Dialects in the Classroom

All language, even nonstandard language, is rule-governed and regular. Language is also constantly changing, which is why your students may speak slightly differently from you, even if you are from the same neighborhood of the same city. The rules that determine what words, and in what order, come out of our mouths when we speak are called the grammar of the language. You may associate the word grammar with school, and with the idea that there is good and bad grammar (or right and wrong grammar), but linguists think of grammar as a neutral set of rules that are stored in our brains, built up over time based on what we hear and experience around us. Linguists have demonstrated that all spoken and signed languages have grammars, or sets of rules, even if those rules are different from the standard. 

Interestingly, grammatical rules are not set in stone, and they can change over time. As a result, young people’s speech tends to differ slightly from that of their parents and grandparents. One example of this in American English is the past tense of dive. Do you say dived or dove? Does one sound more correct than the other to you? This might have to do with your age – the older form is dived, but many younger speakers use dove. Neither is more or less right than the other. But over time, dove will win out as users of dived become fewer (pass away) and users of dove pass their usage down to the next generation. This is language change in action.

While this is a pretty subtle example, anyone who has had to read Chaucer or Shakespeare in school knows that these slight differences accumulate, resulting in much more drastic language change over time. As language changes, sometimes natural variation develops between two forms – like dived and dove above. Language changes all the time, no matter what, but some things may affect the direction of the change. For example, contact between speakers of different languages or dialects, especially if that contact is sustained and across multiple domains of interaction (at school, work, worship, and play, for example). In New Orleans, since Hurricane Katrina, there has been rapid change in local demographics, which may lead to lots of speakers of different dialects interacting with each other more than before the storm. This may in turn lead to language change, and to a significant period of variation between dialects spoken by longstanding New Orleanians versus newcomers. Moreover, the shift to an all-charter system has shifted the city away from neighborhood-based schools, sometimes bringing children from all over the city into classrooms together. The relevance for teachers is that there may be more linguistic diversity in the classroom now than there was a generation ago.