Discrimination based on language is the prejudice against a person based on their language and mother tongue. This type of intolerance is called language discrimination.  Language is a form of communication and also interaction based on the people that surround us. Many people discriminate mainly on immigrants and people with a distinct form of accent or tone, in this case being English. English isn’t just a language but also a tool and many can say that we have to learn how to use it correctly.

In many classrooms children are taught that certain accents others use is wrong and not fluent, enough that speakers of different versions of English have to better practice it and learn the standard variety.  but, why are different accents viewed as different or even scary? These are questions that many parents and people may ask themselves, why is it that accents aren’t considered correct or appropriate in schools? Why is it that our native language is seen as different? In this essay, I will be exploring the ways people have a view on language and how some are blinded by what their dominant values are.

 Well I personally can say that many people agree that there is no language discrimination in the classroom. For instance, in many occasions I’ve heard many teachers say or even read about how the education system is doing a good job in having programs for diverse language, some heart warmed teachers any think separating these children are benefiting others by no delaying the speed other are learning the language. Because there are programs where children are being helped to develop their way of speaking English correctly and those people aren’t wrong. There can be pros and cons to many of the things that schools are penetrating inside a children’s mind. if we look at a classroom based on a simple perspective we might say there isn’t a problem in the way children are being taught, but if we look closer at what the classroom environment is actually like then we can see that many children are being taught certain rules that limit the use of their mother tongue and also ideas that other languages aren’t “correct” or that are “wrong”.  

Extending on to the idea that children are being taught ideas that a distinct language is not “correct”, Walt Wolfram, a sociologist at North Carolina State University describes an experiment conducted by Marilyn S. Rosenthal where children were asked to describe the nicer voice based on two “magic boxes” that produced a different voice, one sounding African American and the other sounding like standardized American English. where given to them.  Steve spoke standard English while Kenneth spoke African American English. Walt Wolfram describes the responses, “I like him [points to Steve] ‘cause he sounds nice. I don’t like him [pointing to Kenneth]”.  Wolfram says “Children acquire attitudes about language differences early and these attitudes quickly become entrenched”. These attitudes may not only come from schools in general but also the way students are seeing teachers have an attitude towards unstandardized accents. I hope to show below that schools play a role in influencing these ideas because while educating children they implant biased ideas based on accents that they have not yet heard. 

Wolfram isn’t alone in his argument that language discrimination begins while students are young and in school. A blog post titled “How Young Children of immigrants face discrimination at school”, by Janie Tankard Carnock, describes similar attitudes that Wolfram talks about not only in students but also in teachers. In their post they talk about a researcher called Jennifer Keys Adair where she describes that “young children of immigrants can face discrimination at the personal level from staff or peers at school. This primarily takes the form of critical comments or name-calling about a student’s accent, appearance, or use of home language. Teachers may also express impatience when these students cannot fully express themselves or take longer to formulate responses. Such interactions are alarming since we know that all learners need a safe, stress-free emotional climate to thrive”. Based on what this post and what Wolfram has said we can see a very discriminatory attitude towards undeveloped languages and accents. First with wolfram, the children like the standardized version of English better because it sounds nicer and in the post, teachers make critical comments because a child is learning to dominate a language he/she isn’t very familiar with yet. This post also describes the racial and socioeconomic segregation in schools, not only this but individual teachers also “discriminate by holding lower academic expectations for children of immigrants and focusing on what…” is referred to as “narrow learning experiences”. Children are not only being discriminated but also looked down on, leading to low expectations from themselves, their peers, and teachers.

Referring back to low expectations, language discrimination isn’t about being discriminated verbally or physically being separated from your peers it has more to do with dominant values that are taught at a very young age, language discrimination can be non verbal, just based on actions and how teachers treat children and that creates the whole concept of lowering the self-esteem of the student. This may be one of the ways that children acquire these accent attitudes, by mimicking the attitudes they see adults portray to them. An example of self-esteem decrease is in June Jordan’s, “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan”, where she emphasizes the idea that some kids don’t know the true power their language holds even though they can’t make a difference, she emphasizes how many of her students didn’t even recognize their own language written down and this may be because they have certain ideas in there head of how they should sound to their selves and their peers. One of her students said, “why she have them talk so funny. It doesn’t sound right”. If we look at the book “The Color Purple” by Alice walker and the way June Jordan’s kids spoke the language is similar but its these ideas that our language isn’t the right way to speak, that throws us off from not actually knowing what to even communicate to teach other. Now, if we look at all this we may think that this only happens in the lower levels of school but this is certainly not true given that I gave an example on the college kids of June Jordan’s essay, that in college, students are asked to speak in a certain way and to write essays in a more standardized way. Stephany Brett Dunstan and Audrey J. Jaeger, NSCU staff both write a peer reviewed article called “Dialect and Influences on the Academic Experiences of College Students”, based on higher education discrimination where students and staffs come in with a belief that there is a certain “proper” English that is spoken by higher educated individuals. In this article it says “This “standard” is typically based on the dominant class’s values”. If we analyze this closely we may see that everyone has a different perception on dominant values of language. I may have my own values and others reading this may too, we are all free to have our own opinions and to judge how someone talk but not in a way that is discriminatory, I want to show the other side of my spectrum and give some of the benefit to the latter side since I’m just going all rational to my side, but there are some rational and very important ideas that are added on to why some people think that language discrimination or as some like to call it “correction”.  In a post by Harvard.edu, Cara Feinberg explains the idea of an assistant professor at HGSE called Nonie Lesaux who conducted an experiment a study focused on ESL kids. Nearly 1,000 kids were being tracked on how well they were doing in reading and math in the grades from kindergarten to grade two. “What they found was that, by the end of grade two, the ESL children had attained reading skills that were similar to, and, in some cases, better than, those of their native English-speaking peers” (Feinberg, Cara “The ESL Advantage”, 2004, Harvard Ed. Magazine). In this case we see that these students instead of being left behind in the learning they exceled and learned even more than the L1 learners which are native English speakers. In a post titled “The problem with ESL culture” it talks about how many teachers aren’t really focused on helping children but instead they think that it’s a break, that there isn’t any work to be done. It says, “I often ask many, why they are here, and why do they teach? To my dismay, I often receive the response, “I just wanted a gap year” or “I needed a break” (Marquis, Ryan “The Problem with ESL Culture”, English first, 2018). We can see that many teachers aren’t very eager to help ESL kids so why should we place a child in this kind of class when we can make them excel with native English speakers where they can adapt their language. Children don’t need to be isolated to learn the language, the more closely they are to a person who knows the language the most likely they are to achieve the goal of learning the “Standard” Language.