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Electronic Reserve Text: Dennis Baron, "Language, Culture and Society" (From Joseph A Gibaldi, ed., Introduction to Scholarship in the Modern Languages. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992.) Once interconnected under
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Along with bipedal
locomotion and the opposable thumb, the phenomenon we call language
is often cited as a defining characteristic of the human species. So
strong is this identification of language with human nature that anthropologists
study hominid fossils looking for evolutionary clues to the origins
of speech. Some humans, however, seem reluctant to share language with
other species: great and still unresolved controversies have arisen
over the past two decades as experimenters began claiming success in
teaching primates to communicate symbolically. There is a tendency to
treat language as the personal property not only of the species but
of the individual as well~ So commonplace now is the notion that language
functions to express the psychological nuances of personality, and so
striking is the idiosyncrasy of language in our daily experience--the
amusing twists and turns of a child learning to speak, the anonymous
but unmistakable voice of a friend on the answering machine, the psychoanalytic
insights language offers the therapist, the stylistic fingerprint of
an accomplished novelist--that we may easily forget that language is
above all a social phenomenon.
guage standards and features not only of time passing but of conscious innovation and social conditioning as well. It is the larger culture that determines language attitudes and validates linguistic norms; that ingores variation, condemns it as an error, or celebrates it as a creative insight; and that sorts the users of language into the average or the chosen or the damned. Convinced that language both reflects and influences culture and society, humanistic linguists and their colleagues in anthropology, education, law, philosophy, psychology, public policy, and sociology have begun to examine the social context of language use, producing studies that range from global theories of orality and literacy, to national language policy and planning, to local annotated descriptions of turn-taking in conversations. Perhaps the most interesting of these developments for students of langauge and literature explore the clash between majority and minority langauge rights that is often aggravated in the selection of an official language; the roles of standard and nonstandard dialects in school and the workplace; the problem of literacy in both developing and technologically advanced societies; and the vexed question of langauge and gender. We must consider as well the ongoing controversy over the ethical polition of the linguist as an agent affecting langauge attitudes, language planning, and language change. There are, of course, many important, even central, areas that an essay such as this, which is necessarily limited in scope, must regrettably ignore in order to present a coherent introduction to the general topic. LANGUAGE AND NATION Language use carries not only the idiosyncratic stamp of the individual but the mark of the nation as well. Consequently, langauge becomes both a primary vehicle for the transmission of group culture and a badge of national identification. Perhaps the most commonly cited example of the relation between langauge and culture is the number and variety of words for snow in the Eskimo, or more properly, the Inuit, language. Inuit has words for falling snow, snow on the ground, encrusted snow, and some twenty others, while English speakers, for whom snow has less central a cultural position, have a rather more limited set of terms. We must avoid the common assumption, however, that language inevitably limits perception. Inuit is no better adapted than English for expressing snow terms, nor is English more civilized than Inuit, or somehow better suited to the abstractions and divagations of literary theory. Both languages express what their speakers wish or need to express, and an English speaker can refer to powder, crusty snow, packing snow for snowballs or for building forts, and sooty mounds of snow piled up by plows at street corners as readily as an Inuit can deconstruct the supposed cinéma veritéof Robert Flaherty's documentary Nanook of the North (1922). Languages carve
up the color spectrum differently--the English shades of dark and light blue are two distinct colors in Russian. They also disagree on the linguistic spectrum. The very definition of languages is influenced by social or political factors as well as linguistic ones. Though to an external observer, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian may constitute mutually understandable Scandinavian dialects, they are classified as separate languages by their speakers, who prefer that distinct tongues separate their distinct political units. In contrast, the Chinese consider the mutually incomprehensible spoken varieties of Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, Hunan, North and South Min, Wu, and so forth not as separate languages but as dialects of an all-embracing, culturally unifying Chinese (see Halliday, Mcintosh, and Strevens). In extreme cases,
the power of language to signal ethnicity can be deadly. According to
the Old Testament (Judges 12.46), when the Ephraimites tried to cross
the Jordan into Gilead, Jephthah asked them to say the Hebrew word shibboleth,
literally and appropriately "stream in flood." Because they
were unable to pronounce the sh sound, the Ephraimites failed the password
test and were killed. So powerful is the story that the word shibboleth
has come in English to mean any test, linguistic or otherwise, that
can reveal a person's identity or allegiance. In elaborations of the age-old assumption that language reflects national identity, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt asserted the natural superiority of their language in contrast to the failings of more primitive forms of speech in nationalistic essays that drew legitimate charges of racism from their critics. In a more scientific attempt to state the language-nation connection, the twentieth-century American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf maintained that because language controls the individual's perception of reality, no two languages perceive the natural world in exactly the same way. While linguists today reject the strong, deterministic form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which would render translation, borrowing, and linguistic innovation virtually impossible, [31] they do acknowledge
a weaker version of the theory arguing that language influences perception
(see Kramsch in this volume). Confirming experiments have shown, predictably,
that it is easier to understand and remember phenomena for which linguistic
patterns already exist than it is to deal with entities or concepts
for which there are no words. But as literary artists have long understood,
the inconvenience of the unknown may he a temporary phenomenon: the
human imagination quickly adapts new data to old language patterns or
invents ways to deal with new situations. In addition to its most basic functions of communication and expression, language takes on symbolic value as the embodiment of a culture. It has come to represent the most potent symbol of group identity and local or nationalistic pride. It is also a prime element in cultural myth and group cohesion, whether the group is narrowly defined (the jargon of computer programmers, the argot of criminals) or broadly (the presumed democratic character of classical Creek; the self-proclaimed rationality of French; the sacred nature of Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit). With language perceived to represent the spirit of a group or a nation, it functions at a political as well as a social level. National literature comes to epitomize the values of society--even when it is critical of those values--and the language in which it is written takes on a sacred as well as a secular character, so that tampering with the literary language may be viewed as anything from a misdemeanor, a minor disturbance to the public order, at one extreme, to nothing short of revolutionary, at the other. The usage critics of English frequently recommend jail sentences, or even capital punishment, for writers brash enough to use, for example, hopefully as a sentence adverbial (Hopefully, this will all be over soon), a construction that, though widespread, is relatively recent (the earliest OED citation is 1932, but the form is rare until the 1960s), or gift as a transitive verb (She gifted him with a necktie), which has a four-hundred-year history in Standard English writing hut is often condemned as wrong today. While no one seriously proposes to hang the violators of English [32]
Language and ethnicity,
which remain strongly connected in the popular mind, have often been
the objects of political manipulation. Despite the myth of the Tower
of Babel, which postulates a single, Edenic language and longs for its
return, multilingualism is and probably has always been the basic human
condition. There are virtually no monolingual states in the world today.
Nonetheless, monolingualism is an ideal toward which many societies
have gravitated, for a combination of ideological and practical reasons.
And in some cases, monolingualism has been imposed-- with varying degrees
of success--on a linguistically diverse polity (see Calvet; Grillo;
Wardhaugh, Languages).
No modern law makes French the official language of France. Nonetheless, France has passed (though it later relaxed) laws to curtail the use of minority languages, and current legislation prohibits the borrowing of foreign words into French. Other nations have considered purifying their languages of what they conceive to be foreign contamination, though usually without much success, at least so far as the informal, spoken language is concerned. In the nineteenth century, and again during the Nazi era, Germany sought to nationalize its language through the creation or revival of native terms to replace foreign borrowings. Reaching outward rather than turning inward, in the late 1920s [33] Kemal Attaturk romanized the Turkish alphabet as part of his plan to westernize and modernize Turkey. The establishment of a unifying national language in states whose boundaries encompass several linguistic groups is frequently accompanied by formal or informal restrictions on the use of minority languages (and, occasionally, majority languages). The Turks banned the word Kurd from their language, renaming this large ethnic group "Mountain Turks" in a futile attempt to render them invisible and thus less troublesome to the central government. England was successful in actively suppressing Irish, Scots, and Welsh for several centuries at home (and, of course, Cornish and Manx, which have disappeared entirely), while at the same time spreading English as the language of education and administration in its Asian and African colonies. After independence, the Republic of Ireland sought to reverse the decline of Gaelic, giving it official status, establishing Irish-language schools, and offering bounties to families pledging to use the language at home. These efforts have not succeeded in reviving the language. The Soviet Union alternated between policies of Russification and support for local languages; unrest among Soviet nationalities frequently manifested itself in demands for local language rights. After two centuries, Canadian policies of Anglicization have been reversed and French language rights have been restored at the insistence of the Quebecois, though other minority languages in Canada, such as Ukrainian or Urdu, are not similarly protected, a situation that aggravates linguistic tensions in the country. In New Zealand, too, some local languages are treated better than others. The indigenous Maori language is now being taught in English-language schools as part of a reawakened appreciation of the national heritage, though Auckland, which has the largest Polynesian-speaking community in the world, pays no special attention to the linguistic needs of this largely impoverished immigrant group. In former European colonies, the question of choosing an official language or languages has often brought conflict. The language friction that persists in Canada (as well as similar linguistic strife that developed when two distinct language communities were yoked to form the national state of Belgium in the nineteenth century and when multilingual India gained independence from Britain in 1947) is frequently cited as a warning by supporters of official English in the United States, though observers point out that linguistic violence generally occurs when language rights are suppressed, not when they are guaranteed. Furthermore, despite the presence of large numbers of minority-language speakers throughout its history, the United States without official-language legislation has managed to create what other countries with official-language policies have failed to establish, a society in which upward of ninety-six percent of the population speaks the unofficial national language, English, according to 1980 census figures. Nonetheless, there have been calls to make English (or, occasionally, American) the official language of the United States since the nation's founding. Supporters of official English in the United States have argued from both ideo-
logical and nativistic grounds, though the stridency of the nativists has often dissuaded more mainstream Americans from supporting restrictive language legislation. The idea of one nation speaking one language appeals to many Americans who consider discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, or gender abhorrent. An official language would create a political and cultural bond among Americans of diverse origins, so the ideological argument goes (bolstering cries for such a bond are 1980 census figures showing that one in seven Americans speaks a language other than English or lives in a home where someone else speaks such a language). Furthermore, official English, according to its advocates, would ensure the continuity of the democratically constituted society whose principles were first articulated in English and can hest he understood in that language (official-language supporters, who seem committed to a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, have a natural bias against translation). In contrast, nativists
have supported the official-English movement as part of their two-century-old
program to curb immigration and keep the United States ethnically homogeneous.
They reacted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against the
German presence in the nation, labeling the German language as undemocratic
and regarding German speakers as racially distinct from other Americans,
as well as lazy, clannish, ignorant, religiously unacceptable, and excessively
fertile. German speakers were even accused of causing Pennsylvania's
hard winters. Similar unfounded charges have been repeated for each
new wave of immigrants who appeared to threaten the stability of those
unhyphenated Americans who had finally assimilated after several generations
of struggle. Nativists later opposed the influx of immigrants from central
and southern Europe between 1880 and World War I. Australia, a largely immigrant country like the United States, is attempting to resolve its multilingual frictions by supporting pluralism after many years of a whites-only, English-only policy. Nonanglophoncs are encouraged to learn English while retaining their native language. At the same time, English speakers, who remain a clear majority of the population, are encorlraged to acquire a second language. Such a policy, known as English Plus, has been proposed for the United States as well, though minority-language retention and foreign language education have typically been unsuccessful in this country on a large scale. Language policy in the United States, while not formally defined, has
It is possible that the official-language question in the United States will come to a head in the 1990s. In the past few years, more than two-thirds of the states have considered some form of official-English legislation, and a number of states have adopted official-English laws, though their effect remains unclear. Nor is it entirely certain what might happen to government language policy should an English Language Amendment (ELA) to the federal Constitution be adopted. Legal practice assumes that in the case of a conflict, more recent legislation has precedence over earlier statutes and legal decisions. It is possible that an ELA would be purely symbolic, producing little or no visible change in the way the American government interacts with its citizens. At the other extreme, the amendment could neutralize earlier minority-language protections based on the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments or on other federal legislation, thereby restricting the use of languages other than English in the United States. It is certain, in any case, that an ELA, if passed, would be subjected to numerous court tests before its effects became clear. Minority-language rights will become a highly visible problem as the European Community moves toward unification and as Eastern Europe moves out of the Soviet sphere of influence, as it seems to De doing. The United Nations Charter and a number of subsequent international agreements such as the Helsinki Accord have stressed the importance of native-language education, particularly in the early grades, for so-called guest workers and for native linguistic minorities. The provision of social, medical, legal, and other governmental services for these groups in their own languages will prove a controversial challenge as well. It is likely that research in the area of language and nation will concentrate in the next few years on the areas of official-language planning, second-language instruction, and the dynamics of multilingualism.
LANGUAGE VARIETY AND STANDARD LANGUAGE Debate over an official language raises another complex issue: Whose variety of English (or French, or Spanish, or Hindi) is to be official! Language changes over time, but it also varies over geographical and social space. Linguists have long studied geographical variation through an examination of written texts and, where possible, through the administration of oral questionnaires and the recording of the spoken language in its natural context. Such research frequently concentrates on the speech of older people in rural areas in order to record forms of a language that may be in danger of dying out. More recently, linguists have come to study social variation as well, looking for usage attributable to class, race, and gender. The sociolinguist William Labov demonstrated the linguistic insecurity of the American lower middle class (Social Stratification). In their anxiety to climb the social ladder, members of this class consider correct English a badge of success. Consequently, in their speech they often employ forms that they perceive as prestigious but that are in reality nonprestige forms, errors, or hypercorrections. According to Labov, those at the top--the upper-middle-class speakers whom others try to emulate--exhibit a low degree of language anxiety, as do those at the bottom of the social scale, who he argues have little hope of breaking out of the trap of poverty. In Language in the Inner City Labov also contributed greatly to the study of Black English, demonstrating that what had frequently been dismissed as error-laden nonlanguage was actually a logical, rule-governed, and effective form of communication. More recently, the study of minority dialects of English has focused on their origins and their variety, together with the difficulties speakers of nonstandard varieties of English may encounter when faced with the academic English of the American school system (see, e.g., Smitherman; Baugh). Initially it was assumed that Black English arose on Southern plantations as slaves learned an imperfect version of their masters' language. Some dialectologists, tracing features of Black English to seventeenth-century East Anglia, went so far as to argue that it was no different from Southern white English. However, many experts now believe in the creole origins of Black English. That is to say, they find in Black English a substratum of West African languages with an overlay of English. This evidence suggests the development of Black English in African slave-trading ports, on slave ships coming to America, or on plantations. In all three, slaves from different language backgrounds were mixed together to hamper communication and lessen the chances for revolt. Defeating the intentions of the traders and owners, the slaves forged a pidgin, or contact, language, an amalgam of their different languages and dialects that served in a limited way to meet their most immediate communication needs. According to the theory, the pidgin eventually expanded, or became creolized, assuming the more general functions of language (including rhetorical and literary use) and becoming more and more like English, the language from which the creole eventually drew most
of its grammar and vocabulary (in Haiti, where the administrative language was French, the slaves developed a French-West African creole). Despite the general
acceptance of the creole theory, in recent years socio-linguists have
been finding less evidence of creolization in the historical record.
Walt Wolfram is one of several researchers in this area calling for
a refinement and reevaluation of the accounts of the origins of Black
English. Linguists now recognize as well that there are many varieties
of Black English, related to age, social class, and the context of communication.
Research in the next decade will examine these varieties and their relation
to the notion of standard English. Labov (Increasing Divergence) has
warned, however, that black and white varieties of English are diverging
as the social distance between the races increases, particularly at
the lower levels of American society. Although Labov's claim has received
much publicity in the popular press, the validity of the of the data
on which it is based has been questioned (see, for example, the well-taken
comments of Butters as well as those of Wolfram). The perceived distance
between Black and white English is widely regarded as one reason for
the failure of many minority children in American schools, and linguists
are likely to pay more attention in the years to come both to the divergence
hypothesis as proposed by Labov and to ways in which language education
in schools can help bridge this gap.
It is commonly supposed, for one thing, that a standard of usage exists for English, and for other languages as well, that all agree on, a standard that may be described with some precision, reduced to a few simple rules, and imposed on an entire nation, if not the whole English- or French- or Russian-speaking world. As a concession to the varieties of English used in such diverse areas as Australia, Britain, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Nigeria, and the United States, we usually--though sometimes reluctantly-acknowledge the existence of regional or national spoken and written standards (see Kachru for a discussion of English varieties in Asia)· Arabic similarly recognizes regional or national standards as well as the more universal literary standard of the Koranic 'language. But whether we are dealing with standards or Standard, we are invariably thwarted by the problem of definition. Try as they have, linguists have achieved nothing even closely approximating an exhaustive description of the varieties of English or any other modern language. Nor have they arrived at an understanding of the complex nature of language standards and the degree of variability permissible within what can be broadly termed acceptable usage. Put simply, the grammars and dictionaries of language are all open-ended. No matter how many correct ways of saying things we manage to collect, many are missed, and mote still have yet to be invented. Ever since the publication of Claude Favre Vaugelas's Remarques sur la langue francois, in 1659, the question of good usage in French has produced volumes of debate. Recent studies (for example, Harmer) suggest that after two centuries of centrally controlled language education, variation in French is as common as ever. Similarly, speakers of English seldom agree on what they mean by Standard English, beyond an identification of it with a vague prestige norm, and though the schools are frequently blamed for a failure to inculcate good English usage, there is little agreement on how acceptable language use is to be enforced. Instead, it is generally easier to reach a consensus on what is not standard--for example, double negatives (I don't got none), errors in subject-verb agreement (they was) or in the concord of pronouns with their referents (Everyone put on their coat). Frequently, the usage experts find themselves on opposite sides of an issue. In his Desk-Book of Errors in English (1907), the lexicographer Frank Vizetelly proscribed the common time-telling expression a quarter of seven on the grounds that it literally means "one and three-quarters"--that is, "seven divided by four." Vizerelly favored the phrase a quarter to seven as more correct. Taking an opposite though equally absurd position based on the same restriction of language to the literal, the grammarian Josephine Turck Baker in her book Correct English (also 1907) contended that to means "in the direction of" or "toward" and insisted that a quarter to seven can therefore only mean "one quarter of an hour in the direction of seven," or six fifteen. Baker chose as the only correct way to tell time the one rejected by Vizetelly. This standoff leaves the perplexed seeker after Standard English to select between two equally illogical expressions. Nei-
ther expert mentioned a quarter till seven, a common variant that is still generally snubbed by the usage critics as dialectal, nor did they have the foresight to predict that the more neutral six ferry-five would become the form most appropriate to today's digital timepieces. As the linguist and usage critic Bergen Evans has shown, rules of correctness seem made to be broken. It is impossible to deny the existence of acceptable variation in English even in so apparently standard an area as subject-verb agreement. In British English, collective nouns like band (as in rock band), government, and corporation are treated as plurals, while Americans employ them in the singular. Even within the United States there is disagreement over the status of data, scrupulously construed as a plural by number-crunching researchers unwilling to seem ignorant of Latin but more freely treated as a singular among the general population. Other Latin plurals-for example, media and phenomena-are frequently construed as English singulars, and many unclassical academics use the Latin genitive vitae, from curriculum vitae, "course of life," as the equivalent of vita or resume (this latter form also appears in our dictionaries of Standard English as the variously accented resume' and re'sume'). Variation in pronoun concord is permitted as well. Evans illustrates this by citing the unquestionably binding, if grammatically discordant, language of the United States Constitution: "Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy" (art. 1, sec. 5, subsec. 3; emphasis added). Their is no slip of the federalist quill. Rather, it is clear evidence--one of countless examples cited by the chroniclers of English--of the perfectly standard process whereby meaning overrides formal grammatical rules. Even so stigmatized a word as ain't has its defenders, and its place in informal, Standard English speech, an undeniable fact but one whose mention in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961) brought a hostile reaction from language critics. It would seem that the complaints against variant pronunciation, morphology, syntax, or diction that are chronically lodged by language watchers in the popular press frequently signal that the offending form is either threatening to become standard or has already become so. As vague as the standard for a language like English or French may be, the power of standard language is undeniable, and it often proves an insurmountable social barrier to those who cannot grasp it. While mastery of the standard language is seldom sufficient by itself to ensure economic success, it is often a prerequisite for achieving such success. This is clear in developed or developing nations, where access to the civil service, education, the courts, the media, and the business community depends on fluency in the official standard, which may he a different dialect or an entirely different language from that spoken in one's home. In the 1970s there was considerable debate in American linguistic and educational circles over what was called, in a controversial pamphlet issued in [40] 1991 by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the "students' right to their own language." Arguing that each variety of a language is a legitimate vehicle for communication and expression, the authors of the pamphlet charged that to deny students the right to their dialect or native language was a form of linguistic discrimination that robbed them of their fundamental humanity. Such a view remains an important corrective to the notion that there is one, and only one, right linguistic way to do things in speech and writing. Of late, however, it has come to be tempered with the equally compelling perception that possession of the standard language, or the "language of wider communication," as it is sometimes called, represents a form of economic and social empowerment, that denial of Access to the standard language produces a form of enslavement. Empowerment has become a catch phrase, and confusion over the linguistic obligations of the schools is rampant, with linguists, education specialists, and lawmakers still trying to sort out theory and practice. In the Ann Arbor School decision (also called the King decision) in 1979, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ordered the Ann Arbor School Board to use the latest linguistic and pedagogical knowledge to ensure that all students possessed the ability to speak, read, and write Standard English (see Chambers; Smitherman, Black English). The confusion over standard language may result in absurd situations that place disadvantaged students in even further educational jeopardy. For example, attempts to institute one English-Spanish bilingual program in New York City were thwarted by the insistence of Hispanic parents that the schools use standard Castilian Spanish rather than the local Puerto Rican variety with which their children were familiar. As a result, the children were forced to learn Spanish as a foreign language, as well as English. It will be up to the language specialists of the 1990s to ascertain the effectiveness of second-language teaching and to contribute to the resolution of the problems of majority- and minority-language education.
Literacy is a protean term, changing with the times and charged with political meaning. To be literate means to he educated or, more narrowly, to he able to read and write. There was a time when to be literate required mastering Latin, and perhaps Creek as well. A literate person can simply indicate someone who is "cultured" or "educated," and its opposite very often refers disparagingly to someone who does not know as much as we do, or who disagrees with our point of view. What literacy has come to signify now, when it is used in such common expressions as the literacy crisis, is an essential skill, one that allows the individual to function at the lowest level of competence needed to get along in life (this concept is also called functional literacy and refers to such minimal skills as reading recipes or tool manuals and filling out job applications). More optimistic perhaps
is the view of literacy as the ability of the individual to participate productively in the national culture and economy. More specifically, and more practically, linguistic empowerment focuses on the development of literacy--reading and writing education. To these traditional literacies, others have lately been added: mathematical literacy (sometimes called numeracy, with its own opposite, innumeracy), psychological literacy, economic literacy, musical literacy, science literacy, computer literacy, and even television literacy, which some might find a contradiction in terms. Capping these off is E. D. Hirsch's umbrella term cultural literacy, which has mesmerized educators and social critics in the United States seeking a clearly defined, shared curriculum in order to rejuvenate a culture, or at least an educational system, that they perceive as both fragmented and failing. At the same time, cultural literacy has generated strong opposition to its reliance on a narrow, traditional body of elite Western knowledge (sometimes disparagingly called "the hooks (if dead white men"), a canon that ignores the contributions to language and culture of women, minorities, the oppressed classes, the East, and the Third World--in short, of most of humanity (see Scholes in this volume). Robert Pattison and Harvey Graff, the latter in The Legacies of Literacy, have outlined the history of views of literacy in order to demonstrate that it is no less than the way a culture looks at the problems of language and, as such, varies according to time and place, Jack Goody and Walter Ong have suggested ways in which the shift from oral to print-based forms of communication alters both social organization and human consciousness and the literacy produced thereby. That position is disputed by Brian Street and Ruth Finnegan, who attack the notion that orality and literacy are polar opposites. Taking her cue from composition studies, Deborah Brandt convincingly treats literacy as process, both pluralistic and contextualized rather than monolithic and objectifying; such a position has important consequences for reading and writing instruction. Paulo Freire places literacy in the political context of class struggle, while Graff (Literacy Myth) shows that mastering literacy is no guarantee of socioeconomic success, and J. Elspeth Stuckey has argued her view of literacy as a tool that society uses to maintain stratification and exclude certain groups from the centers of power. And a number of scholars have attempted to predict the effects of the computer revolution on the literacy of the future, suggesting, for example, that the linear consciousness imposed by books will shift to a more vertical, associative way of reading. Their questions range from the future-shock type (Will there be books in 2001!) to more productive explorations of cognition and linguistic production. The literacy debate focuses scholarly interest from a wide range of fields on a broad range of language-related topics. Although the debate is heated, and is likely to remain so, it promises to produce some valuable scholarship in the next decade as linguists, cognitive psychologists, educators, and computer scientists explore literacy theory and examine the practical issues of reading and writing instruction.
LANGUAGE AND GENDER The questions of what literacy is and whose language is to be standard hinge to a great extent on the distribution of power and prestige in a given society. They raise, as well, the related issue of language and gender, another example of language in its social context that evokes cultural values and power relationships. Since the early 1970s, language specialists have been examining the connections among language, sex, and gender to determine whether men and women use language differently and to remedy the sex bias perceived in English and other languages. Some researchers initially suggested that women and men favored distinct subsets of vocabulary (women used more color and fabric terms; men knew the names of tools). Others found women's language more tentative, favoring trivializing adjectives and such self-effacing constructions as tag questions (The theory is cute, isn't it!). Further investigation showed that vocabulary tends to be a function of experience: those who work with colors and textiles, or with wood and machinery, whether male or female, know the appropriate terms. And self-effacing constructions may be used by those in a subordinate role in an interchange, or by those simply assuming one, noblesse oblige, regardless of their sex. The complexities
of language use have made it difficult to sort language out on the basis
of sex alone. While language is conditioned by social factors, and they
in turn may be conditioned by sex bias, it has vet to be convincingly
demonstrated that the biological distinctions of sex have context-independent
linguistic reflexes. For example, even voice pitch, which may seem an
obvious sex-linked language characteristic, does not pattern categorically:
not all men have low voices; not all women have high ones. Nonetheless,
a stereotype of men's and women's language, based to a great extent
on cultural assumptions about their biological and social roles, has
persisted over many centuries. It is clear, too, that the sexes are
frequently portrayed in popular as well as canonical literature as using
language differently, and their differential access to language has
lately been the subject of discussion in critical circles.
reformer earlier in this century argued that gender was an unnecessary category in English and proposed eliminating the feminine and neuter personal pronouns in favor of a generalized he, his, him. The notion of
women's speech has also been encumbered by views of women as subordinate
to men. And because in the Genesis story the expulsion of the first
couple from the Garden of Eden is attributed to Eve's use of language,
women's speech and writing have often heen discouraged or deliberately
suppressed. For several centuries it was common to find the very word
woman, from the Old English wif + munn, literally "female person,"
derived from "woe to man" on the authority of Genesis. More
secularly minded etymologists, anxious to discover biology rather than
Scripture reflected in language, traced woman to womb + man--that is,
"wombed person"--despite the fact that womb in English initially
meant "belly" or "stomach," thus naming an organ
common to the two sexes. Still others, fixating on social organization
rather than genetic determination, accepted the word's true derivation
from wif but incorrectly saw in wife a reflection of woman's presumed
social function as "weaver." The English system of honorifics has developed asymmetrically, with a bias perceived to favor men: the title Mr. is neutral with regard to marital status in men, while Miss and Mrs. generally signal it in women. Title use in English is complicated by the fact that the feminine terms are sometimes age-graded, Miss being used for younger women, Mrs. for older ones. Furthermore, the words may mask marital status; Miss is used by many professional women who are married, while Mrs. is often retained by widowed or divorced women. Ms., a title probably derived from the marriage-neutral use of Miss that was advocated by some feminists in the early twentieth century, was added to the paradigm as early as 1932 in the United States to restore gender balance, though it did not become popular until the 1970s. Even though it has become increasingly common, Ms. remains controversial--more so among usage critics and the American literary establishment than among the general business community, which recognizes the practical value of the term--and there is some indication that it has simply come to replace Miss in the usage of many unmarried women. In addition to the title paradigm, advocates of sex neutrality in language have targeted the English pronoun system, the word man used in general refer-
ence re, people, and compound nouns ending in -man on the grounds that masculine bias in language reinforces discrimination in employment and has a demonstrable effect on self-image. In the past 130 years, more than eighty proposals have been offered for a common-gender pronoun to replace the generic masculine he or the more fairly coordinate though often cumbersome he or she. Thon and the variations of heer, hiser, and himer were occasionally used in public and were included in a numher of dictionaries. Because it is extremely difficult to introduce an artificially concocted word into something so basic to a language as the pronoun system, no epicene pronoun is likely to succeed for English. However, the singular ihey, generally frowned on in formal writing, remains the most common alternative to the more and more discordant universal masculine. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, English is the only Germanic language that did not develop separate words to refer to man as "adult male" and man as "person, human being." Conflation of the two functions of the word produces confusion as well as bias, and many style manuals now recommend that writers employ a nonambiguous word like person when that is the sense intended. Proposed alternatives to compound nouns ending in -man frequently employ -person--for example, chairperson--or they simply clip man from the stem, as in chair. In other instances, masculine-feminine pairs may he neutralized: steward and stewardess become flight attendant; actor and actress coalesce as actor; waiter and waitress are replaced by server, waitperson or wait, or occasionally by such coinages as waitron, with its pseudo-latin plural, waitri. Attention to the problem of sexist language has affected the style of edited nonfiction English prose, particularly in the United States, and may ultimately be a determinant in the course of the language in the late twentieth century. In support of its stand against sex discrimination in employment, the United States government issued a revised, gender-neutral official list of job titles. The style hooks of major American publishing houses, professional societies;· and the media all root out sex bias to various degrees, eliminating generic masculines, warning writers not to refer to women as girls, some changing adjectives like seminal to influential or nouns like seminar to study group. Feminist writers occasionally propose fairly radical rewritings of English words to draw attention to linguistic discrimination and to correct it. French and German writers have also explored their languages, which preserve grammatical gender in their noun systems, to identify and correct the sexism inherent in language use and analysis. While it is possible to argue that consciously changing language--a difficult task in itself--is no guarantee that social attitudes will follow, it is impossihle to deny that language does influence how people think. Certainly, raising the linguistic consciousness of speakers and writers can and does produce results, though not always the results desired by language reformers. Research in the area of language and gender will continue to focus on the practical issues of reform, though it already shows clear signs of developing theoretical notions of linguistic empowerment of the sort that dominate literacy studies as well.
LANGUAGE TEACHING,
PLANNING, AND As we have seen, linguists and other language specialists not only observe language in its natural habitat; they frequently make recommendations for its improvement. They may he formally charged with the task of refitting an oral language in a developing nation for the technical and communicative functions of a modern, literate culture. Or they may concern themselves with improving language education in the schools of indnstrializcd countries. In some cases, they may seek to put some aspect of language--for example, the systems of spelling or gender reference--on a more rational or less discriminatory footing. Such work can he controversial. In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order requiring that all federal governlnent agencies adopt the reformed, simplified spelling: developed by the language experts of the Simplified Spelling Board, but there was so much opposition to his demand that, speaking more softly, he withdrew the order. Closer to our own day, a small number of MLA members, resentful of what they saw to he unjustified editorial meddling, resigned from the organization on its publication of Francine Wattman Frank and Paula A. Treichler's authoritative and scrupulously researched recommendations for gender-neutral academic writing. In any case, English spelling reform, which continues to be advocated by a number of amateurs and even some professionals, seems doomed to failure, while calls for removing language bias in formal contexts have made significant headway among scholars and other professional and business writers.
Wyld's comments are certainly as true today as they ever were. One area where ignorance of "the science of language" generally proves troublesome is in the tradition of language teachers. Despite repeated calls for the increased involvement of linguists in the education of language teachers, their role in that process remains problematic. As Claire Kramsch demonstrates later in this volume, linguistic knowledge is often prized in the development of second-language instruction. Unfortunately, the facts of language continue to be undervalued in the training of first-language teachers (that is, teachers of English to speakers of English, teachers of French to speakers of French, and so on), who [46] find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to serve as language arbiters without adequate preparation to do so. Language teachers
have always received both praise and blame from the general public for
their traditional role in maintaining language standards. Their opinions
on correct grammar and usage are sought out, yet at the same time their
judgments are feared or resented. One typical comment--which precludes
further communication-should be familiar to language teachers: "Oh,
you're an English (French, Latin, Japanese) teacher, I guess I'd better
watch my grammar." paradoxically, though they are considered language
experts, the linguistic education of language teachers is often rudimentary,
consisting of little more than a single course in descriptive grammar
or history of the language, and they are consequently hard put to make
the linguistic judgments required of them. Moreover, the contributions
of linguistic theory to teacher training have often seemed unnecessarily
abstract, indirect, or even :It odds with the teaching mission (consider,
for example, the failure of transformational-generative grammar to make
an impact on the language teaching curriculum in the 1960s and 1970s).
Clearly, teacher education and curriculum development remain areas in
which linguists and language teachers must learn to address each other
with greater circumspection and effectiveness. In addition to serving as occasional objects of journalistic obloquy, linguists may disagree among themselves about their roles. Some linguists charge in the scholarly literature that their colleagues ignore the facts of language in favor of theories that fail to explain language phenomena adequately. They argue that an undue focus on standard language ignores language variety, particularly that of the nonelite, presenting an unbalanced picture of linguistic operations and placing users of nonstandard varieties at a disadvantage (see Finegan in this volume). They further charge that interfering with the language use of others, a process often characterized in negative terms as linguistic engineering, is a violation both of scientific objectivity and a kind of Hippocratic admonition to do no harm. In contrast, other linguists insist they have a distinct obligation to [47] help nonstandard speakers learn the form of speech and writing associated with power and success. They maintain, as well, that it is naive to strive for objectivity in language investigation, since we must use language to study language and since the very examination of linguistic features interferes with the phenomenon under study. They warn that if linguists, whose job it is to know the history and structure of language, do not involve themselves in issues of language standardization as well as in schemes for language modernization or improvement, these matters will he left in the hands of politicians and amateurs (Wyld's "cranks and quacks") whose interests are conceivably less enlightened and whose insights into language operations are certain to be less acute (see, for example, Greenbaum, Good English). It is not likely that either side of this ethical debate will prevail in the near future. In fact, it may be that both points of view are necessary correctives to any single view of language: after all, it is disagreement among experts, rather than consensus, that keeps us all honest and promotes further investigation. More important, perhaps, than achieving consensus, is the increasing recognition that we must acknowledge and better understand the impact of the language opinions of linguists and nonlinguists alike. As Richard Bailey reminds us, ideas about language based on myth and misinformation are as real and as powerful as those based on fact: both affect the way that language is perceived and used, both affect the way that users of language are treated, and both are appropriate objects of further study for the linguist.
Some good general
introductions include such textbooks as Richard A. Hudson's Sociolinguistics
and Ronald Wardhaugh's Introduction to Sociolinguistics and the updated
collection of essays edited by John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, as well
as the sociolinguistics volume Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, edited
by Frederick J. Newmeyer. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage have
edited a basic collection of essays on conversational analysis. The Official-Language Question. Joshua Fishman et al. (Language Loyalty) discuss, as their subtitle indicates, the maintenance and perpetuation of non-English mother tongues by American ethnic and religious groups; Fishman et
al. (Ethnic Revival)
update this classic work. Arnold M. Leihowitz focuses on official and
minority-language legislation and case law in the United States. Orality and Literacy.
In the past decade, scholarly treatments of literacy have appeared at
an impressive rate. In addition to the basic works listed in the essay
are several recommended volumes. William V. Harris examines literacy
eral commentaries-showing how stereotypes of sex roles have influenced the way we look at language. Deborah Tannen argues that because American women and men live in different worlds, their conversation, or lack of it, resembles cross-cultural communication And Francine Wattman Frank and Paula A. Treichler offer a carefully reasoned theoretical context for sex-neutral language, together with specific recommendations for unbiased academic writing. University of Illinois, Urbana
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Atkinson, J. Mawxell, and
John t-lerita~e, eds. Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation
Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1984. [50] Conference on College Composition
and Communication. Students' Right to Their Own Language. Chicago: NCTE,
1971.
Language" The Varieties
of Present-day English. Ed. Richard W. Bailey and Jay L. Robinson. New
York: Macmillan, 1973. 3-37. Harris. Williarn V. Adult Literacy. Cambridge: H:ITVr7TClljl). 14)84). Haugen, Einar. Language
Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1966.
Sapir, Eclward. Language:
An Introduction to the Studs of Speech. New York: Harcourt, 1921. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language,
Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin L. Whorf. Ed. John
B. Carroll. Cnmhridge: MIT P, 1956. |
