/r/ sounds; because their sentence intonations are Latino; because they say
“y’all” rather than “all of you,” “aks” rather than “ask.”
The demand that the disempowered assimilate linguistically and
culturally to please the empowered is – purely in linguistic terms – an
impossibility. A person’s accent (the bundle of distinctive intonation and
phonological features) is fixed or hard-wired in the mind, and once past a
certain age it can only be very laboriously changed, to a very limited
degree, regardless of commitment, intelligence, and resources. Thus the
constant public debate on good English, on the one right English, is as
fruitless an exercise as the hypothetical congressional debate on the ideal
height and weight for all adults. We cannot purge language of variation
linked to social difference, but more important than that undeniable fact: it
should not matter.
If as a nation we are agreed that it is not acceptable or good to
discriminate on the grounds of skin color or ethnicity, gender or age, then
by logical extension it is equally unacceptable to discriminate against
language traits which are intimately linked to an individual’s sense and
expression of self.
But people are judged on the basis of language form rather than
language content, every day. Without hesitation or contemplation, workers
are turned away, children are corrected, people are made to feel small and
unimportant in public settings. The process of language subordination is
so deeply rooted, so well established, that we do not see it for what it is.
We make no excuses for preferences which exclude on the basis of
immutable language traits.
Having established that this process works, and having looked hard at
how it works for both the powered and the disempowered, a logical
question has not yet been raised: what now?
When discussing this question with my students – a racially and
ethnically mixed group of bright young people of both sexes, well
educated, thoughtful – this is where the deadlock will occur. Some,
enraged by the practices they have studied and observed (and perhaps
experienced), will demand that we stop all pretenses in the school to teach