In August of 1972, my parents, my two bothers and I moved to Maui for one year. We had a month to explore the island before school started. At first, I thought we had landed in paradise: warm ocean water, lush vegetation, and an endless supply of things to do. During that first month I lived outside, barely clothed and barefoot, only seeing the inside of our condominium when eating or sleeping. Then, it happened. School started. I walked into a schoolroom of thirty-five second grade native Hawaiians; I was the only Caucasian child in the class. We had three teachers, all of Japanese heritage. My skin color, in spite of a deep tan, was not the only thing that told everyone I was a foreigner; the way I spoke was a dead giveaway. I had never heard Pidgin English (the native Hawaiian’s) dialect, before then much less spoken it. My classmates said such phrases as ‘da kine’ and ‘make strong’ and I wondered what they meant. There was no dictionary for me to study when I went home.

Inside the classroom, the Japanese-American teachers spoke nearly the same way that I did, and read us stories written in Standard English like The Little House on the Prairie. Outside the classroom, however, everybody spoke Pidgin unless one found him or herself in the tourist area. Each day I felt strange and often tried to convince my parents that I was too sick to attend school. On Maui, "the language associated with the power structure- "Standard English"- is the language of economic success, and all students have the right to schooling that gives them access to that language" (Delpit 53). The conquerors of the islands, Caucasian settlers, took over the schools and went on to impose Standard English upon the native population. There was not a teacher of Hawaiian descent in the whole Kihei School (grades K-8). "Language patterns which closely parallel the teacher’s" (Rosenthal 311) ensure any student’s academic success. The ability to use different codes for different social situations ensures any student’s social success. Why wasn’t Hawaiian kept as the official language of Hawai’i? Why was Pidgin English perceived as a substandard form of English when it was a perfectly logical blend of the islands’ variety of cultures?

Reasons for changing the official language of Hawai’i and subsequently, perceiving Pidgin speakers as ignorant, lie behind the fact that Standard English was equated with power. "When we study the history of how such usages came to be condemned, we find the roots of condemnation in social prejudice. This prejudice became institutionalized and has been handed down through the generations by schools and other language authorities such as publishing houses and the media" (Rubba 112). A dialect can indicate wealth, education and political power. Conquered peoples, such as the Hawaiians, are coerced to adopt the most powerful group’s language or dialect.

No language or dialect is inherently "better" than another; one language may have a broader variety of words for emotions, as in Greek; or one dialect may disregard certain forms of ‘be’, as in Standard Black English. Communication is one of the primary functions of language. If all languages and dialects do this task effectively, how then can one type of communication be preferable? We can make the argument that a society or nation needs to have a common language. Some countries even have two or three, like Switzerland. The U.S. has chosen English as its national language, and Standard American English as its national dialect.

Hairston’s study on judgments of English usage (confirmed by Rubba’s subsequent survey) begs the question: how do we accommodate language diversity in a society which prefers homogeneity? Dialect differences in writing produced an overwhelmingly negative response in readers who are educated in Standard English usage. "Respondents of both sexes reacted most strongly against errors that were so glaring, they might be called status markers" (Hairston 796). Nonstandard dialect users suffer a disadvantage because theirs is not the majority voice. What can a teacher do to facilitate Standard English usage while respecting dialectal difference? Educators need to be practical about the fact that the hiring and higher educational institutions favor Standard English. Yet, tolerance of dialect difference needs to be encouraged, promoted and realized in the classroom. "[A student’s] shortcomings may originate not in his different ethnic, cultural, and economic background but in his [or her] teachers’ response to that background" (Rosenthal 310).

Variations upon Standard English usage which were addressed in Rubba’s study are a sister category to dialect difference. A majority of people with prestigious positions objected to standard dialect variations in writing. These statistics point out yet another reason for employing and teaching the standard dialect’s rules of grammar. Most people in the hiring and admissions/grading positions in higher education look for traditionally proper usages rather than colloquial ways of writing. Reasons for this probably have roots in the fact that these high-status positions are overwhelmingly filled by qualified applicants who went through the educational system with a high level of success. Hairston confirmed with her survey’s results that most people in positions to affect other people academically and/or professionally require writing that obeys the rules of Standard English. Otherwise, professionals form negative perceptions of the writers, applicants, or employees.

To be honest, I responded negatively to dialectal difference in writing when I took Rubba’s survey "Usage Matters", even though I have been a member of a language/dialect minority on several instances in my life. It is clear that "[diverse students] can help all of us learn what it feels like to move between cultures and language varieties, and thus perhaps better learn how to become citizens of the global community" (Delpit 69). The majority of us knows someone, personally or casually, who has grown up speaking either a different language or dialect than we did. If one grew up speaking Standard American English, fewer obstacles interfere with his or her success in the U.S. than for those who learned English as a "second" language. Even though Standard English is the language of the majority now, in several decades our society will be more diverse than it is presently. Is it still logical to be fiercely "guarding the tower" (Hairston 794) in the face of the inevitable changes that lie ahead for us?

Well, it might be logical to assess the expectations that the education and hiring institutions have for their prospective students and employees. And, it is the teacher’s obligation to supply the necessary survival skills to his or her students. However, each person is entitled to the pride associated with belonging to a social group who speaks the same language or dialect. "Students can be asked to "teach" the teacher and other students aspects of their language variety. They can "translate" songs, poems, and stories into their own dialect or into "book language" and compare the differences across the cultural groups represented in the classroom" (Delpit 67). If enough of us become bidialectal we can influence the formation of the testing tools that schools use. We can recruit speakers of various dialects and offer incentives for them to learn Standard English well enough to teach it as a "second" dialect.

When I first started school on Maui, I was socially disadvantaged because I did not understand Pidgin English. On the mainland, however, I was a member of the majority. If we turn the situation around and I happened to be a Hawaiian girl in an all-Caucasian school, more pressure would have existed for me to learn the accepted dialect. Despite the fact that my native dialect was the Standard dialect, with a capital ‘S’, I struggled to learn and speak Pidgin in order to show the Hawaiians my desire to belong. While playing football one day on Maui, my friends instructed me to run maoka with the ball. I just stood there confused, long enough to be caught. Maoka means upland, or toward the mountains, an important concept on an island. Its opposite, makai, means toward the ocean. Standard English has no equivalent single words for these concepts rooted in the Hawaiian topography.

Sources

-Delpit, Lisa. 1995. Other people’s children: cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: The New Press.
-Hairston, Maxine. 1981. Not all errors are created equal: Nonacademic readers in the professions to lapses in usage. College English 43:8 794-806 (December).
-Rosenthal, Robert and Lenore Jacobsen. 1968. Teacher Expectations for the Disadvantaged. Scientific America 36.
-Rubba, Johanna. 1998. Good and Bad English. Chapter 8 of True Grammar.