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DIANA MAZZELLA: I'm Diana Mazzella and this is Sparked, a podcast from West Virginia University Magazine about the people who are changing Appalachia’s future.
For this episode, we went to a place where language re-forms in each generation. Which, whether you like it or not, is middle school.
AUDRA SLOCUM: So what groups do you want to be part of? Or what groups do you think you will be a part of? Is band group it’s own group? Or is there other social groups?
SARAH: That’s more of a nerd group I would say. But I want to be part of a group that like accepts me for who I am. Like I don’t want to be part of a popular group if they're like OK.
KARA: I just want to be in like a group where I can be myself, laugh and have fun until we get out.
SARAH: That'd probably be called the weirdo group. But like we don’t care. Like we take pride in it because like we're not like one of them people that are always mad every single day all day.
KARA: I'm usually happy. I don't know why.
ELLIE: There are some people here that if you say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, they'll get mad.
MAZZELLA: Days before the end of eighth grade, these girls anticipated their one chance for reinvention with the start of high school. A future that fit who they were and who they wanted to alter themselves to become. Because once the impression is made, they sagely say, that’s it. It’s over. You’re done, for four whole years.
It’s the spring of 2018 and we’re in a rural middle school in northern West Virginia where two researchers from West Virginia University are running a study supported by the National Science Foundation to compare the development of Appalachian English dialects across the northern and southern – and country and town parts of the state.
TEACHER: Put your analysis papers in your folder. If you can stack...your speeches on your desk...then pass your folder.
MAZZELLA: Class just let out for lunch. It’s hot dog day, with a side of cole slaw, tater tots and pears. Four girls walk into a conference room to talk with Kirk Hazen and Audra Slocum. They clip microphones to their shirts. The researchers assigned them fictitious names. So we did, too.
Their conversation moves to the chief concern of offices, middle school and any place where there is more than one person: drama.
It’s determining how Ellie is choosing her high school clubs.
ELLIE: There’s some stuff here that it seems like lots of drama. So the high school it’s probably going to have drama but it’s like activities I want to be in you’ve got to be drama free. So I don’t have to deal with that.
Hazen has a question.
KIRK HAZEN: What activities are drama free at the high school?
SARAH: It really just depends on the people that are in it.
MAZZELLA: That’s Sarah.
SARAH: Usually there’s one or a group of friends. Up at the high school, everyone always tells me you can’t get in with the wrong group of friends or else you’re going to be stuck with them or you’re going to get yourself into a lot of trouble. You don’t realize it and people can see it changing you. And then you’ll lose all your friends and then the only people that you have is them.
ELLIE: You’re just stuck.
MAZZELLA: Being stuck and losing all your friends. No one wants that. We care so much about having friends among our peers that who we are and who they are tends to blur together.
Hazen, professor of linguistics and director of the West Virginia Dialect Project, says that peer groups have the greatest influence on speech pattern formation.
HAZEN: What people do with language variation is most often guided by how they identify in their community. And they’re going to have multiple identities, but what’s going to shape those patterns? The language variation goes on. It’s not like some people created it and then other people pick it up. All of us have brains that are wired to do language variation so it’s always going on. Some of it gets pushed socially. Some of it we do every day and none of us notice it.
MAZZELLA: Hazen has been studying Appalachian English dialects since 1998 where he has learned and observed how these dialects fit into the English family and how they’re changing.
When he explains his work at conferences and to the public, he hears a persistent myth that I hadn’t explicitly heard before but it instinctively felt familiar.
It goes like this. Appalachian English is essentially unchanged from an older form of English, say Elizabethan English, and it persists here in a land where if it changes, it does so extremely slowly. In the popular imagination, Appalachian English dialects become special artifacts.
In reality, these dialects have wonderful variety, Hazen says, yet like all other Englishes and dialects across the world, they are changing.
HAZEN: A lot of the findings have been that older varieties of speech are undergoing change. It’s not that things are completely disappearing, it’s that they’re becoming either more socially marked in some way, be it country, be it southern or old, or they’re simply restricted to a smaller section of the population.
MAZZELLA: And one of the places they are changing right now is in this conference room where four Appalachian young women are talking about how they talk.
Here is one of the girls, Molly.
MOLLY: I had to change my whole speaking voice because my friends used to make fun of me for like talking country or whatever, so I changed my whole speaking voice and everything because of it.
SLOCUM: When you said you were changing how you spoke, do you remember specific things you changed?
MOLLY: Now I listen to my words clearly. So If I’m pronouncing it wrong, I like re-change it instead of just like saying country accents and stuff like that. But every now and then, my friends have videos of me and I can definitely hear me being country like in it and my accent and stuff and it’s horrible.
SLOCUM: Why do you think it’s horrible to have a country accent?
MOLLY: I don’t know.
SARAH: Cause she sounds like a country thug.
MOLLY: Yeah, country thug. Cause my friends always like goof off about it. I don’t know. So I try not to do it as much.
HAZEN: With Appalachian Englishes, what you have are stigmas about some of them much more than others. So the question is, is it anything to do with the language itself or how the language is working. The answer is no. The difference between the way fish swim versus whales swim has to do with all kinds of evolutionary biology. But swimming is swimming and it goes on just fine.
Then why the stigma? The stigma is because the people themselves are stigmatized. And any language difference is used as an after the fact justification for the stigma. Oh yeah, they’re bad because their language is bad. You think of them as bad because they’re stigmatized as a group overall.
MAZZELLA: Surrounded by peers from their area, these girls have heard the message that their speech is lesser. This view of non-standard dialects has already taken a societal cost for decades. And it can do so at the hands of teachers.
SLOCUM: My name is Audra Slocum, and I’m an assistant professor of English education and I help prepare new english teachers, and I also study adolescent identity in Appalachia.
When I moved to Eastern Kentucky, I thought I knew what I was doing, but I did not. [Laughter] And my students gave me a really quick lesson in how little I understood.
MAZZELLA: Slocum, who grew up in Maine and Iowa, learned from her students about the intersection of economics and linguistics. About the privileges she had growing up. And the stigma her students faced.
SLOCUM: I was the drama coach for the school, and we’d take our students for competition to other parts of the state, and parents or school teachers in other parts of the state would be the judges, and they would write horrible things on their sheets that would be handed back to the students about their accents about being incomprehensible about being unintelligible. And those were really devastating to these young people growing up.
So it was also a lesson for me in how to navigate being a standard English speaker working in a community that prided themselves on language differences at the same time they were being humiliated for these language differences, and I was their English teacher sort of given this responsibility of the implicit goal of supporting students in academics and particularly around standardized speech forms and not wanting to be part of a system that would erase who they are.
MAZZELLA: Once Slocum and Hazen’s study is completed, they want to develop ways to help teachers create classroom environments where students grow while being encouraged to sound like themselves. Slocum talks about how this is different from a model that focuses on making everyone conform to a mythic standard that we think guarantees success.
SLOCUM: It really it reflects this white, middle-class supremacist thinking that this is the enlightened beacon of being and all other communities are supposed to model themselves towards this and the closest you get the more successful you’ll be and that this is a system that reflects morality and all the good things in society.
MAZZELLA: Slocum says that’s poppycock.
The social costs of dialect discrimination can seem individual, kept in the realm of hurt feelings and low self esteem. Sad but not systemic. That’s not true, either.
In 1979, 11 Michigan elementary school students brought a case to federal court against the Ann Arbor School District. The case dealt with the students’ right to an equal education in English.
As Geneva Smitherman writes in the book “Black English and the education of black children and youth,” children who spoke black English dialects were being categorized as having deficiencies in intelligence or learning because of the way they spoke.
Hazen, who is from Troy, Michigan, calls it a classic case of dialect discrimination.
HAZEN: They were doing verbal testing with these very young kids and then tracking them into either remedial sort of classes or more sort of advanced classes at this young age. The language test they were basically using was about verbal abilities but all it was doing was testing to see whether you had certain black English features, and if you had those features, you went into remedial. Lo and behold their classes were fully segregated.
MAZZELLA: In the court case Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board, the judge came to the conclusion that black children in the district had an equal right to learning standard English and that when teachers treat the dialect as inferior, that gets in the way of student learning.
The publicity surrounding the litigation put the word “Black English” in the public consciousness. Writer and social critic James Baldwin wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, arguing that this English is thoroughly American.
He writes: “Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other.”
And then he talks about children: “A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white.”
SARAH: My cousin from California, she’s always like 'Why do you have such an accent?' and I’m just like 'I don’t really. We’re kind of speaking the same way.' And she’s just like 'No, you have like a country accent.' And it's like people don’t realize like if say I lived in England or something, we don’t realize we talk how we talk and we think that that’s normal and...
KARA: You can’t hear yourself.
SARAH: And then whenever you hear somebody else, you’re just like 'Why are you talking like that?'
I want to know what we sound like to other people.
KARA: I have a friend that's in Australia, she lives there. And we were on FaceTime one time. She said 'Oh my gosh, you sound so weird.' I’m like 'You should hear you.'
MAZZELLA: Thank you for listening to Sparked, a podcast of West Virginia University Magazine. This episode was recorded and produced by Diana Mazzella and Raymond Thompson Jr.
A big thank you to Kirk Hazen and Audra Slocum and the West Virginia students interviewed in this episode. We are grateful to books by Geneva Smitherman for helping us understand the Michigan school court case.
If you want to learn more about this research happening at WVU, visit the West Virginia Dialect Project at dialects.wvu.edu.
Help others find our podcast by rating and reviewing Sparked on Apple Podcasts. And let us know what you thought of this episode by contacting us through our website: magazine.wvu.edu.
Sparked is a production of West Virginia University, located in Morgantown, West Virginia.
