The Dialectics of Dialects
Dear Dennis,
Judging from the responses to our exchange, we've skipped over some of the
issues important to most people, so perhaps we should go over dialects before
we return to some recent headlines.
The very first question, about speakers of AAVE (African-American Vernacular
English, the scholarly term for the dialect popularly referred to as "ebonics")
being unable to do math because their language can't handle it, is tied into
the biggest questions linguists face. The notion is a myth, of course. As you
observe, you yourself--the department chair in English at a major
university--find it hard to understand the math talk of your colleagues. Does
that mean that you are incapable of doing math? Well, it would take some work
to develop the tools necessary. But that is true of the jargon of any specialty
field. A later respondent asks whether German is better suited for Hegel's
philosophy than other languages, but he answers his own question by observing
that languages can evolve to satisfy their own requirements. That is, Hegel
could benefit from the German language not because German is intrinsically good
for the discussion of philosophy but because after years of such discussion it
had developed appropriate words and structures, and German philosophers could
understand them.
In other words, when we say that languages or dialects are equal, we do not
mean that they are all equally able to concisely express every nuance at every
time. We mean that they are equally capable of expressing any thought
necessary to the speakers of that language or dialect. Most educated English
speakers are unable to understand medical jargon; that does not mean that
standard English is incapable of expressing complicated medical concepts. When
it is necessary, such concepts can be explained in laymen's terms, which may
not be as concise as medical jargon, but will do for the circumstances.
Likewise, the language of Hegelian philosophy is not standard German--it is
Hegel's language, and that language can be so difficult that even German
philosophy students sometimes read Hegel in English translation.
To take a very common illustration from English: Though the vocabulary of
English is vastly larger even than other Western languages, there are many
simple concepts that have no one word to express them. If I am referring to my
sister's husband, what word do I use? There isn't one. "Brother-in-law" is
ambiguous; it could refer to my wife's brother. And this is a very common
concept. Other languages, often regarded as more "primitive" than English, have
highly evolved vocabularies for denoting family relationships, so that a single
word can denote, say, one's maternal grandfather's sister. Does this mean that
English is deficient? Well, it means that in the culture of these other
languages, the denotation of family relationships is more important than it is
in English. But even in English we can always say "my mother's father's
sister."
The number of words in a language is irrelevant, contrary to what one
respondent suggests. Most speakers, even highly educated ones, use only a
relatively small proportion of the words available to them. (The entire
Shakespearean corpus contains only 20,000 distinct words.) So even if it were
true that AAVE or Brooklynese had fewer words than some other variety, it
wouldn't mean that speakers of AAVE or Brooklynese are incapable of expressing
certain thoughts. Indeed, there are structures in nonstandard dialects that are
certainly more expressive than what is available in the standard dialect. One
respondent mentions "y'all," an excellent example--English used to make a
distinction between singular "thou" and plural "you," but now only Southern
varieties of English are capable of this distinction without resorting to
circumlocutions. Likewise, the use of "be" in AAVE is what linguists called an
"aspect marker," indicating that the action is habitual: The sentence "He be
workin' " means "He habitually works"--i.e. "He has a job"--while "He (is)
workin' " means simply "At this moment he is working." This distinction is not
easy in standard English.
I'm running long, especially since I haven't had my coffee yet, but I want
to make one last point. We are not saying that minority dialects should be
favored, or that speakers of minority dialects should be prevented (or should
be discouraged) from learning standard speech. It is often true, as several
respondents observe, that in order to succeed in the mainstream world speakers
must use a standard variety. But this goal is not necessarily shared by the
speakers themselves. Dialects survive because people want to be part of a
social group, and this is often more important than other factors. The theory
that mass communication will eventually level all dialects ignores the fact
that not everyone wants to speak like Peter Jennings or Walter Cronkite.
Best,
Jesse
P.S. The word "floccinaucinihilipilification" means "the estimation of
something as worthless." It's an 18 th -century coinage that combines
four Latin prefixes meaning "nothing."
