Why I am so very sociolinguistique [was Re: History of French]

From: Des Small (des.small_at_bristol.ac.uk)
Date: 09/24/04 

Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 16:21:47 GMT

hrubin@odds.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:

> In article <nsanders.DIE.SPAM-EA7EBE.23442622092004@news.verizon.net>,
> Nathan Sanders <nsanders.DIE.SPAM@wso.williams.edu> wrote:
 
> >If native speakers of language L say X in L, then X is correct in L.
> >X is not necessarily correct in a different language (which includes
> >the standard form of L), of course,.
>
> Which native speakers? According to this, there would be
> dozens of different "English" languages.
>
> This is the "modern" version of social science brought in
> by the socialist educationists, that there is nothing
> which can be called "right". They extend it to everything
> else, which is why education has gone downhill.

I'll join in here because even if Herman is a broken record of
ill-informed complaints on this topic, that still puts him ahead of
the Mxthing. Anyway:

"""
Il faut en fait concevoir que tous les locuteurs, même lorsqu'ils se
croient monolingues (qu'ils ne connaissent pas de « langues
étrangères ») sont toujours plus ou moins plurilingues, possédant un
évantail de compétences qui s'étalent entre des formes vernaculaires
et des formes vehiculaires, mais dans le cadre d'un même ensemble de
regles linguistiques.

[It has to be accepted that all speakers, even if they consider
themselves monolingual (that they don't know any "foreign languages")
are always more or less plurilingual, having a range of competences
spread between vernacular and vehicular forms, but in the frame of a
single set of linguistic rules.]
"""

_La Sociolinguistique_ L-J Calvert (PUF, « Que sais-je? »)

Now, typically the prestige dialect is also the vehicular one, and it
is certainly the business of schools to teach their pupils this. To
do otherwise is simply to perpetuate the inequality between those
whose vernacular is a reasonable approximation to it and those whose
is not. I would like to think this is uncontroversial, but that is
probably naive.

Where opinions are guaranteed to differ is that I would favour the
teaching of said prestige vehicular dialect (and its discursive
strategies, but I am short of both world and time and will leave this
for the moment) based on careful descriptive work, rather than just
random collections of shibboleths.

Des
isn't what he used to be, either 

-- 
"[T]he structural trend in linguistics which took root with the
International Congresses of the twenties and early thirties [...] had
close and effective connections with phenomenology in its Husserlian
and Hegelian versions." -- Roman Jakobson

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