Banning Students’ Native Dialects

By Geoffrey Pullum. The teaching profession in Britain, where I currently reside, has very largely heard the sociolinguistic music: The facts of linguistic diversity and language change are generally accepted, teachers acknowledge most of the elementary facts about language, and dialect differences are not viewed in the same light as hideously disfiguring skin diseases. I had begun to think there was little danger of the British teaching profession being disrupted by an outburst of race or class bias masquerading as dialect purism comparable to the awful Oakland “Ebonics” brouhaha of 1996 (see my “Language That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” Nature 386, 27 March 1997, 321-322). Read more...