Words make winners, Faculty Lecturer says

By Bob Roseth
News & Information

Societies, ancient and modern, have developed a variety of ways for deciding who gets educational opportunities, jobs and political power. For many societies, the winners and losers have been people of a particular class, gender or race. One powerful tool for sorting out winners and losers, often overlooked, is language.

Jim Tollefson

Jim Tollefson, professor of English and the Faculty Lecturer for 2001, will discuss the connection of language policies with social justice. His talk, Linguistic Winners and Losers: The Power of Language Policies, will be at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 21 in 130 Kane Hall. A reception in the Walker-Ames Room will follow the lecture.

“Our attitudes about language reflect our attitudes about people,” he says. “They’re hard to defend or even to understand in isolation from the social context. And these issues are very similar, whether within the United States or abroad.”

Tollefson’s work on language policy began while he was a doctoral student at Stanford in the 1970s. He traveled to Yugoslavia, which was in the process of rapid social change, and was able to observe how the issue of language rights for different groups played out as political leaders sought to define the rights of different groups in that region. Tollefson has continued to visit the former Yugoslavia and study how language policy has been implemented.

He continued his work in the U.S. and Southeast Asia, documenting how, in the 1980s, America set language policies for refugees and immigrants from Southeast Asia. “There are strong connections among language policy, education policy, labor policy and migration policy,” he says. “The language policy, at least implicitly, helped to describe what officials thought was an ‘appropriate place’ in society for those who were arriving here.”

Tollefson’s interpretation of the implicit aim of U.S. language policy regarding these immigrants was, “Refugees need to be taught to work hard and to adopt the American philosophy of self sufficiency. In order to do this, they need to accept entry level jobs, regardless of their education or experience.”

Tollefson’s research also has led him to examine what is called “the Official English movement,” which so far has been successful in having about half the states adopt policy statements that English, and English alone, is the official language. This movement often has been related to efforts to eliminate bilingual education.

“What has been apparent in these debates,” he says, “is that people care a great deal about language, and this raises their concern for the pedagogy of language instruction. For example, a proposal regarding Ebonics by a member of the school board in Oakland, Calif., actually was very moderate, he says.

“It simply requested that teachers take into account that their students don’t necessarily speak Standard English, and that people shouldn’t pretend that this is the case. As this played out, it was clear that ‘standard language ideology’ was at work.”

Most individuals who talk about standard English are careful not to define what they mean-and with good reason, according to Tollefson. The boundaries vary with the group under discussion. The usage differences often pertain to differences in class and social group.

For example, employment agencies in New York City have been known to list “no accent” as a job requirement. “Aside from the fact that everyone has an accent,” Tollefson says, “the policy actually was a code for eliminating people of certain races or nationalities. Language can be used as a code for discriminating in ways that, if faced directly, would be illegal.”

Policies such as those in New York have created their own backlash - a language rights movement, proclaiming that speakers of different languages or dialects should be considered a protected category under the law.

Tollefson has written and edited six books and numerous research papers. In addition to his primary appointment in the Department of English, he is an adjunct professor of linguistics.

The Faculty Lectureship honors faculty whose research, scholarship, or art is widely recognized by their peers and whose achievements have had a substantial impact on their profession, on the research or performance of others, and perhaps on society as a whole. The lecture is free and open to the public.