Lost in Translation

I have had an interesting experience this semester because the themes emphasized in two of my courses (nearly) conflict. In ENGL 402, we as students are learning about technical and professional writing. As our skills become more and more fine-tuned and writing business-style memos becomes easier and easier, what is really happening is that we are being brainwashed to more readily and naturally adopt Standard English as a go-to dialect.

Reading our textbook, it seems obvious that it is necessary to write and speak this way in business settings in order to appear at all professional. Reading between the lines, you look stupid and uneducated and incompetent if you don't. Each and every one of us is guilty of at some point in our lives judging others' intelligence by the way they speak. It's hardly our fault; we are culturally trained to do so. Classes like ENGL 402 and textbooks like the one assigned for this class only reinforce our cultural norms and prescriptivism.

However, one of my other classes for the term, ANTH 350 (Speech, Thought & Culture), adopts a very different attitude. ANTH 350 emphasizes the principle of linguistic relativity: no language is inherently better or worse than another. However, people are culturally trained to think certain sounds and accents beautiful and romantic – like French – and others ugly or harsh – like, I’ve been told, Arabic.

We have also spent a lot of time studying various dialects of English, the most common of which is probably AAVE, African American Vernacular English. Previously, and in more prescriptivist communities, AAVE has also be called Ebonics or ghetto speak. AAVE is characterized by “dropping g’s” (as in talkin’ and poppin’), deletion of the copula (as in “He fast”), and unique aspect marking (as in “Why you be trippin’ all the time?”). Speakers of AAVE do not do so because they are stupid or do not understand the grammar rules and structure of Standard English. Instead, they speak AAVE as a way of demonstrating and reinforcing a sense of social unity and cohesiveness in and with their community. AAVE is no better or worse than Standard English; it does not represent ignorance or lower intelligence. It’s simply different from the prescriptive white norm.

Yet AAVE speakers are less likely to be hired and more likely to be perceived as uneducated and disrespectful. It would also be difficult for AAVE speakers to write memos that would receive a passing grade in this class. The reason is simple: the dialect that is expected in formal and academic writing is not necessarily most writers’ native dialect. Is this a problem? Is public school students attempting to write in AAVE or textese or any dialect other than Standard English an “educational crisis?” Many teachers and politicians would argue that it is. However, I think you would have a pretty difficult time finding an anthropologist or linguist who would agree with that.

I’m not really sure where I come down on this issue. I agree with linguistic relativity; I don’t think speakers of AAVE or any other dialect are innately more or less intelligent than me. I also understand that there are many socioeconomic factors influencing different populations’ way of speaking and believe that it is unfair to judge a person’s intelligence or on-the-job competence based solely on the way the speak. However, I am not sure that we can necessarily blame employers for making such judgments either; after all, they have a business to run and clients expect Standard English. In many cases, anything else would result in a negative perception of the company for which a non-Standard English speaker works.

But at the very least, it’s something to think about the next time we pound out a one-page, single-spaced memo in perfect Standard English in less than ten minutes.