Dear Fellow Liberals: Please Stop The Dialect Harrassment

[votesparks]

Why do I still hear liberals participating in dialect discrimination and harassment? Take a minute to learn about sociolinguistics, and you won't be amazed when someone opens their mouth and it doesn't sound like you. Nor will you think less of them.

[FarPoint]

1. You rock Dave!

We need to see more of your messages here at DU.

[votesparks]

2. Thank you!

I love feedback, especially the good kind!

And yes, I would love to see some liberal pundits with a little twang in their thang!

Thanks for watching.

[markpkessinger]

3. An important reminder . . . but one quibble

Parks ascribes the habit of judging people based on dialect or accent as being primarily an affliction of the "liberal class." In my experience, it's not a political split so much as it is an urban/suburban versus rural one.

I learned a long time ago not to make inferences about people's intelligence or education (or about much of anything else) based upon their accent or dialect or, for that matter, even based on certain grammar usages that may be technically wrong. In many cases, particularly with spoken grammar, the error you hear may in fact be a deep-seeded speech pattern that was in common usage wherever that person happened to grow up.

When I first moved to Princeton, NJ and then to New York during college, I was very self-conscious about making sure I had eradicated any noticeable trace of a central PA accent, and that I had eliminated various eccentricities of language that are common to that area. Many years later, when I was confident I had long ago successfully eliminated all such regionalisms from my speech, I was in a business meeting in which we were discussing the testing and roll-out of Windows 2000. At one point, speaking about one of the applications for which I was responsible to make sure it would function smoothly and as expected under the new operating system, I said something like, "That application needs tested." Heads suddenly turned in my direction, and everybody had this strange, somewhat quizzical look on their faces. After the meeting, I asked a co-worker what the strange looks were all about. He said, "It was just . . . the way you said it, that it 'needs tested.'" He added, "I think most of the people in the meeting are probably a little more accustomed to either 'needs to be tested' or 'needs testing'; most of us think of you as being very well-spoken, so it was just a little startling."

Of course, as soon as he said that, I realized he was right, and that it was incorrect. But I have to say, in the part of PA in which I was raised, that phrase would have seemed to most people to be perfectly correct. "The car's oil needs changed"; "The laundry needs washed"; "Your room needs cleaned" -- it was a very common construction. I did eventually eradicate that habit as well, but it took quite a long time.