Northeast who blended New York and Southern dialects within a few months
of their arrival in Chapel Hill. Within a year, only traces of their home dialect
remained. The desire of teenagers to conform to a peer group is well known
and accounts for the rapid dialect shift.
But adopting a new dialect can be problematic when there is little motiva-
tion. We define ourselves and develop our identity through the interactions we
have with those closest to us—our families and friends. Adopting the prestige
dialect may make some students feel that they are losing their connection with
home and community. At the university level, we often hear students talking
about the difficulties they face when they go home for a break and find that the
language they now use is different from what their parents and friends speak.
Some feel that they are outsiders in their own homes. First-generation college
students are especially prone to this experience. Although nearly all parents
want their children to get a college education, ours is a very class-conscious so-
ciety, and education that threatens to move children too far outside the bound-
aries of their communities is often seen as a threat by friends and family, in spite
of their good intentions and best wishes.
This conflict is especially acute in our public schools owing to the huge influx
of immigrants that began in the mid-1980s and continues today. Census Bureau
data indicate that a large percentage of these immigrants are in the country ille-
gally, which necessarily erects a barrier to any notion of assimilation. One result
is that emotional (as well as fiscal) ties to the home country remain quite strong.
Ghettoization is rampant as immigrants seek to find comfort in communities that
perpetuate their home values, customs, ideals, and language.
The result is a serious dilemma for immigrants, our schools, and the nation.
Some states, such as California, Arizona, and Colorado, have dismantled bilin-
gual education programs, and in many other states the pressure to reclassify
children as English proficient is so strong that it frequently occurs too soon.
Consequently, becoming bilingual is a real challenge for the children of immi-
grants. On achieving bilingual proficiency, they then face an equally difficult
challenge—Standard English. Those who do not master the prestige dialect are
likely to remain insiders in their communities but outsiders with respect to the
workplace and the broader society. Most people try to solve this problem by be-
coming bidialectical, over time learning how to use both dialects with varying
degrees of success. Others may find jobs that do not require much proficiency
in the prestige dialect.
Many of our students who speak Black English Vernacular (BEV) or Chi-
cano English—the two most pervasive nonstandard dialects in the coun-
try—resist using Standard English in school because they do not want to be
identified with the white mainstream. Meanwhile, the white population is di-
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