Language and Politics: How Language Use and Reception Influences Minority Status, a Sociological Perspective.

“Aaaaaaowww” said Eliza Doolittle as she sat in the gutter of the wrong side of London. We watched in admiration as Henry Higgins transformed her from a “guttersnipe” to a “Duchess” in mere weeks, concentrating almost entirely on her speech and grammar alone. Is the Cockney dialect she learned from her father the only thing keeping her in that dirty street? Did Professor Higgins give her the gift of a new lifestyle and infinite opportunities simply by teaching her to speak the King’s English?

What can teachers in America learn about the significance of a person’s dialect regarding their class and social standing? We find ourselves in a multicultural society, with many tribes or cliques of people, differentiated by gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, region, religion, and many other factors. Each of us speaks a different language; some of us speaking one from another branch of linguistics, such as Spanish, and some speaking a different dialect of the same language, though sometimes not easily mutually comprehensible. The language or dialect we choose to speak informs others who we are, what tribe we belong to, and where we stand in society.

America is built on the concept of upward mobility; anyone can make something of him or herself if they just try hard enough, yet millions of minorities find themselves stuck in a cycle of poverty or prejudice. The free educational system is set up to eliminate this problem, but until teachers take responsibility for the effects of language on a student’s learning process, it may continue to be an issue.
Sociologists have researched the effects of language on culture, and vice versa. They have come to the conclusion that the differences between languages and dialects, while being partly due to geographic isolation, also have a root in the cultural identities of the people who speak them. While many people may share a common language such as English, the cultures of the people who share that language differs greatly. This shows up in the dialects in the form of less substantial changes in word choice, commonly accepted grammatical errors, syntax, and pronunciation. While wandering abroad, strangers can often identify you by your accent, and upon closer observation, may eventually decipher your economic background and even religious or political affiliations.

How we speak is a direct reflection of our cultural heritage. We are socialized and taught to speak by our parents, who belonged to a specific tribe, and thus taught us in the manner of language used by this tribe. No matter what other languages or dialects we learn, the language our mothers taught us will always be our “mother tongue”, and therefore our parents’ culture, and even their social standing, will always be our “birth culture”. These traits are developmentally difficult to overcome, as anyone who has ever tried to learn a new language or pick up a different accent can testify. Sometimes, effective enculturation can hide birth traits, as in the case of some immigrant populations who have become completely assimilated. This is the process which education sometimes serves to provide, bringing everyone into the “melting pot” that promises a homogenous society in America by using a single example of what they call “Standard English”.

In order to fully understand the role that language has in personal identity, we must first analyze the effects of language on attitudes, power structures, and even cognitive abilities. It is important to start with the assumption that people are not genetically deficient because they speak a nonstandard dialect. Every dialect, regardless of the social standing of the tribe that speaks it, is its own specific variation on a language, based on its own unique principles and guidelines.

What every culture, and therefore every language, shares is a set of rules. Each tribe picks their own rules for their language, and stick by them pretty closely. These rules are learned from our parents and peers, and are difficult to unlearn. Even when faced with the knowledge that some of them may go directly against the accepted rules of the standard language, they are old habits that are hard to break. “All cultures provide rules for appropriate communicative interaction, defining behaviors that should occur, that may occur, and that should not occur in given contexts. These rules are learned through both formal and informal processes of socialization that begin in childhood.” P. 80 (Bonvillain, 2008) A child who speaks a different dialect from her teacher may not realize that what she is used to saying may in fact be a genuine grammatical error. In essence, “children learn a language, the social use of that language, and are socialized to assume a particular identity and roles as members of their group.” (Kinkaid, 1994)

The significance of this fact lies not just with the realization of commonly accepted errors, but a child’s whole concept of self might change as a result of being exposed to several of these contradictions. “Children not only learn to express their ideas about persons, objects, and events when learning language; they also learn how their group uses that knowledge to meet personal and cultural objectives.” (Kinkaid, 1994) Their sense of identity as belonging to their birth tribe might come into questions as they encounter different ways of communicating, particularly if their accustomed way is considered “low” or “substandard” by the very teachers who point out their flaws. This problem is exacerbated when political issues and prejudice are some of the factors involved.

The tribe we grow up with may have several ways of identifying itself; we can identify with our race, class, or any combination of the above mentioned sociological categories. “Variation in ways of speaking stems both from segmentation of the speech community into groups based on class, gender, race, and the like, and from differences in the contexts of speech events.” P. 79 (Bonvillain, 2008) Many of these categories carry with them a political consequence, based on the attitudes of the dominant culture. If you live in a majority White population such as the United States, growing up Black has certain political disadvantages, based on historical and institutional racism. Likewise, only speaking Spanish can provide difficulties in a society that mostly speaks English, and cause frustration among certain members of the majority population who would like to see everyone learn English in order to join our society.

Most of these political differences stem from class issues, those of the rich or middle class versus the poor. Most often, language differences seldom cause problems among the more educated middle and upper classes, which points directly to the class issue as one of the main factors.

“In some cases, our dialect may reflect our ethnic background. Within a particular area, working-class African-Americans can sound different from working-class European-Americans. In the middle class, this distinction is much less reliable. With middle or upper-class speakers, it may be impossible to tell anything about their ethnicity just from their dialect.” (Fought, 2005)

Children of working class parents learn the language of their parents, in addition to their values and beliefs that are firmly rooted in the communicative tradition of that language. When a child grows up learning a certain language, his concept of identity is related to the ideology of his parents and their tribe. Each word choice and accepted grammatical error has a function in demonstrating the speaker’s history and people. “The words we use for concepts do help form our ideologies, attitudes, and behaviors…” which means that “language reflects cultural attitudes and…we unconsciously adopt those attitudes as we learn the language.” P. 428 (Chaika, 1994) In the case of a lower income family, a child’s language may demonstrate the financial status of her parents, and a listener’s attitude toward her may be based on this connection.

Researchers attempt to explain the differences in the language use of students from a poor working class family as it pertains to their communication in the classroom. Some have stated that “low family children are less used to and less skilled at competitive verbal interactions, learn to comply with directives based on appeals to external rules and sanctions, and are less practiced in the kinds of interactions that take place in school settings.” P. 164 (Bonvillain, 2008) This belief attempts to illustrate a difference in the cognitive processes that children from this background may have. It is therefore tempting for some researchers to assume that poor children have inferior intelligence, which has serious sociological significance. If this conclusion is drawn from the assumption that the difference is by nature, then it logically becomes a bias based solely on race or ethnicity, since none would claim that poor white children and rich white children were somehow genetically different.

In the case of gender roles, a case could be made for genetic influence on cognitive ability. What has been discovered, rather, is that gender roles are socially constructed, and the influence of our culture has more to do with our separation than genetics. Upon extensive study of the language differentiation of the genders, it has been found that “…women and men are socialized to express themselves in different ways in accordance with cultural norms that teach and reinforce differentiated gender roles.” (Bonvillain, 2008) How men and women view each other is based on the language that each uses. “Through communicative processes, cultural models of gender are both portrayed and reinforced, contributing to the socialization of females and males into their expected roles and also creating their ideas about themselves and each other.” (Bonvillain, 2008) Communication plays the most important role in not only the socialization of differing male and female gender roles, but in how we perceive the other from our own perspective.

By its very nature, language use and our perception of it leads to prejudice. When someone listens to another person speak with a different language or dialect, they assume that the person speaking has a different belief system. People are by nature very protective of their own belief system as taught to them by their tribe, and are suspicious when they encounter anyone who demonstrates any variance from their own set of beliefs. One researcher suggests that our different language use is evidence in an entirely different way of thinking:

“Because members of difference social classes use different modes of expression, they develop different patterns of thought and, thus, understand their world in different ways.” (Bonvillain, 2008)

According to cultural anthropologists, culture can manifest itself outwardly in many easily recognizable ways. Likewise, linguists understand that “social and economic differences among members of a community are reflected in many aspects of lifestyle, educational and occupational opportunities, and political power…” But in addition to these visible means of identification, language use can contribute to the labeling of people based on preconceived ideas about a person’s culture or class. “These differences, perhaps summarized under the notion of class, have interdependent impacts on linguistic performance as well. Language use both reflects and reinforces class differences.” (Bonvillain, 2008) When people from different classes are in communication, each one gathers information about the other based on their style of communication, and sometimes attaches these generalities to prejudices they may have already had based on their attitudes toward that class.

In the classroom, this prejudice translates into a belief about the way certain children may learn. If a teacher assumes that a child will not learn a certain way because of their background, it may provide a barrier to education. For instance, in the case of Latino children who use Spanish exclusively, teachers have sometimes made the assumption that because they do not speak English, they are necessarily less intelligent than their English speaking counterparts, or that they may not be able to learn the same subject matter as quickly. It has been argued that the “lack of congruence between the cognitive styles of Mexican American children and the expectations of the school environment was offered as an explanation for their failure to achieve in school.” (Lessow-Hurley, 2005) It can be inferred from this that the bias against Spanish speaking students is responsible for the poor performance of Latino children in American schools.

Minority children who struggle in the classroom do so because of a cognitive difference that depends entirely on cultural incompatibility with the mainstream. If a child is used to a way of thinking and learning that was instilled upon him by his tribe, then it would naturally follow that to learn an entirely new way of thinking would be a challenge. This is explained using the example of the cultural mismatch model:

The cultural mismatch model suggests that members of minority groups do not succeed in school because the characteristics of their cultures are incongruent with those of the mainstream group and the school system. This view is supported by the work of researchers who have analyzed learning styles. Culture traits that are part of learning style and that may affect classroom dynamics include cognitive styles, communicative styles, and interaction styles—features that often overlap. (Lessow-Hurley, 2005)


According to some arguments, it would appear that a child’s minority status might account for more than a small amount of responsibility for her difficulty in the classroom, overshadowing factors such as genetic cognitive abilities or cultural contexts that prevent understanding. Racial prejudice might play a significant role in how African Americans, for example, are approached in any discourse, particularly a classroom lesson. John Ogbu (1994) claims that the struggle of African Americans to adapt to the dominant learning style is entirely related to their minority status:
Euro-Americans and African Americans do not differ in intelligence simply because Euro-Americans have a technological culture and African Americans do not. Nor are the two populations different in intelligence only because African Americans practice to some degree the cognitive socialization that can be traced to African origins. Rather, the differences between some minorities such as African Americans and Euro-Americans arise in important part from the status of the minorities qua minorities (i.e., from their minority status and all that it implies.

How we react to an individual’s style of language usage is a reflection of our own bias about that person’s culture. When we make judgments about the way they speak, we are really making judgments about them as an individual, and representing our attitude about their belief system in general. “Fundamentally it is not language in the abstract that is evaluated negatively or positively, but language as it is used by specific segments of the population. Criticizing linguistic variants is actually a mask for the social denigration of speakers.” (Bonvillain, 2008)
The elements of communication between members of two different classes that may lead to judgments being made about one or both speakers has its roots in very minor details, such as word choice or subtle varieties of phrasing. “Alternative ways of phrasing the same goal can also covertly involve different assumptions about individuals’ rights, obligations, and accepted norms of interaction.” (Bonvillain, 2008) If you say, for example, “gimme dat”, versus “please hand me that”, the person you are speaking to will be inclined to make a judgment about your particular class and social standing. This may lead to prejudicial thinking, and eventually steer the course of the conversation, as well as the relationship, based entirely on these assumptions.

On one hand, the insertion of the word “please”, the correct pronunciation of the words “give me”, with the linguistic ability or willingness to pronounce the “th” sound, can indicate which of these speakers are likely to be the more socially powerful and dominant culture, at least in America. One is reminded of the Israelite King who performed ethnic cleansing by killing anyone who could not pronounce the “sh” sound in the Hebrew word for corn. The fact that the English founded the original thirteen colonies and used Africans as slaves does not necessarily mean the definitive superiority of one phrase over the other. Rather, it is just an indication of the power struggle that occurs between the two tribes. “When speakers of different languages come together, the results are determined in large part by the economic and political power of the speakers of each language.” (Eble, 2005)
The use of vernacular language always has its appropriate place, and is used by everyone depending on the scenario. It is used especially among members of a single tribe when communicating amongst themselves, as a show of solidarity with their own people. This would account for the continuation of dialects despite the era of television. “Despite the onslaught of the media, regional, social, and ethnic dialect differences remain strong in America.” (Chaika, 1994) The more minorities feel pressured to conform to the dominant culture, the more they are inclined to resist, and maintain their own distinct cultural flavor, particularly through their language use.

Peer pressure can account for a tremendous amount of pressure to maintain a differentiated language style within a minority population. People who feel oppressed tend to want to bind together in their common identity in order to remain true to their heritage, and sharing a nonstandard dialect is an essential part of this. In this way people can pick and choose which situations demand which particular style of language. For instance, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is spoken frequently among members of the same race, even in the case where one or more of the speakers are capable of speaking the more dominant dialect of the English language. “Features of AAVE occur with greatest frequency in informal contexts when speakers share life experiences, expectations, and values. In contrast, speakers use standard English in situations of formality and social distance.” (Bonvillain, 2008) Whichever form of the language is chosen by the speaker illustrates the context and the goals of the conversation.
In analyzing the use of AAVE and other forms of dialect, it was seen that speakers can even switch back and forth between dialects at will, and that this “…code switching from standard speech to the vernacular was seen to emphasize community membership and create affective and supportive bonds.” (Bonvillain, 2008) These linguistic styles are seen as the device by which speakers establish a common bond, based on their heritage. This may in fact, be the source of such dialects and the means by which they perpetuate under pressure to conform. “Wherever societal distinctions are made among community members, linguistic and stylistic variations arise to reflect and reinforce existing segmentation.” (Bonvillain, 2008)
Elaine Chaika (1994) makes several observations about AAVE that can be surmised based upon the knowledge of African Americans as an oppressed minority and their struggles to respond to this status. She defines it clearly as a dialect based in cultural identification:

“AAVE can be considered an ethnic dialect, as it marks its speakers as belonging to a specific cultural group with a specific history in the American experience…AAVE and hip-hop are ways of African Americans bonding with each other, as well as of showing identity with their forebears who suffered so much.

She also points out that there is sometimes an equal pressure from the fellow members of the minority to avoid any usage of the dominant language, and violators are sometimes seen as “Traitors to the cause.” “There is strong evidence that the ‘in’ group of African American urban youth prefer those who speak AAVE. Those who don’t used to be called ‘lames’, and were treated like outsiders.”

As children become aware of their minority status and all that it implies in terms of their social standing, they may develop some negative ideas about their relationship to the majority. This might perhaps extend to their teachers, who are their first visible encounters with people who regularly insist on their conformity to the dominant:

“Children’s linguistic problems, though, should be seen as resulting from their awareness of teachers’ negative judgments and their ensuing rejection of teachers’ demands. Additionally, the effects of peer pressure can be considerable. Other children often ridicule and reject students who speak standard English and perform well in school. Because most children want to be accepted by their peers, combined with their perception that they will never get teachers’ approval, they frequently rebel against standard norms.” (Bonvillain, 2008)


Family plays an important role in a minority student’s resistance to give up his language in favor of the dominant language. Sometimes, people feel that by sacrificing their language, they are giving up a piece of their own identity, particularly if they no longer are able to speak freely with members of their own immediate family. “When people lose the language of their culture, their family ties can be weakened, and with them often their religious ties as well, and their sense of ethnic identity and community. A shared language strengthens social and familial bonds.” (Chaika, 1994) People begin to feel that their families and kin, members of their tribe, are being cut off from society and from themselves as they become more and more enculturated. “When people lose the language of their traditions, they may also start to disvalue the traditions themselves. When that happens, the old who are seen as the guardians of tradition become disvalued as well.” (Chaika, 1994) In a tradition of tightly knit extended family units, with a strong protectiveness of relatives, this represents a kind of trap, and one that is not willingly entered.
Linguistic solidarity among minorities presents itself most potently when the issue of bilingual education is examined. Latinos make up 14.5 percent of the population of the U.S., (World Directory of Minorities, 2008) and it is safe to say that a vast majority of these people speak Spanish as their first language. Many more immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are coming into the country every day. For people who see this as a threat to their own economic security, due to the lack of low wage jobs available to white Americans, something that is seen as a direct result of this mass immigration, the language barrier provides a hot button issue upon which they can focus the majority of their frustration. One seldom ever hears about people protesting the allowance of highly educated people from other countries who take positions that would have otherwise gone to other educated Americans. This seems to point directly to the fact that the problem is one of ethnic bias, one that is easily attributable to the language difference, in addition to the obvious variations in skin and hair color.

Despite clear research that indicates the usefulness and productivity of bilingual programs in public schools, it is still debated hotly among policy makers, even in the face of evidence that shows the need for extended programs. It is clear by assessing the movement to eliminate bilingual programs from education who is behind this and their motivations why:

Movements to restrict language use reach beyond the education system and are tied into large political and social issues. Language restrictionism in the United States has generally accompanied anti-immigration movements…Opponents of bilingual education commonly hold unrealistic and unsupported notions about how long it takes to learn a language well enough to compete with native speakers in a classroom.” (Lessow-Hurley, 2005)

According to John Ogbu’s typology of the various types of minorities in the U.S., there is only one type susceptible to linguistic pressure; the “Castelike minorities”, who have reached their minority status based on an already predetermined power relationship with the dominant culture. (Lessow-Hurley, 2005) Examples of these are: African Americans who came here originally as slaves and were specifically forbidden from being educated, Mexicans who were either conquered under Manifest Destiny or have immigrated here out of desperate need to escape poverty, and Native Americans who were systematically subjected to genocide and elimination. Autonomous minorities, such as Jews and Mormons, are rarely caught up in battles over language use in the classroom or cognitive ability. Some immigrant minorities, such as Cubans and Asians, who are relatively richer and more educated before they arrive in this country, seldom are the focus of issues regarding minority language policies.

Due to growing sentiments of nationalism and isolationism in the years following World War I, the educational system in America had drastically reduced its accommodation of students whose first language was not English. In the ensuing years during the third wave immigration from countries outside of the typical Arian nations of Europe, such as Asian countries and Latin American countries, there has been a growing hostility toward a public school system that “enables” students to continue learning in their native tongue:

“Proponents of English-only policies are threatened by our multilingualism and insist that language diversity should be discouraged since it leads to national disunity. Analysis of language situations around the world disproves that assertion, indicating that linguistic tolerance is far less likely than linguistic repression to lead to disunity.” (Lessow-Hurley, 2005)

There is a lot of contradictory research out there that can be used by either side of this issue to make their case for or against bilingual education programs. They do cost more money initially for the state that has to create the classes and pay the extra teachers with additional training. Beyond this, the arguments tend to weaken until the only obvious motivation is one based on racial or class prejudice:
…opponents of bilingual education…often characterize it not only as educationally ineffective but also as promoting social fragmentation and divisiveness. Arguments that bilingual education is ineffective focus on interpretations of research that suggest bilingual programs are no better than “sink-or-swim” (submersion) programs and inferior to “structured immersion” programs. (Cummins, 2003)

In the long run, people have made the case that regardless of the method used, the most important factor is the acceptance of the student’s culture, and how this affects their self-esteem and eagerness to take part in their own education. The question should be asked: how much money is being saved by not having to deal with these students after they have been disenfranchised by society for the sin of speaking Spanish, and join a gang instead? We should take into consideration the feelings of the students themselves, when they witness this debate taking place, and they notice the “discourses of educational equity (often pejoratively labeled as ‘liberal’ by neoconservatives) collide with discourses ranging from overtly xenophobic and racist to discourses that are not overtly xenophobic but rather portray themselves as concerned with ‘rationality,’ effectiveness, and cost.” (Cummins, 2003)

Too often the blame is placed on the student, and only for the simple crime of having been born into a minority family. We can blame parents for raising kids speaking Spanish rather than English in the U.S., where English is the dominant language, but how should we expect them to have done so when they had not learned the language themselves?

The same principles are applicable to other dialects as well, such as AAVE. We expect students to speak standard English, and judge them harshly when they cannot meet up to the standards, but it still rests in the educators’ hands to see that they do meet the standards. Until fairly recently, it was the common practice of educators to assume that the reason for deficient language in a minority student was a reflection of their lower capacity for cognition, and they were placed in a tracking system that was virtually guaranteed to continue the cycle.
“When searching for factors to help explain the tendency toward lower educational achievement of many language minority students, educators and policymakers in the past all too often pointed fingers in the direction of the students’ sociocultural backgrounds, suggesting that the students possessed deficiencies that impeded academic success…For example, educators often placed recently arrived language minority students in the lowest curriculum track, thus virtually guaranteeing low achievement levels.” (Ovando, Combs, & Collier, 2006)

If we continue to place children of minorities into remedial classes, or deny them bilingual programs, or just expect them to “sink or swim” in the classroom, are we not contributing to the cycle of poverty and oppression? The labels that we pass on to these children, without realizing the consequences, continues from each generation to the next. “Such judgments are unconsciously woven in with judgments of the quality of the child’s cultural background, and can result in lower expectations of the child’s ability, which will in turn lead to lower achievement by the child.” (Ovando, Combs, & Collier, 2006) By feeding this vicious cycle, we cause the problem to grow worse with each generation.

It was after much media attention given to Oakland in 1996 that the linguists quietly announced that it was, in fact, beneficial to assist African Americans in their acquisition of standard English by first teaching them AAVE, or “Ebonics” as it was known during the controversy:

The variety known as "Ebonics," "African American Vernacular English" (AAVE), and "Vernacular Black English" and by other names is systematic and rule-governed like all natural speech varieties. In fact, all human linguistic systems -- spoken, signed, and written -- are fundamentally regular. The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African American vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as "slang," "mutant," "lazy," "defective," "ungrammatical," or "broken English" are incorrect and demeaning. (Linguistic Society of America, 1997)

No one paid much attention to the announcement, perhaps because they were too emotionally involved in the racist and classist aspects of the debate to listen to the scientific evidence that supported the program. Despite all of this support from the researchers who knew empirically the benefits of such a program, it was cancelled.

When I was teaching in a historically black University, I learned a great deal about the students’ attitudes about AAVE and how it was perceived by the general population. While the importance of learning technically correct English for use in scholarly papers was not lost on them, AAVE was habitually used both in and out of the classrooms. The successful students where those who knew how to write with correct grammar, and they were often prone to look down upon those who could not. They referred to such students as “country” or “talking country”. It was never above any student to resort to idiomatic language unique to AAVE when trying to make a point, and as such, the language thrived as a form of expression, where standard English failed to produce.

The difference for them was in how the professor responded. In the cases where the teacher had a tendency toward racism, the students felt that their use of AAVE was unacceptable, and perhaps for this very reason, they continued to use it as much as possible. If the teacher appreciated their language use as the expressive form that they had intended it to be, they were very pleased, and worked harder to please that professor with better English usage the rest of the time. It is, after all, about respect, and if the minority students felt respect from the teacher despite their use of commonly accepted grammatical errors or colorful idioms, or rather because of it, then they felt themselves a more integral part of the educational process. This is how self-generated learning begins, particularly with minority students who have traditionally felt as though they were being looked down upon. One remembers Eliza’s last speech, where she claims that she learned proper English not because of Professor Higgins constant berating and belittling, but rather because of Colonel Pickering’s manner in which he treated her with respect, and “like a real lady.”

Regardless of the pros and cons of specialized educational programs that accommodate minority students who speak a different language or dialect, the main goal of the free education system is to end the cycle of poverty, and increase the opportunities for upward-mobility. If the only students who are effectively taught in the schools are the ones who come from the tribe of middle class, white, English-speaking people, then that tribe is the only one that will benefit from the educational system. More recently, educators have begun realizing the importance of lesson adaption, which is not just beneficial for mainstreaming students with special needs, but might actually play a significant role in changing the political and sociological climate for the better. Despite the debate still being drowned out by thinly veiled arguments based on racist and xenophobic motives, progress is still being made, and with more and more teachers on board with adaptive learning methods, the face of America will not only be more diverse, but smarter and better educated.