I quite understand Charles Nelson's concerns with the practical issues of
learning "a language", whether there are such beasts or not. Many of those
at the Berkeley meeting were people mainly concerned with the practical
teaching of languages, but trying to find new ways to think about the
problems and their contexts.
So, I am not writing now to contest his perfectly reasonable points, just
to elaborate a few spinoffs from the earlier arguments --
Depending on what sorts of activities one might find oneself using Turkish
in, is it more important to master its syntax (baroquely agglutinative and
'case' rich to an Indo-European speaker) or to acquire an intonation
pattern that sounds 'Turkish' to Turks? or if one wants or needs both,
which more signifies 'Turkishness' to Turks, and under what conditions is
that important to the non-Turk learner? and what kinds of interactions are
there between developing one and developing the other? [this is a
transposition of the "Ebonics" argument]
Is it easier to master Turkish vocabulary (which has few Indo-European
cognates) if one does so in an aural-oral frame of getting into the rhythms
and 'feel' of spoken Turkish, as opposed to writing out lists of words
pronounced as isolates?
How much diversity is there among Turkish lects? what do young kids sound
like? elderly women? provincials? the poor? Kurds who are speaking Turkish?
what kinds of indexical meanings are there in the variations available in
this suite of varieties? How do people speak to foreigners? what
divergences do they obligingly overlook? which ones interrupt communication?
And suppose we lived in a Turkish-Kurdish bilingual community? or a
Turkish-Hungarian or Turkish-English one ... and were learning to talk with
Turks, not necessarily in "Turkish", or even as they talk amongst
themselves (if we are not an intelligence agent trying to 'pass' as a Turk
:), but in what has come to be the speech variety used for this purpose in
this community, and which could not, by a somewhat traditional linguist, be
quite called any 'pure' language?
So the more indirect ideologies of language learning have a lot to do with
issues such as:
Why might someone WANT to try to sound exactly like a native speaker of
this language when you are not one?
Why would we assume that the upper class variety is the one that will be
most useful for communication? when?
What exactly are the advantages of the upper class variety and why is it
easier for foreigners to gain access to it?
Suppose instead of trying to learn a standard national language, we were
trying to learn the dialect of an oppressed community ... how would our
attitudes toward all these issues be different?
Learning to speak and read a little of a language has long been a hobby of
mine. I usually get the grammar book and tapes and do a lot of memorizing
(I do find getting some sound-feel for the language makes the rest seem
easier). And then I go somewhere people actually speak what always turns
out to sound VERY different from what was in my books, because they are
teenagers on a train, or old people who grew up in the countryside, or
anyone being casual. The only people who sound like what my books taught
are other non-native speakers, whom I can usually understand perfectly. Or
highly educated speakers who know I am not fluent and speak in a special
way for my benefit. And of course I can read some kinds of text a little
... but not jokes, or fiction, or poetry, or naturalistic dialogue, or
comic books, or a lot of what's in popular magazines ... just news and
business stories, maybe the weather report.
There is a real sense in which so-called standard national languages are
Ideals, if not Illusions. They portray a speech community as someone wishes
it were; as it is -- by someone's values -- supposed to be. Uncharitably
one can say SNL's are deliberate lies, disenfranchisements, principles for
control and oppression. Historically and still today they do function in
this way. But not so obviously for foreigners, especially those of us who
expect to maintain our class privileges as we shift languages. We are just
mystified at why so many native speakers can't seem to speak their own
language properly.
A matter which would not mystify us at all if we asked it about our own
speech communities. But about which there are many mystifications regarding
the reasons: those speakers are uneducated, we say, or they speak a (rare)
dialect. But what percentage of U.S.-born humans speak (as opposed to
write, and as opposed to can speak with careful self-monitoring) "standard
English" (or "standard" anything else)? Certainly not a majority; probably
not the tiniest minority if we go by the results of high school students in
_writing_ this variety. Of the tiny minority who can and do speak SE,
almost all have learned it as a schooled variety, not as the native speech
of family and community. SE exists almost exclusively as a written variety,
not a spoken one; it is a hyperstandardized social acrolect, not the common
language of communication uniting a great nation across its diversity,
which it is mythologized as. I am thinking American SE, but the points
apply pretty much to all standard national languages today, differing by
degree from case to case.
We are hiding something behind the illusion of a "homogeneous speech
community", which doesn't exist. We are hiding important truths about
language and about society behind grammar books that seem to have innocent
practical uses. Have you seen polylectal grammars that describe the actual
variety of speech forms in a community? They would almost be a
contradiction -- grammars are about homogeneity, for homogenization. The
era of the 'prescriptive' or normative grammar is not over at all. Class
power exercised through linguistic discrimination is not at all on the
wane. In fact, it seems to be on the rise as other forms of discrimination
become illegal.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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