Sociolinguistic Short-Takes

• Do people swear more today than they used to? We have no way to quantify how much people used to swear, or even how much they swear today. It would be fair to say that people today swear more in public (and on radio and television and in film) than they did in the 1940s or 50s.
• Is the language of blacks and whites diverging? Some observers worry that the social distance between whites and African Americans may be increasing, which could in turn lead to greater linguistic differences.
• Is E-mail ruining the language? Critics object that it encourages misspelling and grammatical error, makes people lazy, and is impersonal and overly informal. Even so, standards for e-mail started to emerge as soon as it became common. E-mail programs come with spell- and grammar- checkers, advanced formatting capabilities, and graphics and sound. Many e-mail writers want their e-mails to read as if they have been written by someone who knows how to do things right.
• Where do language standards come from? Language standards — ideas about correct spelling, usage, grammar, and style — emerge by consensus within communities of language users. In some countries, government offices or language academies devise language policy, draw up standards and attempt to enforce them. There are no such mechanisms for English, though teachers, editors, writers, and self-appointed experts serve as language guardians, transmitting ideas of correctness and attempting to secure their adoption. Despite their efforts, there is no single standard of correctness in English. Instead, there are multiple standards that emerge from fluid communication contexts.
• Can I be fired for speaking Spanish on the job? That depends. Federal courts frequently side with the workers’ right to use any language they want, particularly when on breaks or talking privately. The courts also allow employers to specify the language to be used when employees deal directly with the public, and more than half the states have adopted English as their official language — a designation more symbolic than enforceable. English doesn’t need the protection of being an official language: the number of English speakers in America is rising and will not decline anytime soon. No other language, including Spanish, is positioned to become the majority national language. However, designation of English as official can put a chill on the use of other languages. In a period of increased globalization, a knowledge of the world’s languages should help rather than hurt the U.S. position among the nations of the world.
• Are literacy rates really too low? We all agree that literacy — the ability to read and write — is one of the most important things that people need to succeed. Yet as experts disagree over how to define and measure literacy, the stakes have gone up. Is a high-school education enough? Can we say that a given score on a standardized test guarantees a comparable level of performance in real-world reading, writing, and calculating?

Every few years we have a literacy scare. Most recently, a report in the 1990s warned that almost half of American adults couldn’t read, write, or calculate at adequate levels. At the same time, the vast majority of people interviewed considered their reading, writing and math perfectly adequate for their jobs and other everyday tasks. So, the assessment could simply mean Americans are too complacent about their literacy … or that testing doesn’t really measure what we need to know.

After a report on literacy in crisis, politicians legislate more standardized testing. This forces schools to redirect their efforts to get students past the standardized tests. Scores go up, things settle down for a while, then the next report comes out and the crisis cycle starts again.

Standardized tests have some ability to predict actual performance. But when schools devote too much time to test-taking skills and too little time to the actual literacy practices the tests are supposed to measure, actual progress is stymied. A more reliable measure of literacy might be the amount of time spent in and out of class on reading, writing, and numeracy. A 2003 report from the Brookings Institution indicates that two-thirds of American high school students spend less than an hour a day on homework. This suggests that students don’t spend enough time on actual literacy tasks — and that is something that no test can address.

Sez Who? Index

Suggested Reading/Additional Resources

• Chaika, Elaine. Language: The Social Mirror. 3^rd ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1994.
• Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes. American English. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999.

Dennis Baron is professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of several books on the English language, including The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans? (Yale Univ. Press, 1990); Grammar and Gender (Yale, 1986); Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (Yale, 1982); Declining Grammar (National Council of Teachers of English, 1989); and Guide to Home Language Repair (NCTE: 1994). He writes for academic journals but his essays have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers, and he speaks about language issues both on his local public radio station, WILL-AM, and on radio and TV programs in other cities around the country. He is currently writing a book on the impact of technology on our reading and writing practices.

---------------------------------------------------------------

https://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/ebonics.lsa.html

Resolution On The Oakland " Ebonics" Issue
Unanimously Adopted at the Annual Meeting of the