In Jones “Teachers’ Attitudes toward African American Language,” she examines the attitude and beliefs that teachers have towards AAL. Even though countless studies have been done to determine the causes for such behavior, researchers have never been able to pinpoint one particular reason why evidence is skewed or unclear. According to Jones, the main reason for the negativity towards AAL is “Teachers’ lack of awareness of what are commonly referred to as ‘nonstandard dialects’.” This is a problem that has greatly impacted students who do speak other dialects ability and desire to learn what we consider Standard English.
This trend in education can be seen even from those outside the classroom, simply because this posture has been reinforced in every outlet of media. The average person does not have a defined understanding of other dialects and even worse those in education are uniformed. In college you may be exposed to one or two linguistics classes, but the depth and training are grossly overlooked. My own knowledge and competency of AAL is far below what it should be. To be honest, I don’t think I would want to participate in a survey, simply because I know very little about it.
The view many people have is that African Americans are Americans, so the language that they speak must be English. This viewpoint can be applied to any race living in the United States, which points out a common misconception and belief. When you think about it, we are all immigrants. Everyone in this country at one point migrated here. So technically the only people who should be able to claim a particular language as the official “American Language” would be the Native Indians. This may be straying off the topic, but as you examine language, you realize more and more how much it as affected by power. Especially when you start asking the question, why we do speak English?
I find it really hard to make a distinction between AAL and what some term as “thug language”. What are the differences and how are the grammar and usage rules different from LWC? I don’t think I can make an informed opinion or hold a certain attitude towards something until I completely understand it. This may be a reason for so many neutral responses in the studies done to evaluate teachers’ standpoint on AAL.
You raise an interesting question here, which is whether it's possible for two (or more) dialects to coexist peacefully and equally in one nation? Would it be possible for Americans to give up the linguistic prejudice and take the attitude of, as long as we can understand each other, we don't care who speaks what dialect? I can't immediately think of any place where this has been the case--one dialect seems inevitably to emerge as the language of the powerful and takes on that power. But surely it's happened somewhere, at some point in history....right?
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