DW 1B

There was one reason why I couldn’t stand my senior year publications class. A group of five or six junior girls would sit at a table and gossip during the entire class. It wasn’t so much what they were saying that irritated and distracted me, but how they said it. Each of the girls spoke with a dialect that sounded like a super annoyed “valley girl”. Their voice inflections, tone, pronunciation, and unnatural pauses were like nails on a chalkboard to me as they pronounced “I don’t care” as “Ion’tcaire” (that had a particularly heinous stress over the “Ion”). Another common phrase they used was “I was just sitting there, and then…”, which came out as “Ias jus- sitting there…and aTHEn”. It seemed like everybody else I knew spoke with the same tone, inflections, and mannerisms except for the nonsense of that particular group of junior girls. However, the more junior girl dialect I listened to during that semester, the more patterns I noticed. What sounded at first like sloppy, attitude-induced English surprisingly turned out to follow a structure. If not for structure, how else did the girls become fluent in this dialect? One girl must have started the high to low voice inflections, slurring of similar sounding words, and inserting a pause to illustrate a point. Her style was systematic enough for other girls to catch on and mimic the dialect. I noticed this dialect was stronger in some girls than in others and the dialect seemed to go away depending on their audience. Soon, I saw variations in other people’s speech as well. For example, some people say “like” more often than others, some drop the “g” on “ing”, and some omit syllables altogether. Then I realized that I say things in a way that is exclusive to me. What gave me the right to get down on the way the junior girls spoke when I speak in an equally matchless way? Leah Zuidema explains in “Myth #3: Standard English is better than other varieties” in Myth Education that “judgments about “good” and “bad” language use are subjective social constructions”. What may sound rash and annoying to one person may be totally acceptable and ordinary dialogue to another person or a group of people. “There is really no single dialect of English…[because] the norms for Standard English are not identical to all communities”. It is not fair for one dialect to be stigmatized because “…no matter how standard [you think your] English, all speakers are perceived by some listeners to have an “accent””. If I had seen the dialect of the junior girls as just a distinguished variety of language characterized by phonology I wouldn’t have ranked my own dialect above theirs. Had I not been so ignorant I could have placed an importance on what they were saying instead of how it had been said.