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If women are being discriminated against, you don’t
say
“You should become a man” An interview with Peter Trudgill on sociolinguistics and Standard English conducted by Kontra Miklós Professor Peter Trudgill is a world-renowned sociolinguist and one of the foremost researchers on the regional and social dialects of British English. He is the author and editor of many important books on English (see the Select Bibliography below). Currently he is chair of the English Department at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. In the past several years he lectured at the University of Veszprém in 1995 and at the European Society for the Study of English congress in Debrecen, in 1997. The following interview (which is part of a longer conversation) was conducted in May 1999 in Szeged, where he participated in an international Socrates conference on linguistic stigmatisation and tolerance. On becoming a sociolinguist ... KM: How did you become a sociolinguist rather than a linguist? PT: Well, I don’t actually accept the premise of this question, because I think I am a linguist. And I think the most interesting and most important sort of work in sociolinguistics is carried out by people who are actually linguists, that is to say, they have the same goals and interests and concerns as linguists in general. So I would agree with Bill Labov, who once said, in fact he said it more than once, that sociolinguistics is a way of doing linguistics. KM: OK, then let me rephrase that. When you went to study linguistics at Cambridge, I assume, did you have any sense of linguistics versus sociolinguistics? PT: I think it is a legitimate question that you ask me, how did I become a sociolinguist. And I can answer that, when I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate student, it was 1963, I did not know what linguistics was. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. And I was studying modern languages, as it was called, which meant mostly studying literature with a bit of practical language expertise, in my case, a low level of expertise, in French and German. And I discovered that there was a subject called linguistics by walking around in the modern languages library, and noticing linguistics books lying around on the table. And then I realised that linguistics was what I’d always been interested in. I’d always been interested in linguistics. I didn’t know there was such a thing. From the age of about eleven or twelve I’d taken all the grammar books of foreign languages out of the local library and looked at them, I’d been fascinated by learning about the relationships between languages and so on. And so, without knowing that I was interested in linguistics, I was. And then I suddenly discovered, probably sometime in 1964, that there was this thing called linguistics. And I went to my supervisor at King’s College in Cambridge and said, “I am thinking of dropping French literature and doing a course called general linguistics, which I’d found out about instead.” And he, who was a specialist on French literature, said, “I think that would be a very good idea.” KM: Bill Labov more or less completed his dissertation by about 1966. How did you get to know about Labov’s work? PT: Well, by the time I left Cambridge, in 1966 I graduated in modern languages, I managed to convert most of my studies into linguistics or philology. I did one general linguistics course, and then I did the history of French, the history of German, the history of the English language. And I knew that what I wanted to do is to study linguistics. After I graduated, I recall walking around Heffer’s bookshop in Cambridge, and coming across a book called Socio-linguistics, with a hyphen, by Capell, an Australian linguist. And I thought, great! Sociolinguistics sounds what I’d really be interested in. It sounds like looking at the relationship between language and society, and probably social class dialects and that kind of thing. I bought the book, and I was rather disappointed in it, because it’s very anthropological. I’ve since re-read it and I think it’s very interesting. But it wasn’t what I thought. Anyway, I went to Edinburgh to do a one-year MA course, actually it’s called a diploma course in Edinburgh, in general linguistics under John Lyons. And it was during the course of that year, 1966-67, that I really discovered that I wanted to be a sociolinguist, because I came across this book which was also called Sociolinguistics (without a hyphen this time, which of course is interesting), which is the volume that you know, edited by Bill Bright (1966). And in that was this fantastic article by Bill Labov (1972) on hypercorrection of the lower middle class. It was this wonderful article by Bill Labov that really made me excited. And I thought this is what I want to do. And I wrote an essay which is based on an article by Bill Labov, and stuff by Raven McDavid as well, and I handed it in to John Lyons, who said, ”This is really very interesting. I personally don’t know anything about this, but I think it’s very interesting.” KM: Is this about the same time when Lyons was writing his books popularising Chomsky? PT: Well, I think he was actually writing the first edition of his Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Lyons, 1968), which was pro-Chomsky, and I’d actually heard Lyons give a series of guest lectures in Cambridge on Chomsky as well. So yes, he was very interested in Chomsky, but the great thing about John Lyons was that he always thought it was important, in fact he stated this many times, that the linguistics department in Edinburgh was school-neutral. He wanted his students and his staff to be interested in all different aspects of linguistics and all different linguistic theories. So he encouraged me. He actually said to me on the basis of this essay, “Would you like to stay in Edinburgh and do a PhD?” And I said I thought that would be the most wonderful thing out, and I would like to do it on sociolinguistics. But I didn’t know what exactly, and I didn’t know whether I can get any money. And then, quite soon afterwards, I discovered Labov’s book, The Social Stratification of English in New York City. And as you quite rightly said, he published that in 1966, and I found it in an Edinburgh bookshop in 1967. And I read it and I thought, “That’s what I want to do.” And I thought that the whole world would be full of people doing this stuff. And I said to John Lyons, “I would like to come and do a PhD working in this paradigm,” and he said, “It’s a whole new thing, you’ll be on your own, there won’t be anybody to supervise you, but you know, you can do it.” And I thought, as I was accepted to do a PhD in Edinburgh, I probably ought to do it on Edinburgh English. And I was a bit worried, because, you know, Scottish and the dialect situation in Edinburgh is very complex, and I was aware I didn’t know enough about it. And I was thinking about doing this, and then somebody who was very important to me, I mean he’s been important to me since, but E. K. Brown, Keith Brown, who was one of the lecturers... he was much later a colleague of mine in Essex, he said to me, “Well, you come from Norwich, don’t you?” I said, yes, and he said, “I think, from the stuff that you said, that you’re very interested in the Norfolk dialect,” and I said I am. He said, “Why don’t you do a Labovian type of study on Norwich?” And I said, “Well, that’s what I’d really like to do.” He said, “Well, do it!” And I recall being rather worried that there might be, you know, one or two other people wanting to do sociolinguistic urban dialect surveys in Norwich and I’d better get there and do it quick. So, that’s what I did. KM: And looking back at those years you realise you were the first one and there was no-one else around? PT: I realise now, I did not realise then! Everybody credits me with being the pioneer of British sociolinguistics. That’s not true, because I think Bob Le Page was the first person in Britain to ever do anything we would call sociolinguistics. But of course I had no idea at the time that I was the first person to do Labov-type work. On dialects in British Education ... KM: In Accent, Dialect and the School (Trudgill, 1975) you have a chapter on non-standard dialect, restricted code, and verbal deprivation, in which you say that Bernstein has been misunderstood badly and the misunderstanders have caused great harm. What exactly happened? PT: OK, I kind of got into this area, as I suspect a number of people in sociolinguistics did, almost against my will. I mean, it was never my intention to do this kind of work. I know that subsequently people like Bill Labov and Walt Wolfram have argued, and I agree with them, that linguists who get data from a particular community have a duty to repay that debt to the community in a number of ways, and you’ll be familiar with their writings on this topic. But I didn’t think much of that at that time. But I’d always been very taken by the notion of the potential equality of all languages and the potential equality of all dialects, and I well remember in my first year in Edinburgh hearing John Lyons talk about that and arguing very persuasively that there was no reason to suppose that any one variety of language is superior in any linguistic way to any other. And I’m thinking, “Yeah, you know, I’m sure that’s right, and I’ve never heard anybody say that before, and I’d always sort of felt that in my bones, but I’d never had the intellectual arguments at my fingertips to argue this.” So what happened was that I got my first job after finishing my PhD at the University of Reading under Frank Palmer in 1970, and the Linguistic Science Department at Reading at that time was a real powerhouse and was for many years after that, it was the first linguistics department in a British university to offer undergraduate degrees in linguistics, and Frank Palmer and Peter Matthews and David Crystal were very influential in British linguistics and very influential on me as well, and I don’t recall exactly how it happened, but I remember being asked to go and talk to groups of school-teachers about language. It must have been David Crystal that asked me to do that. I went along to talk about various things like... they were interested in hearing about different dialects and so on, and I remember being sort of shocked by the amount of ignorance, and in particular the amount of prejudice that school-teachers had at that time. I’d been within the academic world of linguistics for, you know, five or six years by this time, I’d sort of come somewhat removed from the real world, I’d forgotten how it was out there. So I gradually realised that if you’re going to go and talk to school-teachers, they want help, and they want information, and they want to be able to think rationally about language. Precisely at the time when I was going around starting to argue to teachers that there is nothing actually wrong about non-standard dialects or about low prestige accents of English, which was a very controversial thing to say in the England of the early 1970s, particularly to school-teachers, although many of them were very favourably disposed towards this argument, so precisely at that time many colleges of education, teacher-training colleges in England were beginning to propagate what they saw as being the theories of Bernstein (see e.g. Bernstein, 1975; Lawton, 1975). Now, Bernstein’s theories were very difficult, I think, for people in linguistics and in education, they were very sociological, very philosophical, and it’s not surprising that people misunderstood what he was saying. I still think he is not a very good writer, I don’t think his writings are very clear, and also his own thinking, particularly in his early articles was rather confused in that he didn’t have sufficient linguistic-analytical ability to distinguish between what people said on the one hand, and the way they said it on the other. I mean, he had an interesting insight, which is probably still correct that, if people move in tight social networks, and most frequently encounter people from the same background as themselves, and who know each other very well, then they take a lot of shared information for granted and won’t make things explicit, whereas people who move in much wider social circles will tend to realise that they have to make things more explicit and can’t take things for granted. Something by the way which I think has very interesting implications for certain aspects of linguistic change. Anyway, he coined these terms restricted code and elaborated code; restricted code is a form of speaking which takes lots of background knowledge for granted, and elaborated code is a code which doesn’t do that. But immediately it was interpreted by many people who hadn’t really understood what he was saying to mean “non-standard dialect” versus “standard dialect.” He had argued that restricted code was insufficient in an educational situation, because in the educational situation you need, particularly when you’re writing, to take into account that people may not have the same background information as you do. Now, it was partly his fault because he didn’t just talk about what people said, he started talking about pronouns and relative clauses and things which confused the issue, and that was his fault. But many people came to think if Bernstein’s theory was that restricted code is not adequate in the educational situation, therefore we need to encourage pupils to acquire elaborated code. That was a very philosophical position. I think, my very down-to-earth common sense position is: all that meant really was that we need to sensitise pupils to the fact that they may often be talking to, and especially will be writing for, people who do not know the same stuff that they know. That’s all it boils down to. But there was a body of opinion amongst the educational establishment in Britain that said non-standard dialects aren’t good enough, the standard dialect is the only thing that works in the educational situation, therefore – two different solutions – some people said we have to teach Standard English to people who can’t speak Standard English, other people said, well, it’s hopeless, you know, no wonder working class people don’t do very well at school, it’s not our fault, they are just not up to it. KM: Recently you got into a strange debate with Randolph Quirk and Gabrielle Stein over teaching Standard English in schools. They maintain that you say Standard English is nothing but an upperclass variety. They also say that the English National Curriculum “protects the child from being falsely discouraged from learning Standard English, trapped instead into a parochialism that would inhibit geographical and occupational mobility. For of course, so far from being redolent of privilege and class-based restriction, a standard language vastly enhances individual liberty by moving towards the ideal of universal empowerment” (Stein & Quirk, 1995 p.63). How do you counter such arguments? PT: Well, if you want to say that Standard English empowers people, you need to ask why is this? What is there about Standard English which empowers people? And I don’t think people who have ever argued in this way have thought about it properly. Why should it be empowering to say I did it yesterday, and not empowering to say I done it yesterday. Particularly when I done it is a non-standard form which is found throughout the English-speaking world. In fact it is safe to say that a vast majority of people in the English speaking world, native speakers of English would normally say I done it rather than I did it. So why would it be empowering to say I did it? And I think there is of course an important sense in which it is empowering to say I did it, and that is that there is a lot of prejudice and a lot of discrimination against people who can’t speak Standard English. So yes, there are many jobs which are not available to people who don’t have access to Standard English. But it’s not empowering in any sort of mystical sense, it’s empowering because it enables people to fight against the discrimination which they suffer. And it seems to me that the correct way to counter discrimination is not to say, well... if Black people are being discriminated against, you don’t say, “Well, you should become white,” or if women are being discriminated against, you don’t say, “Well, you should become a man,” and if non-standard speakers are being discriminated against, why should you say “Well, you should speak Standard English”? What you should actually attack is the discrimination! That’s what I think. KM: Are these arguments, e.g. that knowing Standard X liberates you from your self-imposed ghetto, universal? PT: I don’t know whether they are universal, but they are certainly wide-spread. And they are totally fallacious, I mean, in what way is it liberating? In what way are you removed from your ghetto? OK, now, you could make a common-sense argument in terms of comprehension: if people can’t understand you, well yes, then you are going to be restricted. But I don’t think linguistic variety within the English-speaking world is such that most people have any difficulty at all understanding any other variety of English. With other languages it might be different. And I don’t think there’s anything parochial about speaking our own local dialect. Ask the Norwegians! Norwegians don’t think there’s anything parochial about speaking your own local dialect, people become national politicians, they become national figures in literature and science speaking their own local dialect. The only reason why it might be restricting is because other people would restrict you. So my solution is that you should stop other people restricting you. KM: Why would well-reputed linguists subscribe to such socially dangerous fallacies? PT: Well, I think it is embarrassing, I agree with that it’s embarrassing, and I don’t want to say bad things about Lord Quirk because he is a most brilliant linguist, and I for one will always be grateful for the magnificent Grammar of Contemporary English that he’s been responsible for. But, as I say in my article in The European English Messenger (Trudgill, 1996b), he’s always had what seems to me to be a blind spot about the argument, which seems to me to be obviously true, that Standard English is a social class dialect. And I think anybody in sociolinguistics would know that that’s true, it’s true that Standard English is a peculiarly important dialect of English, it’s true that all of us in the English-speaking world – because after all we are not in Norway – have to learn to read and write in Standard English, and it’s also true that being able to write in Standard English is a sine qua non for advancement in the educational world and in many other worlds. Although I would say, I think that’s got nothing to do with Standard English, that’s just a social convention. Nevertheless it’s quite true that some people are native speakers of Standard English and most are not, and the people who are native speakers of Standard English (and I would define it as a set of grammatical forms) very strongly tend to be towards the top end of the social scale, so I mean, upper class, upper-middle class. The lower down the social scale you go, the further the dialects get from Standard English. And Professor Quirk does not seem to believe that’s the case, and I have no idea why. On “correct” language ... KM: In the Fall of 1995 you attended our conference on education through the medium of minority languages in Ungvár, Ukraine, where you gave the opening plenary lecture. A Hungarian reviewer of the proceedings of the conference (Cs. Nagy, 1997) was flabbergasted at your thesis that the use of the notion of “correct language” in education is harmful (Trudgill, 1996b). Are you surprised? PT: No, I’m not surprised. But I think there is a very wide-spread, naive and therefore “common-sense” view in probably most linguistic communities that some forms of language are correct and others are not. All these attitudes are deeply irrational, I mean, some people in sociolinguistics would say, “Yes, but they are so wide-spread, we have to understand them, you can’t just go around saying they’re wrong, you have to counteract them in all sorts of complicated and intelligent ways.” But I am very struck by the fact that people who know nothing whatsoever about language or linguistics feel entitled to pontificate publicly and with extraordinary confidence about linguistic issues in a way which they would never dare to do about astronomy or physics or biology or whatever, simply because they speak a language. So they just take it for granted that correctness is a given, that we can talk about correctness in the same way we can talk about correctness in solving arithmetical problems, or correctness in identifying geographical locations or something like that, and because in other areas of education we are very concerned that children should get the correct answer to problems, they think you can extend this to talking about the way in which children speak their native language. KM: Recently several American sociolinguists have indulged in self-criticism because they admit that their message has not been communicated well enough to those who should benefit from sociolinguistic research. What has been the problem? PT: I think to a certain extent they are right, but to a certain extent they are also wrong. Linguistics is an area of academic study, an area where we do research, where we can do pure research, and where we need to do pure research. Like in any of the social sciences, and linguistics is partly a social science, there are very often cases where linguistics can be applied to the solution of real world problems. That doesn’t mean to say that all of us have to do it, or that some of us have to do it all of the time, but it is important, I think, that in areas where there are direct applications of linguistic knowledge to the solution of real world problems, we should do it. Now, as far as sociolinguistics is concerned, in particular with reference to the very serious problem that we have in anglophone societies and in Hungarian-speaking societies about discrimination against non-standard dialects, I think, it’s true that we should do more. What has been the big revelation to me is that – and this is something which John Rickford (1999) has recently discovered for himself as his recent article in the Journal of Sociolinguistics mentions – these are battles that have to be fought again and again and again, every generation. I personally was involved in a battle involving attitudes towards non-standard dialects and low prestige accents in Britain in the 1970s, and we were very successful. You mentioned my book Accent, Dialect and the School (Trudgill, 1975); that became a standard text in very many teacher-training colleges and the Open University and so on, and we had a whole generation of teachers who were persuaded by the message that, if children suffered because of discrimination against people with certain regional accents, the solution to that problem was not to change the accents but to change the prejudices and get rid of the discrimination, and similarly with the non-standard dialects. And then I thought oh, we won that battle, that’s pretty good, we can’t hope to influence the journalists and the politicians very much, but at least we persuaded the teachers, and that will go on to produce a whole other generation of children, who are more confident speakers of their language, and teachers who are more enlightened and more informed about language. But it didn’t work like that of course. Because another generation of teachers comes along, who haven’t been exposed to this message, and who go back to the mainstream societal thinking which they inherit from whatever they happen to read, the people they happen to talk to and so on. So one thing we have to remember is that you can’t just rest on your laurels, you have to keep on pressing home the message, and hope that younger people will come on after you and press home this message. KM: Sociolinguistics has been coming to the centre stage of linguistics, but it is still not as centre stage as we think it should be. For instance, it is not really surprising to me that in a major Hungarian university young instructors can say things in a staff meeting like “I don’t know what sociolinguistics is, but it cannot nearly be as scientific as structural linguistics, it is baloney.” What do you think is the problem? Would such an opinion be voiced in a good western university today? How long is it going to be until such a statement becomes self-stigmatising? PT: No, such a statement would not be made, nevertheless the views would be held. There are people who think that. Of course, sociolinguistics is many things. And, I’ve actually, as you perhaps remember, a long time ago written an article called “Sociolinguistics and Sociolinguistics” (Trudgill, 1978), which I think says it all, although incidentally Deborah Cameron professes to find it a very strange title, I do not see why. But the point is, by calling this article “Sociolinguistics and Sociolinguistics,” the idea is to show that there are many different things which are called sociolinguistics. Some of them are deeply linguistic, like Labov’s work, I mean what could be more important for historical linguistics than his book on the principles of linguistic change? And there are other things which are only peripherally linguistic, which really use language as data to solve the problem of social sciences, and in between you have a whole range of things. Now it is true that there are some people in what they like to call theoretical linguistics or theoretical syntax who look down their noses at sociolinguistics as being unimportant or unscientific, and I think one reason for that is that sociolinguistics is something which students like, and theoretical syntax is something which students do not at first blush actually like. Students like sociolinguistics because they can relate to it immediately, because it says something to them about the use of language in everyday life, they can see it has to do with certain social problems. So students at a university or college can immediately be attracted to sociolinguistics. And I think people in some aspects of theoretical linguistics are jealous of that, and they also think, ”Well, if people like it, it must be easy,” and easy in the academic world means no good. Sociolinguistics is not easy. It is true that it is more immediately accessible, but it is not easy. You could try getting first-year students to read Labov, but they could not do it. On sexism and racism ... KM: Not too long ago you asked me for Hungarian data concerning what some call sexism in language. The Linguistic Society of America stylesheet goes out of its way to be non-sexist. What do you think of the sexism in language issue and the drive to turn languages, especially English, into politically correct means of communication? PT: Obviously I’m opposed to sexism and racism, and if language is sexist and racist, well, I’m opposed to it, but I think that sometimes people lose sight of the fact that language is mostly a symptom of the situation, of the disease if you like, and not a cause of the disease. It’s true that, if you find a particular aspect of the language which you find sexist, you can talk about it and try to change it, you can highten people’s awareness of it, not people in general of course, because most people in general are not going to listen to your discussion anyway. But I think it is reasonable, for example in English, to talk about generic he as a pronoun, a problem which happily you don’t have in Hungarian. I think even reading my own writing from thirty years ago it does jump out of the page at me that I say he when I’m referring to people in general, and I think it makes kind of sense to use singular they instead in English. On the other hand, I think it’s very easy to go too far with this issue, for example it never seemed to me – my intuitions as a native speaker were never – that chairman consisted of the word chair and man. It does not mean in modern English ‘a man who sits in a chair,’ it means a person who presides over a meeting, and it always seemed to me to say that She was the chairman strikes me as being perfectly grammatical English. Also, I think it’s very interesting – and of course this is something which language cultivators come across as well – that you can try and introduce changes, but because in a way to a very considerable extent language follows society and doesn’t create society, because language is a symptom and not a cause, you can try and introduce changes, but unless you change society, those changes will never be totally successful, witness the attempted introduction of Ms into English instead of the distinction between Mrs and Miss. It strikes me as being reasonable, you know, why should women have two distinct forms and men only one? Yes, it makes a lot of sense. But the introduction has not been successful, instead of replacing two forms with one, we now have three forms: Ms and Mrs and Miss. KM: My perception of English was that “Ms” was a usable, not very infrequent kind of thing ... PT: Perfectly usable, but it hasn’t by any means at all replaced Mrs or Miss. Not at all. It has been added to it. KM: Nine years ago I used the Hungarian word néger ‘Negro’ in a Hungarian paper and somebody accused me of being insensitive or worse to Black sensitivities. I countered that nobody reading my Hungarian paper could possibly be offended since few Blacks read Hungarian academic journals, and those who do should know the way Hungarians use this Hungarian word néger. Can you comment on this? PT: It is difficult for me to comment on this with any degree of assurance,
but of course I accept what you say about the Hungarian situation. I think
ethnonyms are an interesting area. And I think if the community itself
says “We don’t want you to call us X, we want you to call us Y,” then we
kind of have to go along with that. I mean one interesting thing, a parallel
example occurred with the Lappish-speaking community in Northern Norway,
who argued correctly, apparently, that the term Lapp in Norwegian
or Swedish is derogatory, and that it should be replaced by a term from
their own language, namely Sami. OK, the Norwegians seem to
think that’s reasonable, but then they wanted to introduce it into English,
they said “We don’t want you to use the English term Lapp, we want
you to say Sami.” – Why? – Well, we just do. – OK, but you have
to bear in mind that Lapp is not derogatory in English at
all, it is just a descriptive term. And now I think they have been reasonably
successful, many people use the term, I personally use the term Sami
in writing, but I always have to put Lapp in brackets, because
I’m quite sure a large number of English people don’t know about this.
And I think you can go too far with this. You have to do what the community
wants, and be careful that minority communities are sensitive about this
issue and think it a sign of respect to use a name that they want. On the
other hand, I would point out that being known by a particular name which
is different from your own name in some other language is a kind of sign
of acknowledgement and fame. Nobody would seriously suggest that we should
start calling Germany Deutschland, because that’s what it’s called in Germany.
It’s a sign of how important and significant Germany is that it is called
all sorts of different things in different European languages. You might
take the same point about particular cities. The University of Gothenburg
has just taken the decision that it’s going to be known in English as the
University of Göteborg. But if I was a citizen of Göteborg, I
would be proud that it had an English name.
References Bernstein, B. (1975). Nyelvi szocializáció
és oktathatóság. In: M. Pap, & G. Szépe
(Eds.), Társadalom és nyelv (pp. 393-41). Budapest: Gondolat.
Select bibliography of Peter Trudgill’s works Trudgill, P. (1975). Accent, dialect and the school. London:
Edward Arnold.
Kontra Miklós is Professor and Chair of the Department of English Language Teacher Education and Applied Linguistics, University of Szeged. |