Comrade:Jaiden/sandbox

Why mocking "aks" is pretty racist, actually: clearing up misconceptions about language

This essay aims to examine some misguided assertions that I have seen quite often over the years. Some of these views are not only held by liberals but also by communists, and not only by people who know little about language and linguistics but also by people who have dipped their toes in it and think of themselves as knowing quite a bit. As such, it is important to discuss these topics. I must add that, while I do study linguistics and the English language in university, I am not an expert. Always be critical of what you read. Anyways, let's start with the first, and most pressing assertion.

You can't say "aks"! It's ungrammatical!

/Aks/ instead of /ask/ is a non-standard variation of English speech and as such, people have very strong feelings about it. /Aks/ is a different pronunciation of the verb to ask, but it means the same thing. Aks is used in the New Afrikan dialect of English, especially in the south of the USA but also in other places where New Afrikans exist. Against popular belief, "aks" is not only used by black people in the south but also in some British dialects and by some non-black people in the southern US. However, people who deride "aks" as being ungrammatical, seem to be concerned mostly about how black people specifically use it and how that is wrong. In linguistics, assertions of so-called "correct" or "grammatical" language usage are called linguistic prescriptivism. Prescriptivism is contrasted with linguistic descriptivism, which only seeks to describe how language is used and not to judge whether or not it is "correct" or to prescribe how to use language more "correctly". Linguistic prescriptivism must be opposed by us marxist-leninists as it is not only unscientific but also because it is built upon oppression, perpetuates it, and serves only the ruling class of capitalist society. To see how this is the case, let me present to you some examples. Prescriptivism derides language usage specific to the working class as being incorrect. Take for example the insistence by prescriptivists that people should "pronounce their t's". To clarify, in England, there is a working class sociolect in which the /t/ in words like water is replaced with a glottal stop /ʔ/ (the sound you make when you say "uh-oh" for example). This is, just like /aks/, a non-standard variation of the word water, but that doesn't mean it's incorrect. The standard is always relative and it depends upon who upholds it. In the UK, the standard is Received Pronunciation (RP), but when you look at certain groups of speakers, it becomes clear that very few of them actually strictly adhere to RP. This is the case with the wa'ah example. In certain social groups, replacing /t/ with /ʔ/ is the standard and even if prescriptivists say that speakers should all adhere to the standard variation of a given language, they fail to realize that this standard is always relative. It is evident that the targeting of this non-standard language variation is purely informed by classism and the derision of this non-standard, spoken mainly by English workers, only serves the ruling class by hindering worker solidarity. The same is true for aks, though now, it's not only a class, but also a race issue. The same arguments apply to the prescriptivist derision of the variation aks and we can see that it perpetuates the status quo by putting workers against each other on the basis of supposed racialized language usage.

I must add that by "working class sociolect", I am not referring to some theorized class character of language itself. As Stalin clarified, there is no such thing as class language. I agree. What I mean is that both /'water/ and also /'waʔer/ are different pronunciations of the same word of the English language; the bourgeoisie (who don't use /waʔer/) speak the same language as those workers who do use the non-standard and they can communicate perfectly well in their shared national language regardless of whether they pronounce a /t/ or a /ʔ/. Furthermore, not all workers in England use this variation, some use the RP standard or another variation. So we can see that, while not a symptom of class language, /waʔer/ is an example of a sociolect, a variation of a standard national language that arises from the fact that differing social groups are seperated to certain degrees and also from the want and/or need for social groups to have linguistic group signifiers. If someone says /waʔer/, we can safely assume that they are not part of the bourgeoisie, this is one of the connotations of this variation. Another example of connotations would be that, if someone uses the word slay, we can safely assume that they are relatively young. This is not language having some inherent class character, which it hasn't, it is simply that different groups of speakers tend to develop some variation in their language usage.

I feel like I need to clarify that making fun of wa'ah doesn’t automatically make you a class traitor or something like that. However, it might be interesting for anyone who does like to make fun of such variations to examine why they are doing so. Why do you find it funny? Who does you making fun of it benefit? And especially in the aks vs. ask example, could your derision be driven by deep seated racism? These are important questions to aks yourself if you want to fight against these systems of oppression as a whole. Language might be a small part of the entire racist capitalist structure, but it is a tool, and like all tools, it can be wielded with the intend to build up or with the intent to destroy.

Irish english is an accent of british english.

This stems from a general misconception as to what actually differentiates dialects from accents. The common conception is that native speakers of a non-standard language variation speak dialects and language learners speak with an accent. This is enough for everyday usage, but a more scientific definition is that dialects are language variations that differ in terms of morphosyntax (grammar), vocabulary and pronunciation from the standard variation and accents only differ from the standard in terms of pronunciation. This definition is more accurate because there do exist native speakers who only speak a different accent, only changing pronunciation, and not changing grammar nor vocabulary in any significant way.

Furthermore, there are nations with their own national language whose members have to learn and often only get to learn the language of their colonizer. Do some members of the same nation speaking their colonizers language have a dialect and do members who speak their national language as their mother tongue and the colonizer's language non natively have an accent, even though the language variation of the colonizer's language that developed within their nation is the same between native speakers and not native speakers? To return to the original thesis, Irish English is not an accent of RP, regardless of whether any Irish person speaks English, or Irish as their mother tongue. As Irish english has it's own morphosyntactic rules and differences in vocabulary and pronunciation, it is considered a dialect.

It is also important to think about what's commonly regarded as the standard variation of a language. For German for example, it is rather easy. High German or standard German is the standard variation. Austro-Bavarian, Thuringian, Badish and so on can all easily be classified as dialects. But English is harder because the commonly regarded standard has been shifting from RP to Statesian English.

We should just adopt the IPA as a universal script/orthography!

This is a sentiment that exists only in hobby-linguist spaces like r/linguistics or comparable places. And I'm honestly glad that it isn't more widespread. The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a system of transcription that assigns each speech sound that occurs in any language on the globe a symbol, in order to make it easier for people to understand how a word in a foreign language is pronounced. The argument goes that it would be best for every language to use the IPA as its script so that nobody would ever wonder how anything is pronounced.

There's a couple of problems with this. First of all, the IPA is plain ugly. Why would you ever want to replace the graceful Arabic script with this abomination: [ˈdˤɑħ.ħæ] ضَحّى ('[he] sacrificed') And the further away a language is from english the uglier it looks as transscribed by the IPA:

English: /ˈtæks.peɪər/ taxpayer

French: [lez‿aɲo] les agneaux

Navajo: [txópɑ́tʃɪ́ʒ̊tʃʰɪ́nɪ́] Tóbájízhchíní

Russian: [tɕɪˈtɨrʲɪ] четы́ре

Inuktitut: [pi.ɡi.aʁ.ˈniq] ᐱᒋᐊᕐᓂᖅ

Excuse my individualistic aesthetic preferences, though the last examples can make a more substantial point. The IPA was designed primarily by white Englishmen and it reflects upon it in a very eurocentric light. That's kind of problematic, some people might even say that it's racist (that's me, I am some people). Isn't it enough that westerners force a eurocentric transscription system upon the nations of the world all while calling it international? Should westerners really get to force all nations of the world to use their eurocentric transcription system as their regular script?

My second point is one of pure practicability. If you wrote everything in the IPA, you would have to analyze every little speech sound you make in order for people to understand. What happens if you have a dialect or an accent? Do you transcribe it faithfully and risk that people with other dialects, accent or sociolects who do, however, speak your national language will not understand it? Or do you conform to the standard variation while transcribing and risk losing your local dialect? Also, like, adapting your IPA writing to the standard variation defeats the whole purpose of what it was trying to achieve in the first place, because you would no longer write as you speak, and other people would no longer have an understanding of how you speak through your IPA writing alone. Also, analyzing your own speech can only go so far. What if you have a lisp, a cleft lip or a stutter? Have fun consulting the IPA extension for disordered speech. Speakers would, even if this was imposed unilaterally, eventually just develop their own national differences between IPA writing because of the reasons I mentioned above. This would, after some time has passed, result in different writing systems again.

We should just get rid of the letters x and c in the english alphabet!

This is a very popular sentiment and I honestly do not understand why. The argument goes as follows: We can get rid of the letters x and c because they are redundant. X can be written as ks, as in takses or relaksing. C can be written as k, as in kat or konnekt, they say.

However, this entirely ignores digraphs. How would these people solve the problem of ch as in cheese, or ck as in lucky? Would they write them like tsheese and lukky? Also, sometimes x and c are pronounced different than /ks/ and /k/ respectively. What about cello? What about xylophone? What about center, Hoxha, x-ray, cupid? Would they like to spell cupid like qupid? It doesn’t feel thought through at all. Then again, it would be impossible to implement these changes. People would not change how they write this drastically.

You can spell fish like ghoti!

Supposedly: because the gh in tough is pronounced /f/, the o in women is pronounced like /ɪ/ and the ti in the word nation ist pronounced like sh, you can spell fish like this -> ghoti, and still follow all structural rules of the English language.

This is blatantly wrong. And I don't feel bad for pointing it out and ruining the fun because this meme is so stale at this point that there's no fun to be ruined. English has certain phonotactic rules. Phonotactics are concerned about which sounds are allowed where and how we need to write those sounds. The English language only allows gh to represent the sound /f/ in the coda (after the vowel) of a syllable, not in the onset (before the vowel). O representing the sound /ɪ/ is actually completely unique to the word women and even that is not true for all variation of English and ti can only be pronounced like sh if it is followed by an on: nation, salvation, condemnation. So, no, ghoti is not possible and would not be understood by any native English speaker.

Grammatical gender is stupid and useless

This is very prevalent even outside of linguist or hobby-linguist circles, especially learners of gendered languages show this sentiment. What do I mean by gendered language? A lot of languages arbitrarily classify nouns into different categories. Take for example the noun bridge. In English, the bridge has no inherent category other than noun. In German, however, it inhabits the "feminine" category: die Brücke. In Spanish, it is el puente, the masculine category. There is a lot of confusion about why Germans think that bridges are female, but this is not the case. These grammatical gender categories are just that - purely grammatical. Speakers of languages that have grammatical gender do not think about nouns in feminine or masculine frameworks as applied to humans. These gender categories are assigned arbitrarily. That means that it could have been der Brücke or la puente if history had turned out slightly differently. It is also important to note that not all languages that classify nouns do so in terms of gender. Tamil assigns humans and deities the rational category and other nouns the nonrational category, with the rational category having further subcategories.

However, the people who complain about noun class distinctions do not complain about the more comprehensible noun classes of most languages, rather, they complain about German, Spanish, French, and other languages with gender based noun classes specifically. It is true that learning the gender categories that are randomly assigned to each and every noun is a chore. Then, the question follows: why on earth would all these speakers choose to deal with all of that instead of just gradually getting rid of grammatical gender like English did during the Middle English period.

Language is in constant change through the dialectical process. It evolves continuously to adjust to changing material conditions, in terms of new vocabulary but also morphosyntax, phonetics, pragmatics and so on. As marxist-leninists, we also know that there needs to be some material reason as to why speakers of gendered languages keep this feature that seems so random. And yes, grammatical gender is actually quite useful in a very simple way. Speakers just have it easier to understand what others are talking about in noisy environments. Take for example a busy train station. If I didn’t quite make out what english noun you just said, I'd have to ask you. But in german, if I did understand the article you used - der, die or das - my chances of understanding the noun, with this added context, is much higher. This applies to writing aswell. Also, speakers of languages with grammatical gender show increases in the speed of spoken word recognition when the article of a familiar noun is marked with the correct grammatical gender. To conclude, we can say that the evidence suggests that grammatical gender is in fact not stupid nor useless and actually has some reasons that it exists.

It is very important to consider a more meta level reading of this issue. And it is, once more, about linguistic prescriptivism. Saying that languages with grammatical gender are stupid and should get rid of it is obviously prescriptivist, but saying that grammatical gender is actually awesome and implying that speakers of other languages would be better off if they adopted it is prescriptivist aswell. We mustn't make this mistake. The correct marxist-leninist line is that some languages have this feature due to a number of material reasons and other languages do not have this feature due to other material reasons. They function well enough with or without it. Grammatical gender as a whole should neither be opposed nor appraised but only understood through a historical materialist framework. One is not better or worse than the other. It is important, however, as I stated near the beginning, for marxist-leninists to oppose prescriptivism under all circumstances. The prescriptivist derision of grammatical gender, too, only serves to divide the working class. A lot of European, African, Indigenous American, Indian, Polynesian languages and more share this feature called grammatical gender and saying that it is inherently bad is a perfect counterexample of how internationalists like us should act.

Thank you guys, gals and non-binary pals for reading! I hope you liked my first essay on a topic that is very important to me. I'd love to get criticism on this, and/or some suggestions on other misconceptions that I should examine further.