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Do You Speak American?

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Monica Dennis
Do You Speak American?

Do You Speak American? is an investigative documentary that seeks to explore the way various people talk throughout the United States of America. It has been a concern that since change is inevitable, the English language has also evolved over time and the linguists are keen to keep track of these changes to predict the future of the it. As the America has become the land of a diverse population, the demographic shift has resulted in the modification of the language, and this is the premise on which the narrator seeks to transverse the country with the aim of getting answers about the evolution of the American English. In his venture, he encounters both prescriptivist and descriptivist scholars who have criticized and supported the changes in same measures.

Major Arguments for both Prescriptivist and Descriptivist Approaches

Dying of Some of the Dialects

The local dialects have continued to thrive stronger while they have been in an isolation. Due to the globalization that brings new population to new places, communities fear their dialect will disappear. A good example is the Mainers who fear that their dialect is coming to an end. Their language is derived from the British colonialists, and they omit pronunciation of “R” at the end of words such as “a mother”. Due to the influx of the outsiders, the word “yes” has been used more frequently than their equivalent of it in their dialect which is “ayuh”.

The narrator also stops by a gas station and the lady attendant called Pam Head shares her story in which she had a hard time trying to converse with a woman from Texas while in Oklahoma. She was in the process of buying a car, but her pronunciation was “cah” and the girl could not understand what she was saying. To make her point clear, she had to use other words including telling the girl that she wanted an automobile that one gets in and drives.

Flouting of the Rules and Grammar

According to the acerbic theater critic named John Simon,who supports prescriptivist viewpoint, the flouting of the rules and the grammar of the English language is self-destructing. He is Yugoslavian immigrant but talks for many Americans, who fear that their language is getting worse by the day. He says that the language is sinking lower and thus disintegrating further. When asked to describe the state of the language at the present, he says that it is depressing, miserable, sad and unhealthy.

On the contrary, the narrator interviews a discriptivist Jesse Sheidlower, who stands to support everything that John Simon hates. He is an American editor at Oxford Dictionary and praises the American slang. His job is to go through the numerous magazines in the library looking for the word that can be of interest in any relevant field. According to him, any word that is overused by many magazines is taken into their database to help in identifying that word with a certain cultural dialect. He says Simon and others of his kind are misguided and supports the change in which colloquial or slang languages are common in argumenative essay.

Differences between Different Dialects

Midland dialect is used in the Midwest part and is considered to be the most correct and conventional dialect. It includes the states of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Iowa. This language is what is termed as the Standard English. The New York dialect, on the other hand, is distinguished from other dialects in its way of pronunciation, where they say “wawder” instead of “water”. The Maine dialect is a language spoken in the coasts of Maine and is discernable by the way it substitutes the word “yes” with “ayuh”. The Pittsburgh dialect, as explained by Barbara Johnstone, differs in pronunciation of the plural “you” as “yin”, it also tends to add “Z” at the end to sound as it would do with a U “yunz”. Also, “in and out” sounds “in an ahht”, while “down and town” resembles “dahn and tahn". African American dialects, on the other hand, grew out of slave trade as a business language. It was created on the West African coast as a mixture of English and the African languages. This dialect is mostly spoken in Carolina where most African Americans have their roots, remembering that in Africa their forefathers have been part of the slave immigrants.

Linguistic Profiling and its Example

Linguistic profiling is the mapping of the different dialects with the aim of identifying how different people react to various dialects regarding race or ethnicity. For example, in everyday business one can tell the race or ethnicity of a particular customer by the way he/she speaks. Consequently, these speech patterns can be used to identify a person’s ability to rent a house or have access to better products/services. Needless to say, that this is a regrettable development in many ways.

Other Salient Aspects

One of the most important aspects, outlined in the film, is the fact that the change has been inevitable, and the language is no exception when it comes to change. Dialects will erode with time, and new ways of speech will evolve depending on the way diversity increases. The linguistic profiling has a discriminative power, such that one can even assign a wrong stereotype to a person, who belongs to a different group and just acquired the accent while visiting a specific place. Therefore, making a wrong assumption about social and economic background of the certain individual, based on this kind of stereotype, can result in negative outcomes.

 

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Monica Dennis
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