Can You Say "Shibboleth"?

I've had the good fortune lately to go to a couple of fancy dinners. I call it good fortune because the company was good, not because the event was fancy. The food was not especially tasty, but it was presented with great style and pomp: it looked pretty. And then there was the silverware. My plate was surrounded by a garrison of forks, spoons, and knives. I had no idea which spoon to use for the soup, or which fork to use for the salad. Worse, there were glasses placed, with perfect symmetry, on each side of my plate. Which glass was mine? I chose the wrong one, of course, thus stealing my neighbor's glass. This breach of etiquette sent shock waves around the table, as each of my dinner companions had to use their neighbor's glass instead of their own. I apologized in my politest Arkansas accent, but if any of my dinner companions had decided I was a yokel, that probably didn't help.

All this would have bothered me if I were a more formal person. But I laughed it off, because I figure things like that shouldn't be taken too seriously. Knowing which fork to use--and speaking in a certain accent, for that matter--are nothing more than shibboleths. They don't have any particular purpose except to identify who belongs to a particular group...and who doesn't. Using the wrong fork immediately identifies me as someone who hasn't mastered the rules of etiquette. My accent identifies me as being from the hilly part of the south--not a region associated with sophistication in the average American mind. Linguists know that pronunciation is arbitrary, and has no intrinsic association with intelligence, but I can attest that people will judge you for having an accent like mine. The shibboleth is still in effect, no matter what the linguists say. But when I think about the origins of the term "shibboleth", I realize it could be a lot worse.

The word "shibboleth" comes from the Old Testament. In the late second millennium BC, the Israelites were still a set of quarrelsome tribes who hadn't yet united into the Kingdom of Israel. The Book of Judges tells how two Israelite tribes, the Ephraimites and Gileadites, went to war. The Gileadites defeated the Ephraimites, leaving many Ephraimites stuck in Gileadite country, east of the Jordan river. As they tried to cross back into their own country, the Gileadites stopped them at the river. The two tribes spoke the same language, but unfortunately for the Ephraimites, they had different accents. Judges 12:5-6 tells what happened next.

Whenever one of the fugitives of Ephraim said, "Let me go over," the men of Gilead would say to him, "Are you an Ephraimite?" When he said, "No," they said to him "Then say Shibboleth," and he said "Sibboleth" for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand of the Ephraimites fell at that time.

A fateful word, shibboleth, but not because of its meaning. Depending on who you ask, it meant either "ear of grain" or "torrent". The point was that Ephraimites said it differently than Gileadites, and that allowed the Gileadites to identify their enemies. Shibboleths have been used in warfare more recently, too. In World War II, Allied soldiers would distinguish Japanese soldiers from other Asians by asking them to say, "lollapalooza." Since the Japanese language doesn't distinguish the "L" and "R" sounds, the Japanese would say "rorraparooza"--a dead giveaway, often in the literal sense. A fictional shibboleth appears in the movie "Inglourious Basterds", where an Englishman posing as a German soldier is caught making a hand-gesture a German would never use.

Not all shibboleths are so deadly, or even particularly nasty. Accents, in-jokes, fashions, slang, musical preferences--all these things can function as shibboleths. Many of them are pretty harmless, and just used to distinguish some subculture, often distinct only in its sense of fashion or music. There are all kinds of pop culture shibboleths I haven't mastered, but no one is particularly mean to me because of that (there's the occasional snotty hipster, but life is too short to concern oneself with the opinions of snotty hipsters).

However, the shibboleths of formal etiquette can get nasty (though not usually downright murderous). Knowing your table settings is a shibboleth indicating whether you know the rules of etiquette, and that is historically a way of indicating whether someone is from the upper or aristocratic classes, because only people from those classes had the means to learn such things. That's why etiquette is full of rules that don't really serve any purpose except to differentiate people who know the rules from those who don't. The word "etiquette" actually means "tag" or "label" in French. Having etiquette labels you as being from the refined classes. It's a behavioral badge, but a badge nonetheless.

Of course, etiquette can be more than just a set of shibboleths. It can also give people guidelines for being polite and thoughtful. But that purpose can be lost in the minutia of social rules. The shibboleth function of etiquette, when you think about it, is not very polite and thoughtful at all, at least to the people it excludes. Arbitrary social rules are also a burden for the people who know them, because life would be simpler (and often less expensive) if they didn't have to bother with them. People will work very hard to appear better than others.

It's odd how notions of good behavior are still bound up with old notions of class, or even old-world aristocracy. Think about the word "classy", as in, "That was a classy thing to do." "Classy" didn't originally mean "thoughtful and admirable", but "what a person from the higher classes would do". Today we think of a "gentleman" as a man who has good manners, but once it simply meant somebody who didn't have to work with his hands, or even work at all, regardless of how polite he was. The word "courtesy" originally meant "the proper way of acting at court." Americans still say certain behaviors are "noble" even though we have never had a class of noble men and women here. The aristocracy often weren't very noble, anyway, if by "noble" you mean "well-behaved and honorable". In fact, the oldest noble families in Europe first became nobles by fighting brutal wars.

The problem with confusing good, thoughtful behavior with class-based shibboleths is that class divisions don't necessarily reflect good behavior. In fact, most people today would say that a rigid, hereditary class system is a form of societal injustice. People aren't members of the upper classes because they have good manners, but because they were born in certain families, or made a lot of money and bought their way in. As the old saying goes, "Make money and the world will conspire to make you a gentleman." Making your money in a gentlemanly way is optional, and often counter-productive.

I don't mean to bash the upper classes here. I've known people from the upper classes who were truly noble, but I've also known some who used social niceties as a weapon to shame others.  I don't care how "well-bred" they are, those people can be as mean as scorpions in a skillet.

The point of all this is that we need to disentangle true courtesy from arbitrary shibboleths, and politeness from class and wealth. If some rule of etiquette makes life more pleasant, or shows thoughtfulness and respect toward other people, then let's keep it. If it's merely a shibboleth, good for nothing but distinguishing one group of people from another, then toss it in the garbage, where it belongs. I'm all for refinement and politeness when it serves a real purpose. After all, people can be pretty nasty creatures when they aren't taught manners, and the current parenting style ignoring rudeness strikes me as a horrible idea. But what's also a horrible idea is continuing to use arbitrary rules to distinguish people based on social class. If we could root out shibboleths masquerading as manners, and focus on actually being nice, thoughtful, and honorable, the world would be a simpler and kinder place. As Emily Post herself said: "Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use."

Big Brains and Southern Accents

I've lived in the south most of my life, and I've met people with pronounced southern accents who also happen to be Rhodes Scholars, Ivy League grads, doctors, scientists, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers. Yet when you enter the phrase "southern accent" in a web search, you'll immediately see words like "stupid" and "uneducated".  I discovered this yesterday, because I was searching for "smart people with southern accents". Why? Because I needed to find some examples to pass around.  I had just seen a particularly painful example of a dumb southerner, and it was hurting my soul.

It was on the Daily Show.  They were poking fun at the hard right's mistrust of science, and they choose to interview a socialite and occasional Republican spokesperson from Little Rock, Arkansas named Noelle Nikpour.  Ms. Nikpour claimed, in her thick southern drawl, that scientists were "scamming the American people right and left", and that ordinary Americans are just as qualified to judge scientific theories as scientists themselves.  The interviewer pretended to agree with her, and the stupidity of her statements just escalated from there.  She never even realized he was messing with her.  I thought she was probably an actress who was in on the joke, but no, she's a real person who occasionally appears on Fox News.  The clip was surely edited to make her look as dumb as possible, but if she's not an absolute bubbleheaded idiot, she did an amazing impression of one.  It would have been painful to watch if it wasn't so hilarious.

OK, so it was still a little painful. I'm from Arkansas too, and I don't want people thinking she represents everybody from my state.  And lord have mercy, I hope I'm not that dumb. But when I leave the south, people quite often assume I am, because I talk like she does.  I've had people talk to me for a while, get a puzzled expression on their face, and then tell me, "You're a lot smarter than you sound!"

They actually intend it as a compliment, which is truly bewildering.  I've also had people assume I'm very religious or conservative, or that I'm a racist.  I've even met a couple of people who seemed to be afraid of me because I'm from the south (and I'm not a scary person).  But here's the ironic thing:  I may have a southern accent, but when people hear it and assume I'm stupid, they're the ones being foolish, not me.  They're the victims of a fallacy:  the idea that you can take a stereotype about a group of people, and conclude that an individual from that group will match the stereotype.  It doesn't work that way.  For one thing, many stereotypes are unfounded.  But even if there's some basis for the stereotype, it still doesn't work that way, because a group average, and an individual from that group, are two very different things.

I'm not trying to deny some of the uncomfortable truths about the south.  I grew up here, but I've lived other places, so I know what's good and bad about it.  The fact is, there's some truth to a few of the stereotypes about the south.  On average, it does lag behind the rest of the country in things like education and literacy.  That's not because southerners are born dumber; it's because a complex mix of history and economics has left education tragically neglected in some parts of the south (though not in places like Austin, Athens, and Chapel Hill); and because ignorance, like education, is self-reinforcing.  Of course, everybody knows that racism has played a big role in southern history, and it's true that serious racism still exists here.  However, the south has no monopoly on that particular poison.  Here's an example:  It's hard to gauge racism in surveys, but if you look at how often people Google racist terms and jokes in different states, it's not just southern states. Yes, 6 of the top 10 are in the south (although number 1, West Virginia, is a border state that stretches far north).  But the other four are indisputably northern.  They are:  3. Pennsylvania, 6. Michigan, 7. Ohio, and 10. New Jersey.  This actually matches my experience.  I've heard plenty of racist talk in the south, but some of the most viciously racist things I've ever heard were said in a northern accent.

While it offends me when people assume I'm dumb or racist, it merely irritates me when they assume I'm conservative, simply because...I'm not.  It's true that I'm appalled by the excesses of the extreme right, but to say that all conservatives are dumb, racist, or poorly-educated would be making the very mistake I'm railing against here. I bring conservatism up only because it is one of the assumptions people make about southerners.  Southernness, conservatism (particularly social conservatism), lack of education, and racism are all somewhat correlated, but that doesn't mean they're inseparable, much less identical.  If you're a smart, educated, non-racist conservative, you've probably had people make the same assumptions about you, based on your politics, that they make about me, based on my accent.

In any case, if you randomly picked out a southerner, the person you picked would be somewhat more likely to be poorly-educated and conservative than someone randomly picked from the rest of the country.  Furthermore, if you randomly picked a southerner with a strong accent, you would be somewhat more likely to get someone who is religiously conservative or poorly educated.  That's because: 1. People who come from rural areas tend to have stronger accents, and people who stay in those areas are more likely to be conservative.  2.  Highly-educated southerners usually tone down their accents.  That's partly because of the prejudices I'm talking about here--they don't want their non-southern peers to assume they're dumb racists; an assumption that's as common as it is ridiculous.

But the fact remains that if you had ten-thousand randomly selected people with a strong southern accents, and ten thousand people from outside the south with boring newscaster accents (yes, that's an accent too) then it's probably true that more people in the southern accent group will be poorly-educated and conservative.  And yes, a few more might be more racists too, though that probably has as much to do with education as region (uneducated non-southerners are more likely to be racist than educated ones, after all).  So what does this prove about the person you just met, with that thick southern accent?  Not a damn thing.  The fact that lack of education, conservatism, and--possibly--racism are a little more prevalent among people with strong southern accents doesn't mean a particular person with a southern accent has any of those traits, or that a person without a southern accent lacks them.

Still, if you stop in a diner in some rural part of Mississippi where people have thick accents, you would be right to think you shouldn't make loud jokes about the religious right, or declare to a bunch of rough-looking white guys that Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest American ever. You would probably be right to think those guys don't have Ph.D's, too. Heck, you might even be right if you thought they were dumb racists.  But you might be wrong, too, and that's my point:  you can't take a statistical tendency of a group and arrive at any certainties about the particular representative of that group standing in front of you.  Likelihoods, yes; certainties, no.  If you meet me, hear my accent, and think, "Maybe I should watch what I say, he might be really religious or conservative", I have no problem with that, because it's a reasonable assumption...if you remember the "might be" part.  People who talk like me are more likely to be religiously conservative--but I'm not.  We all think in percentages.  Intuitive statistics are a vital part of the human mind.  We just have to remember the limits of that kind of thinking. I say "we" because I've been guilty myself.  Once I was at a music festival in Arkansas, and a hairy guy in overalls--with an accent stronger than mine--started talking to me.  I was thinking, "Who is this yokel", when he told me he was a dermatologist.  That "yokel" was an MD in a very competitive specialty--dumb people don't become dermatologists.  When he saw the look on my face, he shot me a knowing grin.  I knew that grin, because it's the same grin I give people when I say big words in an Arkansas accent, and see the confusion in their face. It's a grin that says, "You're the one being dumb, not me. Gotcha!" I grinned back. Touché, Doc.

Judging people by their dialect is dumb for other reasons, too, not just because it's an unwarranted and unfair generalization.  It's not just that people with accents might not match your stereotype about them.  It's also that the distinction we make between high-status and low-status accents is completely arbitrary.  There is no Platonic form of perfect English pronunciation, or even perfect English grammar, hanging up there in the sky.  There's nothing about saying, "You guys went to the store already?" that makes it intrinsically better than saying, "Y'all done went to the store?"  The first is the standardized way of saying it, but that's because of historical accidents that have more to do with social prestige and arbitrary pronouncements than rationality.  It could have gone the other way.  Of course, I realize that if someone doesn't seem to know how to speak in standard English, that probably does mean they're less educated, since people learn standard English in school (and grammar is easier to control consciously than accent--it's easy for me to speak in standard grammar, and nearly impossible for me to speak without an accent).  But poorly educated is not the same as dumb, and a non-standard form of English is not the same as a degraded form.  Languages evolve, change, and diversify, but no language has ever devolved into meaningless gibberish.  If you're a grammar warrior, you may be pretty skeptical about these claims. Well, this ain't the place to get into that, but I done wrote more about that here.

The point of all this is that it's time for southerners, and anyone else with an unusual accent, to show the rest of the country that we don't all match the stereotypes.  It's the people with the prejudices about accents, not the people with the accents, who are being stupid.  Smart southerners should point that out to them, and fight the "dumb southerner" stereotypes the media loves so much.  If I were a filmmaker, I'd be tempted to put together a video showing a bunch of brilliant people with southern accents talking about their accomplishments: "Ah'm a world renowned brain surgeon, and Ah have a southern accent." They wouldn't be hard to find.  At the very least, I'd like the next person who Googles "smart people with southern accents" to actually find something good, or at least find this post.  When I had the idea for this post, I was just going to make a list of smart, famous people who still sound like they're from the south. But I realized it's tough to come up with a list like that--not because it's hard to find smart southerners, but because a lot of southerners who've become famous have had to suppress their accents. Because of people's dumb assumptions.

But not everyone had to learn to talk like Tom Brokaw to get famous.  A southern accent is a good thing if you want to be a country singer, for example.  While "smart" may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think of country singers, some of them, like Lyle Lovett and Dolly Parton, are quite brainy (Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes Scholar, though he didn't grow up only in the south).  A southern accent can also be useful for politicians, which may explain why half the presidents from the last few decades have had them (some of those presidents have even been pretty smart.  Bill Clinton may be morally flawed, but nobody can say he's dumb).  But most other famous southerners--people like newscasters and actors--have to be able to dial back their accent, at least some of the time.  Either it doesn't fit the part, or...well...people think it makes them sound stupid.  Of course, most brilliant people, wherever they're from, never become famous (maybe they're too smart).  You can be at the top of your field in medicine or law, and be a complete unknown to most people. I went to college with a guy with a thick north Louisiana accent.  Now he's a neurosurgeon.  He's not famous, but he's scary smart.

My point in all this is that, even though there are thousands of absolutely brilliant people out there with strong southern accents, it's hard to name many famous ones that aren't country singers or politicians.  But it only takes one counter-example to wreck a bad generalization, and there are plenty of those, even among famous people.  William Faulkner, Bill Clinton, Harper Lee, Martin Luther King, Jr, Bill Moyers, EO Wilson, Rick Bragg, Flannery O'Conner, and thousands of other bright, successful people are proof that having a southern accent doesn't make you dumb.  Most people know this, at some level, but it's a hard association to kick.  As I said, even I have been guilty of stereotyping people with thick accents, and I have one!  That's how pervasive the stereotype is.  That's a shame, but I can fight it.  The next time I hear someone speaking with an accent--any accent--I'm going stop and listen to what they're actually saying, not the accent they're saying it in.  Having an accent doesn't make people stupid.  But unfounded stereotypes and assumptions do.

Ain't Nothing Wrong With Dialects, Y'all

Looking at the tag cloud at the right of this post, I see the word "language" growing larger and larger.  I've always been interested in language, particularly regional dialects.  That's probably because I grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks, which means the rest of the country loves to make fun of the way I talk. Being laughed at as soon as you open your mouth (or being written off as stupid, uncultured, or racist) will make you think long and hard about dialects, and what they really mean.  Upon reflection, I've decided I like my accent, and I like hearing other accents.  English would be mortally boring if everyone spoke it the same way.  Besides, when people jump to conclusions about my smarts based on my accent, it's their foolishness, not mine.  I'll explain why that's true below, but first I want to point out the amazing variety of southern English.

I live in Louisiana now, which surely has the widest variety of English dialects in the south.  At least five different dialects mingle here.  In north Louisiana, you get the twangy drawl of the upper south.  When these people tell you they are southerners, they pronounce the two R's in that word.  There are also a few southuhnuhs around Louisiana, who do not pronounce those R's.  They tend to come from old money, or at least imagine they do.  All across south Louisiana there are Cajuns, who generally speak English these days, but a very different English from the rest of the south.  Anybody who's ever watched Justin Wilson's cooking show has heard an exaggerated version of this dialect.  Of course, you can hear African American English throughout Louisiana.  Linguists recognize this as a distinct dialect, although it does share a lot of common ground with other dialects originating in the south.  

One of the most unusual dialects in Louisiana is the working class speech of New Orleans, which doesn't sound like anything else in the south. This dialect is known as Y'at, because its practitioners say "Where y'at? (which actually means "How are you?").  The accent sounds more Brooklyn than Mississippi, although the people who speak it still say "y'all".  Where I live, southwest of New Orleans, most people's speech seems (to my outsider ears) to be a cross between New Orleans and Cajun. They use syntax I've never heard outside of Louisiana; saying things like "I been knowin' him for years", or "Why you didn't call me?", or "Is that you new house?"  Even "y'all" is different.  Here, and in New Orleans, if a couple had just gotten that new house, people would ask "Is that y'all new house?"  Being from Arkansas, of course, I know that the proper way is to say, "Is that y'all's new house?" I mean, we have to have some rules here, right?

Whether it's "correct" or not, Louisiana's speech is as flavorful as its food, and hearing it every day has revived my longstanding interest in language and regional dialects. But I'm not alone. Most people are fascinated by language, or at least have strong views on which kinds of language are better than others.  When newspapers publish articles that stray from the rules people learned in school, they get letters lamenting the Decline and Fall of the English Language.  These letters describe the near-physical pain their readers suffer at the sight of split infinitives and questionable subject-verb agreements.  They claim to get sick to their stomach, to suffer from headaches, or to just get deeply depressed (oops, I mean "just to get".  Don't want to cause split infinitive sickness). 

People react pretty strongly to differences in spoken English, too.  If you have a strong regional dialect, you already know that strangers will draw conclusions about your intelligence and social class based on how you talk.  Many intelligent, well-educated southerners who have lived outside the south have had someone tell them "You know, you're a lot smarter than you sound!"  Astonishingly, this is usually intended as a compliment!  Dialects and other non-standard speech styles, like teen-speak, cause strong emotional reactions.  Most people like certain speech patterns, and they may deeply, viscerally hate others.

I'm guilty, too.  There are types of language I really dislike.  For example, the buzzwords and catch-phrases of business-speak (leveraging, actionable) and education-speak (the whole child; the apparent quota for using constructivist and praxis every few words) make my skin crawl.  When it comes to the pompous, difficult style so pervasive in academia these days, especially in the humanities and social sciences, hate is not too strong a word.  I admit it: I hate that stuff.  In case you haven't encountered this style, here's a sample.  This is the first sentence in an article called "In Other Words: The Other as Inventio, Allegory, and Symbol", by Stephen Tyler, a professor of anthropology at Rice University:

"The narrative of the symbol is the account of the object's impassioned upward flight from the outer world through the pathemata of the senses to the phantasms of of (sic) the imaginatio to the symbols of the nous and beyond( into the realm of the anagogic, and it is simultaneously the poem of the object's journey from expression to impression to representation (repression) to expression." (Italics and typographic error in original)

Call me a Philistine, but I think this is pretentious, impenetrable crap.  The ideas being "communicated" here may or may not be coherent.  I don't know, but I will assume they aren't until they are put into language that makes some degree of sense.  Life is too short to try to navigate a linguistic smokescreen like this.

So yes, I have my share of strong feelings about language usage.  I don't think language should be used to exclude or obscure, and the passage above does both.  Some kinds of language irritate me in far more minor ways.  In a previously blog post I discussed how people who are trying to sound educated (for example, those being interviewed on NPR, or speaking at conferences) keep saying "sort of" and "kind of".  I do find this mildly irritating, but I don't think I made my reasons clear.  It's not that it offends my sense of "correct grammar" or "proper English".  I dislike the constant repetition of "sort of" because I see it as an indicator that people are consciously trying to speak like a certain group, which means they are in danger of automatically thinking like that group.  I see buzzwords, catchphrases, unnecessary jargon, and stereotyped linguistic tics like "sort of" as signs of an imitative, parrot-like habit of mind, which is not conducive to independent thinking.

But I'm actually a big fan of regional dialects.  Imagine how boring the world be if everyone spoke the Standard English that newscasters use, with its rigid grammar and its nondescript accent.  Dull, dull, dull.  Regional dialects add an enormous amount of spice to the world.  Many people (though certainly not all) would agree.  Far fewer people would agree with my next claim, however: there's no real evidence that any dialect is inferior to any other.  If you ask most linguists, they will tell you that the most backwoods hillbilly uses a grammar that is just as complex and rule-based as William F. Buckley's.  It's a different grammar, but not an inferior one. 

This isn't just knee-jerk ivory tower relativism; it's based on piles of painstaking empirical research. People tend to think of regional dialects as variants of language in which the rules have broken down, but this is a fallacy.  Dialects have their own rules; those rules are very subtle; and native speakers know them very well.  Take African American English, which was at the center of the extremely contentious Ebonics debate several years ago.  Some African Americans say things like "He be taking night classes".  In this dialect, this is a standard way of saying something is happening in the present tense.  It's not just sloppy usage.  No African American would use "be" when speaking in the future tense: you wouldn't hear "He be gonna take night classes next semester".  In the grammar of African American English, that would be incorrect.  Only someone who didn't know any better would say a thing like that.  

It is certainly possible to speak a dialect incorrectly.  As a southerner, I've heard non-southerners try to imitate southern speech, and get it all wrong.  There's this strange misconception, for example, that y'all can be singular.  I have a friend from the Midwest who used to poke fun at my speech by greeting me with "Hey, y'all".  I would always look around, to see who else was there.  He just didn't get it.

To speak sensibly about disputes over the grammar of different dialects, I need to distinguish two kinds of grammar.  When people tell you not to say things like "He don't know nothing", or "He be taking night classes", they're advocating a prescriptive grammar.  They believe English should follow a standard set of grammatical rules, and that deviations from these rules constitute incorrect grammar.  This is different from descriptive grammar, which is what linguists are studying when they record how people really do speak, and try to work out the rules they follow.  Prescriptive grammar is concerned with how people should speak, while descriptive grammar is about how people really do speak.

Looking at language from the descriptivist point of view, it's clear that no language is a unitary, static thing.  All living languages naturally evolve, as people invent and import new words, combine old ones, develop new styles of slang, and so on.  Since the language evolves differently in different places, any widespread language develops dialects, which may eventually evolve into different languages.  Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian, for example, all evolved from regional dialects of Latin.  

The tendency for language to transform and diversify over time has been noted, and lamented, for thousands of years.  Many look at the changes they see in the language in the course of their lives, and conclude that the language is decaying into gibberish.  It isn't. It is changing, and, given enough time, it will evolve into something unintelligible to its current speakers.  But, as atavistic as the teen-speak in the mall may sound to you, no language has ever devolved into something that can't be used to communicate.  As old distinctions fade away, new ones appear to take their place.  

Of course, all I have established so far is that most linguists are descriptivists, that languages always change and diversify into new dialects and languages, and that dialects follow complex, consistent rules of their own.  This doesn't prove that some dialects aren't inferior to others. The mistake the prescriptivists make is thinking that the rules and pronunciations of Standard English are somehow the perfect form of English, and that regional dialects are corruptions of this form.  There are several problems with this point of view.  For one thing, what is considered Standard English has changed considerably over the years, so it is certainly not eternal.  Also, the rules and pronunciations that have been codified as standard are mostly based not on modern understandings of language, but on historical accidents, false analogies with Latin, and arbitrary proclamations by self-appointed guardians of the language.

The very idea of a standardized English first became popular in the 1600's, in--not surprisingly--England.  By this time, the city of London had come to dominate the politics and culture of the country.  London was where the royal family lived, where Parliament met, where the rich and fashionable congregated, and where most books were published.  All this made the English of upper class London the most prestigious dialect in England.  Naturally, this strain of English served as the model when people started trying to standardize the language.  If history had gone differently, and the city of York had become the political and cultural center of gravity in England, then the Yorkshire dialect would have been the model for the standard.  The rise of the London dialect as the standard had far more to do with accidents of history and social prestige than with its intrinsic logic or superiority.  While the Standard American English we hear on TV over here is very different from the Standard English of the 1600's, it didn't become the standard by a process any more rational.

 

In both cases, the pronunciations and grammatical rules that people think of as "proper" are based on whatever dialect the upper classes in the most influential regions happened to speak.  There are no compelling reasons to think the dialect that became standard was any better than any other dialect.  People simply confused "spoken by high class people" with "intrinsically better".  For example, there's no good reason to think one pronunciation is better than another, as long as it's understandable.  In New York, people in the lower classes are more likely to drop R's at the end of words than the upper classes are.  On the Upper West Side, people have "brothers" and "mothers", while in the grittier areas, they have "brothuhs and mothuhs".  The dropped R is correlated with lower social status, but does that make it worse?  What about in parts of the deep south, where the upper class people are the ones more likely to drop their R's?  

Distinctions between "good" and "bad" accents are arbitrary, and based more on prestige than intrinsic worth. Saying "He can't talk very well" is considered more correct than "He cain't talk very well" for the same reason that a particular fork is considered the correct one to use for your salad--some influential group of people decided it was correct, and that's that.  It has no foundation in rationality. Oftentimes, differences in pronunciation can be used the same way the "correct fork" distinction is: to determine who's in the in-group, and who isn't.  They are shibboleths, which mainly serve to determine whether the person speaking is "our kind of people".

Regional accents, like regional syntax, follow very complex, albeit mostly unconscious, rules.  Being from Arkansas, when I say the words "ten" and "tin", they sound exactly alike.  Both sound like "tin".  My father's name is Ben, but I call him Bin.  He doesn't mind, because that's what he calls himself.  Once I was thinking about this, and thought, "If I say tin and ten so that they sound alike, why not bit and bet?"  I say bet the same way most people in the country say it, with a clear "e" sound.  When I looked up linguistic studies about this, I was amazed at the complexity of the rule I'm unconsciously applying.  The pin/pen merger, as this phenomenon is called, only happens with words that end in nasal consonants: m or n.  When you make either of these sounds, you drop your soft palate, so that air escapes through your nose.  The nasal cavities resonate, which helps give these consonants their distinct sounds.  Other consonants in English are pronounced with the soft palate raised.  What's interesting here is that I knew this rule without really knowing it.  Before reading up on the pin/pen merger, I couldn't have told you what a nasal consonant is, or that m and n are examples of one.  But I automatically applied the rule, which is why pin and pen sound alike for me, but bit and bet don't.  That's how language works.  People learn the rules implicitly, not explicitly.  They know how to speak their dialect fluently, but they would have a hard time explaining the rules they're following.

I'm mentioning all these facts about accents to show that a regional accent, like regional syntax, is not an example of an offshoot of the language in which the rules have broken down.  It's simply an example in which the rules have changed.  In the case of the pin-pen merger, the rules have actually become more complex, not less.  People who speak like me follow an additional rule, which people in other regions do not. 

Based on these kinds of arguments, I think most people will concede that value judgments about accents are based on stereotypes and historical accidents, not the inherent worth of the accent.  But what about grammar?  Isn't it still wrong to end sentences with prepositions? Shouldn't we be careful about splitting infinitives?  Surely people who use double negatives, like "He don't know nothing" are mangling the language?  Consider the rule against ending sentences with prepositions, which has caused generations of writers to compose tortured sentences like "To whom are you speaking?" instead of the perfectly straightforward "Who are you speaking to?"  According to David Crystal, the restriction was first promoted by John Dryden in the late 1600's.  Dryden was one of the first people to think it might be possible to perfect the English language, and then freeze it in its "perfect" form (Dryden's English sounds archaic now, ironically).  To this end, he started proposing rules he thought good English should follow.  One of these was to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.  His reasoning is not well known, but it's likely he was basing his judgments of English grammar on his extensive knowledge of Latin.  Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that Classical Latin represented a sort of pinnacle of human language.  English was thought to be a barbarous tongue compared to the language of Cicero and Caesar.  In Latin, prepositions always come before the nouns or pronouns they modify, which is why they are called pre-positions in the first place.  English has a different structure than Latin, and there is no reason why this should be true in English. 

Nevertheless, Dryden's preference stuck, and is with us to this day.  Even though influential grammarians have been saying for over a hundred years that the rule is silly, people are afraid to abandon it, for fear of sounding uneducated.  Just yesterday, I was writing a grant proposal, and keeping an eye out for dangling prepositions, because there are still people out there who would see them as a sign of a poor command of the language. The fact that a tradition is patent nonsense has never been sufficient reason for a society to abandon it.

The rule against using double negatives may seem to be on slightly firmer footing.  Logically speaking, isn't saying "He don't know nothing" equivalent to saying, "He does know something"?  The negative words "don't" and "nothing" cancel each other out and produce a positive, right?  This is what the people who originally proposed the restriction against double negatives argued.  But the fact is, as much as we might like language to follow the rules of logic, it doesn't.  When people hear Marvin Gaye sing Ain't No Mountain High Enough, they don't think he means "there is a mountain high enough".  We naturally interpret double negatives as, well, negative.  In fact, their widespread use in popular music suggests they pack more punch than more formal usage.  Would a song called There Isn't Any Mountain High Enough have ever made it onto the charts?  In many languages, double negatives are standard.  When the French say "Je ne sais pas" (I don't know), both the ne and the pas are negative.  Chaucer and Shakespeare also used double negatives, and most people don't fault them for their poor grasp of the language.  

The point I'm trying to make in this unfeasibly long blog post is that not that some styles of English can't be inferior to others.  Some are inferior, because they don't work well.  The reason language exists is to help us communicate complicated ideas and emotions to each other.  Any style that fails at that task is bad English.  The passage I quoted above by Professor Tyler is a shining example of bad, bad English, because it fails to clearly communicate any idea (except, perhaps, "I think I'm smarter than you").  I also think other kinds of English are bad, if not that bad.  The jargon used in business, government, and education is unfortunate, because it reveals questionable, herdlike mindsets, and because it often serves more to obscure clear thought than than promote it.  While I think teenage slang can be expressive and entertaining, the teenage tendency to try to sound dumb are is not a positive one.  I certainly wouldn't want to see writers and newscasters trade in their Standard English for teen-speak.  I wouldn't even want them to start using whatever regional dialect they grew up with--at least not entirely.  There's no reason they shouldn't speak in version of their regional accent, as long as it's understandable.  In fact, it would do some good, because it would lessen the stereotype that no one with a non-standard accent can be smart and successful.  Still, having a standardized form of the language makes good sense, because it serves as a common medium between different regions, different social groups, and different generations.
 

When it comes to judging regional dialects against Standard English, I think people need to realize two things:  First, Standard English is not "Perfect English".  Its pronunciation is just as arbitrary as any other, and many of its rules were simply made up.  Second, regional dialects are not corrupted, "fallen" forms of English.  They're healthy varieties of a diverse language, with their own rules and their own strengths.  While I think we should keep teaching Standard English, I also think we should start emphasizing to students that it is just a tool for communicating to a wide audience.  Standard English wasn't handed down to us from on high.  We invented it, to serve a certain purpose.  With this in mind, there's no reason not to do away with rules that exist for no good reason.  Let's teach kids, once and for all, that it's fine to end sentences with prepositions. This would save them a lot of heartache, and ourselves from a lot of ugly sentences.  Let's accept that some nonstandard usages exist because they fill gaps in Standard English, and consider whether Standard English should adopt them.  For example, Standard English has no non-gender-specific singular form.  To say "If someone is using a dialect, that doesn't mean they are stupid", is widely considered to be poor usage, because "they" is plural, and "someone" is singular.  But people say it because they don't want to specify a gender.  Since Standard English doesn't give us a neutral option, let's declare that "they" will work, plural or not.  Who's the boss here, anyway, the language or the people who created it?  

Maybe we could even accept that words like "ain't" and "y'all" are widely used because they make the language more efficient.  Standard English doesn't distinguish the singular and plural forms of "you", but sometimes you want to make that distinction.  When people from various parts of the country address a group as y'all, youse, or even you'uns, they are actually being more precise than people saying the more ambiguous you.  Maybe we should listen to them.  Finally, let's ask ourselves why ain't, that venerable outlaw of a word, is used in countless popular songs, even by well-educated singers. I suspect it's because ain't is more expressive, concise, and versatile than "aren't" and "isn't".  Maybe we should finally accept this fact, and let ain't come in from the cold.  Finally, and most importantly, let's stop assuming that people are less worthy because they speak in a dialect.

Will these things happen any time soon?  Probably not.  Groundless snobbery is a habit as hard to break as hand wringing over where to put prepositions.  Old, meaningless rules are especially hard to abandon when being the trailblazer could get you branded as being provincial or stupid.  And that's the problem, right there:  equating provincial with stupid or unworthy.  This equation is nothing more than old-fashioned bigotry and stereotyping.  While it's true that some populations speaking regional dialects may have lower average educational levels than others, that doesn't mean they are dumber, or that some of them aren't highly educated or naturally brilliant.  When we write people off as being dumb, old-fashioned, or small-minded based only on the dialect they are using, we're the ones being stupid, not them.

Recommended Links and Reading

Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 

Do You Speak American?

Lynch, Jack. The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park. New York: Walker & Co, 2009.

Pinker, Steven. "GRAMMAR PUSS." New Republic 210.5 (1994): 19-26

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperPerennial ModernClassics, 2007

Yeah You Rite! New York, NY: Cinema Guild, 1985.

Non-Recommended Reading

Tyler, Stephen A. "In other words: The other as inventio, allegory, and symbol." Human Studies 16.1/2 (1993): 19-32.