Linguistic Diversity and the Public Interest

Despite periodic reports of their imminent death, American dialects survived the twentieth century. Radical changes in media, transportation, and technology drastically compressed the social and cultural geography of the United States and altered American lifestyles, but they hardly threatened language variation. In fact, some dialectologists maintain that major regional dialects of the United States are diverging rather than converging and that ethnolinguistic distinctiveness is becoming more rather than less marked. Certainly, the methodological, descriptive, and theoretical advances of recent decades have secured the study of North American speechways. We now find comprehensive documentation of situations that range from major dialect shifts affecting large, mainstream populations to rapid dialect recession in small enclave communities.

Meanwhile, the general public has become more exposed than ever to language variation. The most remote dialect communities can now be physically accessed within a couple of hours, and everyday media presentations routinely provide firsthand coverage of regionally and socially situated news events. There is even occasional media focus on language issues per se, from the benign American Dialect Society announcements of the Word of the Year/Decade/Century/Millennium to emotionally charged public language debates such as that surrounding the adoption of English as the official language of the United States and the Oakland Ebonics controversy. There seems to be ample evidence of public interest in issues related to language diversity.

Unfortunately, recent language controversies played out in the media only underscore the dire need for public education about language and dialect diversity. American society remains entrenched in an ideology premised on the sovereignty of the standard variety and the linguistic subordination of vernacular varieties, particularly those associated with asymmetrical class and ethnic relations. And it is not all innocent folklore. Discrimination based on dialect remains "so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that it must be seen as the last back door to discrimination" (Lippi-Green 1997, 73). Furthermore, the ideology of linguistic subordination is one of the few social issues that seem to transcend class and ethnic lines.

Two concerns should lie at the heart of public education about language: truth and equity. On both scores, we face formidable challenges with respect to dialect diversity. One response to the need for public education is the implementation of language and dialect AWARENESS PROGRAMS, that is, programs designed to raise sensitivity and conscious awareness of language diversity and its role in social life.

Of all the challenges I have faced in my professional career, none has proven more difficult and elusive than the implementation of dialect awareness programs. For almost a decade, I proposed an experimental dialect awareness curriculum for primary and secondary students. The goal of the curriculum was simply to teach students to understand and appreciate the nature of language differences and the intricate and systematic patterning of all dialects and languages. No aspect of the programs ever endorsed eaching in a vernacular dialect or teaching students to use the vernacular in any productive way. Nonetheless, I was repeatedly turned away at the door of public-school education by principals, teachers, and parents who worried that the programs might teach students to speak "bad language" and spread dangerous linguistic propaganda. Although I have finally gained admission to a few public schools that have received our dialect awareness curricula with greater enthusiasm than I ever anticipated, this acceptance is only a small step towards the adoption of large-scale, systemwide programs.

The implementation of dialect awareness programs cannot, however, take place exclusively in the education sector. While media coverage of language controversies sometimes provides "teachable moments of national proportion," we also need to move beyond those occasions to provide long-term, informal sociolinguistic education for the American public. Few facts of life are more misunderstood by the public than those involving language variation; it seems only appropriate that a wide-scale, dedicated effort of formal and informal education should be mounted to counter popular myths concerning language differences. The efforts of...