obvious because we don’t use a completely different accent, but we can use more formal sentence structures, less slang, or speak in a different tone.
For instance, “gonna” is not a word in the dictionary, but most native “standard” English speakers will say “I’m gonna go to the store” rather than “I’m going to go to the store.” Language tends to move towards whatever is easier and quicker to say, and you can’t say that’s a tragedy unless you’re willing to revert to Old English, because the word Lord, comes from the Old English hlāfweard, which got shortened over time.
So, no, don’t pretend that shortening words is going to kill our language – you already speak in a heavily, heavily modified form of Old English, and it works just fine. There’s nothing magical about the form of English you were raised with that makes it any better than the forms of English that came before it, or the forms of English that will come after it.
There’s actually an entire field of study called sociolinguistics that studies the effects that society has on language (and vice versa), so obviously we’ve only just scratched the surface here, but I’ll put some links in the description if you’d like to learn more.
And this video is a part of a series I’m doing for Everyday Feminism, a website dedicated to helping you stand up to and break down everyday oppression. I’ll put some links down below so you can check out my previous videos in the series.
And as usual, I love you all very much, I hope you have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you next week. Bye!
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