If you keep this up, OP, your RES net vote count tag is going to be *bright* green everyplace I see you around.

My hero

To be fair, believing people ought to know a prestige dialect of English isn’t synonymous with believing minority dialects should be crushed. I tend to think schools should teach standard English, not AAVE, since without huge societal change that’s the dialect people need to know for interacting with much of society at large (honestly, I’d much prefer the latter–it’d be cool is Standard English and AAVE had a dual tense-aspect system). But stigmatizing dialects for being “incorrect” or “stupid” isn’t right. There’s a profound difference between “ain’t isn’t a real word” and “ain’t isn’t a word we use in formal writing”.

But I’m not sure there’s much you can do about this. Stigmatization of minority language has been going on for quite a while. It’s not really something that’s even possible to eliminate.

*If I go back to school for linguistics, I don’t wanna spend my years watching this kind of thing happening from my ivory tower and writing about it for other academics to read. I want to get out there, roll my sleeves up, get in people’s faces, and make them aware of what ignorant, racist, bastards they’re being.*

Sounds like you should look at getting involved in education policy or curriculum development. In which case a degree in formal linguistics isn’t gonna do you much good anyway. Maybe think about doing applied ling or an Ed.D. or something like that?

I mean, I do think it’s possible to do some good from up in the ivory tower — just because most academics *don’t* try to reach out to a larger audience doesn’t mean you *can’t*. But if it’s not what you want to do, it’s not what you want to do.

I actually don’t find the original thread to be racist. We don’t even know the race of either the child nor the teacher! I understand and agree with your point that non-standard English is both useful and worthy of respect, but screaming at people and calling them names is not a good way to sway others to your point of view. Especially, stretching their innocent misunderstanding into willful racism is hurting your case.

You especially lost me when you went off on the English teacher. English teachers teach non-standard English as a doorway to other cultures all the time. They must do so in order to share works by authors such as Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger, and Harper Lee. They don’t deride these characters, but show us how to see ourselves in them.

However, theirs is also the responsibility to teach students the writing skills necessary for their future careers. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, salespeople, receptionists – pretty much EVERYONE with a job – will need to use standard English in order to be successful and respected as professionals.

I jumped into the fray to help, but from one person committed to social justice to another, saying “you’ve just been racist!” is really, *really* not effective.

Anti-dialect attitudes are almost inevitably the result of underlying racism *[edit] in the case of AAVE, or classism, or so forth*. Or at least that’s what sociolinguists have found.

I’ve only taken one linguistics class, but my whole perspective on being a “proud grammar nazi” was completely flipped.

You’ve restored my faith in the genuine decency of /r/linguistics that was shaken by that awful image-text post from earlier today. Thanks.