The importance of proper and improper English

What not speaking proper English teaches you about language—and about life

Books & artsNov 4th 2017 edition

“LET’S talk properly.” Tom Sherrington had little reason to think that his blog post, so titled, would cause controversy. A British consultant and former head teacher, he had called on educators to work harder at getting their students to stop saying things like “We done lots of great activities” and “I ain’t done nothing.” He recycled the blog post recently on Twitter—to a fierce and (to him) surprising backlash from linguists.

Led by Rob Drummond, a linguist at Manchester Metropolitan University, and joined by Oliver Kamm, a journalist at the Times, critics focused in particular on the word “properly”, along with related words like “correct”. The ding-dong perfectly encapsulates the way academic linguists (especially sociolinguists, who focus on things like class) see standard English, and how teachers do.

The biggest misunderstanding is about the nature of dialects, especially urban ones. (Country dialects get a pass, for being quaint.) Teachers see “I ain’t done nothing” as simply wrong. But linguists have found that dialects are rule-governed, coherent and fully expressive, and have written extensive grammars of them. They sound “broken” only to outsiders who don’t know their rules.

The debate, of course, also has a political dimension. The London teens who say “We done lots of great activities” are likely to have other social strikes against them, especially being poor or non-white, with parents who themselves are not highly educated. Poverty and lack of formal education are behind the mistaken belief that these dialects themselves are somehow defective. If the people who speak them are poor, goes the faulty reasoning, their impoverished and fractured language must be part of what holds them back.

In a long follow-up, Mr Sherrington reframed “proper” as “appropriate”: children must speak and write the correct variety of English for school. For their part, Mr Drummond and Mr Kamm agree that of course “standard English” exists, that it is valuable and that children need to learn it—poor children most of all. All sides agree that although it can be spoken with any accent, it does not permit “I done” or “he ain’t”.

What is at issue is how to teach the standard kind of English to children who speak something else at home. For the sociolinguists, there certainly is a place for dialect, even if it ain’t in the job interview or the lecture hall. All language varieties are valuable to their speakers; they give a sense of community and belonging. For a child to come to school and be told that how he speaks and how his parents speak is embarrassing—something he must abandon—is more likely to make him think school is not for him than it is to get him hitting the books trying to learn to speak like Henry Higgins in Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (“My Fair Lady” on the big screen). As in that story, contempt for other people’s speech only tends to drive them away.

But a change of mentality can remove a lot of the tension in the debate. All children in Britain and America do need standard English. But they do not need it all the time. Indeed, there is absolutely no need for them to abandon their home speech; people are perfectly able to switch speech varieties. Watch the many talented black American comedians, from Richard Pyror to Eddie Murphy to the duo of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, whose effortless swapping between a buttoned-up English and black vernacular is played for laughs. For plenty of people this is a survival skill, one that deserves respect. Fortunately, it can also be taught.

The core of doing so is recognising how language varies naturally by occasion. Both teachers and students should be taught to think about this variation with curiosity. If both dialects and the standard are valuable, what is interesting is just when, and how, people switch between them. Children can learn to recognise the differences, and even translate from one to the other. One classic study in Chicago of “contrastive analysis”—essentially of black students trained to translate their native “we was” into the standard “we were”—found a 59% reduction in the usage of the “we was” style. (A control group drilled in traditional methods showed a slight increase.) The group with contrastive analysis not only discovered something about English. In learning to navigate race, class and the importance of the right words at the right time, they also learned something deeper about the world where they will grow up to use it.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "We was and it ain’t"

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