ozarque ([info]ozarque) wrote,
@ 2005-01-27 18:32:00
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Linguistics; "Standard American English"
It's certainly true that parents who are native speakers of Ozark English don't speak Standard American English. It's important to remember, however, that this is also true of parents who are speakers of any other variety of English. Speakers of all the multitude of American English dialects usually are convinced that there is a Standard American English and that they speak it -- despite the fact that listening to any ordinary assortment of that population talk for twenty minutes or so will demonstrate that they're not using some single consensus set of grammar rules.

I once co-chaired a one-day conference at my university on the perennial topic of "literacy crisis." I've forgotten the exact title, but it would have been something like "The Literacy Crisis in Today's United States." Scholars gave papers all day long, and the papers were recorded so that a "proceedings" of the event could be produced and distributed.

I transcribed all those tapes myself because I didn't trust anyone else to do it accurately, and I was _extremely_ careful. However, when I furnished copies of the transcript to the people who had presented papers I got an immediate flood of messages that I can summarize as follows: "I'm sorry, Professor Elgin, but your secretary has made a number of errors in transcribing the tape of my conference paper." Then there'd be a list of the alleged errors .... for example, a sentence transcribed as "There's three reasons for the difficulties these students face." And the message would close with "I would of course never have said any of those things."

I did not respond to any of those people with "I transcribed the tape myself, and I assure you -- you did say those things. I can prove it. They're on the tape, often several times." Nor did I respond by letting people know that some of their statements about correct grammar contradicted statements being made in the messages coming from other presenters, despite the fact that they were all native speakers of English equipped with Ph.D's. I sent an acknowledgment memo to everyone, saying, "Thank you for your input; the corrections you have specified will be made."

So far as can be determined, Standard American English doesn't exist. I've served on numerous scholarly committees assigned the task of defining SAE so that exams or essays or oral presentations could be judged against the definition; I've sometimes been the administrator to whom a committee charged with that task was supposed to report. In every case, the result has been a report that the committee is unable to reach a consensus. (I've seen no evidence indicating that the situation is different for the other hypothetical Standards such as Standard British English, Standard New Zealand English, and the like.) A rough consensus list exists of items that the hypothetical Standard does not contain, like "ain't got none" and "done went"; there is no consensus on what it does contain.

Like so many other hot-button political issues, this one is handled by ignoring it, a practice that's very hard on the students taking the tests and writing the essays and giving the oral presentations. Official definitions of the Standard ordinarily go like this: "Standard English is the form and style of English commonly spoken and written by educated people."

If Standard American English does exist -- and I don't think it does -- it exists only as written language. That makes it hard for children to acquire it natively.

Suzette

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[info]toshfraggle
2005-01-27 02:12 pm UTC (link)
But I'm curious as why to stadard written and spoken english have to be the same thing.

If "there is" is an acceptable oral replacement for "There are" to be used in casual settings, why is it not okay to say "In most settings, the replacement of 'there's' for 'there are' is not noticed"? Sure it would be difficult for ESL students to understand, but I've heard my foreign students use those conjunctions anyway. (I've also seen that at most conferences presenters are using a friendly tone meant to engage the audience, so more casual speak is being introduced--it's nothing to be ashamed of! If anybody asked, it was a rhetorical decision based on an attempt by the speaker to make the audience comfortable.)

There are other more stringent rules that would still be against the rules of standard spoken english. "Ain't" is not acceptable, unless used in parody or pun, for example.

~me.

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[info]undauntra
2005-01-27 02:18 pm UTC (link)
If Standard American English does not exist, what about Standard Newscaster English, as spoken on the major networks?

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[info]h_thur
2005-01-27 02:36 pm UTC (link)
Newscasters are essentially reading a report that has been previously edited for grammar and style.

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[info]wizwom
2005-01-27 03:58 pm UTC (link)
Done to a style guide, which each network decided on independantly.

And a pronunciation guide, based off a midwestern dialect.

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[info]redbird
2005-01-27 02:45 pm UTC (link)
I find it useful to think of Standard Written American as a dialect of English, one in which I am fluent and which I am paid to translate other forms of English into. (Those other forms include both various mostly-spoken Englishes and, on occasion, standard written Canadian or British.) This goes along with the more ordinary sorts of error correction that people expect a copyeditor and proofreader to make: things like changing "peoples'" to "people's" when the reference is a simple plural, or pointing out that the U.S. borders on three oceans, not two.

As Suzette knows, many people will say things they wouldn't write, because far more speech than writing goes out as first draft. You say "There's..." and then realize that there's more than one thing, and just go on: on paper, you'd change that to "There are."

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[info]mrlogic
2005-01-27 05:51 pm UTC (link)
There's also the issue that "There's" is much easier to pronounce than "There're", and so if one has it in mind to us a contraction in the sentence for fluency's sake, there is pressure to use the one which is more easily spoken and understood.

I commit all sorts of grammatical solecisms in speech that I would edit out in writing. Sometimes it's because the sentence changes course in midconstruction; sometimes it's because it's the "wrong" construction is easier to say; and sometimes it's just a slip of the tongue. I can understand the wishes of those who, having spoken and been transcribed, would prefer a published transcription to conform to what they would have written and not what they literally said.

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[info]pyesetz
2005-01-28 02:40 am UTC (link)
But I think part of Suzette's point is that these people claimed they never said the solecism she transcribed from recordings of their speech, because that text looked so wrong to them in print.  Another part of her point is that it was not appropriate to argue with them about what they actually said, but simply to correct it to match what they thought they surely must have said.

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[info]mrlogic
2005-01-28 03:29 am UTC (link)
Certainly. I don't have any argument with either of those points. It's quite interesting that those people were not aware or not willing to admit that they would produce language in speech that they would disapprove of in writing. I agree that nothing would have been gained by "proving" this to them; unless they were linguistically inclined (and therefore likely to find it intriguing), they would probably just be embarrassed by the revelation.

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[info]janet_coburn
2005-01-28 12:11 pm UTC (link)
I think academic pride is a factor. Once my boss asked a man to "write an article" by talking into a tape recorder. The guy knew his subject, but the tapes were simply dreadful in terms of SAE. Even after cleaning up of the most egregious ums, ers, false starts, agreement errors, etc., the piece was still moderately appalling. On seeing the results, however, the author/dictator was clearly embarrassed--but he owned that he had indeed produced the appalling prose. He said it was a real eye-opener, though I suppose ear-opener would have been more accurate.

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[info]suecochran
2005-01-27 03:09 pm UTC (link)
This is from a geographically challenged person - is the Gulf of Mexico considered an ocean? If not, what is the third ocean that the US borders on? Thanks.

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[info]redbird
2005-01-27 03:27 pm UTC (link)
The Gulf of Mexico is part of the Atlantic. The United States has coastline on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans.

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[info]wild_patience
2005-01-27 03:28 pm UTC (link)
I have to disagree with you on this one.

My 82-year-old mother was born and raised in New York and got her teaching credential in California. At that time, there was a requirement that teachers had to speak Standard American English -- regional accents were not allowed. She had to work to get rid of her New York accent. She also used to scold my Texan father for various ways he said things because she couldn't afford to lapse into that kind of speech in the classroom.

As a voice (music) major in the 1970s, there was definitely a standard pronunciation that we all had to adhere to as well. Of course choirs need uniformity of vowel to function as a good choir, but we were told it was the Standard American English we were to sing.

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[info]oursin
2005-01-27 03:38 pm UTC (link)
I think there are differences between accents, and various forms of linguistic usage which fail to conform to people's expectations of Standard English - and which may be employed quite unconsciously in spoken, rather than written, communication. Even people who speak with a 'BBC English' accent may, at least in informal settings, be using constructions that would count as incorrect by the standards of grammar books or Fowler's English Usage. (I know I do, and at least one person once described me as having a 'BBC accent'.)

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[info]metalfatigue0
2005-01-27 04:37 pm UTC (link)
I do not see how either of these anecdotes contradicts what Suzette is saying.

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[info]kirinqueen
2005-01-27 05:11 pm UTC (link)
I don't either. I think maybe there wasn't enough of an emphasis on the contrast between spoken "Standard American English and written "Standard American English." The standards could be said to exist in the latter but empirically do not in the former.

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[info]pyesetz
2005-01-28 02:46 am UTC (link)
Because of the influence of Hollywood, the speech of Los Angeles is often considered "unaccented American English", but really there is no such thing as unaccented speech.  When your mother was told she had to "speak without an accent", they were actually demanding that she speak in the local accent.

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[info]wizwom
2005-01-27 03:56 pm UTC (link)
The television networks realized this long ago.
They settled on a consistent english, and wrote style and pronunciation guides to have cosistency. It still doesn't always work :-)

English is so wonderfully slippery.

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[info]plasticsturgeon
2005-01-27 05:38 pm UTC (link)
Official definitions of the Standard ordinarily go like this: "Standard English is the form and style of English commonly spoken and written by educated people."

So they define Standard English as something that most of the population doesn't speak or write, and then wring their hands about the "literacy crisis"? I probably shouldn't be shocked, but I am.

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Definitions, again
[info]janet_coburn
2005-01-27 06:12 pm UTC (link)
Depends on how you define "educated." Presumably, in this context, it means something other than "having succesfully graduated from an American high school." In the sense of having completed the mandated formal education, most Americans *are* educated.

Does that imply that "Standard English" is more than--and better than--what is deemed necessary to pass h.s. English and graduate? That would be one huge explanation for a large part of the "literacy crisis."

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Re: Definitions, again
[info]plasticsturgeon
2005-01-27 07:12 pm UTC (link)
I was tentatively assuming that "educated" meant at least a college degree, because that's the minimum amount of education that you need to get most corporate higher-ups to speak to you as if you were older than 10.

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Re: Definitions, again
[info]janet_coburn
2005-01-27 09:53 pm UTC (link)
You're quite right about college ed being assumed in the corporate world. But a lot of Americans never get within shouting distance of Corporate America, except to deliver their lunches and wax their floors. And college is (technically) optional and (essentially) out of reach for many Americans.

I'm just a little wary of any definition of "educated" that leaves out, for example, my mother, and other high school graduates who, while not being on speaking terms with corporate bigwigs, are certainly literate enough to read, write, and converse with other intelligent adults about significant topics.

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Re: Definitions, again
[info]sighkey
2005-01-28 02:51 am UTC (link)
I'm with you. My definition of 'educated' would be anyone who is able to read well enough to allow her/him to seek out information from the books found on library shelves and who is able to add, subtract, multiply, and do simple division on numbers. Everything else is simply window dressing.

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Re: Definitions, again
[info]plasticsturgeon
2005-01-28 06:40 pm UTC (link)
Please note that that's not my definition of "educated". It's the definition I expected the High Arbiters of Grammar to have.

By the way, if you live in a city or suburb and you go outside your home once in a while, you're probably going to end up interacting with Corporate America. Even if it's just bumping into them on the sidewalk, or watching them from the bus, or reading about their plans for your street in the local newspaper.

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Re: Definitions, again
[info]janet_coburn
2005-01-28 07:35 pm UTC (link)
Absolutely. And those newspaper-reading bus-riders may be looked down on by corporate America, but they are, mostly, neither illiterate nor uneducated.

I would expect that a college education would be needed to become one of the High Arbiters, but not necessary to be defined as educated or as capable of learning the mythical beast of SAE.

Unless the High Arbiters are saying that *only they* speak SAE and everyone else is a hopeless shlub. Now, *that* would raise my hackles indeed.

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Re: Definitions, again
[info]sighkey
2005-01-29 01:26 am UTC (link)
I'm thankful for small mercies. I am not so likely to bump into Corporate America on my local streets and Corporate NZ is still a beast that mostly hides under rocks - although I guess the day will come when it will make itself more visible on the streets.

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[info]chanaleh
2005-01-27 07:05 pm UTC (link)
Hi Suzette -- your mentioning Ozark English reminds me that I thought you might be a good person to ask about audio samples.

I'm in a production of Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly (set in Lebanon, MO) right now, and my character's speech is supposed to be slightly Ozark-inflected (in accent, not in usage). And I suspect I haven't gotten much closer than southern Indiana. :-} I have been limping along with a dialect book, but it's not the same as hearing it; and I went poking around online for audio samples, but found almost nothing useful. Do you happen to know offhand of any you could recommend?

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Theatre Q
[info]niemandsrose
2005-01-27 07:24 pm UTC (link)
Hi, I'm a voice/speech/dialect coach for theatre, and while I haven't coached Talley's Folley, I'm going to point you toward the International Dialects of English Archive, a resource originally created with actors specifically in mind.

Although I'd be very curious to see Suzette "review" the Arkansas/Missouri dialects on offer there, because I trust her ear and her descriptive capacities.

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Re: Theatre Q
[info]chanaleh
2005-01-27 07:59 pm UTC (link)
Oh, fantastic! thank you! I had found some similar sites, but none that seemed to have appropriate samples. (In fact, I seem to have saved a bookmark to the IDEA site that's a broken link, so I suspect I found it cached on Google but never found the content. I appreciate it very much.)

Here's our production, btw: http://www.theatreatfirst.org/

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[info]sighkey
2005-01-27 07:54 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure that we have a 'standard New Zealand english'. I had never come across the phrase 'standard [country of choice] english' until I started reading here. When we talk about literacy or lack thereof in NZ we are talking solely about the ability to read and write.

In NZ we do not have regional accents (with one or two exceptions - everyone knows a Gore accent). There are a few differences in vocab between the South and North Island (eg: South Islanders like myself will call our holiday houses 'cribs', North Islanders call theirs 'bachs') but even these differences are fading. The North Island contains the majority of our 4 million people so I guess it's inevitable that the North Island vocab will eventually take over.

Also, our vocab is becoming increasingly 'Americanised' - the majority of what we see on television comes from the US. (When I was a child what television we did have was mainly from Britain)

As far as I know none of us really care enough about spoken word usage enough for it to become an issue.
In fact, if I want to discuss/argue matters of linguistics in my everyday life I have to seek out the Americans and Germans I know, Kiwis really don't care that much.

Some of those in my parents' generation decry the manner of speaking and word choice of the youngsters of today. Those in my generation, especially those of us who teach, have a bigger problem with the fact that schools do not seem to be effectively teaching basic sentence structure in writing. It is a little disheartening to have to spend half a lesson pointing out to a bunch of 18 to 20 year olds that generally we expect a sentence to contain a subject, object, and verb. To give credit where credit is due however, once it is pointed out to them they catch on fast :-)

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(Anonymous)
2005-01-27 10:30 pm UTC (link)
(Michael Farris)

I've had people mistake my spoken English for SAE (linguistic shorthand for Standard American English) and more than one has thought my pronunciation is a very good example of SAE.
They're wrong of course, if you listen closely, I do all sorts of "non-standard" things that come from the mix of dialects found where I grew up. These include (the following are examples meant to illustrate systematic lapses from SAE):

1. I pronounce cot and caught identically (actually this is more and more common and may soon be more common than pronouncing them differently in the US)
2. I pronounce pen and pin identically (I can pronounce them differently but almost never try to)
3. I pronounce winter and winner identially (again, I might pronounce them differently for some purposes but that doesn't come naturally)
4. I use y'all (possessive forms y'alls' and y'alls's)
5. I tend to pronounce didn't as ditn't (both t's usually come out as glottal stops)
6. I usually pronounce which and witch differently (I'm not sure of the status of this, if SAE is supposed to differentiate them or not, but it's the minority pronunciation as far as I can tell)
7. I tend to nasalize vowels before and after nasal consonants

I've seen all the above features classes as non-standard, but I can do all that and more and most people don't notice. Partly this is because my intonation/stress patterns are mostly mid-western (though I've never really been in the 'midwest' as I understand it) and partly because I'm a teacher living in Poland.
Teachers here are expected to do most of the talking, even in a language class [I try to make students talk more than I do, but there I limits to how far I can push that and prosper]. In addition, rooms are often large and/or have really bad acoustics and the students never completely quiet down (another unavoidable fact of teacher life here). I don't shout, but I've had to learn to project my voice a lot better without over-articulating or falling into teacher-talk. The final result is that I sound like I don't think I have an accent (though I do of course) and people pay attention to that and not all the non-standard details.
Also, I don't have many grammar red flags (unless I use them on purpose). This doesn't mean my grammar is SAE, I've heard myself say 'aten' instead of 'eaten' and 'boughten' instead of 'bought' and some other forms that don't correspond to any dialect of English I'm familiar with (oh, I very often pronounce the 'w' in 'sword' I don't know where that comes from either).

I'd say that SAE is partly negative (as in it's not obviously from outside the US and doesn't contain certain shibboleths) partly attitudnial (it's what people say it is even if different people say different things) and partly perceptual (almost everyone is sure they know it when they hear it though the forms they identify as SAE may be very different).

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[info]sighkey
2005-01-27 11:26 pm UTC (link)
How can you pronounce 'which' and 'witch' differently? They are exactly the same in NZSpeak.

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[info]cortezopossum
2005-01-28 12:13 am UTC (link)
I think 'which' is supposed to be pronounced more like /hwich/ whereas 'witch' is just /wich/.

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[info]sighkey
2005-01-28 02:22 am UTC (link)
To both yourself and wetdryvac - thanks.
It's a good thing I have my own office - there is no one else to see/hear me aspirating and articulating in my attempts to hear and feel the difference between 'which' and 'witch'. I am now able to percieve the difference and will probably spend the next few weeks attentively listening to those with whom I'm talking in order to discover if they actually pronounce those 2 words differently :-)

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(Anonymous)
2005-01-28 06:24 am UTC (link)
(Michael Farris)

IIRC the which/witch distinction is pretty rare in kinds of English that have more recent connections with the British Isles (what I think some people call Commonwealth English).

Interestingly, although I pronounced which and witch (and where and wear etc) differently, I don't really hear the difference very clearly (and was surprised to find out that I do pronounce them differently).

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[info]sighkey
2005-01-28 08:53 am UTC (link)
When I first read all this about the 'which'/'witch' distinction I had assumed that we (kiwis)pronounce both as 'witch'. Now that I really listen to myself and also take note of how much 'whisper' there is when I say witch/which I'm inclined to think that I at least am more likely to use 'wh' rather than 'w' in both those cases. I find that saying 'wi' seems more awkward/more energy intensive than saying 'whi'.

Over the last couple of decades the Maori language has come to be quite widely taught at primary and secondary school level. There has also been a lot of emphasis put on the correct prounounciation of Maori placenames. The 'wh' is a common phoneme in Maori and at least in some regions in NZ sounds very like the 'wh' in 'which'. In other regions it sounds more like a soft 'f'. It is possible that the young NZ generation of today will end up using the old english 'wh' sound in english words because they have learned to use them in Maori words.

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[info]sighkey
2005-01-28 09:06 am UTC (link)
Oops, my apologies to all for incorrect spelling of 'pronunciation'. I thought it looked wrong.
The Oxford Paperback Dictionary tells me
"Note that the word should not be written or spoken as 'pronounciation'"

Moral of story: BEFORE posting the comment, always check the dictionary if unsure of spelling - or at least get LJ to spellcheck it before posting.

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A physical explanation of sorts.
[info]wetdryvac
2005-01-28 01:02 am UTC (link)
I'm from Maine in the United States, so it's true that I hear no difference when some regional accents speak the witch/which difference - same exact sounds - but in my own speach, there's a definite difference.

For which, I'm pushing air forward at a constant rate, the back of the throat doesn't close (hwich), and it's not until the termination of the word that flat of the front of the tongue contacts the flat front of the roof of the mouth - and that only for the shortest possible time.

For witch, the word begins with the back of the throat closed, then maintains constant air though the midportion of the word, but treates the end sound as more percussive, tongue barely touching teeth at all, tip of tongue pushing into the flat front of the roof of the mouth creating a more explosive T.

Dunno if that helps, but I do see a lot of changes in those words from accent to accent, mostly relating to closure of throat at the beginning and position of tip and flat of tongue at the end. Needless to say, I don't have the technical terms to descibe a lot of this.

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Pin-pen
[info]janet_coburn
2005-01-28 01:38 am UTC (link)
I had an "Aha!" moment when a friend once asked me, "Why do you say 'ink pen'? What other kind of pen is there?" It suddenly dawned on me that, although I do pronounce "pin" and "pen" differently, I had been born in, was born to people who for most of their lives lived in, and frequently visited a region (Kentucky) where the two words were not a "minimal pair" (I think the linguistics term is). In that region, you had to specify ink pin, safety pin, bobby pin, etc. Somehow, I had picked up the regional term without picking up the regional pronunciation.

(Of course, I could have replied "pig pen and Sean Penn" to my friend's question, but that never occurred to me at the time.)

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[info]mrlogic
2005-01-28 03:37 am UTC (link)
Interesting...I used to get mildly annoyed with my former wife because she pronounced "pen" and "pin" essentially identically, and there were times when I didn't know which she meant. I pronounce them with substantially distinct vowels. She also doesn't distinguish "cot" and "caught" or "don" and "dawn", but I am aware that my making those distinctions puts me in a minority among American English speakers.

BTW, I'm fairly sure that nasalizing vowels before nasal consonants is considered "standard" in English, although doing so after them isn't as far as I know.

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(Anonymous)
2005-01-28 06:18 am UTC (link)
(Michael Farris)

Where I grew up pin and pen weren't distinguished in what passed for the local dialect. I remember one teacher who moved there from another area more than once completely baffled her third grade class by occasionally launching into harangues that went (paraphrasing):

"What is wrong with you? Pin and pin are two separate words. Pin ... Pin. Hear the difference? Pin ... Pin. Don't say pin when you mean pin ...(and on and on and on)." This is what it sounded like to us since, not making the difference, we didn't hear it when other people did. We, her students, just kept very quiet and each one of us hoped they wouldn't be the first one called on to demonstrate the "difference" she had so helpfully outlined. It was _years_ later before I realized what was going on. I had become interested in languages and started reading some linguistics on my own.

Some nasalization of vowels around nasal consonants is considered normal. The phenomenon isn't rare, it's the extent to which it's carried out (how many syllables before and after are affected) that can sound "nonstandard".

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[info]niemandsrose
2005-01-28 06:27 pm UTC (link)
Laws, that can be hard one to teach to people who don't hear it. I once had a student actor from Kentucky whose tongue was just so habitualized to the pin/pin position (rather than feeling the muscular difference between pin/pen) that I couldn't get him to come around. He was playing the Duke in Shakespeare's As You Like It, I think, and his climactic speech was all about "revinge"!

My favorite teaching tool for pin/pen, by the way, is to rest the end of a pen (no joke intended) on the center of my tongue, and say the two words in sequence with the pen resting loosely balanced between my tongue and my fingers. The two words: pin/pen. Then the two vowels: i/e. Watch the pen drop as the tongue drops in height between the two vowels! Then they try it. It's always fun to watch and for a lot of kids, once they *see* it, then they can *feel* it in the muscles on the tongue and jaw. And once they can *feel* it, they can suddenly *hear* it.

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While we're on the subject, what about "us"?
[info]mrlogic
2005-01-28 03:44 am UTC (link)
My ex-wife's speech has one feature that I considered unusual, and she used to tease me about it, saying that I was the one who was odd: she pronounces "us" as "uz" in many contexts. I haven't ever seen this feature "mapped out" as a regionalism; is it familiar to anyone here?

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Re: While we're on the subject, what about "us"?
[info]janet_coburn
2005-01-28 12:19 pm UTC (link)
Not that quirk, but a different one. My husband, who grew up in Pennsylvania, pronounces "saw" (either verb or noun) as if it had an L at the end of it. Especially if it comes before a vowel: "I sawl a hawk outside my window." Again, I don't know if it's personal or regional.

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Re: While we're on the subject, what about "us"?
[info]mrlogic
2005-01-28 04:31 pm UTC (link)
Interesting. I've heard "sawr" but not "sawl".

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Re: While we're on the subject, what about "us"?
(Anonymous)
2006-04-16 09:44 pm UTC (link)
I have read the above with interest. I would add that in the British Isles there are a multitude of accents and at no point has the term "Newcastle Standard English" or "Liverpuddlian Standard English" been used. I would conjecture that what we are talking about is a matter of regional and national identity and not different types or deviations of english. After all we have all read the above without the need for a translator...

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