It’s something I’ve not mastered – the language or the grammar – and
that’s caused a problem for me. It goes back to the education.
Secondary modern school education wasn’t the greatest, but there
were lots of people who learned the grammar – I didn’t. It’s often
used as part of my characterization – mangle the language.Since the popularization of the internet, examples of trivialization abound.
Later we’ll be looking at two examples: the explosion of websites
mocking Ebonics after the 1997 controversy (Ronkin and Karn 1999), and
similar tactics undertaken to peripheralize and trivialize Spanish speakers
(Hill 1995, 2008).
Any speaker of a stigmatized vernacular is promised large returns if he
or she will adopt SAE. Persons who persist in their allegiance to
stigmatized varieties of English will be cut off from the everyday
privileges and rights of citizenship at every turn, regardless of inherent
talent or intelligence.
At its most brutal, this turns into personal attacks on whole groups of
people. The most salient example of this will be seen in the way SAE
speakers and adherents react to any attempt to cast a stigmatized variety in
a positive or legitimate light. Dominant bloc institutions lead the charge in
cases like these, and the results are loud and shrill. The best recent
example of this happening on a large-scale basis is what is generally
called the Oakland Ebonics controversy, something we will look at in more
detail in Chapter 16.
In this model linguistic form and social structures are connected by
means of ideology (here used simply in the sense of “what people
believe”), an approach that originated in its current form with Silverstein
(1979), as well as in the work of other anthropological linguists and
sociolinguists. In fact, all three of these nodes are bound, each to the other
(Figure 5.2). Ideology cannot be abstracted away; no one can suspend the
way they think about language from the process of interpreting language.