Dialects in the Classroom

There are several advantages to standardization. The most important is that it allows us to read efficiently and focus on the content, not the form. You can recreate the process of reading without standardization by reading the work of a beginning reader/writer – for example a first or second grader’s writing. You will necessarily read more slowly, even if the letters are clear; this is because beginning writers often use nonstandard spellings that force you to sound everything out (and focus on context in the case of homophones) to identify the words. Standardization allows for orthographic mapping,1 the process by which specific spellings are associated with individual words in the brain, including their pronunciation, thereby allowing us to access them automatically and effortlessly, bypassing the sounding out stage (though that stage is necessary to connect the spellings to the lexical entries in the brain and become a mature reader, and mature readers still employ it when encountering new words).2  For mature readers, it is so automatic that it is impossible to stop yourself from reading when you are presented with written material, as Stroop3  and others4 have shown. When reading is automatic, you no longer have to think about decoding and you can instead devote all your attention to the message. A side effect of this is that people who speak mutually intelligible dialects can now read each other’s words with the same ease they understand them when spoken (and in some cases, possibly with more ease). Orthographic mapping, in short, neutralizes the effects of dialect on reading. But to get to that point requires instruction that acknowledges and understands dialect and its relation to the standard.  

Standard spellings in English reflect many things, including the personal choices of foreign-language press holders (e.g. the GH in ghost is the product of Flemish typesetters), but the most important is that while standardization was a long process and small changes continue to be made to the system, it fundamentally represents the pronunciation of the region surrounding London in the 17th century (though with additional complications: note that it also preserves the orthography of borrowed words, e.g. pizza from Italian or beautiful from French; that morphology is preserved, as in the case of music-musician; or that etymology is represented, as in psychology). Unfortunately for every English speaker (and writer) in years to follow, this standardization was also taking place at a time of great change. Specifically, a major change in the way vowels were pronounced was initiated in the 16th century: the Great Vowel Shift. This shift, a slow process that is technically still in progress, most notably resulted in the diphthongization of English long vowels (and in fact we call them “long vowels” because historically they were just longer-held versions of the short vowels). “Silent [or Magic] E makes the vowel say its name” is a product of the Great Vowel Shift.  

But languages are always changing, and this is particularly true of English. A quick rundown of changes to the language in the past 500 years at Wikipedia (see, for example, here) will give you an idea of the many ways English has changed since Shakespeare’s time (reading Shakespeare, of course, will also give you a feel for it). This is compounded by the fact that English spread all over the globe during this period, creating new communities of English speakers and new opportunities for the language to develop independently. The result is a vast array of English dialects, distinct but related to each other, created as the language developed differently among groups separated by geography, class, ethnicity, and other factors.  

The upshot of this is that nobody alive today speaks the dialect that was encoded in the standard spellings (especially since this standard took some time to settle into its modern form).  But despite updates and some minor regional variation (e.g. Noah Webster’s decisions regarding American English spelling that solidified spellings like color and neighbor, resulting in the rest of the world selecting colour and neighbour), English spelling world-wide is remarkably uniform. The good news, however, is that language change is regular. What this means is that generally speaking, it changes systematically: if you pronounce the vowel /a/ differently in one word, you usually now pronounce it that way everywhere (or at least everywhere that shares the phonological context). This results in predictable patterns: phonics. While speakers in Australia may pronounce day [dai] and Americans pronounce it [dei], the spelling of the word remains unaffected. Australians simply learn that AY stands for [ai] and Americans learn that it stands for [ei]. Across dialects, there may be many rules that differ (speakers of non-rhotic – or r-dropping – dialects, like some varieties of British English, must learn to contend with the R that only surfaces under certain conditions), but these are not insurmountable problems.

Likewise, grammatical structures may pose problems for comprehension.  In the eighteenth century, English was not yet the global powerhouse it is today.  Inspired by the Enlightenment, people like Samuel Johnson, suffering from a sense of insecurity regarding his own language, applied rules from mathematics and from classical languages (Greek and Latin) to the English language.  Thus it was decided, for example, that “double negatives” (I ain’t never) were incorrect (after all, in math, two negatives make a positive), despite their widespread use.  While the formal standard is not specifically codified in a single place and the boundaries are fuzzy, a comparison of several style guides will reveal a number of core, generally agreed-upon features.  

Spoken language has a standard as well; this standard is entirely uncodified but represents the collective agreement of the speech community.  In short, features that are associated with people who hold wealth and power are favored over those used by those occupying lower positions in the social hierarchy.  The features selected, as the example of multiple negation in standard French outlined at the beginning of this pamphlet demonstrated, are not chosen for their objective superiority, but rather for this association with wealth, education, and power (which tend to coincide).  Consequently, there are a range of pronunciations and structures deemed prestigious and there is no single dialect that represents the spoken standard.  There are also a range of dialects that speakers consider incorrect, however unfair this may be.  The common misconception of the public is that these are poor attempts at speaking the standard rather than equally valid, if different, ways of speaking.