As an international student who learned English as their second language, this was one of the more entertaining academic pieces I’ve read. I can resonate with this piece in several aspects from my experience here in the US, but I’m unsure if I agree with it. My teachers started drilling the laws of English grammar into our heads when I was in elementary school in China for my first English classes. Tenses, fixed phrases, parts of speech, and so on; these abstract guidelines were the rules everyone abided by. Countless nights were spent memorizing words with irregular past tenses like ‘sneak’ and ‘snuck’; pages and pages of practice conversation scenarios made clear the difference between ‘there,’ ‘their’, and ‘they’re.’ Aside from written English, they tell students who plan to study abroad that they would be looked down upon if they spoke with an accent. I spent years learning, writing, and speaking the “standard English” they taught me. They used to always tell us this is how English-speaking people spoke. When I arrived in the US for high school, I realized that wasn’t the case. My peers indeed spoke English, and I could pick up words from their sentences, but the words were all arranged in a formation unlike what they taught me in school. The confusion and awkwardness that washed over me when I was greeted with “‘Sup” for the first time instead of “How are you” was palpable. The cluelessness of receiving a text that said “fr” from a friend and having to come up with a reply is still vivid. Learning how people my age spoke in real life was akin to learning an entirely new language. I caught on with the speech pattern with time, but in the beginning, it was a struggle to communicate with people as someone new to the language, and it was prohibitively challenging to engage in a conversation when the ‘lingo’ doesn’t translate. Nowadays, I speak and text my friends a certain way, and I agree with the idea of blending the written and spoken language patterns of cultures to form a stronger argument. Still, I believe using dialect, and regional vernacular in any official setting is counterproductive. I disagree with Young’s sentiment in the refusal of Fish’s statement, “If he meant everybody should be thrilled to learn another dialect, then wouldn’t everybody be learning everybody’s dialect? Wouldn’t we all become multidialectal and plural-lingual? And that’s my exact argument” (Young 111). Because you don’t want to learn one dialect, you will learn all of the dialects? Language is meant to be an organized way to effectively communicate, and I don’t believe language is the appropriate platform to showcase one’s identity in a setting where efficient communication is expected. Where I’m from, each town has its own dialect with its own expressions and proverbs that vary from neighboring towns; whenever in a conversation, if any party does not speak the dialect the discussion is engaged in, the language in question will default to standard Mandarin for the sake of clarity and the ease of communication. There may be expressions that work in a specific dialect but do not work in standard Mandarin; it does not matter how good the expression is if the other parties in the conversation do not understand the dialect or the culture it references to. It complicates communications where accuracy, preciseness, and a vast reach of understandability are critical. I do enjoy texting and speaking to my friends in a personal setting with more casual language, but I believe official communications should be differentiated and treated more seriously.
Young also argues that language or dialect does not affect how they’re perceived and do not make them vulnerable to prejudice (Young 110), but that’s simply not true. Maybe in a perfect, harmonious world, people’s accents only enrich their characters, but in the real world, disclosure of your background through your language or accent inherently carries judgment or sometimes even hate from others. We’d rather think it’s not there, but it’s there. Young uses an example of the communications between Cleland and Rich, who used colloquial language, to refute the idea that non-standard English should be reserved for non-official settings (Young 115). But the example is of two old white men in positions of power; they are effectively exempted from prejudice no matter their usage of vernacular language. If a person whose first language is not English uses the same, non-standard language, the perception will be much different, for the worse. I need to put in the extra effort with speaking and writing whenever my country of origin is disclosed because the standard I’m being measured against changes. When I say anything in a non-standard fashion, it does not get branded ‘vernacular language’; it’s ‘bad English.’
The standard we are held to in this society is different for different groups of people; I would love to live in Young’s world where people don’t receive judgment when speaking non-standard English, but that’s not the world we live in right now; I enjoy this rhetoric, but it is unrealistic. I’ll keep speaking the mainstream way in any non-personal setting until we can close that gap between here and there.
