The Cato Institute’s Walter Olson posted an article today criticizing the idea that states should be prohibited from monitoring the English fluency of their teachers. He makes the point that teachers were once “demons for correctness” in pronunciation, and that federal control over education is threatening this tradition. Now, I’m no fan of federal control over education, but I also recognize that language is constantly evolving. Whose pronunciation is “correct”? The New Yorker? The southerner? The Minnesotan? If we can tolerate these accents, why are we so unwilling to tolerate Hispanic accents? Would we favor the restriction of teaching licenses to Canadians, or are their accents close enough to not matter? I accept that there is such a thing as “bad English”, but we should be careful when zeroing in on pronunciation.
About Josh Hanson
Some people criticized Arnold Schwarzenegger (sp?) during his bid for governor of California, saying anyone who wants that office should be able to pronounce the name of the state. I never had a problem understanding the man’s English.
I work with a diverse group of people spread around the globe. Some have heavy accents. All it takes is a bit of careful listening. Americans have been shielded from this by a combination of factors. Europeans deal with this all the time. As a country, we need to learn to deal with it.
I believe General American, or Standard American, became a broadcasting standard after WW2. It’s a mix of various Midwestern dialects, mostly urban. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American
The advantage is, it’s pretty much understandable to anyone in the country, unlike many of the regional dialects (including those in the uppermost and lowermost regions of the Midwest). I received ESL training in the early 90s and worked with a number of students … the version of “American” we taught them was General American. Having been in a number of intercontinental conference calls with participants from Asia and Europe, there are communication and economic advantages to being able to speak clearly and in a “standard” way.
This is the approach to language learning in general … when I learned French, I learned Parisian French, not provincial dialects or the creolized versions spoken in Quebec or Louisiana. Regarding the Olson article, it’s not simply a matter of pronunciation: both the Olson article and the Arizona Republic article he cites clearly state that “mispronounced words and poor grammar” were not to be monitored. Whatever one’s ethnic background, if one wants to be a teacher, one’s grammar should be impeccable, and one should learn proper pronunciation. Individuals who do not understand basic English grammar and pronunciation have no business teaching children in English, period.
My favorite postmodern African-American author, Ishmael Reed, wrote of literacy in Haiti vs. California: “They talk about Haitian illiteracy, when at a major university located in California [presumably Berkeley], 60 per cent of the entering freshman must take remedial or ‘bonehead’ English.” (from an essay on the New African Movement website) Or as was hammered home to me in my writing classes at the University of Iowa many years ago, if you want to break grammatical rules, fine, but first understand the rules you’re breaking. Embracing illiteracy in teachers is doing a disservice to the children they’re teaching, as well as to society in general.
There may not be one “right” pronounciation, but there are certainly some wrong ones: those so unusual that they will leave most listeners wondering what you said. And it’s not just accent: I’ve seen *ballot blurbs written by candidates for school board* that used non-words such as “orientate” and “competency.” Anyone who believes those are words lacks the *competence* to *orient* our youth.
Mr. Galt – what about ‘action’ as a verb (i.e. ‘actioned’)? That’s used in business all the time!
I would argue that language has always been, and will always be, flexible. There are lots of constructs I like, and many I don’t. But my distaste for them doesn’t invalidated them. An example (discussed on the Volokh Conspiracy blog recently) about starting a sentence with a conjunction. Many commentators on English object to that usage, but the King James Bible is full of such.
I recommend the book “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue” by John McWhorter. He argues, convincingly, that customary usage is exactly that—customary, and does not define the ‘rules’ for a language.
There is a difference between grammatical deviations that are chosen by writers who know the language’s current usages and make a conscious decision to warp that usage to their own aesthetic or rhetorical purposes, and grammatical deviations that are the result of ignorance of the language, or sloppiness, or whatever. An example: the poem “Letter #41 [broken off]” by the seminal 60s poet Charles Olson begins with the line:
With a leap (she said it was an arabesque
and ends with the lines:
The war of Africa against Eurasia
has just begun again. Gondwana
The left parenthesis in the first line is never closed. It is an opening without a closure, just as the poem itself (the first in volumes IV through VI of his Maximus poems) is not at the end closed … it is left hanging with a sentence fragment, for the author’s artistic purposes.
Charles Olson knew what he was doing with the language. He knew proper usage, and chose to subvert it … just as did Vladimir Nabokov in his writings, and many other figures in 20th century literature. It is a subversion grounded in a love for the language, rather than in contempt or ignorance.
Yes, the language evolves … but there are a set of grammatical rules that define the way educated people in this culture communicate at the present time … just as there are rules in other languages, and in other times. Some of the usages generated by business types like “actioned” have become a part of standard business communication … but you’re not likely to see “actioned” in a scientific journal, or a literary review (unless of course it’s used ironically). This is an example of a specialized usage related to a profession; all professions have generated their own special usages, and the business world is no different. It’s management-speak.
Grade school teachers, the people we’re really talking about here, are not poets or business people or scientists. They’re paid to educate the young, and the reading and writing part of that role requires them to understand the rules of English as it’s used in educated discourse. That applies whether the teacher and his students speak with a Midwestern accent, a Southern accent, or a Latino accent. Again, the issue here in the original article went beyond the issue of accents: the state of Arizona agreed to stop monitoring the grammar of teachers. I find this unspeakably appalling: a teacher who does not understand basic English grammar and usage has no business being a teacher.
I would argue that grammatical rules are extremely flexible and also change over time (see the references book for numerous examples). Should a sentence end with a preposition? Should an infinitive be split? Are these rules really hard and fast? And if the vast majority of the population does not follow the rules, then are they really rules? Or are they attempts to put a coat of shellac on a point-in-time usage and declare it correct for all time?
I argue (as does McWhorter) that the latter is the case. They are a faulty understanding of language. Language is not the province of scholars or the erudite, but the common man. Usage ebbs and flows and ignores the supposed rules all the time. English has been warped by many outside forces along the way, such that the ‘rules’ and constructs are at odds with all of the other Germanic languages. Applying the same ‘rules’ as the rest of the Germanic languages would change English into something nobody speaks. Just like many of the rules you are pointing to.
So, an immigrant from Russia, who does not use articles in his speech has no business being a teacher? I beg to differ. Whilst his usage might be uncommon, it in no way affects his ability to teach, nor should it disqualify him in any way. I don’t speak ‘English’ like most people in the US – does that disqualify me? I refuse to follow some of the rules because I think they are in error, yet I’ve been quite successful.
As for the rules, you’ll find the violated very day in newspapers, magazines and on the television. Why? Because they follow the public usage. It isn’t called the ‘vulgar’ without reason!
To be frank, I don’t need to read McWhorter’s book … I’m very familiar with his position and his arguments from my undergraduate days studying structural linguistics and anthropology at the University of Iowa. There’s a difference between claiming prescriptive grammarians are attempting to “shellac” the language at a point in time (as apparently you and McWhorter do), and claiming that prescriptive grammar tells the student of a language how to use that language in a way that appears educated to a native speaker (as I do). I have never claimed that prescriptive grammars are written in stone for all time.
An excerpt from a cover letter written by a freelance web designer who apparently has studied our language at the university: “I also have a degree English which serves me well in editing text for poor grammer or typos.” Yeah … I’m sure it does.
http://www.killianbranding.com/cover-letters-from-hell/