Each of us would group the accents we come across in different
configurations. For the majority of Americans, French accents are positive
ones, but not for all of us. Many have strong pejorative reactions to Asian
accents, or to African American Vernacular English, but certainly not
everyone does. The accents we hear must go through our language
ideology filters. In extreme cases, we feel completely justified in rejecting
the communicative burden, and the person in front of us:^6
The supervisor explained that workers would ... ask the plaintiff
what he wanted them to do, and then simply walk away, unable
to understand. The supervisor refused to attribute such incidents
to the plaintiff’s accent, but offered no other explanation. He
said they just couldn’t understand him “like normal people with
normal language.”
I signed up for this chemistry course but dropped it when I saw
the Teaching Assistant. I shouldn’t have to have TAs who can’t
speak English natively.
She put on a really excellent presentation to the committee, but
if she had applied for a job on the phones sounding like she does,
we wouldn’t have hired her.What we have yet to fully understand is how the subjugation process
works, why it works, and why we let it. We will see that standard language
ideology is introduced by the schools, vigorously promoted by the media
and entertainment industries and further institutionalized by the corporate
sector. It is enforced in subtle and not so subtle ways by the judicial
system. Thus, it is not surprising that many individuals do not recognize
the fact that for spoken language, variation is systematic, structured, and
inherent, and that *SAE is an abstraction. What is surprising, even deeply
disturbing, is the way that many individuals who consider themselves
democratic, even-handed, rational and free of prejudice, hold on
tenaciously to a standard ideology which attempts to justify rejection of
the other because of race, ethnicity, or other facet of identity that would
otherwise be called racism.