Underlying Assumption Three: The Speech, Language, and Social Communication Patterns of White Monolingual Speakers of the Northern Dialects of American English Are Normal, Typical, More Important, and Preferred

Did that heading bother you?

It might have, and it should, in a lot of ways and for a lot of reasons.

And yet, have you ever heard the old aphorism that anyone with access to your checkbook or your calendar can figure out what you value? It’s an imperfect joke, of course, but it’s not entirely untrue; where we spend our money and how we spend our time reflect, on the whole, what we believe in. Archeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others use a similar method when they study the products of a culture. We can learn a lot about any group of people, including about the implicit assumptions that drove their actions, by observing the things they make and the records they leave behind.

Consider, for example, our professional journals.

First, think about the fact that we publish professional journals. Many assumptions underlie a group’s decision to publish professional journals! Our journals physically exemplify our assumption that our specialized professional expertise exists, and they are certainly related to our assumption that our specialized professional body of knowledge needs to be communicated to new professionals in graduate-school courses.

The content of our journals also provides a fascinating record of our professional culture’s beliefs and behaviors over time.

Do you happen to know, for example, what the very first article was, in the first issue of the first volume of our profession’s first journal?

The first article in Volume 1, Issue 1, of our new profession’s first journal, the Journal of Speech Disorders, was titled “Correcting the mechanism causing most foreign brogue” (Barker, 1936). The first thing that our professional ancestors felt the need to publish, when our new profession started its own journal in 1936, was that the spoken English of people who had immigrated to the U.S. was “unsatisfactory” (Barker, 1936, p. 4). Our new profession was encouraged to help clients “overcome all trace of faulty accent” (Barker, 1936, p. 4). A year later, in a different article focused primarily on some details of French pronunciation and linguistic theory, Barker (1937) again referred to the need for “correction” of accents.

And it was not only Barker and not only our research journals. Our profession’s textbooks also explicitly furthered the professional assumption that certain accents or dialects needed to be “corrected.” The first edition of Van Riper’s (1939) classic and still influential textbook, for example, ended with six treatment chapters, one each for what he called language delay, articulation, voice, stuttering, cleft palate, and “bilingualism and foreign dialect.” The “bilingualism and foreign dialect” chapter explicitly used the word “error” to refer to the speech patterns and the word “treatment” to describe the necessary actions by the speech therapist.

This assumption that “foreign” speech could be considered a disorder, on an equivalent footing with language disorders or cleft palate, marked our profession for decades. Wise’s (1946, p. 330) “classification of disorders of speech” referred to “the defects that result from environmental background such as foreign language dialect.” Konigsberg and Windecker (1955) began their tutorial about speech correction in high schools by listing five types of disorders typically seen in that setting: “articulatory faults...voice problems...disturbance in fluency...speech problems related to hearing loss, and...foreign accent” (p. 247). The second (1947) and third (1954) editions of Van Riper’s book retained the foreign dialect treatment chapter. As late as 1978, MacKay (1978) explained that teaching English to speakers of other languages is “remediation,” requiring the same pedagogical or clinical techniques that are required in treating disorders for monolingual English speakers.

Many of these phrases might sound bad enough to your current ears, depending on your starting point, your journey, and your personal views — but we are not finished asking about the next layers of underlying assumptions. We also need to be blunt and clear, as we were in addressing raciolinguistics in Section Two, that our profession’s foundational emphasis on treating accents as disorders did not extend to all accents.

Which Dialects Are We (Not) Talking About?

Let’s think for a moment about some of the dialects and accents of English.

Did your phonetics or language development classes include the opportunity to complete narrow transcriptions of any version of Scottish English or British English? They are distinctly different from American English, including in several characteristics of vowel use, realizing the grapheme “th” as the phoneme /f/, and the use of the velar fricative /x/. The differences extend well beyond accent, also, into language forms that characterize dialects. Many individual semantic items differ, from lifts and lorries to chips and biscuits. British English uses several prepositions differently from the way American English uses them (including to live “in” a street and to do things “at” the weekend). Speakers of British English use present perfect verb constructions (“I’ve lost my wallet,” “She’s brought some pencils”) where an American English speaker would probably describe the simple past as correct or necessary, and speakers of British English frequently add what American English considers an unnecessary (or even incorrect) verb in such phrases as “I might do” (for the American “I might” – although some Southern dialects of American English use the related “I might could”).

But would a White, monolingual English-speaking child from London be judged in need of speech or language therapy in the U.S. on the basis of these patterns?

Of course not.

And is the reason astoundingly obvious, as you think about which accents and dialects have been judged to be problematic by our profession and which have not? Remember, as we discussed in earlier modules, that the reasoning behind many judgments about accents and dialects often has much less to do with the phonology or the language forms and much more to do with the (incorrect, stereotyped, and discriminatory) assumptions and judgments that a listener has already made about the speaker, or about the speaker’s identities or background.

You are correct, therefore, if you are aware that the “foreign” or language-history-based accents deemed to be problematic within our profession have often been those accents produced by people who, as we have addressed, had already been judged by our White, English-speaking professional ancestors to be not White, not speaking the “appropriate” dialects of English with an “appropriate” accent, or both.

Something very similar can be said, of course, about our profession’s history as regards the cultural dialects of American English, including especially the African American Englishes. One intriguing difference between language-based accents and cultural dialects emerges, however, as we try to explore our profession’s early approaches to the African American Englishes.

We noted above that our profession’s journals and textbooks began by asserting that the spoken English of some people who had happened to grow up somewhere other than the U.S. was “unsatisfactory” and “faulty” (Barker, 1936). What were our early professional journals publishing, at the same time, about the many native dialects of American English that have been combined and referred to as African American English, African American Vernacular English, or Black English?

The answer, amazingly enough, is almost nothing.

Boxes 13.1 and 13.2 summarize some patterns from our profession’s early journals.

Start with Box 13.1. (It won’t take you long!)

Is that what you were expecting?

It was not what I was expecting, when I started exploring our profession’s journals as part of my attempts to dig underneath our profession’s assumptions. I fully expected that our 1930s and 1940s and 1950s journals would be full of cringeworthy old articles about the “errors” made by Black speakers, and about the “deficiencies” of the African American Englishes, and about the “need” for speech-language pathologists to “correct” the speech and language of people who were simply going about their lives using any of the many variations of African American English or any of the other (natively spoken) dialects that have somehow been viewed as not close enough to “General,” “Mainstream,” or “Standard” American English (see Module 7 and Module 8). I assumed that our profession’s cultural products would include decades of frankly awful old articles followed by a growing recognition, starting in perhaps the 1960s, that dialects are dialects.

I was wrong, and what I found — or, rather, what was not there to be found — was even more indicative of our underlying assumptions, in a very interesting way.

There was nothing there.

From 1936, when we started our first journal, until 1966 (see Boxes 13.1 and 13.2), more than 30 years later and encompassing almost one-third of the timeline of our profession’s entire existence, our professional journals published no articles with the title words culture or cultural, Black, African, or even the older word Negro (remember, we are discussing the timeframe between 1936 and 1967) and no articles with the title word “dialect” except one 1955 reference to “foreign dialect.”

What does it mean when nothing is there? When something is deemed completely unworthy of any mention? When something is simply not part of the conversation, not on the table at all?

It means, obviously, that the topic has been deemed uninteresting, unimportant, not under consideration, or not worthy of consideration.

It means, in our case, that the guiding cultural belief and implicit assumption of our profession, as reflected in the content of our professional publications for more than 30 years, was clearly that the speech, language, and social communication patterns of White monolingual speakers of the Northern dialects of American English were of interest. These speakers and these dialects were assumed, presumed, normal, typical, more important, and preferred — and this assumption was so firmly entrenched that there was no reason for our journals to even bother mentioning any other people or any other possibilities. Our ancestors addressed the “errors” made by “foreign” speakers, but as our journals created and shared our developing professional expertise about people born in the U.S., Box 13.1 shows clearly that the frame was obviously assumed to be White monolingual speakers of the Northern dialects of American English.

What Assumptions Drove Our Profession’s Changing Conversations?

We also know, of course, that our current journals and our current profession do at least attempt to address some of the African American Englishes, other natively-spoken dialects of American English, the American Englishes that are not grouped as the Northern regional dialects (or not viewed as part of as General, Mainstream, or Standard American English), and the people who use them. When and how did this change occur, and what underlying assumptions or beliefs are reflected in the change?

Box 13.2 summarizes a few of the earliest relevant publications.

What do the patterns summarized in Box 13.2 show us?

• During the era when the older word “Negro” would have been in use, articles about the needs of people who would have been described as Negro essentially did not appear in ASHA journals. (A title-word search identifies a grand total of two articles in ASHA’s publications, one from 1967 and one from 1972.)

• The first time the word “dialect” was used in the title of an ASHA journal article to refer to African American English was in 1966, in an article that focused on listeners’ “difficulties” and reported a method intended to change speakers’ productions of individual words (Hurst et al., 1966).

• The first time our journals included any version of the word “culture” or “cultural” in the title of an article was in 1967, in the context of “deficits” and “disadvantages” (Raph, 1967).

• The third article in ASHA journals ever to use the title word “dialect*”, and the first publication in our journals with the title word “dialect” that provided information about African American English as a dialect (rather than using the word dialect in the context of the “difficulty” or “difficulties” that listeners were presumed to face when speaking with people who had immigrated to the U.S. and/or learned English as adults) did not appear until the 1970s (Adler, 1971).

In these and many other ways, again, our profession’s products, the publications we produced as the permanent records of our guiding science, opinion, and recommendations, show very clearly that the speech, language, and social communication patterns of White speakers of the Northern dialects of American English have been assumed to be not only the topic of interest but explicitly normal, typical, more important, and preferred. For decades, these speakers were the only ones worthy of mention or consideration. In the late 1960s, when other speakers began to be discussed in our journals, the message was that all other dialects cause difficulties for listeners and that culture refers to “deficits” and “disadvantages.”

And of course, the cringeworthy old material that I had been expecting to find about sociocultural dialects is there, too, even if it did not appear until much later than I was expecting. Raph (1967), in the first article in our journals to use any form of the word “culture” in its title, wrote about the “underlying problem of language structure” for children from “deprived backgrounds” such as “urban slums” or “a remote reservation” (Raph, 1967, p. 204) — obvious allusions to African American children, children of families who had immigrated to the U.S. and settled in cities, and Native American children. She asserted that the children from the homes and neighborhoods she called “deprived” were “disadvantaged”; she described them as “show[ing] marked limitations…in both reasoning and speaking” (p. 205). She managed to claim that what she called “lower-class” African American children did not understand such constructs as first and last, or long and short, until they were almost 9 years old. Overall, she dismissed the children she called “culturally deprived” as unable to communicate, to learn, or even to think, and therefore destined to achieve essentially nothing in life unless they received substantial intervention. She reached these conclusions based, in part, on her claims that the children could not “use language as a means of carrying on a dialogue with themselves” and that “they lack the use of language as a means of getting and dealing with incoming verbal cues” (Raph, 1967, p. 207) — genuinely unbelievable claims, to my reading; laughably absurd, were they not also so monumentally serious.

How could anyone have looked at entire large groups of children in this manner and declared them to be incapable of using language? And how in the world did such patently bigoted views end up in our profession’s journals?

The answer lies in the power of underlying cultural belief systems and assumptions, precisely as this module is exploring.

We are amateur archeologists, anthropologists, or sociologists at the moment, studying the products that a culture left behind. We are uncovering the evidence of, and the power of, our professional culture’s underlying assumptions. The evidence is right there in our profession’s records.

And what have we found?

First, our profession’s research and practice journals spent more than 30 years essentially ignoring people who were native speakers of American English but not monolingual White speakers of the Northern dialects of American English. Then, when our profession decided to write about people who were native speakers of American English but not monolingual White speakers of the Northern dialects of American English, the message was that “their” speech patterns caused “difficulties” for “listeners” and that “their” children somehow did not possess or display the basic human ability to use symbolic communication.