Dialects, Idiolects, and the Standard

You don’t speak standard English. No matter how hard you try, you will always fall short of the standard; but don’t worry because no one else speaks it either. Often times the standard, or at least our perception of the standard, lags behind the reality of the language itself. Did you ever have a teacher tell you “never end a sentence with a preposition”? Why? Does anyone actually consistently speak that way? It reminds me of an old joke.

Guy goes to interview for a job at Harvard. Afterwards, he walks out and asks the first person he sees, “excuse me. Could you tell me where the restroom’s at?”

“Sir, at Harvard we do not end a sentence with a preposition,” replies the man.

“Fine. Can you tell me where the restroom’s at, asshole?”

Even great linguists don’t always follow these rules. In his 1921 Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech, Edward Sapir wonders if the who/whom distinction will one day disappear entirely from English. In his discussion he provides several examples in which the standard whom is often replaced by nonstandard who:

“The man whom I referred to.”

“The man whom they referred to.”

“Whom are you looking at?”

“Whom did you see?”

Notice anything about three of the four examples above? They end in prepositions. Obviously the only conclusion we’re left with is that Edward Sapir was an English-hating fraud of a linguist. Or perhaps there’s a simpler, less sinister explanation: no one really speaks the standard. So what do we speak? Well if you think about it, no two people are going to speak the exact same version of a language. One of them is bound to know some word the other doesn’t, or favor a particular turn of phrase in situations that the other doesn’t, or perhaps have slightly different pronunciations for some words, etc. We all speak what is called an idiolect, the variety of a language that is unique to each individual. Unfortunately, cataloguing the billions of idiolects on the planet (remember anyone who speaks more than one language will have their own idiolect for each language) is an impossible task, to say nothing of the fact that it wouldn’t be particularly useful either. There is such a thing as too much data. So instead, we tend to focus one level up, on group tendencies. I am of course talking about something with which we are all familiar at some level or another: dialects.

There is perhaps no better reminder of the fact that we all speak some nonstandard variant of our language than the rich variety we see in dialects. Fortunately for American English, it’s easy enough for a layperson to appreciate the differences between various dialects because the vast majority of them are mutually intelligible. There are some languages where the differences between dialects are sometimes so stark that speakers of two different dialects cannot actually understand one another. German is a prime example of this. The extreme differences between dialects of a single language often beg the question “where do you draw the line between a dialect and a language?” The short answer is that it’s kind of arbitrary. There is a quote by an audience member at one of Max Weinreich’s lectures, often attributed to Weinreich himself, that you’ve probably heard before: a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’ (the original was Yiddish in case you’re wondering).

But hey, this is America, we all speak the same language. So if I told you I built up a wicked thirst from whippin’ shitties and needed to go to the bubbler before I fell out, you’d get all that right? Go here if you want an idea of just how differently we all speak. Each link on that page will take you to distribution maps for the various responses. If you need a little help decoding what I said earlier, take a look at numbers 77 and 103 (and I’ll just tell you that in some parts of the Midwest fall out is used in place of pass out). You can see that there are all sorts of differences that crop up, from simple phonological differences like in 15, to lexical (basically “word choice”) differences like in 105, to syntactic (basically “word order”) differences like the distribution of anymore in 54-57.

There aren’t a whole lot of people who don’t find dialects at least a little interesting. I’d imagine all of you have had discussions about the pronunciation of syrup (27) or aunt (1) at some point in your lives. For a lot of us, even though there’s a part of us that feels like we should be speaking “good” English, our dialectal features play a big role in our identity. How we pronounce things, or what words we use for certain concepts can mark us as being a member of a community. So why bother with a standard at all?

I had a professor in undergrad from North Carolina. Having moved to Pennsylvania for his job at Penn State, he realized with winter coming that he was going to need to be prepared. So he went to a local sporting goods store, looked around, and asked the man behind the counter if they sold toboggans. Puzzled, the man glanced over his shoulder to the wall behind him with twenty or thirty wooden sleds hanging off of it and then back at my professor. He thumbed over his shoulder and said “well...we’ve got those right there.”

“No, no, I’m sorry,” said my professor. “I mean the kind you wear on your head.” You see, in the area from which he comes in North Carolina, this use of toboggan to mean knit cap is a common occurrence. It is what linguists call a shibboleth, a linguistic feature that marks a speaker as being a member of a certain speech community. This comes from the book of Judges 12:5-6, which reads:

(5) The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” (6) they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.

While we’re a little less likely these days to kill someone for saying coke when referring to carbonated beverages in general, it does bring up the other side of the coin. Our dialects mark us as being members of a certain community, which can be a very positive thing and for many of us is not an insignificant part of our identities. But it can also sometimes inhibit understanding or even reflect poorly on us if we speak a less prestigious dialect. Most of us with fainter accents when meeting someone from another area of the country for the first time may be used to hearing something like “oh your accent’s not that strong.” Southerners often hear something just slightly different: “oh your accent’s not that bad.” Southern accents (and there are many more than one), are often perceived as being spoken by the less educated. So we may choose to play down our dialect features when in mixed company so as to provide greater intelligibility as with my professor, or to avoid stigmatization. Is it fair that some accents are viewed this way? Of course not, but it is reality. Very practically speaking, this is perhaps the most important reason to know the standard.

The standard allows us to navigate certain social situations while avoiding undesired complications. It is sometimes referred to as a “higher register”. The word “higher” there is problematic as it implies “better”, which I will repeat no doubt ad nauseam simply isn’t a legitimate value judgment to be making about language despite the fact that we all do it. That said, think of register as the variety of language you use based on the given situation. You’re more likely to speak a more standard version of English in a job interview than at home with your family. This is partly because you never know how your interviewer might perceive your native dialect, but also because, as Stephen Fry puts it here, you dress nicely for an interview, so it only makes sense that you would dress your language up as well. A three piece suit isn’t better than a t-shirt and jeans, but it is certainly perceived as more formal. It shows a willingness to put in effort. It shows you care. But at home or with friends, speaking very proper English may well get you made fun of just like wearing a tuxedo for a Friday night pub crawl is maybe not usually the best idea. So you slip into dialect because it allows you to more easily navigate that particular social situation.

I’ve been talking about dialects this whole time and have failed to mention what should hopefully be quite obvious by now. For many people, there is a clear stigma to the very word dialect, as it implies nonstandard, which for many people in turn implies wrongness. But for linguists, dialect is a completely neutral term. It is what it is. Dialects shift and change over time just as the standard is prone to change. This idea that languages have some inherent dignity that is violated by nonstandard usage is silly. The standard 1,000 years ago was much different than it is today, and the standard 1,000 years from now will no doubt be just as unrecognizable. It’s a curious thing about language, and perhaps it’s because it ties in so closely with our identity; but how many other areas can you think of where simply being able to use something makes people feel they are experts in its inner workings? I can drive a car, but I’d be a terrible mechanic. I wear clothes, but I couldn’t tell you how a pair of jeans is made. I can brown sausage, but I have no idea how the chemical process of denaturing that raw meat into something edible happens beyond “heat + magic = tasty food”.

That said, there is such a thing as being wrong. Linguists usually like to use other terms like “ungrammatical”, but you can screw up. People do make mistakes, but hopefully today’s entry has given you a little more appreciation for the fact that much of what we might tend to view as “wrong” is really just different and that it very much serves a purpose. As for what constitutes wrong for linguists and what contexts this sort of language shows up in...that’s probably best saved for another time.

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PS: The type of survey I linked to above isn’t without its problems, such as number 42. Here we have a clear case of people confusing letters with sounds. I would bet a million dollars that not even half of those 38.93% of people who said they pronounce the g in strength actually do so, but we think we do because it’s written there. What that g really does is change the nature of the n (say “pander” and feel where your tongue is for that n. Now say “strong”. See how your tongue touches at a different spot?)...or at least that’s what it did historically. Now it just kind of sticks around to let us know that that’s what it did. We’ll talk more about phonology another time and maybe introduce the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), which is a way for linguists to transcribe words based on how they are actually pronounced with no regard for spelling. We can also talk about what English spelling tells us about a word and what it doesn’t.