A dialect is still English, y'all

https://www.ajc.com/education/get-schooled/a-dialect-is-still-english-yall/BJWGL6AA55ENDHBYYANJLO2F24/

April 18, 2025

By Peter Smagorinsky

UGA professor emeritus wants teachers to think about how they might pathologize students who speak differently.

"Our captain has a handicap to cope with, sad to tell. He's from Georgia, and he doesn't speak the language very well." - 'It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier' by Tom Lehrer.

Citizens of Georgia, how does it make you feel to be an object of humor because of how you learned to speak while growing up? How does it feel when Georgians, and Southerners more broadly, are made the objects of humor in film and everyday media, mocked and considered to be uneducated yokels because of the way they talk? How do students feel when teachers look down on them for using the diction they learned at home?

I began musing about these questions as I was reading transcripts of discussions some of my former undergraduate students at the University of Georgia took part in as they participated in book club discussions of research-centered books on issues facing educators. The group I focus on was composed of four white, upper-middle class women in their second year of college.

The first book they chose to read and discuss was Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy's edited collection, "The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom." The editors are African American women who are concerned with the ways in which a racial speech pattern is interpreted by people from other linguistic communities.

In their discussions the four students put this book-learning in dialogue with their personal experiences and worldly knowledge, their experiences tutoring students at Athens' alternative high school, their knowledge of popular culture, their learning from other university courses and their own projected images of how they would teach once they had their own classes.

Among the consistent questions they asked: When people are treated as stupid, an outsider, an alien, a member of a pathologized social group because of a social marker like a dialect, hairstyle, clothing and so on, how do they feel about their sense of belonging?

Delpit and Dowdy's contributors are primarily concerned with African American speech and how it is interpreted as stigmatic by those whose judgments have authority and consequences. The students broadened the discussion to any group that might be underestimated due to the way they speak, whether they were speaking with their skin, to use the book's title, or with their tongues.

The students explored the consequences of linguistic disapproval, focusing on the feelings of alienation that might envelop a student who is continually corrected or dismissed based on using the version of English they learned at home. How, then, might an English teacher work on the language and writing strands of the curriculum, when there is an expectation that schools teach a single version, the one found in textbooks, and correct any student's alternative ways of speaking English? Especially when students' verbal skills will be assessed on standardized tests that use the textbook standard for English, what is a teacher to do when students have had a lifetime of socialization to other versions of the language?

In their discussions, they agreed that a resolution might be in considering how people feel when they and their families are assumed to be deficient. Schools are much better at promoting unemotional ways of thinking, grounded in science and reason, than at using emotional connections to help generate a feeling of affiliation with school. They are better at correcting than understanding. But to these prospective teachers, teaching with empathy provided the best way of connecting with students' lives and considering how it feels to be constructed as a deficient outsider, all for talking the way they learned to talk at home.

Their discussion included reflections on how they themselves might be interpreted because of their own Southern speech practices. In most of Georgia, they fit in. But outside the region, people might judge them negatively, even though their dialect has its own distinctive, consistent and acceptable pace, cadence, vocabulary and other genre features.

Thinking about their own feelings about being from Georgia and being handicapped, to use Lehrer's term, by their Southern accents and speech patterns, led them to put themselves in the shoes of their students. Empathy, in this case, provided them with a relational way of helping students feel more academically at home, and making school a place they are more likely to find welcoming and serving their interests.

The language strand of the curriculum has long bedeviled English teachers. Over a century of research has agreed that teaching grammar as grammar does not change how people speak. The students I'm describing agreed with what might be called an applied linguistics perspective: that grammar use is situational, and that instead of using a single grammatical standard, people benefit from learning local grammar rules. They should learn how to talk when shifting from context to context, without feeling ashamed of what they consider their home language. Textbook rules matter in school and (often) in white-collar professions, but might be interpreted as putting on airs down at the body shop. And not in the tires.

Many Georgians might not speak the same language as the Harvard-educated northerner Tom Lehrer. But they speak an English that works for them. It helps if they can switch language codes to fit in elsewhere, just as it behooves anyone to learn whatever codes of power are in place from situation to situation, provided that such a code switch is welcome. And it helps them even more when the people with power extend empathy toward them in order to understand that being different doesn't mean being deficient.

Peter Smagorinsky speaks mostly English, but not always in the same way. He is a retired professor at the University of Georgia, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame and former co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English.