Language in Its
Social Setting Language is a social phenomenon. In America — as
anywhere — it’s shaped by contact, conflict and incredible cultural
complexity. Dennis
Baron
explains how. Read Summary

Is E-mail ruining the language?

Can I be fired for speaking Spanish on the job?

Are we less literate than we used to be?

These questions reflect how language is a social phenomenon.
Although many linguists believe that humans are genetically
programmed to learn language, it takes social contact to flip the
switch that makes us talk. So, linguists study not simply the sounds,
grammars and meanings of the world’s languages, but also how they
function in their social settings

Language varies according to the social structure of a local speech
community. For example, American English has varieties, dialects that
are subsets of the larger linguistic whole called English. Some
dialects vary by geography: In the North, you put the groceries in a
bag; in the South, you put them in a sack.

Language expresses group identity

Language also expresses solidarity or group identity. Language can
separate insiders from outsiders, those in the know from those who
didn’t get the memo, the cool from the pathetically unhip, and, in the
case of the Biblical shibboleth, friend from foe.

Members of small groups such as families, couples, friends,
roommates and work groups all give their language a spin suited to the
group’s interests and experience. Members of a profession develop a
jargon, an internally efficient job-related shorthand that permits them
to impress, mystify or stonewall outsiders. In simple two-person
conversation, language may reflect power differentials: One person may
take charge while the other plays a subordinate role.

We sometimes label the language of larger social groups a social
dialect, with differences in pronunciation and usage based on social
class, ethnic factors, contact with other languages, gender or age.
Let’s take a look at some issues in social dialects.

Ebonics Emerges

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) — sometimes known as
Black English or Ebonics — is used by many African Americans,
particularly those from working-class or inner-city areas. Black
English clearly differs from other varieties of English in its
vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, but simply attaching it to one
population group oversimplifies a complex situation.

Many African Americans do not speak Black English; many non-African
Americans who live in inner cities do. Complicating matters further,
African American influence — music, fashion, language — on American
culture is very strong. As a result, some white American teenagers from
the suburbs consciously imitate Black language features, to express
their own group identity and shared opposition to mainstream culture.

Many people — African American or not — look down on Black English
as an undesirable or ignorant form of the language. Others see it as a
proud and positive symbol of the African-American experience. A few
political activists or Afro-centrists insist that Ebonics isn’t a
dialect of English at all but rather a separate language with roots in
Africa. And many people accept Black English as an important social
dialect but argue that its speakers must also master standard English
in order to succeed in America today.

The debate illustrates a larger sociolinguistic point. We all
master several different varieties of our language, standard and less
so, that we deploy depending upon social contexts. In unfamiliar social
situations, we feel linguistically inadequate and “don’t know the right
thing to say.” Yet we can pick up the lingo of a new context if we are
exposed to it long enough.

Word Wars Between the Sexes

Gender differences in the use of English are subtle. Nonetheless,
notions of men’s and women’s language use abound: Men are said to swear
a lot, to be more coarse and casual. Studies claim that American women
know more color terms and men know tool names; that women use more
qualifiers and diminutives; and that young women are more likely than
men to end a declarative sentence with a rise in pitch, as if it were a
question? In meetings or other professional contexts, men are said to
speak more than women and interrupt them more often. On the other hand,
women seem to carry the burden in mixed-gender conversations.

Clearly, these stereotypes aren’t very trustworthy. It’s probably
not so much gender as gender roles that influence linguistic
behavior. As gender roles change, gender differences in speech
frequently disappear. Women who work as mechanics know the names of
tools, and men who paint and decorate have to know their color terms.

Gender roles change, but they may not disappear. For example,
although the taboo against women swearing has eased, both men and women
students still report some degree of discomfort when women swear in
mixed company.

Department of Ms. Information

In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Labor rewrote its extensive
list of job titles to eliminate gender bias, making language less
patronizing, more accurate and inclusive — by, for example, replacing
“stewardess” with “flight attendant.”

The case of the missing “Miss” illuminates more change. For
some time people sought an alternative to Miss or Mrs. that did not
indicate marital status, a title that would parallel the masculine
title Mr. “Ms.” took root (after decades of failed starts) in
American usage in the 1970s, pronounced Miz to distinguish it from
Miss. Since then, Ms. has undergone an interesting shift. Many young
women use it either as a trendy alternative to Miss, or to indicate an
unmarried woman (widowed or divorced) of their mother’s generation.
It’s a good example of what can happen when planners decide a word
should mean one thing, but users of the language adapt it to mean
something else.

Another interesting development in gender-neutral vocabulary is the
rise of you guys as a new kind of second person plural in
American speech. Even though guy is usually masculine, the
plural guys has become, for most people, gender neutral — and
can even refer to an all-female group.

Minority Report

Human history can be viewed as what happens when groups of people
speaking different languages encounter one another. The result isn’t
always pretty: language contact can lead to mutual understanding but
also social conflict. Although it’s the speakers who unite or
clash, language often symbolizes what unites or divides people — and
linguistic minorities often find their right to use their native
language severely restricted by laws requiring the majority language in
all sorts of situations.

In the U.S., diversity tends to give way to one common
language: English

The United States is founded on diversity and difference. In religion
and ethnicity, we are a composite people. However, when it comes to
language, diversity tends to give way to one common language: English.
And although the very title Do You Speak American? suggests the
broadness of American speech, there have always been Americans who feel
that if you don’t speak the “American” language, you may not really be
an American.

Americans initially accepted French in Louisiana and Spanish in
California and the Southwest territories, but soon began requiring
English-only in all public transactions. Government policy initially
eradicated Native American languages, but has recently switched — in an
effort that may come too late — to try to preserve them and encourage
growth. Similarly, depriving African slaves of their linguistic roots
was one way of controlling them.

Language loss is common for immigrants to the United States. During
the pre-World War I waves of immigration from non-English-speaking
countries, it was common for second-generation speakers to be bilingual
in English and the language of the land they came from, and the third
generation to be monolingual English speakers, unable to converse with
their grandparents. There is some evidence that the switch to English
has speeded up since the 1960s, skipping the bilingual middle
generation altogether. Parents are monolingual in Spanish or Hmong or
Ukrainian. Their children speak only English.

American schools have never dealt comfortably with their
non-Anglophone students. In the 19th century, bilingual
schooling was common, particularly in the heavily German areas of the
Midwest. As immigration increased, public schools shifted
overwhelmingly to English as the language of instruction. The
Americanization movement of the early 1900s reinforced assimilation to
English, often punitively. But there was no concerted effort to teach
these students how to speak English. It should not be
surprising that in this sink-or-swim environment, many students simply
sank: More than half of students dropped out at the height of the great
wave of Eastern European immigration.

Teddy Roosevelt warned the U.S. was in danger of
becoming a polyglot boarding house

Teddy Roosevelt once warned that the
United States was in danger of becoming a polyglot boarding house.
Instead we became a nation of monolingual English speakers. Language
teachers tell a joke: What do you call a person who speaks two
languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks one
language? American.

Immigration reforms in the 1960s brought an influx
of speakers of
Spanish, as well as Russian and a variety of Asian languages —
yet English continues to dominate the United States. In the 1970s,
court-ordered bilingual education attempted to deal with the problems
faced by minority-language speakers in the schools. Ideally, such
programs use the students’ native languages to instruct them in basic
subjects (reading, writing, math, science and social studies) so that
they don’t fall behind while they get up to speed in English.

Highly effective when done well, bilingual education has been
controversial because many people fear the programs are designed to
preserve minority language, not to teach children English. California
voters recently rejected bilingual education in favor of English
immersion programs. Supporters of bilingual education fear that this
reduction in language support services that signals a step back to the
isolationism of the early 20th century.

Americans will continue to face issues of assimilation and minority
language rights. Opponents of immigration see the English language as
endangered and call for laws to make English the nation’s official
language. Still, the U.S. Census has reported for several decades that
English is spoken by 95 percent or more of U.S. residents. Although
bilingualism may be on the rise, the children of non-English-speaking
immigrants are abandoning their heritage languages, becoming
monolingual speakers of English with record speed.

Sociolinguistic Short-Takes

Do people swear more today than they used to? We have no
way to quantify how much people used to swear, or even how much they
swear today. It would be fair to say that people today swear more in
public (and on radio and television and in film) than they did in the
1940s or 50s.

Is the language of blacks and whites diverging? Some
observers worry that the social distance between whites and African
Americans may be increasing, which could in turn lead to greater
linguistic differences.

Is E-mail ruining the language? Critics object that it
encourages misspelling and grammatical error, makes people lazy, and is
impersonal and overly informal. Even so, standards for e-mail started
to emerge as soon as it became common. E-mail programs come with spell-
and grammar- checkers, advanced formatting capabilities, and graphics
and sound. Many e-mail writers want their e-mails to read as if they
have been written by someone who knows how to do things right.

Where do language standards come from? Language standards
— ideas about correct spelling, usage, grammar, and style — emerge by
consensus within communities of language users. In some countries,
government offices or language academies devise language policy, draw
up standards and attempt to enforce them. There are no such mechanisms
for English, though teachers, editors, writers, and self-appointed
experts serve as language guardians, transmitting ideas of correctness
and attempting to secure their adoption. Despite their efforts, there
is no single standard of correctness in English. Instead, there are
multiple standards that emerge from fluid communication contexts.

Can I be fired for speaking Spanish on the job? That
depends. Federal courts frequently side with the workers’ right to use
any language they want, particularly when on breaks or talking
privately. The courts also allow employers to specify the language to
be used when employees deal directly with the public, and more than
half the states have adopted English as their official language — a
designation more symbolic than enforceable. English doesn’t need the
protection of being an official language: the number of English
speakers in America is rising and will not decline anytime soon. No
other language, including Spanish, is positioned to become the majority
national language. However, designation of English as official can put
a chill on the use of other languages. In a period of increased
globalization, a knowledge of the world’s languages should help rather
than hurt the U.S. position among the nations of the world.

Are literacy rates really too low? We all agree that
literacy — the ability to read and write — is one of the most important
things that people need to succeed. Yet as experts disagree over how to
define and measure literacy, the stakes have gone up. Is a high-school
education enough? Can we say that a given score on a standardized test
guarantees a comparable level of performance in real-world reading,
writing, and calculating?

Every few years we have a literacy scare. Most recently, a report in
the 1990s warned that almost half of American adults couldn’t read,
write, or calculate at adequate levels. At the same time, the vast
majority of people interviewed considered their reading, writing and
math perfectly adequate for their jobs and other everyday tasks. So,
the assessment could simply mean Americans are too complacent about
their literacy … or that testing doesn’t really measure what we need to
know.

After a report on literacy in crisis, politicians legislate more
standardized testing. This forces schools to redirect their efforts to
get students past the standardized tests. Scores go up, things settle
down for a while, then the next report comes out and the crisis cycle
starts again.

Standardized tests have some ability to predict actual performance.
But when schools devote too much time to test-taking skills and too
little time to the actual literacy practices the tests are supposed to
measure, actual progress is stymied. A more reliable measure of
literacy might be the amount of time spent in and out of class on
reading, writing, and numeracy. A 2003 report from the Brookings
Institution indicates that two-thirds of American high school students
spend less than an hour a day on homework. This suggests that students
don’t spend enough time on actual literacy tasks — and that is
something that no test can address.

Suggested Reading/Additional Resources

Dennis Baron is professor of
English and
linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is
the author of several books on the English language, including The
English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans? (Yale
Univ. Press, 1990); Grammar and Gender (Yale, 1986); Grammar and
Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (Yale, 1982); Declining
Grammar (National Council of Teachers of English, 1989); and Guide
to Home Language Repair (NCTE: 1994). He writes for academic
journals but his essays have also appeared in the New York Times,
Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other
newspapers, and he speaks about language issues both on his local
public radio station, WILL-AM, and on radio and TV programs in other
cities around the country. He is currently writing a book on the impact
of technology on our reading and writing practices.