[345/366] accentism and the standardized language ideology

[cosmolinguist]

I read something that makes me want to reference that blog post I wrote about how reading Milroy about the standard language ideology was such a goddam epiphany for me...but it turns out I never wrote it (which makes sense actually, I was busy af when I read that), I just remember wanting to write it so badly that I now feel like I did.

Linguistics nerd problems, eh?!

Actually it's a general problem for me as someone with a blog old enough to vote. I've written down almost everything I've ever thought so now I can just copy paragraphs or links and not have to reinvent the wheel. Apparently I've gotten so used to this it's confusing and disappointing to me when I've had one entire thought that I don't seem to have archived.

So the thing I read is "Accentism" is real, but impossible to end. The first part I need no convincing on (although it surprised me to learn accent discrimination can lead to a pay gap of about 20%, comparable to the gender pay gap [pdf link]), but I was intrigued by the second.

I raised an eyebrow that the writer said the gender pay gap "at least is mostly explained by motherhood." and it turned out that all the writer had to say about this kind of linguistic discrimination being "impossible to end" was "Such accentism might be impossible to remove because accents are subtle status signals, and humans have evolved to pick up on cues." This seems as baffling to me as "gender pay gap is inevitable because motherhood" hopefully seems to all of you.

This writer's examples of linguistic discrimination like the "shibboleth" story from the bible and medieval Oxbridge riots between northern and southern students are using language a proxy for other kinds of discrimination. It isn't inherently better to say "shibboleth" than "sibboleth," doing so just indicates whether or not someone is in a particular ethnic/social/cultural group. And it's the same with northern vs. southern English accents (not that this writer mentions any part of the student riots being language-related: the accompanying image references the St. Scholastica Day riots in Oxford, but a quick search doesn't turn up anything language-related or even north/south; the divide seems to have ended up much more town vs. gown). Sure we think we're responding to the intrinsic qualities that make e.g. a Birmingham (England, not Alabama) accent sound bad, but we're not even correct in these criticisms -- people call it monotonous or say it has a falling intonation at the end of sentences and it just...doesn't. This is a fact that can be objectively measured about speech and these claims are factually untrue.

I should say British people say these things, because that study shows something I can confirm as a non-Brit: none of these prejudices made sense to me. I moved here with none of the ideas about English accents that their speakers have about each other. As a result, I was often criticized, corrected and laughed at for having made the "wrong" evaluations. If these accents truly were objectively ugly or unpleasant I wouldn't have needed to be told to disapprove of them, surely! But people had to try to indoctrinate me - and they did try, scorning me as a stupid American when I refused to join them -- into what I was told was the universal understanding.

So: I loved Brummie accents immediately, I found them so interesting. I liked Welsh accents to a degree unmitigated by the English's feelings about Welsh people. As the study talked about at that link says, "Judgements of the perceived beauty or ugliness of accents are based almost entirely upon a knowledge of the social connotations which they possess for those familiar with them." Language encodes so much of our identity -- class, age, gender, where we grew up -- yet seems a better target for prejudice than those things are, but it's really just a proxy. And it's one that can be dressed up in pseudo-scientific evaluations like these about Brum intonation.

This kind of linguistic discrimination existed before but a lot of it stems from the 18th and 19th century rise of nationalism and capitalism, which brought about it what James Milroy calls "standard language ideology": our reliance on standardized languages of nation-states may have distorted our understanding of language. Milroy points out a difference between how linguists and the general public think about language that has really stuck with me (I'm forever talking about it on social media, for one!).

Indeed the general public, including those who make judgements about correctness, are often willing to admit that they themselves make mistakes and are not competent in their own knowledge of the language. They require the guidance of privileged authorities. This last comment makes a point that is crucial for understanding the effects of the standard ideology and the difference between most linguists and the general public on this matter, so let us consider it a little further. The ideology requires us to accept that language (or a language) is not the possession of the native speakers.

That last bit, "a language is not the possession of its native speakers," really floored me when I read it. By that point I'd had half-a-degree's worth of "native speakers are the ultimate authority on their language," like literally in linguistics the word "grammatical" doesn't mean "follows rules you learn in school" as it means to most people, it means "native speaker intuition" (I'm using spoken-language-centric terminology here but please know that all of this applies to signed languages too and native signers are just as valid an authority on their own languages!).

But also, I'd just never thought about my language being something I am entitled to possess in this way. It gave me such a rush to try to imagine what it would be like to believe that. Once I thought about it, it really was weird that I believed my own language existed more properly or authoritatively in books or classes than in my own head...but I'd never thought about it until I read this.

A few years of linguistics classes couldn't yet override a lifetime of immersion in the standard language ideology, in what Milroy calls "common sense" evaluations of language -- which can be anything from " 'I seen it' is bad grammar" to "Brummie accents are the worst." The pull of that "common sense" label is really powerful!

although common sense attitudes are ideologically loaded attitudes, those who hold them do not see it in that way at all: they believe that their adverse judgements on persons who use language `incorrectly' are purely linguistic judgements sanctioned by authorities on language, and this belief is itself partly a consequence of standardization. People do not necessarily associate these judgements with prejudice or discrimination in terms of race or social class: they believe that, whatever the social characteristics of the speakers may be, these persons have simply used the language in an erroneous way and that it is open to them to learn to speak correctly. If they do not do this, it is their own fault as individuals, whatever their race, color, creed or class.

There's so much more I could say about this paper (Milroy, J. "Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization", Journal of Sociolinguistics 5/4, 2001: 530-555), I love it so much, but I don't think rambling more will convey any more of the sea change that happened; the fact that after this I started saying "there's no authority beyond usage" to social media types who were trying to cloak their bigotries in language prescriptivism (indeed if you search the phrase you find me on Mastodon basically trying to say what I've said here; maybe that's why I thought I had a blog post about it!).

So to drag it back to that "accentism" thing I started with, it surprised me because I forget that not everyone has had an epiphany lately where they realized they're living in the standard language ideology. This guy who thinks linguistic discrimination is inevitable because "status" and "social cues" and "evolution" doesn't appreciate how recent and arbitrary standardization is -- as with any really successful ideology, part of its hold over us is that we don't even know it's there.

Accentism can end, it need not always be around just as it hasn't always been around. It'll take a lot to dig out the roots, connected as they are to capitalism and nationalism, but those are relatively recent human innovations and neither is covering itself in glory lately.

And even now, there are languages that have never been standardized and thus people who have never been part of the standard language ideology. Milroy quotes other researchers studying such languages who describe them in what seem like practically science-fictional terms to me -- "the language as a whole had no truly separate existence in the mind of its speakers" "though it may sound odd, not all people have a language in a sense of which this term is currently used"-- but it's likely everyone once thought (or didn't think!) about language and their language in such ways.

We don't need to always be stuck with linguistic pay gaps, or gender pay gaps or race ones, and of course all the intersections of these things. Hopefully one day we won't be.

Comments

Thanks for capturing this

[jesse_the_k]

so I can learn.

This quote the language as a whole had no truly separate existence in the mind of its speakers imagines speakers as meta-analysts of their own activity, which seems unlikely.

Re: Thanks for capturing this

[cosmolinguist]

There weren't more details because that wasn't what this paper was really about, but I think the idea is that the linguists visiting them and studying them were doing the meta-analysis.

[silveradept]

This makes sense to me, but it probably means something that as you were explaining this, I was thinking, "anyone who's gone through the process of being told repeatedly that AAVE is improper English spoken by low-class, probably gang-affiliated, Black boys will hopefully grasp the concept." These days, it's a less visible prescription, because linguists have brought the hammer down on the idea that AAVE is wrong English, but there's still plenty of accentism all the same. And it extends, in the States, to anybody who speaks English with an accent that isn't "broadcast" English, which is, if I recall, supposedly the accent that surrounds the Chicago metropolitan area?

Which sounds exactly like the standardized language ideology being described.

[cosmolinguist]

I've always heard Chicago too but also Cleveland apparently?

Yeah I was interested in linguistics anyway but moving to the UK made me particularly interested in linguistic discrimination, because this was the first time it'd happened to me! There were so many conversations where I'd say/write something a British person would tell me was "wrong," I'd say "no, it's just different, neither is wrong," and they'd say "you're wrong about that too. You're just wrong."

[silveradept]

I think it's "Great Lakes area, not north enough to be Canada-influenced, so no Wisconsinite, Minnesotan, or Yooper, not west enough to be Great Plains States, not South enough to be Appalachian or Southern, not east enough to be Pennsylvanian / New Yorker."

That's interesting that you're getting that kind of definitive "nope, you're wrong, and you're wrong about whether or not you're wrong."

[cosmolinguist]

I don't get it so much any more (partly because I'm better at code-switching now, but also because I'm better equipped with to hammer people when they try to tell me I'm wrong!) but yeah it is interesting. They need to not just correct me but address the threat I pose by saying "there's no right or wrong here, only things suited to different situations." The ideology of stamdaized languages doesn't like having attention called to how arbitrary it is. :) It works best when people think of it as a fact of nature, like gravity, something totally irrefutable.

[silveradept]

Yep. So many things work like that - if you actually stop and think about how many things are actually very arbitrary, you might decide that some of them can be messed with, and then at that point, you're well on your way to hacking the Matrix.