Summarised from elsewhere, probably not news...

[kaberett]

The point of language is to communicate; if communication's been achieved, everything else is window-dressing and point-scoring. Who defines "accuracy" and "what (forms of) nuance matter)s(" is a case of privilege. Rich white folk not caring to understand Englishes (written or spoken) other than "Standard English" also means that communication loses accuracy and nuance, but oddly rich white folk (of which I am one!) don't seem, by and large, to be as worried about that. Taking the time to understand multiple Englishes (or multiple forms of any language) doesn't impoverish us - it makes our engagement with language richer.

See, e.g., linguistics blog Languagehat on the topic; I feel I should clarify that I'm Cambridge-educated and upper-middle class and I speak RP - but English is my second language and I speak a really weird hybrid of dialects in my first language, that combines the "standard" form of the language as legislated in the largest country in which it's spoken with forms of dialect that were definitely spoken in one very specific geographic area in the 1950s, but might well not have been since then. In my first language, spelling things the way I do is absolutely a political statement and will be interpreted as such, even though what it is in practice is "that's how my grandmother taught me to write". Just because the politicisation of Standard English is largely invisible to people for whom it is their first or primary language doesn't mean that the choice to use it (never mind attempts to enforce it) aren't political.

(Questions about the specifics I'm referring to re German etc welcome from you lot!)

Comments

[deathbyshinies]

> Just because the politicisation of Standard English is largely invisible to people for whom it is their first or primary language doesn't mean that the choice to use it (never mind attempts to enforce it) aren't political.

I was about to launch a counter-argument about the politicisation of Standard English being very much not invisible to people who are speakers of other Englishes, then realised that that was actually what you were saying! Oops.

One of my favourite things about the much-hated and now-defunct FHS English Language paper was teaching students about dialect and code-switching. Not every year, but often enough to spot a pattern, those classes would see a student who was a dialect-speaker -- Northern, working-class or both -- suddenly take a dominant role in the discussion; suddenly realise that ze had access to a bank of knowledge that hir RP-speaking classmates did not have. They definitely knew that it was political, but maybe hadn't had the sense of being backed-up by an academic discourse to articulate it until that moment.

One of the scariest things I've ever done in front of students was in that same class: I gave them about five minutes of me speaking in the same way that I'd done as a teenager. Was fucken shitten m'self, ay: but I think it got the point across :D

[kaberett]

Yesss, fist-pumping of appreciation and cheerleading to both you & the Students Of The Past who understand code-switching! Similarly, in one of my German A-level classes one of my teachers - who'd grown up in East Germany - switched to speaking the Ossi dialect rather than Hochdeutsch, and was clearly similarly uncomfortable, and - ugh. This is complicated shit and people need to be more aware of it and less fucking prescriptivist, because prescriptivism is wrong ;)

[deathbyshinies]

:D Yup. In case you haven't seen it already, this is one of my favourite code-switching poems, by John Agard (the 'Listen Mr Oxford Don' poet):

http://windies4wi.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/stereotype-by-john-agard-guyanese-poet/

The final five lines get me every single time.

[kaberett]

I really proper love Agard.

[davidgillon]

OMG, never thought of code-switching applying to how _I_ speak, but yes, absolutely. I've a natural mid-Durham accent that largely disappears when I'm in Kent, but put me on the train home, and never mind I've lived in Kent for 25 years, somewhere about York my native accent and vocabulary snap back into place. And despite thinking the years have smothered my accent, there are still occasional times I have to go to faux-RP to get someone to understand me.

[milkymoon]

I agree with this entirely. Standard English is a politicised thing (and there is even politicisation between Standard Englishes - for example, Americans believing that even the Standard Englishes of England or Canada or Australia don't matter and making software that can't even spellcheck English English) and people don't seem to understand that because the standardisation is invisible. There's nothing wrong with regional accents; the English language isn't impoverished by people speaking with Yorkshire, Texas or Broad Strine accents, or using their particular local vocabulary. I call it a pavement; somebody else might call it a sidewalk. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

And yes, German is politicised as well. There are the rules of Hochdeutsch, the rules of Swiss and Austrian German and all the spelling reform controversies of the 90s and early 2000s. I remember hearing about all the controversy over German spelling reforms. German is not my first language at all and I don't consider myself fluent (most of my German knowledge is 'receptive German' that's good enough to read news articles with the minimum of confusion, though it's more difficult to produce German), but I do know about many of the language controversies within it.

[syntaxofthings]

I was a German major in school and absolutely a fan of German linguistics so I'd love to hear how you write differently - is it ß vs. ss?

Taking a class on German linguistics, learning the part that they were aware that they were making laws to standardize the language in the 1800s, gave me a rather different perspective on the English language and its path toward "standardization". Totally fascinating.

[kaberett]

Yep, lots of it is ß vs. ss, but it's also, mm. Some of the diminutives I use, but that's more Austrian dialect which is a different kind of politics - but basically all the changes on this page look wrong to me. Well, that's not quite true - B1.1 is Definitely Wrong, B1.3 I'm unconvinced by in the general case, B2.1 is ick, D1 is a Nope from me, and so on and so forth!

[stephdairy]

I have a vague recollection that these "new" rules are ignored by some (many? most?) German newspapers.

I wonder how common legislating particular varieties of language is. (It still amuses me that the only official language in the UK is Welsh.)

(S)

[alexseanchai]

Huh, I have more points of reference for this sort of thing than I initially thought. Southern US English vs African-American Vernacular English vs Internet English vs whatever the hell I actually speak. Schools pointedly teaching Castilian Spanish when it's Latin American Spanish that most native Spanish speakers in the US actually speak.

I want to get the hang of AAVE someday. If only so I can write AAVE-speaking characters without sounding OHAI WHITE PERSON WROTE THIS.

[kaberett]

There is a huge potential for everyone (even native speakers of Standard English) to understand this set of concepts, and part of the issue is that we're taught to believe that there aren't.

I find a fairly useful way to talk to Other White People From The Internet about this is to use the examples of lolcat and doge, both of which have defined grammars - you can tell when someone's "doin lolcat rong" or whatever, because it has a grammar. It's not the grammar of Standard English, but that doesn't mean there aren't rules that've developed organically in the way of all language.

(There was a really good discussion by Tobias Buckell - I think I typed it up in one of my LonCon3 reports - about writing non-standard Englishes out phonetically, which has a super-racist history and gets perceived as racist even when the author is ingroup, versus using standard spellings and just representing grammar instead of trying to convey accent. It was a thing!)

[untonuggan]

My language background: taught standardized US English in schools; parents both grew up speaking not that (my dad working class Oklahoman which he only code switches into when drinking, on the phone to someone with that accent, or making a point) and my mom/mum Yorkshire but schooled in Standard UK English (she similarly only goes full out Yorkshire when talking to family, in Yorkshire, or when singing "On Ilkley Moor Bar'Tat").

So I was a bit tearful in school when I kept getting marked down for spelling color "wrong" because of the u I used.

It's also weird because I do the thing where if I go to Yorkshire I start using some Yorkshirisms, not on purpose and I have yet to find a way to stop it. I sound like a USer trying to sound British and my aunt used to tease me about it, but really I think it's just being a halfie.

Also I totally bought the UK version of Harry Potter just so I could revel in the glory of the UK English rather than the version they sold across the pond.

[kaberett]

Yeeeeeeeep. My mum gets asked if she's local when speaking German in Kärnten and so (less frequently) do I; I get asked if I'm local when in Zürich and otherwise sound A Bit Austrian; code-switching is totally, totally a thing.

[aella_irene]

My father was in Iran during the Iranian Revolution. And he told me once that one of the things the revolutionaries did was speak the Farsi of the people, when on the radio or on television. Because previously, government statements on broadcast media had been in Court Farsi, which was the Farsi of, I think, about 1800, instead of the vernacular. So you had people listening to them in awe, because they could understand them. Without effort and concentration!

[kaberett]

YEP.

(See also Dante. DANTE WAS THE END OF ALL GOOD ITALIAN LITERATURE etc etc etc...)

[batdina]

I'm fascinated by this stuff. (And off the top, I'll acknowledge that I'm upper middle class white folk from the Northeast of the US, transplanted to California umpteen million years ago: I AM the default English, at least in the US.)

Anyway, language clashes in our household are between me (up there) and the partner chick: born and raised in the area of England east of Newcastle, transplanted to Ontario Canada, further transplanted to Texas, with a brief stint in Vancouver BC until she got to California fewer than umpteen years ago, but getting there. We use a conglomeration of posh [american] English (me), Canadian English (her), Quebecois (her), Yiddish (me), Parisian French (me), and Houston Texas slang (her). There's also a bit of German on the edges (my Yiddish and her German communicate fairly well), and a smattering of Hebrew (which my cat knows better than my parents ever did).

The closest dictionary I've ever found for what gets spoken in this house is Chambers. The closest WP dictionary we've ever found is Canadian which you can get on a Mac, but NOT on a PC. (What's that about?)

Also? the amount of "hold up; that thing you just asked for. What is it exactly?" can be boggling.

I grew up to be a PhD in early Modern English lit (Marlowe, Shakespeare, duh) so I suppose I should have been startled when the New Yorker a number of years ago decided that the English of Appalachia (often known as "lower hillbilly" in the US) is probably closer to the English spoken in 16th century London than London is today. A fact I use to my advantage when teaching Mark Twain and dialect.

Like I said, I love this stuff. Add in the issues of race and class and I'll sit and talk with you for hours and hours and hours.

[My father has a writing partner in Berlin, who has a young child. Every time my old man goes to Germany, he tries very hard to have a conversation with the youngster. And every year he's better, and every year he STILL sounds like he's speaking Yiddish (his first language). We laugh now, but I suspect decades ago that could have been a life or death distinction.]

So yeah. hours and hours. I'll stop now.

[birke]

I've been reading through these comments and didn't have much to say until now, but OMG you use Chambers?! Chambers is my jam! It's the dictionary I grew up with -- even though my entire family is American -- and I still think of it as a better source than Merriam-Webster and other American dictionaries. I drag it out to prove that I'm not wrong in the way I pronounce basil, etc.

[macey]

This is quite fun in the context of American English, because my 'But this /is/ the Right English' instinct from being raised RP and excessively educated in that, gets hit smack in the face with the baseball bat of internationalisation. Sorry, I mean internationalization. And yes, re: politicisation (zation) of spelling, that is very much the case of using British English out here. I tell my co-workers that I 'use a translation matrix' - as much as is possible, I modulate my idioms and specific words (sidewalk not pavement, never say 'half three') to conform to the local standard, because there's also the fact that maybe 50% of my coworkers are ESL to varying degrees of proficiency (in most cases, very high, but some have a few struggles). And the English they've learned is generally Americanised. I don't want to confuse them further.

But there's honestly only so much I can do about being chronically non-rhotic. And I refuse to say 'Aluminum' or spell 'ise' with a z.

[silveradept]

Oh, all the variances of English I have to understand in my profession. Not just ESL variances, but teenager English, people-machine translations, and those cases where I betray that I'm not a regional native, despite having always lived within a half-day of the Canadian border all my life.

I just had a post I read from Arthur Chu, Jeopardy! champion, taking about how people watching documentary DVDs want his accent to show through when he's talking about China, even though he's been working all his life to erase the accent and it's variances.