DW1b

After reading the Smitherman text “From Ghetto Lady to Critical Linguist”, one of the passages really caught my eye and resonated with my prior life experiences. In my previous writing I discussed my code-switching skills between my language style with my friends and then my language style at school and home. Just like Smitherman, I had acquired adequate language switching skills between my most common settings, and I was seen as intelligible to those who I was talking with. Smitherman describes that feature in the following paragraph.
“It wasn't that young people of Color and whites from working-class backgrounds could not be understood. By the stage in our lives, we had developed adequate enough code-switching skills that we were intelligible to those who "carry on the affairs of the English-speaking people." Rather, the problem was that there existed a bias against this different-sounding American English emanating from the margins. Yet our sounds were "American as apple pie,"...”
(Smitherman pg. 54)
This passage is similar to my experiences in Catholic school because during my time there I was taught to speak very precise English and use correct grammar. But when I was with my friends it was the opposite, I would have been made fun of if I talked the same way in both situations. Both of my dialects were English, one was a cruder version of the other. If I would have spoken the dialect of my peers around my teachers or parents I would have been looked down upon, just as Smitherman describes she way looked down upon and even held behind in school for the way she talked. But as soon as she learned that not talking at all could fix the problem, she excelled in school and nobody thought anything bad of her. Until she got to college and she had to take a linguistic test, which she failed. I can see some of myself in some ways in this story; I would have been punished by my teachers if I spoke anything other than their version of perfect English.
I do not agree with this practice of only accepting perfect or “Standard English”. A lot of these dialects even originated in America, such as “Appalachian English” or “Black English”. These are different American dialects that should be accepted and not discriminated against when applying for jobs or schools; Smitherman flunked her linguistic test for becoming a teacher because of these norms that say “Standard English” is the only good English.