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Notes -
It's a Vibes-based World for Us
The New Yorker recently printed a piece about a conflict among parents, politicians, and educators centered on childhood literacy. One group wants teachers to use a variation of whole language learning, a method based on immersing kids in books and showing them how to connect words with images. The other wants teachers to use a method called phonics where children are taught to sound out letters and groups of letters, allowing them voice whole words.
Currently, whole language learning dominates curricula in the US school system, with some 60% of children being taught using it--especially in urban areas. Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.
This is why some states and cities have begun ordering their teacher to switch to phonics. It's happening in New York City, for example, where whole language learning has been the preferred method for almost twenty years. It's happening in Oakland, CA, where groups like NAACP or REACH (an educational advocacy group), are putting pressure on local school districts to get teachers to use phonics.
But to what do we owe the pleasure of putting tens of millions of kids through the less effective of the two teaching methods?
The New Yorker piece author points to vibes.
According to what she found, whole language learning gained popularity among both teachers and parents because it painted a rosy, feel-good image of literacy education. The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself--"through proximity or osmosis", as the New Yorker writer sarcastically describes it. And the teacher's role? To ask encouraging questions, such as why an author chose to use a certain color or why a character was represented by a certain animal.
The author delicately points out another reason why so many favor whole language learning over phonics: politics. Through some clever rhetoric, whole language learning has positioned itself as a counter to the authoritarian, regimented phonics approach, where children have to go through regular letter-sounding drills and have to read the same set of books.
Kenneth Goodman, a famous proponent of whole language learning, said phonics is steeped in "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity." Basically, phonics codes "conservative", and that often was enough to get whole school districts to move away from it, damn whatever researchers say about its effectiveness.
Well, this is all an interesting story that explains a lot about how the education system works. (I would also recommend this 1997 The Atlantic piece to get an even broader picture). But what really struck me about the whole thing is that it's not just vibes-based literacy, it's literally vibes all the way down:
Whole language learning is a vibes-based approach to teaching kids how to read. It's supported by vibes-based academics doing vibes-based science. It's put into practice by vibes-based policymakers. It's supported by vibes-based parents and vibes-based teachers.
Even the New Yorker writer, despite building a strong case for using science-backed phonics, abandons her position at the end, going instead for vibes. She concludes her piece by stating that it's tempting to focus our energies on changing concrete things like school curricula, but what we should really be doing is attacking larger, more abstract problems like poverty and structural racism.
It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.
Wouldn't phonics eventually wipe out regional dialects?
AAVE seems like it wouldn't survive long under phonics.
And if more liberal areas tend to go with whole word learning, and presumably conservative areas with phonics, could this be why (it seems) that southern dialects are disappearing?
Phonics associates letters and sounds - you can still memorize sound patterns that are different for different dialects, or make that association yourself by noticing how people speaking your dialect speak the same words. Keep in mind that you could teach British English with phonics, for instance.
Also, school indoctrination is far from omnipotent, regional dialects can survive even if the children are taught a standardized form in school and over the internet. Maybe that will stop being the case in the near future, but children interact with peers, their families, and other locals a lot more, and can make themselves understandable to foreign city-folk/mainlanders/whatever with little effort - whereas the opposite would involve internalizing and speaking the standard form while in an environment where everyone speaks differently, but switching back to the local dialect to speak to your own parents and friends, or weirding them out by speaking the standardized way. There isn't a lot of pressure to change. It can depend on mutual intelligibility, though - very minor differences may get smoothed out, very major differences can cause you to choose standard, I'm not sure it's predictable.
As an aside: Versions of a language can diverge pretty significantly. Diglossia is fascinating - it happened in Greece, before my time, but not that far back, just a few decades ago. What happened is that the "high-status" (official, pretentious, archaic, literary, ...) version of the language mostly disappeared, and is now only really used in sayings, when referencing history, for fancy labels, or for comedic effect. Of course part of the reason is that government changed what was taught in schools, it's not all natural - but the high-status language itself wasn't natural to begin with. Ordinary dialects based on geographic regions still very much exist.
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You don't need all the racism and plantation aspects to explain the disappearance of dialects. The same is happening in many European countries with no such history. Dialect is associated with peasants, low skill workers, poor and uneducated people, etc. Probably due to infrastructure, media, urbanization, telecommunications, but also standardized schooling etc.
While I broadly agree that this is a common phenomenon in the West, I wanted to say that this disdain for dialects is less prevalent/important in India.
We've got a fuck-ton of dialects, which isn't a surprise given the thousands of distinct languages we have. As such, there really isn't all that much discrimination on the basis of dialect, and whatever there is usually mild, like girls speaking Hindi who seek to emulate the posh South Delhi Girl accent (exactly equivalent to the Valley Girl accent in the US).
If I had to guess, that's largely a consequence of the normal linguistic diversity, hard to care about accents when you hear 3 or 4 different languages on a daily basis.
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My wife and I usually speak in dialect. A few weeks ago I spent a lot of time cloistered away at work and she spent a lot of time trading voice messages with a northern friend of hers. The friend does and my wife used to belong to the cultural left that try to distance themselves as far as they can from dialects, using that distance to signal tribal allegiance. After a while, my wife began speaking to me and our child in high german. I was honestly horrified. Our dialect is dear to me, a large part of my home memeplex, and I felt like an utter stranger when suddenly adressed in that artificial, impersonal and politically loaded high language.
It's back to normal now but aua did that sting. Felt like the clammy fingers of the cathedral sullying a sacred space.
In Hungary, the culture war angle seems a bit different than that. Here academic (usually leftist) linguists emphasize descriptivism and that no dialect should be stigmatized, there is no single correct way to speak, the standard language is more like customs of clothing while real language is organic and biological. I generally agree by the way. There's even a term, linguicism to describe prejudice against non-standard speakers, which may prevent people from getting hired etc. While there's a connection to the topic of Gypsies, these linguists also speak out in favor of not shaming non-Gypsy Hungarians for their dialect, inclusivity etc.
Why doesn't it work out like that in Germany?
Germans hate individualism with a passion. Blame it on protestant puritanism, or prussian uniformity, or whatever animation the nazis ran on, but each German thinks he knows exactly how things need to be in the world, and any aberration must be expunged with a vengeance. The right way to brew beer, the right way to build a machine, the right way to drive a car, the right way to engineer a society, the right way to respond to a novel virus, the right way to speak German. I'm fully prepared to believe that all of the current progressive mania is based on whatever the Frankfurt School did, because this modern big-government, small-individual ideology is exactly something Germans could come up with.
Maybe Hungary doesn't have the same hardon for collectivism?
I was specifically reacting to you attributing your wife's switch to standard German to some leftist influence. I would imagine German leftists would want to distance themselves from that Prussian style rigidity that you mention.
Superficially they do, and even substantially in some ways, but a leopard can't change its spots and more often than not they drift towards the same old uniformity-for-uniformity's-sake that most people here love.
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Language is for communication. If you speak in a dialect that is not mutually intelligible with the standard, or is only with difficulty, communication becomes more difficult. This is not "prejudice", this is a legitimate consideration.
That's not even the issue here. There are practically no speakers of dialects remaining who cannot make themselves understood without switching to the so-called standard. What we have is the remaining dialects, which are almost universally mutually intelligible given any but the dumbest or deafest listeners, being opposed by the dominant strain of cultural leftism.
Depends how close to the border you get. As a high-german speaker, I can say from experience that spoken Plattdeutsch is completely unintelligible to me. I'd have had more luck talking to that person in English - which is a problem if you're trying to book a room for the night! :) (We got through it with sign language.)
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That depends on whether the dialect actually hinders communication no?
This may or may not be the case, I might understand your accent perfectly well but still not like it for prejudicial reasons, e.g because it outs you as a backwards farmer or a privileged type worthy of resentment.
Motte: We're protecting against prejudice against those with clear but low-class dialects
Bailey: We're protecting people who speak unintelligibly and placing all the burden of communication on those who speak the standard dialect, and if they complain we call them bigots.
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This doesn't happen in Hungary though. There are specific stigmatized grammatical quirks that are present in some dialects but they don't make understanding harder.
Imagine for example if there was a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von". L And people who learned it so in their village would be ridiculed for it or assumed uneducated. "Haven't you paid attention at school? That makes no grammatical sense! It makes me cringe like hearing nails on a chalkboard!"
I know that in German there are dialects that aren't mutually intelligible with the standard, so there it can make sense to require standard knowledge for a job (not sure whether that's legal though). But in Hungarian we only have slight pronunciation differences, some regional words and some minor grammatical differences.
The question still stands: why don't inclusive German leftists fight for the proud right to speak dialect and fight against linguicism, encourage dialect use as a form of diversity etc? (maybe they do)
In English there are relatively few grammatical differences between the American and British standard dialects, but 'different than' vs. 'different from' strikes me as a perfect analog here.
Though both of those have a whole country where they are part of the local standard.
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Those are few, and spoken by very few people, and even then most of them are very well able to modulate their speech to find some compromise in which they're intelligible while still retaining as much of their dialect as possible. Unintelligibles used to be more prevalent of course, but they're nigh-nonexistent by now.
Because tribal ideologies aren't designed in advance and built on rigorously logical foundations. Instead they coalesce around condensation nuclei and after that only shift under pressure. German leftism coalesced around cosmopolitanism, antinationalism and high german with as many anglicisms as possible as its common tongue because this distancing from dialects and even your own language signals that you have no actual national allegiance.
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Country music notably uses southern dialects and is very popular, just not with Hollywood tastemakers. And red tribers and working class whites(to the extent that there’s still a difference) still use southern dialects.
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Also - radio, television, internet etc do a lot to remove dialects.
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That's part of it, but a lot more of it is just the straightforward result of modernization.
Ocracoke Island is a good example.
The Outer Banks were fairly isolated until about 80 years ago. The Wright Brothers had plenty of room to try out their aviation experiment there, but today the area around their flight path is highly developed. But Ocracroke Island, which is a bit further south is one of those places that I think is still only accessible by ferry. It has a unique dialect, speakers are known colloquially as "High Tiders", and their accent sounds like British Isles with some Southern sprinkled in.
These early American immigrants lived in a community that was fairly isolated from the mainland for centuries and developed its own culture. I have always loved the stories of several of these Carolina island communities who celebrated 'Old Christmas', basically because they ignored the memo about shifting over to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. But then you get radio, television, and infrastructure that brings the barrier islands in closer contact with mainland people and culture. Today, fewer than 200 people on Ocracroke still speak the High Tider dialect, and the island is increasingly populated by 'dingbatters' or outsiders.
It's the same phenomenon playing out in black southern island communities that speak Gullah.
On the other hand, there are places in Appalachia where it works pretty much as described - JD Vance goes Ivy Leauge and learns to say "wash" not "warsh" and "toilet" not "towlet", etc. But within these communities themselves, all of which also have radio and television and infrastructure, etc., it does seem that the areas themselves remain somewhat isolated, with fewer migrants or tourists, and that differences persist.
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The standard American English dialect doesn't correspond to a simple phonics, anyway. We're not Spanish and even Spanish has weird dialects like Argentinian.
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