wylan

me: ahh what a lovely day

okay but things that are tragically funny in High School Musical 2:

Troy Bolton being weird and passive-aggressive because he thinks his gay classmate, Ryan, is trying to steal his girlfriend 

i hate to burst your pretentious little bubble, but linguistic prejudice is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism.

no, i am not saying that people of color, women, poor people, disabled people, etc, “can’t learn proper english.” what i’m saying is that how we define “proper english” is itself rooted in bigotry. aave is not bad english, it’s a marginalized dialect which is just as useful, complex, and efficient as the english you’re taught in school. “like” as a filler word, valley girl speech, and uptalk don’t indicate vapidity, they’re common verbal patterns that serve a purpose. etc.

because the point of language is to communicate, and there are many ways to go about that. different communities have different needs; different people have different habits. so if you think of certain usages as fundamentally “wrong” or “bad,” if you think there’s a “pure” form of english to which everyone should aspire, then i challenge you to justify that view. i challenge you to explain why “like” makes people sound “stupid,” while “um” doesn’t raise the same alarms. explain the problem with the habitual be. don’t appeal to popular opinion, don’t insist that it just sounds wrong. give a detailed explanation.

point being that the concept of “proper english” is culturally constructed, and carries cultural biases with it. those usages you consider wrong? they aren’t. they’re just different, and common to certain marginalized groups.

not to mention that many people who speak marginalized dialects are adept at code-switching, i.e. flipping between non-standard dialects and “standard english,” which makes them more literate than most of the people complaining about this post.

not to mention that most of the people complaining about this post do not speak/write english nearly as “perfectly” as they’d like to believe and would therefore benefit by taking my side.

not to mention that the claim i’m making in the OP is flat-out not that interesting. this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. the only reason it sounds so outlandish is that we’ve been inundated with the idea that how people speak and write is a reflection of their worth. and that’s a joyless, elitist idea you need to abandon if you care about social justice or, frankly, the beauty of language.

and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications–in employment (tossing resumes with “black-sounding names”), in the legal system (prejudice against rachel jeantel’s language in the trayvon martin trial), in education (marginalizing students due to prejudice against dialectical differences, language-related disabilities, etc), and…well, a lot.

no, this doesn’t mean that there’s never a reason to follow the conventions of “standard english.” different genres, situations, etc, have different conventions and that’s fine. what it does mean, however, is that this standard english you claim to love so much has limited usefulness, and that, while it may be better in certain situations, it is not inherently better overall. it also means that non-standard dialects can communicate complex ideas just as effectively as the english you were taught in school. and it means that, while it’s fine to have personal preferences regarding language (i have plenty myself), 1) it’s worth interrogating the source of your preferences, and 2) it’s never okay to judge people on the basis of their language use.

this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. 

and

first of all, i went into great detail about how other dialects and usages, while perhaps not appropriate in every context, are valid, useful, and complex, so blathering on about how students just don’t know how to read, write, or spell completely misses the point. saying that certain usages are just wrong is a value judgment made overwhelmingly about language common to marginalized people (who are not necessarily minorities, but anyway). this is not a new or bold assertion. this is fundamental to the field of sociolinguistics, and i’ve never seen anyone present a compelling case in favor of linguistic prejudice. no one’s patting anyone on the head–we’re saying that grammar cops suffer from a basic misunderstanding of how language works. as i wrote in the very long post you don’t appear to have read, the point of language is communication, so if people are communicating effectively, language is functioning exactly as it’s meant to.

but what really gets me about this abysmal response is your assumption that linguistic descriptivism = not teaching grammar, spelling, or reading at all. that’s not even remotely the case–in fact, here’s a post i wrote about my success in bringing a descriptivist approach to the classroom. i’ve done this same kind of thing in one-on-one tutoring and have found it far more effective than any “this is wrong, this is right, grammar is set in stone” approach. teaching descriptivism leads to better writing, a deeper understanding of grammar, and fewer assholes.

That’s some 6000km.

Other places similarly far away are China and Ireland.

This is symptomatic of a much more general problem with black panther where it presents a vision of Wakanda a utopian nation with cultural touchstones taken from across one of the most diverse continents I’m the world; cultural touchstones that have no business existing next to each other and someone who recognises the importance of one will probably not recognise it in any of the others. This blending of the myriad of African cultures into one single “Africa” is part of the legacy of imperialism which has always treated such distinctions as trivial.

As @metsew has pointed out, across most of Africa (with some notable exceptions such as South Africa), most Africans identify far more strongly with finely grained ethnic labels than they do with race so, from that pov, speaking Xhosa as Wakandan ought not be any less shocking than them speaking Irish or Mandarin.

Now we’ve not seen it in as much detail as we see Wakanda in Black Panther, but what we do see contrasts quite well.

Sokovia is placed with a similar level of vagueness, being somewhere between the western border of Slovakia and the northwest of the black sea in Ukraine. They write in Cyrillic (some people online are saying the Serbian variant rather than the more plausible Ukrainian or Belarusian variants, which would be a little off, but I didn’t actually see any of the Serbian characters so I’m not sure how accurate that is) and speak a Slavic language. Their flag uses the panslavic colours (albeit rotated from their usual horizontal configuration) with a crowned eagle. The architecture, dress, and customs of the Sokovians appear to all be consistent with a post-soviet Eastern European country.

The biggest incongruity there is in using the Serbian alphabet (if they actually are) which depending on the exact placement of the country is at most 1000km away (remember, Wakanda is 6000km from any significant Xhosa population). That same distance could get you from Sokovia to Xi'an in China or to Mumbai in India.

A Sokovia portraying Eurasia similarly to how Wakanda portrays Africa could have people in salwar kameezes watching Turkish wrestling, be speaking Tundra Nenets whilst doing vodka shots over fish and chips all in a Venetian Palazzo. I mean, it’s all Eurasia right so who’s going to sweat the little differences between those cultures?

If you’re going “but that’s different, those cultures are completely different and the people with those cultures are of different races” I’ve got some news for you: Africa is at least as culturally diverse as Eurasia and race was socially constructed deliberately to lump all of Africa into one group that could all be dismissed as primitive.

Black panther is an important film and I am excited to see it, but these sorts of apologia for its (major) flaws serve no-one and continue the very harmful legacy of non-Africans ignoring the many, many differences between various African peoples.