Who's Responsible for Whose Language?

Abstract

LOOKING back, now, we can see that it was almost inevitable that by the seventies those of us in English departments would feel particularly responsible for doing something about social ills. John Kennedy turned university faculties into a farm system for the Federal League, and when the population bulged onto the campuses a few years later, the sheer numbers of young people made them?and many of us?feel we had a Special Mission. The embarrassing truth was, though, that it was the social scientists who got The Call and not English teachers. But now we seem to be coming into our own. The problems of standard and non-standard English are as much political as linguistic problems. The NCTE has its Committee on Doublespeak, and it gets its share of editorial notice. Sexist language is an issue with just enough entertainment value to keep it interesting. A writing crisis has been sighted. So we ought not to be surprised that the 1976 Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English took up as the topic for one of its forums: What is the Responsibility of the University for the English Language? But before we can decide what special responsibilities universities ought to assume for either the English language in general or written English in particular, we ought first to understand how language can become a social problem. And since all social problems are ultimately rooted in individual experience, we might best begin with the linguistic problems of individuals. Two kinds of linguistic disability stem from social rather than biological causes. First, a speaker may not have access to the language that a society requires in its public discourse; and second, if he knows it, he may not be able to use it as he is expected to. In the most extreme case, in poly-lingual societies, the code is one rather than another particular language appropriate to public communication. In our essentially monolingual society this is not a problem that afflicts as many as it does among French-speakers in Ontario or English-speakers in Quebec, non-Hindi speakers in India or most Africans in South Africa, where enforced mono lingualism is a way to control the black population.1 In advanced societies, the problem may be one of literacy, of access to the written language. And again, though we have too many functional illiterates among us, this is less of a problem in the United States than in most parts of the world. Our culture does, however, require that we master a large number of idiosyncratic features of the written code. While Sir Francis Bacon would probably not have been embarrassed if someone had pointed out to him that in the same essay he had spelled the same word three different ways, we have institutionalized consistent spelling and punctuation