Where the Rubber Meets the Road
"Linguistics," I assert when my grandmother asks what I want to study. She blinks, a blank look on her face.
"And that is...?" she returns.
"Well, um, it's, um... It's hard to explain."
To most, linguistics seems a nebulous field. I plan to spend my career studying and teaching it, and still have trouble coming up with the right words. I have tried saying that it's the study of languages, to which the reply is often, "So how many of them are you studying?" Language seems to be neatly segregated into the "non-math, non-science" category in our minds, so it's hard for many to understand how (and why) the two come together. By applying a scientific approach to studying language, however, linguistics not only informs our understanding of words and how we use them, but also allows us to objectively address our own bias, and expose social injustice.
Considering the ubiquity of language, it seems uncanny how often it is used to judge others. We often parse speakers of different dialects or languages into their own categories, and look down on them for being slovenly, uneducated, or illogical. The truth is, as one reads repeatedly from Bauer & Trudgill (1998), that language is highly organized, predictable, and perfectly valid. Bauer (1998) responds to the myth that "Some Languages Have no Grammar" with "All [languages] allow the precise communication of complex messages, and this requires grammar" (p. 79). Languages have to have rules to indicate the meaning of the utterances spoken. He later writes, "A language without grammar is a contradiction in terms" (p. 84). If language is a manner of communicating ideas, a language without grammar cannot exist. Many say that a language lacks the rules that ‘civilized' languages have, usually referring to Latin. While this may be true, in order for it to function as such, a language must have rules, and is perfectly capable of conveying thoughts accurately and precisely. By understanding the systematic nature of language, we can appreciate all language as legitimate. Evans (1998) also gets at this idea. His experience with Aboriginal languages, and peoples' attitudes toward them, shed light on the complexity and sophistication of languages many people term "primitive." One Aboriginal language has declensions as Latin does. And the adaptation of a singular noun to refer to one or two or more of that noun is efficient and rule-governed. Furthermore, many Aborigines not only learn their own complex language, but typically learn two or more languages from their spouses, grandparents, parents, and friends. Is a culture really "primitive" or uneducated if its members are multilingual? Predispositions to one's own language may blind them to the strengths of others'.
Such bias against different ways of speaking can have some devastating outcomes. In his "How I got into Linguistics, and What I got out of it," Labov (1997) chronicles how his research uncovered some nasty truths about discrimination, through studying language. In one study, he and colleagues found that the disparity between black and white students' reading abilities in Harlem was due to "the symbolic devaluation of African American Vernacular English that was part of the institutionalized racism of our society" (p. 4). Characterizing a trend in his research, he also notes that "increasing segregation in the northern cities is depriving the black community of its basic resources, and is in danger of creating a permanent underclass" (p. 5). Without his empirical approach to language, it's hard to believe that he would have exposed this important truth.
This clip draws out some important questions surrounding language bias. Garrard McClendon, the author of the book Ax or Ask asserts that African Americans should learn to "defend themselves" from failure by learning the "rules of the game" when in the field of American English. This is certainly an effective way to adapt to a system hostile to nonstandard dialects. But is this right? Should speakers of African American English have to change their dialect to succeed in our system? It seems to me that if we have learned anything from our study of language, it is that any dialect is legitimate. So, in a system that unjustly discriminates against legitimate language on the mere basis of its being nonstandard, it's the discriminators that have the burden of change, and not the discriminated. Thank goodness we have a scientific method of studying these languages and their differences; and it is linguistics that offers us this approach, without which we may not be able to step outside our stigmas and uncover the truth about something we seem so familiar with: our language.
References
Bauer, W. (1998). Myth 10: Some Languages Have no Grammar. In Bauer L & Trudgill, P. (Eds.), Language Myths (pp. 77-84). London: Penguin Books.
Evans, N. (1998). Myth 19: Aborigines Speak a Primitive Language. . In Bauer L & Trudgill, P. (Eds.), Language Myths (pp. 159-168). London: Penguin Books.
Labov, William. (1997). How I got into Linguistics. Retrieved March 10, 2008, from http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/HowIgot.html
No comments:
Post a Comment