I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had the “discussion” with people. It’s the one where that dreaded word “dialect” comes up and, suddenly, a whole host of misunderstandings and prejudices come spewing forth. This word is so convulated in its associations for those who don’t explicitly study language as a science that it’s often even taken as an attack on one’s linguistic faculties when the opposite is really what’s meant. This regularly happens when explaining to native Louisiana French speakers that their language is a dialect of French, so as to make it an equal in value to any other variety of French, including Standard French, and their response is outrage that one would demean something they care so much about.

But perhaps the clearest case of unfortunate misconceptualization is the case of African American English (AAE), whose name itself can lead to heated debate. I feel it would be impossible to cover and explain this whole mess in a single post, even if I focused purely on AAE, but a good starting point might be the paper I wrote during my first semester in college and somehow forgot to post, entitled Ebonics and Prejudice under Writings above. I personally work with this issue daily as a tutor at a community college and it’s leading me to the conclusion that schools that serve mostly speakers of non-standard dialects should be treated the same as those who have to deal with large numbers of students whose first languages are not English as far as financial support is concerned.

For those who grew up speaking dialects (of any language) which are non-standard: learn other ways of speaking so that you can write for newspapers or give lectures at academic conferences, but don’t abandon the way of speaking you grew up with. It’s perfect just as is.