Section Two
Module 7: Normalizing Dialects and Accents
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What is American English? What are “the American Englishes”?
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After working with the material in this module, readers will be able to
explain the relationships among language, languages, dialects, and accents, especially as these constructs relate to American English
use the constructs of dimensions, continua, and identity to evaluate common beliefs about dialects and accents in American English
explain the relevance of dialects and accents as cultural and linguistic correlates for clinicians engaged in prevention, assessment, or intervention with persons with communication and swallowing disorders (cf. ASHA Certification Standards IV-B, IV-C, and IV-D)
decide how they will refer to the dialects of American English or to the American Englishes, and why
American English exists as a set of many related but different dialects, and it is spoken with what might be perceived as a wide range of accents. Let’s think about the resulting questions and opportunities for client-centered, culturally and individually appropriate practice in speech-language pathology.
Languages, Dialects, and Accents
Languages and Dialects
In Module 6, we discussed the range of languages that are spoken in the U.S., including English. We also need to address, of course, the variations and subdivisions that exist within any “one” language, some of which we can refer to as the language’s dialects.
As Wolfram and Schilling (2016, p. 2) began their classic text about American English, “to speak a language is to speak some dialect of that language.” In this sense, and as is true for English and many other languages, it is not possible to speak a language without speaking one of its dialects, just as it is not possible to eat ice cream without eating a flavor of ice cream (Hamilton, 2020) or to drive in some general way without driving a single, specific car.
In many ways, therefore, our entire discussion of “English” in Module 6 was lazy. We cannot think about our profession by thinking only about abstracted languages; we need to make the effort to think about our profession in terms of the dialects of those languages that real people actually use.
(Explore the languages of China or India, of the African continent, or even of Scandinavia, or find some of the very accessible work of the linguist John McWhorter, if you are interested in some of the other possible relationships between and among language families, languages, dialects, and language variations. In English, the divisions run in that order (from larger to smaller) and have certain assumed meanings. For other languages, however, social and political divisions result in what are known as “languages” that actually meet the “mutually intelligible” definition often reserved for dialects; my own personal experience with this issue involves Norwegian, which I learned, and Swedish and Danish, which I can understand because they are no more different from Norwegian than the primary dialects of Norwegian are from each other. That the U.S. government collects data about people who speak “Chinese” at home, as we mentioned in Module 6, is another example: “Chinese” is not a language, even though people manage to answer that question (Mandarin and Cantonese are less similar than French and Spanish are). That a language is necessarily divided into its dialects is true for English, so we will treat it as true for a while as we think about speech-language pathology in the U.S., but these terms apply in different ways for other languages and can be used in other ways — a point we will return to at the end of this module!)
In general for many human languages, and for American English, some dialects are regional, developed because the communication patterns of individuals who live together must be similar to be useful and tend to diverge, over time, from the patterns used by people who live farther away. Other dialects are sociocultural, age-based, or reflect other reasons that subgroups of people develop specialized ways of communicating with each other, even when they live close to, or geographically intermingled with, other subgroups (Labov, 2003; Wolfram & Schilling, 2016).
To linguists, and as defined by ASHA (2003), all dialects of American English, whether regional or sociocultural, represent equally reasonable options, in that they are all complete and adequate communication systems for the people who use them. Dialects are not ranked; there are no “better” or “lesser” dialects. A dialect is no more than (and no less than!) a specific and acceptable rule-governed system for all aspects of speech and language production that is used by a group of people as their means of communication.
Beyond this strict linguistic definition, however, the differences among dialects also raise many political, social, emotional, and personal issues. Whether linguists declare them to be equal or not, dialects are among the many otherwise benign differences that human beings tend to rate and rank (see Module 2). You are probably already well aware that, throughout history and around the world, some dialects of all languages have been described or perceived as more or less desirable. Dialects can be perceived as stuffy, educated, lazy, higher-class, working-class, correct, or incorrect, and dialects can be judged and ranked in many other ways. Similarly, at the individual level, speakers who are aware of their home or native dialect tend to feel strong and positive emotional connections to it that they simply do not feel about other dialects of their language. Our native dialects are part of our identity, part of how we understand our relationships to a geographic area, and part of how we feel connected to a subgroup of people whom we describe as our “family” or our “home.”
(Lippi-Green, 2012, provided a thorough and readable discussion of these social-judgment issues for dialects of American English, as we will address in more detail in Module 8. Yu, Nair, et al., 2022, provided a more recent analysis of related issues within speech-language pathology in particular. You might enjoy their work, if you are interested in languages and dialects, and we will revisit them in Module 8.)
One interesting aspect about people and dialects, however, is that our linguistic sense of home or of belonging often remains subconscious, leading many speakers to interpret their dialect, almost automatically, as simply the way speech should happen or even as the absence of a dialect. This common human tendency, popularized as the old joke that fish do not know they are in water until they are not, leads to an unfortunate tendency for many people to notice other people’s dialects while somehow remaining under the impression that they themselves are not also speaking a dialect.
Remember, linguistically, for English: Everyone is always speaking a dialect. It is not possible to speak English without speaking a particular dialect of English, just as it is not possible to eat ice cream without eating a flavor of ice cream. If you notice that someone else is eating strawberry ice cream, your basis for that recognition is not that your own ice cream is somehow unflavored; no one eats “General Ice Cream.” You yourself are eating chocolate, or pistachio, or whatever your own flavor of ice cream might be. Similarly, when we notice that someone else is using a dialect of American English, we need to remember that we ourselves are currently doing exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reasons.
Dialects and Accents
As we begin to consider dialects and accents, let’s also note that some sources, including ASHA’s definitions for speech-language pathology, differentiate accents from dialects by limiting accents to variations in pronunciation and prosody, while defining dialects as including language variations. In this formulation, your dialect includes the words you use, how you inflect them, and how you combine them, while your accent affects only how you say them. Dialectal features are often noticeable in all expressive language, whereas some accents would be demonstrated only in spoken and signed (but not written) expression. Sometimes it helps to think of a dialect as the version of a language that is passed from generation to generation within a community, and to think of an accent as how a single speaker sounds to a person from a different community. A speaker’s language history, similarly, will influence the way they produce any new dialect or language, through linguistically predictable patterns of speech transfer and in ways that can often be described as an accent.
As with most details about real people, however, and despite ASHA’s attempts to divide dialects from accents, none of these distinctions between dialects and accents is complete or fully accurate in all situations. Some language variations that are widely agreed to be dialects, for example, differ almost exclusively on the basis of articulatory, phonological, or prosodic details.
For the remainder of this module, therefore, we will accept but not emphasize our profession’s traditional distinction between dialects and accents. It can make sense, in some situations, to recognize that some speech-pattern variations (accents) involve only speech-motor and prosodic features while others (dialects) include variations in all aspects of speech and language, including pragmatics. In many other situations, however, trying to determine whether two speech patterns vary “only” in terms of speech, or differ in terms of both speech and language, introduces an unnecessary complexity. (If you are interested in phonology, you know already that speech and language are not separable after all, despite our profession’s generally useful division between the two.) Languages, dialects, accents, and other language variations already represent some of the most complex, dynamic, and interesting features of being human. Let’s keep it as simple as we can and jump on in.
Your Turn
Hamilton (2020), a scholar with specific expertise about dialects in speech-language pathology, also used ice cream as a metaphor. (I’m sure many others have, too; it’s a good metaphor!) She wrote, “[T]hink of the language base as ice cream and all of the different ways to speak that language as the flavors.” I think my imagery is even stronger than hers, while making the same point she was trying to make: Picture the unfinished, not-yet-frozen ice cream base, consisting at that point of merely an unflavored custard. That’s not ice cream. It does not become recognizable as ice cream until it is flavored and frozen, or until it becomes a specific type of ice cream, just as our underlying abilities in symbolic communication do not become expressive language until we speak (or sign or write, or at the very least think to ourselves in words), an act that must involve producing the content and the form of a particular dialect. As Wolfram and Schilling (2016, p. 2) phrased it, “to speak a language is to speak some dialect of that language”; speaking “the language base” is not an option. Do any versions of these ice cream metaphors help you to think about the dialects of American English? (Or is this conversation leaving you… cold?)
I have lived in Georgia for almost 30 years. Every time I return to the Atlanta airport after having been elsewhere, I feel a physical sense of relief to be surrounded again by the familiar sights and sounds of Southern speakers, dialects, and accents, even though my own dialect and accent are not Southern. Do you have any strongly positive emotional reactions to dialects or accents that you speak or that you do not speak? How might similar positive emotions affect our clients and their families?
The novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace used the metaphor of fish in water as a theme in a relatively well-known and frequently re-posted commencement address from 2005. His address also emphasized the importance of working to be aware of other people’s experiences, and Wallace summarized the problems with human beings’ subconscious or unexamined assumptions delightfully bluntly: “a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” You might enjoy reading or listening to his speech, thinking about how its themes relate to our perceptions of dialects or to your efforts to provide client-centered, culturally and individually appropriate speech-language pathology.
Dialects of English
Let’s think a bit more about the many variations of English, and especially about the many variations of American English. Answer the questions below as best you can without looking up any facts: What is your best guess or current impression? Discuss your guesses with a few other people, if you can, before you move on.
How many dialects of English are there around the world? Is/are any of them more correct than any others? If so: Which ones, and why?
How many dialects of American English are there in the United States? Is/are any of them more correct than any others? If so: Which ones, and why?
Ready to consider some answers?
Many sources recognize between 7 and 10 dialects of English around the world, including British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian, and/or Hong Kong. Depending on how differences are categorized, however, it is possible to recognize 150 or more distinct variations of English (see the Wikipedia List of Dialects of English), including in many countries where English is used to facilitate international communications (Crystal, 2003).
Is any of these many variations more correct than any other? You might have had two answers here. One of your answers was probably “no,” at least for the primary 7-10 dialects. You know that Canadian English, for example, is no more or less correct than Australian English; it’s merely a different system used by different people in a different place.
But does another part of you also want to say that one answer to this question is “yes,” at least in some way or for some people? You might be aware, for example, that many people think of British English as the original or as the standard, for historical or political reasons, with other variations then perceived as somehow secondary – even though you also know that the other variations are complete and correct in themselves, not incorrect versions of British English.
Similar complexities and tensions exist for the American Englishes. You might have answered that there are approximately 6-8 dialects of American English, perhaps dividing the continental U.S. into rough geographic regions in your mind and/or including one or more sociocultural dialects. Many standard sources would agree with you, but an equally common estimate is 25-30 (Wolfram & Ward, 2006; or see this discussion of American English dialects), and it is more than possible to distinguish many more. The difference between 6-8 and 25-30 (or more) reflects the same definitional and category-level complexities that affected our counts of worldwide Englishes; one source might refer to Southern English, for example, while another distinguishes among Virginian, Appalachian, Coastal/Lowland South, inland South, Cajun-influenced, and many other southern Englishes.
Is any one or more of these dialects of American English more correct than any other? You probably said “no” again here, as you did in considering the difference between American English, Canadian English, and Australian English. And you are correct, as we emphasized above; there is no reason to view Virginia’s dialects as any better or worse than New Hampshire’s or Nevada’s. They are equally reasonable options, all complete and adequate linguistic systems (ASHA, 2003) that differ primarily in that they are used by different people in different places.
But did your thoughts about American English also reflect, at least in part, issues similar to those that allow British English to hold some special status in some people’s minds on the world stage, or that have historically led some dialects around the world to be perceived as “better” than some others? You might be aware that speech-language pathologists often refer to what they call General American English, Standard American English, or Mainstream American English (GAE, SAE, or MAE), terms that seem to imply the centrality, superiority, relative acceptability, or at least popularity of one version of American English as compared with others. You might have counted General American English, or one of these other terms, as one of the core or somehow “key” dialects of American English, something we will explore in detail later in this module. Or you might have been aware at some point along your journey that your own wonderful and important home accent or dialect was being judged negatively by other people, an experience that might have led you to answer that at least in some people’s minds there are, most definitely, “more correct” and “less correct” dialects of American English.
You are in good company, if your thoughts about dialects are complex or even self-contradictory. At one level, we know that White adults in Nebraska and Kansas cannot possibly speak the single correct version of American English, just we know that London does not define a single correct version of worldwide English. Nevertheless, we as speakers of American English, and as speech-language pathologists, do often harbor some underlying sense that there must be core, main, general, standard, more correct, more acceptable, or more typical dialects of American English, or that some dialects of American English might be somehow less standard or less correct. Why do people have these reactions about dialects? How should we, as speech-language pathologists, think about the dialects of American English?
Answering these complex linguistic and social questions requires us to draw once again on the notions of dimensions, continua, and the human tendency to rank differences, from Module 2. (Later, in Module 12, we will also consider the influence of the 25 people who started the association that became ASHA.) Let’s first think about dialects as continua that have been divided into categories and subcategories. Then we will need to compare the linguistic realities about our dialects with the ways that we tend to talk about our dialects, a comparison that has some important implications for our work in client-centered, culturally and linguistically appropriate speech-language pathology.
Dialects of American English: Continua, Categories, and Judgments
Linguists around the world have demonstrated that, on the whole, languages change every 50 miles or so, assuming that those 50 miles are physically, socially, and politically traversable (see Gooskens, 2004). The same is true everywhere in the U.S. that researchers have looked closely: We agreed above that there might be 25-30 dialects of American English, but Purcell et al. (2013) described almost 50 varieties of English in Wisconsin alone, and other linguistics researchers routinely present data that distinguish the speech in one town or county from the speech of another area only 50-100 miles away. Sometimes the differences are small, reflecting one phonological or morphological tendency or a few semantic items, but other changes are larger and relatively abrupt across specific geographic and social boundaries (Labov, 1994, 2001, 2011). In addition to these incremental and local differences, regional dialects in the U.S. also reflect an overriding and (possibly growing) distinction between what are often called “northern” and “southern” speech patterns (Labov,1994), among many other local and social influences (Labov, 2011; Wolfram & Schilling, 2016).
Given this enormous variation in the speech and language patterns used across the U.S., linguists and other scholars interested in language tend to draw some lines, or impose some categories, to combine those 50- or 100-mile distinctions into larger and more manageable units. The result is usually a set of multi-tiered geographical, sociocultural, and other categories and subcategories that can be used as an organizing or descriptive system. None of these category boundaries can be perfect (as much of Labov’s work emphasizes), because all such boundaries are imposed upon continua: lines and circles can be drawn on maps, but the reality on the ground is that incremental changes slowly add up as the physical or social distances increase and also continue to shift over time. Still, Wolfram and Ward’s (2006) well-respected book, for example, did collapse the almost infinite variety of American English into only 26 dialects, which were organized in turn into only six major categories (the South, the North, the Midwest, the West, islands, and sociocultural dialects). Most other systems are similar.
It is important to repeat here that linguists’ categories and subcategories are not designed to rate or rank dialects, only to describe or compare individual dialects, subcategories of dialects, and superordinate or combined categories of dialects as linguistic systems. Descriptive typology linguistics assumes and demonstrates that languages vary geographically, socioculturally, and over time (for American English, see Wolfram & Schilling, 2016), not that any particular variation is better than any other. And, importantly, most linguistic sources do not use terms such as “General” or “Standard” as they describe the dialect systems of American English. Linguists depend much more on geographic and sociocultural descriptors (referring, for example, to such categories as the northern Midlands dialects). Some sources do refer to the speech and language patterns used in the middle of the continental U.S., perhaps as far west as Montana or northern California and perhaps as far as east as Ohio or even western New England (compare Kretzschmar, 2004, with Van Riper, 2014) as a generalized or neutral form of American English. The implication as linguists discuss dialects, however, is not that these central-continent forms are general, standard, more common, or more correct than any other variety, only that they can be described as using or not using features that occur in other areas or are used by other speakers.
Problems emerge, of course, when non-linguists, including speech-language pathologists, are confronted with speech and language patterns that differ from our own. Remember the general human tendencies we addressed in Module 2: People tend to think in terms of binary oppositions instead of recognizing the many equally reasonable options that fall along continuous dimensions, and people tend to rank as better or worse things that are merely different from each other or that are more or less familiar. When we do recognize the existence of a dimension or continuum, these tendencies combine, and people tend to perceive some ends or sections of many cultural and individual continua as preferred. The result, for dialects, is findings like these examples, and many others:
“Nine- to 10-year-old children living in both Illinois and Tennessee reported that Northern-accented individuals sounded “smarter” and “in charge,” whereas Southern-accented individuals sounded “nicer”” (Kinzler & DeJesus, 2013, p. 1154)
“Preston (1999) found that…Southern speech styles were considered more friendly but less correct than standard speech styles” (Heaton & Nygaard, 2011, p. 202)
“Participants viewed the neutral accented speaker as more competent (e.g., grammatically correct, effective instructor, professional manner) than the Southerner” (Boucher et al., 2013, p. 27)
The problems raised by such stereotyped judgments are even more apparent when the listener holds one or more of Morgan’s (1996) socially privileged characteristics and the speaker does not, as we will address directly in Module 8.
An Absolute Starting Point and the Next Questions
Where are we, then, as we think about dialects for our practice? As an absolute starting point, and repeating key points on purpose, we as speech-language pathologists must recognize that the dialects of American English used by real people in the U.S. vary along the full lengths of multiple continua. We must understand that all of these variations are complete and adequate communication systems for the people who use them, equally valued in every way (ASHA, 2003). And we must do our best to resist any preconceived notions, stereotypes, or judgments about the “correctness” or relative superiority of any person’s or group’s dialect.
But do you have any “and then what” or “what about” questions?
You should! Dialects are complicated. And our profession’s traditional reliance on constructs such as “General American English” does not help. Let’s keep going; we need to explore that idea and several other complexities about dialects that affect our speech- and language-based profession.
Your Turn
Search online for several maps that show the dialects of American English. Enjoy the variety that you find. How well do the maps characterize the speech patterns of people in your area?
The artist Saul Steinberg derived considerable humor from the human tendency to perceive and value much more detail about our own interests, cultures, and languages than about other people’s. (Critical thinking refers to this tendency as the “out-group homogeneity bias,” which we discussed in Module 5. It’s also a form of stereotyping, where stereotyping is defined as depending on a fixed, oversimplified view of another group; see Module 9, among other examples throughout this website.) Explore some of Steinberg’s drawings online, and compare them to the maps of American English dialects that you found. Can you almost literally see where the linguists who made the maps lived and worked, as Steinberg’s cartoons parodied? How could our tendency to collapse all variations that are less familiar to us into one large category that we describe with one broad label (e.g., the “Western” or “Northeastern” dialects, depending on where you are from), as Steinberg drew the entire North American continent west of New Jersey, influence our work with individual clients?
Discuss some of the main points of this section. How do these claims support or contradict other things you thought you knew about American English?
English is necessarily realized as its dialects, and it is not possible to speak English without speaking one of its dialects.
Dialect names represent artificial category labels imposed upon almost continuous geographic and other variation and change.
All dialects of American English are “adequate as a functional and effective variety of American English” (ASHA, 2003).
General, Mainstream, Standard, or the American “Englishes”?
We mentioned the words “general,” “mainstream,” and “standard” above, all of which have been used to describe some version or versions of American English. Try thinking about each of these terms and about a plural usage, “the American Englishes.” Are you familar with any of them? Were you taught that any of them is preferred to any other for some reason? What are we assuming or implying, when we use them?
“General” American English
As the previous section addressed, the word “general” is common but inaccurate. There is no usable general form of spoken American English. To speak American English at all, you must speak in a specific way. Some dialects of American English are similar to each other and can be combined for some purposes into categories that linguists have named “Northern American English” or “Western American English,” among other examples, but these are not names for any single “general” form; they are category labels, a way of organizing and then referring to multiple similar specific systems that have been combined as linguists created typologies of systems. Speech-language pathologists who use the phrase “General American English” often do so to avoid the phrase “Standard American English,” which we will discuss below, but “General” is not part of any widely used typology of linguistic systems. It also seems to have given way recently to “Mainstream,” so let’s keep going.
“Mainstream” American English
“Mainstream American English” might be the most common term in current speech-language pathology literature. Do you like it? If you use it, what are you trying to communicate about American English, when you use it?
I have never liked it. I perceive an underlying implication in this term that a dialect used by more people is better than a dialect used by fewer people, or that everyone should speak the way most people speak, or that we have identified the most common dialect in the U.S. I do not accept or believe any of these implications. With respect to the third of them, in particular, I am unaware of any data to show that the individual dialects combined and referred to as the category of Mainstream American English are actually mainstream, if “mainstream” is intended to imply that these patterns are used by more speakers in the U.S. than any other. In fact, I suspect that if we were to combine into one large category all the Spanish-influenced versions of American English spoken across the southwest, Florida, the northeast, and multiple smaller communities everywhere in between, while distinguishing appropriately among other different regional dialects, we might find that Spanish-influenced English is actually more common or more “mainstream” in the U.S. than any other set of variations – but the term “Mainstream American English” decidedly does not refer to Spanish-influenced English.
My best guess, therefore, and the thesis also presented by many authors and sociolinguists, is that the language patterns referred to as “Mainstream American English” feel mainstream primarily to the White, educated, financially stable, monolingual speakers who tend to have more of the political and social power in the U.S. (as we mentioned in Module 6, and see Lippi-Green, 2012) and in speech-language pathology (see Holt, 2022; Yu et al., 2022). The term is, in this sense, a rather transparent substitute for “Standard,” an example of Cross et al.’s (1989) “cultural blindness” (see Module 25), and another example of Kohnert’s (2013) “privileges” that accompany being White in speech-language pathology (see Section Four).
(You might have figured out that I do not use the term “Mainstream” to refer to any version or versions of American English.)
“Standard” American English
What about “Standard” American English?
For many languages around the world, a standard form is officially documented and prescribed. The French Academy (Académie Française) and similar bodies have been tasked for centuries (since 1583, in Italy; since 1890, for modern Hebrew; and since 1935, for Persian in Iran) with developing and maintaining official records that specify approved grammar, vocabulary, and/or usage for the language, often also highlighting works of literature that are viewed as exemplary models of the language. For languages used in more than one country, one academy can attempt to coordinate (e.g., the Real Academia Española, for Spanish), or standards committees can exist in each country (e.g., separate committees exist for Arabic in Algeria, Arabic in Egypt, Arabic in Iraq, and other forms of Arabic).
English does not have such an academy, nor has any board or committee ever been tasked with prescribing the correct version of English. But the phrases “Standard English” and “Standard American English” have existed for centuries anyway — as have ongoing debates about what it might or might not be (see Lloyd, 1951, for one classic example, or see Bex and Watts’ entire 1999 book). To many scholars, “Standard American English” refers to a somewhat loosely defined version, or set of versions, of American English that they might describe as more formal, more professional, or more educated, meaning perhaps the linguistic style(s) or system(s) used in large-scale business, government, education, and other relatively official settings. As Cheshire (1999) also emphasized, “Standard English,” to the extent that it exists, tends to be heavily based on written English; thus, a “Standard” style might also refer to the speech pattern chosen by people familiar with written English when they seek, at some level or in some way, to align themselves with other people who are familiar with written English or who are familiar with text-heavy official pursuits including commerce, government, and education.
You are probably also aware, of course, that to other authors, referring to a “standard” form or forms of American English represents the encapsulation of a deeply problematic set of issues. One problem is that descriptive linguistics often becomes prescriptive linguistics: once the word “standard” is invoked, then that which some people tend to do (descriptive) ends up becoming that which other people are somehow expected or required to do (prescriptive). The word “standard” also draws us away from the basics of dialects, which are all complete and adequate communication systems for the people who use them, equally valued in every way (ASHA, 2003). How can we, in one breath, agree that my dialect and yours are both acceptable, and then, in the next breath, assert that the way you talk, but not the way I talk, is to be considered “standard”?
Your answer might be that we can because “everyone knows” that garlic-broccoli ice cream is not a “standard” flavor, but that is precisely the problem with the term “standard.” It can mean typical or common, which is the usage that got us to the popularity-contest problems of “mainstream.” Or it can mean correct, normal, expected, or necessary, which is the error of moving from descriptive to prescriptive. Sometimes we need standards; I, for one, am glad to know that standards exist for bridge building and for safely therapeutic dosages of potentially lethal anesthetics. And of course it is true that most people do not make, sell, or eat garlic-broccoli ice cream. But garlic-broccoli ice cream is ice cream, and it is perfectably acceptable to and for the people who eat it, and I am going to go out on a linguistic limb here and suggest that our desire to resist garlic-broccoli ice cream reflects little more than our human tendency to rate or rank things when we should be sitting back and accepting (or even enjoying!) that equally-ranked differences exist. Many things, including dialects, can be different without being wrong, and chocolate and vanilla ice cream can be enjoyed by some people in some settings, or even enjoyed by more people than garlic-broccoli ice cream, without being correct, better, or necessary for anyone else in any way.
(I do not refer to “Standard American English,” and I do not actually believe that any one such form has been identified. We also have yet to address some of the social and even distinctly racial complexities that influence references to “standard” English; see Module 8.)
The American Englishes
What about simply switching to the plural? If we genuinely believe that all dialects are equally acceptable versions of American English, could we stop trying to name a “main” one and simply recognize that all of them are, when we put them together, the American Englishes?
If you have never referred to Englishes (or Spanishes or Frenches) in the plural before, it might bother your ear or conflict with your definitions of languages and dialects. But the related phrase “World Englishes” has been used since the 1980s, primarily to refer to the teaching, learning, and use of English in countries where it is not or was not traditionally a native language (see Melchers & Shaw, 2013, or Bolton, 2020, and see the journal World Englishes, which has been published under that name since 1985).
The term “World Englishes” is attributed to the Indian linguist Braj Kachru (see Kachru et al., 2009), whose original model used three concentric circles to recognize that English is used around the world in at least three ways: as a native language in countries that speak primarily English, as one of two or more native or important languages in bilingual countries, and also as an important language (a lingua franca, which might be native or might be learned as a second or later language) for international business and communications. The model also recognized the political realities of why and how English came to be used in the second-circle areas, in particular. The related question for English teachers around the world, then, was how much their practices should recreate British colonial history: Should teaching English anywhere look like teaching British English? Or, several generations later, should English teachers in India teach what had become their own native version of Hindi-influenced, Bengali-influenced, or other English — effectively using and teaching not London’s English, and not a secondary version of English at all (as we noted at the beginning of Module 6), but simply one of the other (to use his plural) World Englishes? You might have actually experienced a version of this question during your own world-language education classes in high school, if you studied Spanish in Idaho with a teacher who was a native of Spain, a native of Mexico, or, most likely, a native of Idaho.
Referring to “the American Englishes” is a similar solution that could acknowledge our widespread geography as Americans, our complex social histories, and the linguistic diversity that we recognize and value, and I have found myself using the phrase “the American Englishes” more often. My intended implications, when I do so, are to acknowledge and include all the variations on American English, or to combine them into one category as equally valued exemplars, and also to respect the complex continua of important differences that they incorporate and represent. It’s a better to solution, to me, than simply referring to “American English” and defining “American English” as including all its dialects and variations, not because we cannot define “American English” as including all its dialects and variations but because we as inherently flawed human thinkers hear a singular term like “American English” and start looking for the single thing that it refers to. Switching to the plural honors and communicates our recognition that all of the dialects and all of their variations exist and are equally valued, while also freeing us from our fruitless search for the single core, central, main, most popular, or otherwise privileged version of American English that the singular terminology somehow implies must exist.
I recognize, of course, that refering to “the American Englishes” is also an imperfect solution, not least because of where we started: English is a language, and it is realized through its dialects, and refering to the World Englishes or to the American Englishes conflates languages and dialects, if we continue to use the definitions of “a language” and of “its dialects” that we as speakers of English have accepted.
(But we’re back! Remember our sidebar comment, at the beginning of this module, that these terms apply in different ways for other languages and can be used in other ways? That English is one “language” realized through its “dialects” might not be as firm a foundation for our terminology or for our practice as we thought it was.)
Is there a correct answer here? Maybe not, if the correct answer must identify terminology that we will all agree about and agree to use. But yes, in another sense, there are definitely some correct answers. How precisely to live out this answer will be up to you, but here’s the answer: As speech-language pathologists seeking client-centered, culturally and individually appropriate practice, we all need to understand and convey that American English includes, or that the American Englishes include, all the dialects, all the accents, all the variations, our huge geographic areas, all the histories, and all the people.
Your Turn
Do you use any of the terms discusssed in this segment (general, mainstream, or standard) to refer to an assumed or hypothesized core, main, central, preferable, or primary version of American English? Why?
Which of these three terms did you learn first or have you previously been taught was preferable to which other term(s)? Do you prefer the one you learned first? Why? If you can, ask some colleagues of different ages this question and compare their answers.
Do you like the idea of referring, in the plural, to the American Englishes? Why or why not?
ASHA’s (1998) entire Position Statement on “Students and Professionals who Speak English with Accents and Nonstandard Dialects” is reproduced below. Fix its title, and fix the underlined phrasing.
“It is the position of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) that students and professionals in communication sciences and disorders who speak with accents and/or dialects can effectively provide speech, language, and audiological services to persons with communication disorders as long as they have the expected level of knowledge in normal and disordered communication, the expected level of diagnostic and clinical case management skills, and if modeling is necessary, are able to model the target phoneme, grammatical feature, or other aspect of speech and language that characterizes the client's particular problem. All individuals speak with an accent and/or dialect; thus, the nonacceptance of individuals into higher education programs or into the professions solely on the basis of the presence of an accent or dialect is discriminatory. Members of ASHA must not discriminate against persons who speak with an accent and/or dialect in educational programs, employment, or service delivery, and should encourage an understanding of linguistic differences among consumers and the general population.” (ASHA, 1998, https://www.asha.org/policy/ps1998-00117/ ; emphasis added)
This brief 1998 Position Statement and a longer 1998 Technical Report still represent current policy and were supplemented by an extended 2011 Professional Issues Statement entitled The clinical education of students with accents. Read the 2011 statement and use the material from these modules to evaluate it.
Highlight Questions for Module 7
What is a language, what is a dialect, and what is an accent? Use the information from this module to discuss several possible answers.
Use this website’s emphases on dimensions, continua, cultures, identities, kindness, and respect to evaluate some common beliefs about dialects and accents in American English or in the American Englishes.
When an official standard version of a language is described, an accompanying offiicial recognition also often exists that people will use their own dialects in their own informal daily lives or smaller communities. Could the formal designation of one Official American English therefore actually help our attempts to value and respect all dialects or all of the American Englishes? Why or why not?
Are you aware that you or some people in your community perceive some dialects of American English as more or less correct, acceptable, or desirable, or perhaps do so in certain situations or for certain applications? How does that awareness influence your practice? (We will have to address some specific complexities for teaching children to read, in Section Five. You might already be familiar with the work of Julie Washington; if so, try discussing her emphases on ensuring that all children have access to reading and writing using the terms emphasized in this module.)
Imagine individual clinical scenarios that involve three regional dialects (maybe a clinician from Boston is working in San Antonio and has a client from Hawaii). Explain the relevance of their regional dialects as these three people engage in the specific activities of prevention, assessment, or intervention (cf. ASHA Certification Standards IV-B, IV-C, and IV-D)