Which of the following beliefs do you hold?

* There is a single standard variety of American English, distinguished by level Midwestern pronunciation, correct usage and logical grammatical agreement.

* Varieties of English that differ greatly from the standard are best considered substandard dialects.

* In the United States, as elsewhere, official encouragement of more than one language is an impediment to national unity.

All of these beliefs about language are widely accepted. They are advanced by educators, lawmakers and members of the news media. They inform public discourse and public policy, including the controversy over ebonics and successful attempts to curtail bilingual education.

And they are all myths, reflecting widespread popular misconceptions about how language works.

Nearly everyone has an opinion about language. In perhaps no other field, scholars who study social attitudes toward language say, is unscientific folk belief so consistently enshrined in high-level policy. It is as if, they say, the Federal Government seriously entertained a plan to harvest cheese from the moon. “People would never pontificate about a physics issue, because they would acknowledge that you need to consult an expert,” says Donna Christian, the president of the Center for Applied Linguistics, in Washington. “But they wouldn’t hesitate to pontificate about language.”

In the past few years, a number of scholars have undertaken serious study of these grass-roots opinions, a discipline Dennis R. Preston, a linguist at Michigan State University, calls “folk linguistics.” Examining what ordinary people believe to be true about language, they say, allows us to identify some of the deeper impulses beneath the public battles: among them, fear of the unfamiliar, insistence on language “standards” as a way of preserving the social status quo and the condemnation of “substandard” speech as a coded expression of prejudice against the speaker. “If we learn to appreciate diversity,” Preston says, “then the way we talk has to be included.”

Judged on purely linguistic grounds, all languages — and all dialects — have equal merit. All spring from the same human cognitive faculties; all have the same expressive potential and operate according to the same kinds of logical rule systems. Why, then, are some dialects considered substandard?

The answer is simple: judgments about relative worth — that Walter Cronkite speaks “better” English than, say, a black inner-city teen-ager — are socially determined. “I can’t think of any situations in the United States where low-prestige groups have high-prestige language systems,” says Walt Wolfram, a linguist at North Carolina State University who is an authority on American dialects.

Consider how the idea of socially stigmatized language played out in the ebonics debate, which began at the end of 1996 after the Oakland, Calif., School Board publicly affirmed the variety of English spoken by the district’s black students — known as African-American vernacular English, or ebonics — and acknowledged its usefulness as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of mainstream English. The wording of the Oakland resolution was awkward in places, leaving it open to misinterpretation, but the linguistic recommendations at its core were sound. What’s more, they were nothing new. Three decades before, the linguist William Labov demonstrated in seminal articles, including “The Logic of Nonstandard English,” that African-American English, like all language varieties, displays its own, perfectly regular systems of grammatical concord; they are simply different from the ones most white speakers are accustomed to.

But the announcement from Oakland set off a firestorm. Commentators, including many African-Americans, excoriated ebonics as “broken” English. The Oakland board appeared to backpedal: a task force it appointed ultimately released a report in which the word “ebonics” never appeared.

To understand the level of outrage, it helps to tease out the two folk-linguistic beliefs at the heart of the debate: the myth of standard English and its corollary, the myth of substandard English.

Many Americans believe that there exists a single standard dialect — the one broadcasters use — kept free of regional and vernacular encroachments. But in reality, no one such creature exists. “If you said to anyone, ‘Here’s a room; put the hundred people in there you think speak the best English,’ you’d get people that speak all different kinds of English,” the linguist Rosina Lippi-Green says. “You’d get Dan Rather, who has a little bit of Texan; you’d get Peter Jennings, who’s Canadian. They wouldn’t be stigmatized varieties of English, but they wouldn’t be the same variety of English.”

But if we allow all these diverse Englishes into the pantheon, how can we keep out the ones that discomfort us, like African-American vernacular or working-class Brooklynese? That is where language myth comes in.

One function of myth, as Lippi-Green points out in her book “English With an Accent” (Routledge, 1997), is to provide a rationale for preserving the existing social order. The myths of standard and substandard English do just that, permitting those in power to label others inferior on the basis of their “broken” language. “Nobody speaks ‘nonstandard’ or ‘substandard’ language,” Preston explains, “unless they are regarded as nonstandard or substandard human beings.”

But in matters of language, the myth of “good” versus “bad” is viscerally ingrained. That is why it seduced even black commentators, who would have instantly condemned racism in any other guise. “Even people who claim not to be prejudiced,” Preston says, “believe in the linguistic part of this myth.”

Similarly with the myth of national unity. This folk belief, linguists say, underpinned ballot initiatives like Proposition 227, which effectively ended bilingual education in California last year. (A drive to place a similar initiative on the ballot is under way in Arizona.) In reality, they say, there is no evidence that civic unity stems from sharing a single national language — look at Switzerland, whose three official languages don’t seem to have done it any harm.

Why do language myths endure? They have, Lippi-Green says, a disturbing utility: “Right now, it’s very hard for people to talk about race — they feel they can’t say, ‘I don’t like black people; I don’t like Asians.’ But they are very comfortable saying, ‘That person doesn’t speak English to my satisfaction.’ So it stands in for things we’d rather not talk about.”

Margalit Fox, an editor of The New York Times Book Review, writes frequently about language and linguistics. William Safire is on vacation.



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