In the meantime, a realistic goal must be a much smaller one: to make
people aware of the process of language subordination. To draw their
attention to the misinformation, to expose false reasoning and empty
promises to hard questions.
If in the face of clarity and truth about standardization, the way it
works, and its social connections and meanings, peripheralized language
speakers and communities choose to try to assimilate to linguistic (and
cultural) norms of another group, then that is a choice freely made that
must be respected. But at this time, there is little or no truth in advertising
the process of language standardization. Right now, people attempt to
conform and to assimilate because they are inundated with promises and
threats if they do not. The threats are real: the evidence is at hand in the
experiences of the people whose stories are told here. The promises,
however, are not so real. Because discrimination on the basis of language
has not to do with the language itself, but with the social circumstances
and identities attached to that language, discrimination will not go away
when the next generation has assimilated. Mainstream U.S. English is a
flimsy cover to hide behind in the face of serious intent to exclude on the
basis of race or ethnicity.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s statement on the connection between inferiority and
cooperation is one that I have thought about for a long time, in the writing
of this book. It captures two basic elements of the language subordination
process: First, one person or group must want to make another person or
group believe that their language – and hence their social allegiances and
priorities – are inferior. Second, that targeted person or group must
become complicit in the process.
But it also raises the important issue of language system and language
content, or linguistic and social grammaticality addressed in the first
chapter. I raise this topic here because I anticipate a common response to
the arguments set forth in this book will be that I am – as I have been
called in the past – a language anarchist. One of those lax, liberal types,
for whom anything goes. Who has no respect for language or the traditions
of the past, and no interest in teaching those traditions to children. No
interest in aesthetics, and an unwillingness to talk of quality in spoken
language, for fear that somebody will be marginalized.
In fact, I will state very clearly that in my opinion, it is not a sin against
mankind to have standards and preferences about the spoken language. As
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