Politicking Politicker Politicky-tacky

What holds together and defines a community?

We often discuss ideals and rules which define groups of people, but without language acting as a binding agent, the different members of communities are not able to communicate ideals and rules.

Linguistic choices play a part in defining communities through phonetic differentiation in dialects, word choice, and varying syntax.  Such is also true of the classroom environment.

In choosing linguistic norms for the classroom, teachers and education policy makers define the language policy of the learning environment.  These norms refer not only to linguistic value but also to underlying political and social goals which the educational community use to influence the behavior of the speech community.  The chosen linguistic norms hold value as the official language of the classroom while perhaps devaluing other linguistic choices.  In breaking the language choices of the classroom versus 'other', the teacher and policy makers create a dichotomous relationship in the wider communities, separating those who are able to conform to the classroom linguistic choices versus those who either do not have access to the classroom or who value their external communities more highly (and may consequently see conforming to classroom language policy as a denial of their culture).

How can the H-language of education and official policy not create cultural conflict?

How can, as Auerbach (1995) discusses, language in the classroom not create tension as a dynamic of power and domination?

Is it true that a common language unifies whereas multiple languages divide?  Or only mostly true?

While I personally see the value in uniting a people through language instruction so that in day-to-day activities we comprehend one another, I do not see official national policy as the place to dictate which languages should be excluded from the classroom.  It is true that common language unifies.  Given this fact, I see the debate moreso as needing community/township discretion.

If in schools the students are regularly introduced, through bilingual education for example, to more than one language, they are bound to become more unified with their peers and the larger community.  When introduced to new community members or visiting relatives, the students will be able to draw on more than one language and linguistic form in order to accommodate for the linguistic characteristics of the new members creating further unification!  If new members are pushed away due to linguistic differences, there will never be the sort of unity which policy seeks to administer.

Don't talk of the Highs and Lows, talk IN them

Kubota and Ward (2000) and McKay and Bokhorst-Heng (2008) align thoughts through discussion of diversity in the world of Englishes.  English is spoken around the world as an official language, of government and enterprise, in many more countries than those of the 'inner-circle', and it is pushed as a second (foreign/international) language in dozens others.  The growth and spread of language through globalization and access to media meas that fewer and fewer clearly monolingual communities exist.  It is not to say that the average American community contains a majority of bilingual participants (being that the average American is generally impoverished when it comes to exposure to second/foreign languages), but imagine what we find at any grocery store on food packaging:

Ingredients/Ingredientes
Calories/Calorias
Flour, Sugar, Salt
Harina, Azúcar, Sal

We expect to find Spanish options on packaging, on the phone when calling Comcast or T-Mobile, on credit card applications and at the car dealership.  We do not expect to find Spanish spoken by the principals of our elementary schools, by the deans of our universities, by our politicians and policy makers and CEOs of multi-million dollar corporations.  We, and the communities and countries discussed in the article and book, live in a diglossia.

English is the language of power, the high language in relation to the other languages spoken in diglossic situations.  English is empowered by those in the upper classes as well as by the mystic role it plays in the minds of the lower classes as the key to upward movement.
However, even when a person learns English and adapts it to his voice and style, making it his English, he may not be accepted:


Asian: eighdy fie sen.
D-Fens: I can’t understand you . . . I’m not paying eighty-five cents for a stinking soda. I’ll give you a  quarter. You give me seventy “fie” cents back for the phone . . . What is a fie? There’s a “V” in the word. Fie-vuh. Don’t they have “v’s” in China?
Asian: Not Chinese, I am Korean.
D-Fens: Whatever. What difference does that make? You come over here and take my money and you don’t even have the grace to learn to speak my language . . .
(qtd. in Lippi-Green 101–102, from Kubota and Ward)

The discriminatory character, 'D-Fens', is somewhat justified in saying that 'Asian' does not speak HIS language, they speak Englishes in different registers, with different lexicon, and towards different purposes.  However, 'Asian' is still classed into using his English as a low language being that his accent causes others to discriminate against him.  Through this lens we see that English being a key to upward movement is somewhat a myth to stand guard against.  'Asian's English may have allowed him access to life in a different country, but is he a white-collar worker?  Does he own his business?  Is he a doctor? lawyer? engineer? professor?  No.

The myth of English as a springboard to success accompanies another hard pill to swallow, but this time from  the other side, the NES side.  Many Americans are not aware that they speak an English or that they speak with accents.  This leads to such problems as that expressed above, as well as in depressing speakers of low languages in a diglossia.  TESOL professionals, as well as all concerned instructors in the humanities, need to make students aware of themselves on the global scale which they so regularly access.  When newscasters, film, and tv speak with a midwest accent, and these clips travel the world around, the midwest American is reinforced with his thinking that he is the norm and everyone else is 'other'.
Instructors have to guide students through the realization of self as other, as well as recognizing the pressures placed on other cultures through globalization.  Students need to be aware of the role that colonialism and class structure plays in other countries' politics regarding English so that they themselves can become more sensitive to their situation and others' both high and low in the diglossic span.