The news recent reported a
case of a school in Halesowen, in
the West Midlands, clamping
down on the use of dialect within the classroom. This isn't the first time it's happened,
nor indeed the first time I've blogged about
it. I think it's the kind of thing that will keep on happening, and it's the
kind of thing that polarises opinion. On the one hand you have the language
purist camp who arguably are more inclined to see the use of dialect among
young people as a threat to the standard language, while on the other hand you
have those, generally speakers of the dialect in question, who would oppose the
school's decision to discourage (in this case, adopt a 'zero tolerance
approach') dialect use in the classroom.
As
somebody who speaks only the standard version of English and works in the
language industry, I would find it more natural to sit in the former camp. Part
of what I chose to do as a career, and enjoy doing on a daily basis, is to find
errors in documents written in English and correct them. I have to accept the
need for somebody else’s idea of what ‘standard’ is taking precedence over what
I perceive as being Standard English. I don't always know what the preferred
option, spelling or phrasing is, because it's not me personally who gets to
prescribe these things, so I often have to look things up. Sometimes, though it
pains me, I have to accept something I don't agree with. I think benefitted is
a perfectly acceptable variant spelling of benefited, for example. I also quite
like putting the word 'hitherto' in my translations, but am very rarely allowed
to do this, except on occasions on which my unfortunate proofreader is having
an especially sleepy day and is more inclined to just give in to my various whims.
But
I have to ask myself why it
pains me when I'm not allowed to write exactly what I want in my translations,
and I think it's ultimately this that puts me firmly into the second, 'dialect
defender' camp. Of course I'm not allowed to just write down all the words that
immediately come into my head when I'm translating, for
one thing because I'm trying to write to get a specific meaning across, for a
specific audience and in a specific context. Furthermore, translation isn't all
about the translator. When I translate, I'm not supposed to write in my voice,
with the words that come to mind most quickly, because it's not my own
voice I'm meant to be conveying. It seems generally reasonable that I can
rarely use any of the very few dialect words that I actually employ in speech
in one of my translations. My translations remain, for the moment, chopsy and
cwtch-free zones.
However,
when I'm speaking to people, and especially to people I know well, it is my
own voice I'm conveying. I think if somebody corrected how I spoke, I
would be annoyed, confused or both, especially if I was a small child, and if
the person correcting me spoke in a similar way to me. The letter sent to parents in Halesowen did at least
recognise the principle of linguistic code switching and called for “Formal
English in the classroom and slang in the school playground”. As I wrote when I
commented on the 'Middlesbrough debate', children know how to code-switch
anyway. A wonderful thing about sociolinguistics is that like language itself,
this is something we pick up on passively. Children don't need to be told to
speak in a more formal way in more formal situations, as they will follow the
lead of the person doing most of the talking (in this case, the teacher).
Simply cherry-picking the 'Top Ten Most Damaging Phrases' used by children in
the school will do nothing except confuse people, especially as once again, the
school authorities have chosen a rather mixed bag of slang (ain't, as a less
formal negation, is used across vast swathes of the English-speaking world),
dialect ('I cor do that' for 'I can't do that') and informal pronunciation
('somefink' for 'something', 'woz' for 'was', although how exactly that can be
monitored in the spoken language remains a mystery to me).The school states that it values the local dialect and culture, and yet I cannot see how they can maintain this view while ending their letter to parents with 'Never settle for less than your best'. The dialect some of these children speak is part of their culture, and by outright stating that in using their dialect, people are just not trying hard enough, the school only serves to widen the gap between those who speak dialect in that region, and those who do not. There will be children in that school who speak the Black Country dialect as their 'native language' (i.e. the language they use at home) while there will be others, and I would have fallen into this category, whose native language is Standard English, which happens to be more appropriate in formal circumstances and does not necessitate as much code-switching. Why widen the gap between these two groups? To speak a dialect is not a sign of laziness, and it is patronising and short-sighted to say that dialect speakers could just try a little harder rather than 'settling' for the way they were brought up to speak.
I
wish I could say class didn't come into it, but of course it does – this is Britain.
At the risk of generalising in order to avoid opening a can of British social
class worms, speakers of this dialect are more likely to come from
working-class backgrounds, which is why I have a great deal of sympathy with
the view that the school's actions are a case of snobbery, however
well-intentioned they were. Arbitrarily telling children that certain words are
best avoided in the classroom is likely to confuse them. They may get out of the
habit of using some of the words, but not others. It will probably be the case
that as soon as they leave the classroom at the end of each day, they will
speak exactly as they did when they first entered it. And when the pupils leave
the classroom for the final time, it is likely that they will still speak using
the same accent, using the same (if any) dialect words as they did when they
started school, with possible additions picked up from friends. These speakers
of dialect will only remember that once, one particular teacher in one
particular year told then off for using a couple of particular words. Chances
are, they will never have even been told why the teachers thought they
shouldn't use certain words in a classroom context, because it's difficult to
explain issues like code-switching to primary school children, although that
doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
There
are many times, and many places, for the use of Standard English, and there are
many settings in which a prescriptivist approach is called for. As I see it,
the primary school classroom – a setting in which you have a range of people
who comparatively recently learned how to speak, all living in the same area,
all developing and slowly growing in confidence – is not one of these settings.
There
may be a more positive outcome of all this for my fellow dialect fans: take a
look at what happened to the Irish language under Cromwell. The best way to
revive a language is to ban it. Maybe, in a couple of generations, we'll see a
resurgence in the use of the Black Country dialect too.
About the Author:
Katie Roskams graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2010 and is currently working as an in-house translator of German and Dutch in Northumberland. She is especially interested in Germanic sociolinguistics, dialectology in particular. At the moment, she is trying to teach herself Swedish, with limited success. Apart from linguistics, she loves gardening and is impatiently waiting on the council list for an allotment. She also loves maritime history and coffee.
