On December 4, 2002, a student named Stephani Hardin posted this note to the ADS-L list, under the title "Teaching With a Kentucky Accent."

In one of the Education classes I took last fall, a Professor made a remark in class that has bothered me to this day. He said, "Some of you in here speak with a heavy Eastern Kentucky accent, and you need to think seriously about working on changing it if you want to teach English." I find this to be both offensive and judgmental. An accent has no bearing on accepted forms of speech. (I use the word 'accepted' rather than 'correct', because on whose standards do we even judge forms of speech). To ask someone to change an accent is ridiculous when you consider the fact that we all, regardless of where we are from, have one. This Professor displays a preference for one accent over another, and he suggests I change something that is a part of who I am. Why should I compromise my heritage to suit the standards of someone with linguistic prejudices?

Following is a selection of responses to the ADS-L list from that day and the next (full versions are available via the ADS-L archive). Note the sensitivities to what might be described as a "politically correct" sense of "equal entitlement" to any particular speech dialect and possible confusion between this and whether the Kentucky dialect would be an appropriate "norm" for teaching spoken English, at least outside of Eastern Kentucky (which is close to the Appalachian "hillbilly" area).

---

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 05:08:38 -0500
From:    Frank Abate <abatefr@EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject: FW: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

Stephani:
You were wise to take the position you did.  Stick by it.  Your prof is
absolutely WRONG.  (I would even add a swear word or two.)

How do we brook such nonsense?  And in a college classroom -- truly
appalling.

This reminds me of an incident at a DSNA meeting some years ago.  A young
scholar was addressing the meeting (at DSNA, all papers are "plenary"),
perhaps 80 folks were in the auditorium.  In the course of his paper he
said something "incorrect" (perhaps it was hopefully).  He paused and
sheepishly apologized for using this frowned-upon word.  At the end of his
paper he sat down, and Sidney Landau, who was moderating that session, got
up to intro the next speaker.  But first he made a comment to the effect
that if there is ANY group of people in America where one can pretty much
speak as they please, and with impunity, it is the DSNA.  Truer words were
never spoken at a DSNA -- we DSNAers are all (well, most of us, anyway)
language liberals. (I'm a radical -- I believe that everything is OK as to
one's idiolect and regional dialect.)

One should be aware of the potential reaction of given audience members.
On the radio, yes, many people will think that an Eastern KY accent sounds
ill-educated.  Too bad for them, but they will still think that.  You can,
however, win (many of) them over by saying good, smart, sensible things,
no matter what the accent.

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:44:02 -0500
From:    Terry Irons <t-irons@MOREHEAD-ST.EDU>
Subject: Re: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

> On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Dave Hause wrote:
> I think you might have taken that as pure career advice if he had
> qualified it by saying "...teach English somewhere other than Eastern
> Kentucky."

How would we react to this statement if accent were replaced by sex or
race? Surely, language is intrinsically part of identify as much as, if
not more than, either sex or race.

Rather than career advice, I find the comment to be overt discrimination,
which should be challenged every time it raises its ugly head.  Bravo,
Stephani!

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 09:23:22 -0500
From:    Margaret Blankenship <maggie37_62@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

Stephani,
I have to also say that your professor was wrong to expect people to
change what is a part of who they are. Where has he/she come from that he
thinks his accent is far superior to anyone else's. That is what is wrong
with our society today, people are always so quick to judge others by an
accent, sex, religion or culture. It is ridiculous to say the least.
Stephanie you stick to your guns and tell your professor maybe they should
not be teaching because of prejudices.

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 09:51:44 -0500
From:    Herbert Stahlke <hstahlke@WORLDNET.ATT.NET>
Subject: Re: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

As offensive as attitudes' like this professor's are, they are legal, as
are the prejudicial actions that are taken on the basis of them. Rosina
Lippi-Greene makes this point eloquently in her book *English with an
Accent*. Accent and dialect are two of the few remaining areas of public
activity in which discrimination is still not just legal but licensed by
court decisions.  It's not just attitudes we have to change.

---------------------------------

The point about career advice is well taken. I begin the first day of a
class here by telling, oh, the first minute or so of Jerry Clower's
Mississippi Coon Hunt. Then, just after I've talked about havin' a rat
killin' ("If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'"), I interrupt myself and tell the
students in my real version of standard academic English that it was, in
fact, all a big lie. Then they're to talk among themselves about that
crucial initial impression they had of me and, as part of their homework,
to write a short piece about their reaction for the next class.

Most admit to wondering how anyone with an accent like that could be
teaching in college, and some say they immediately assumed I was a racist
redneck. (I did ask for absolute honesty, incidentally.)  "American
Tongues," which we see later in the course, reminds them of that first day
when they were all caught with their prejudices a-flyin'. That video, as
you'll all remember, has a nice section devoted to the extra mile that a
speaker with a heavy Southern--or Brooklyn--accent must walk in order to
reach the starting line for a responsible position. It's a tough lesson,
not soon forgotten.

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 10:54:13 -0800
From:    Anne Gilbert <avgilbert@PRODIGY.NET>
Subject: Re: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

To all:
I don't know what to say to all of this.  I only know what my mother told
me once about her college experience, where everyone was expected to take
"speech" lessons.  The purpose of these "speech lessons" was to get some
people (specifically people from some parts of the South and from some
parts of New York) to "lose" their "accents".  Southerners at that time
were (and sometimes still are) considered ill-educated and stupid in the
"folklore". The other "experience" I've had is reading about people who
take "speech" therapy so they can "lose" their accents and succeed in
business. Apparently people with "Eastern Kentucky" and other obvious
"Southern" accents aren't taken seriously in business or as TV announcers,
etc.  So prejudiced and ill-informed as this professor may be, he appears
to be coming from a long tradition. . . .

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 14:19:41 -0500
From:    Beverly Flanigan <flanigan@OHIOU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

I tell my students that this prejudice will change as power and money move
southward, as they now are.  Four presidents since LBJ have been from the
South, and no one considers them dumb (well, maybe excepting the present
one...), and the two recent midwestern presidents, Truman and Eisenhower,
didn't talk like the Eastern elite by any means.  Congressional,
corporate, and even media leaders are increasingly from the South and
Southwest.  So patience--as Labov concluded a talk he gave a few years ago
at SECOL, the South shall rise again!

I'm curious to know what college your mother attended, Anne?

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 15:22:28 -0500
From:    Grant Barrett <gbarrett@WORLDNEWYORK.ORG>
Subject: Re: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

The fun part is when discriminated-against accents collide. An intelligent
acquaintance in the tech business recently moved from Atlanta to New York
City. He's got a placid, meandering Southern accent and works for a firm
of fast-talking Brooklynites who he says sound like Joe Pesci. The firm
responded to the stupidity they perceived in his accent by offering him
ridiculous below-average hourly wages; he believes his employers to be
uneducated fast-talking scammers not far from thugs.

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 16:53:11 -0500
From:    "Joanne M. Despres" <jdespres@MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM>
Subject: Re: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

Here's a counter-example:  it's always struck me as funny that the "Boston
accent" seems to enjoy status outside eastern MA. Whereas I grew up
thinking of it as a sort of working-class dialect, my friends from out of
state associate it with the aristocratic Kennedy clan.  On the other hand,
a Latina friend from NYC just howls at the way Bostonians pronounce "Nomar
Garciaparra" [a well-known Boston baseball player]. Those Bostonian
aristocrats can't roll an "r" to save their lives, it seems!

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 14:09:15 -0800
From:    Peter Richardson <prichard@LINFIELD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Beverly Flanigan wrote:

> I tell my students that this prejudice will change as power and money
      move southward, as they now are.

How very true. There's a nice parallel in Germany, where the shift of
power and money to the south has engendered a sudden appreciation for
Swabian and Bavarian accents that used to be ridiculed.

------------------------------

Date:    Thu, 5 Dec 2002 22:43:16 -0500
From:    Laurence Horn <laurence.horn@YALE.EDU>
Subject: Re: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

At 2:19 PM -0500 12/5/02, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
   I tell my students that this prejudice will change as power and money
   move southward, as they now are.  Four presidents since LBJ have been
   from the South, and no one considers them dumb (well, maybe excepting
   the present one...), and the two recent midwestern presidents, Truman
   and Eisenhower, didn't talk like the Eastern elite by any means.

Actually I think there is some dialect prejudice at work here.  There were
(and for all I know still are) jokes about both Carter and Clinton being
dumb, even though by objective standards neither is the case (Rhodes
scholarship for Clinton, various honors for Carter, and so on).  I suspect
a lot of it had to do with them "sounding like crackers", as I've heard it
put, and some it specifically linked to what people from Georgia or
Arkansas are like. There may be a disconnect in each case, part of which
is presumably mediated by the politics involved, but at least some of it
by the dialect/accent.

I don't recall similar jokes about Walter Mondale [Minnesota], George
McGovern [South Dakota], or Michael Dukakis [Massachusetts], although
there were of course other sorts of jokes involved, as there were about
Gerald Ford, Bush Sr., Reagan, and especially Nixon.  In fact, a nice
minimal pair might be Ford vs. Carter or Clinton: while there were jokes
and routines about Ford not being able to walk and chew gum at the same
time, nobody (or not that many) made fun of the way he talked or looked
(remember the parodies of the Carter smile?) or ate/farmed (remember the
jokes about the peanuts?).  I don't think regional prejudice can be
entirely dismissed.

P.S.  Consider too JFK vs. LBJ:  the latter was often treated as dumb, the
former never, although objectively I think this would be hard to support.

------------------------------

Date:    Fri, 6 Dec 2002 05:43:09 -0500
From:    Frank Abate <abatefr@EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject: FW: Teaching With a Kentucky Accent

It would make an interesting paper for an ADS meeting to present evidence
of current attitudes towards various "familiar" regional dialects in
America. Actually, probably a series of papers, then a book collecting
them. Takers?

In my own case, moving to western Massachusetts as I did in 1978 (having
lived prior to that only in the Midwest), I was amazed by the variety of
"accents" in New England.  There are at least two in and around Boston
(Brahmin vs. Kennedy/"Dawchestuh" type), then Rhode Island/SE Mass., then
W Mass., esp. W of the Conn. River (the Great "r-less" Divider; many
people who hail from Mass. and Conn. W of the river sound very much the
same as folks in upstate NY, and much closer to the Midwest "accent" than
nearby E Mass.).  The old Yankees of Maine and NH are also r-less, but
with differences from the folks from around Boston and south.

This has been widely studied and documented, of course, but things have
shifted, and new studies would are needed.  The various accents of NE got
laid down according to settlement patterns, and the fact that wide rivers
(like the Connecticut for much of its lower course) were once very
difficult to cross, so folks tended to live and have families on their own
side. Now with travel across rivers, across anything really, so easy, the
accents are fading and melding somewhat . . .

PS: I always found Bugs Bunny very funny, largely because of his
Brooklynese. Then I thought "All in the Family" was very funny, largely
too because of the Queens accents (or attempts at same).  Then I heard
real people who speak this way in NYC; to hear them is still is very
striking to me.  So yes, Jerry Cohen, you DO have an accent!

---------------------------

Date:    Fri, 6 Dec 2002 07:37:09 -0500
From:    Frank Abate <abatefr@EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject: Eastern Kentucky accent and UK accents

The following from Patrick Hanks is forwarded to ADS-L at his request:

*******************
As a Brit, I have no idea what an Eastern Kentucky accent sounds like. (Is
it like the Everly Brothers?  If so, that's a prestige accent where I come
from.)   Anyway, British English is rich in accent differences, so my
comments may be of interest.

I think there are two quite different notions buried in Stephani's
protest: "norm" and "correctness". The question is, was Stephani's
professor criticizing her accent on pragmatic grounds of deviation from
widely accepted norms (i.e. was he trying to help her with job-hunting in
places where Kentucky English is not understood or recognized) or was he
just being a pointless pedant trying to impose his own notion of
correctness on her Eastern Kentucky speech?  The distinction is crucial.

What he might have added was, "....if you want to teach English outside
Eastern Kentucky."

Here's a relevant cautionary tale:

A couple of decades ago, in Sweden, I learned more about English-language
teaching techniques from Jim, a Scottish colleague, than from anyone else
I've ever met.  His knowledge of pedagogical techniques was profoundly
illuminating, and he shared his expertise generously. He spoke a rich and
expressive form of Glaswegian English.  Unfortunately, his Glaswegian
accent was so strong that the course participants (including businessmen,
diplomats, and members of the Swedish and Norwegian parliaments) could
hardly understand a word he said.

Cruelly, he got fired, while I, with my southern British English accent,
got all the credit for what he had taught me, because my accent conformed
to what the students had been led to expect.  Stephani, do you want to end
up like Jim, or can you bear to learn "code switching"? Many Brits have
one code of English for the home and another for the workplace.  After
all, if you applied for a job in Germany, you might be expected to be
competent in German, and this would in no way be an attack on your
heritage as a speaker of Eastern Kentucky English.

I mentioned the "Jim" experience (which troubled me) to John Spencer,
Professor of English at Leeds University (now Emeritus). He had an
interesting comment.  He said that he encouraged his students, who were
from West and South Africa, Austria, Eastern Europe, etc., etc. to develop
an accent that would combine local identifiability with international
comprehensibility. Ha! Easier said than done!  Anyway, John Spencer
actively discouraged "parrots" from sounding like Old Etonians.  You see,
a student with a good ear can sometimes produce perfect RP or General
American (it often happens), parrot-fashion, and this too can be a
disadvantage, because it generates false expections. The interlocutor is
led to expect that such a student's English comprehension will be as good
as their spoken English production.  So then the poor parrot gets lost,
and cannot bring themself to admit their comprehension failure.

[I hope you all enjoyed "themself" in that last sentence  -- it is highly
relevant to "notions of correctness".]

In short, I think that, on the limited evidence before us, Stephani writes
so punchily that I doubt she will ever be short of a job for long --
though it may not be an English teaching job, or at any rate not in parts
of the English-speaking world that are far distant from Eastern Kentucky,
like New York or Nigeria. If she expects New Yorkers and Nigerians to
adjust to a highly distinctive regional norm, she's on a hiding to
nothing.  (Is "a hiding to nothing" a British regionalism? Oh, sorry....)

Code-switching is an acquired skill. 500 years ago people like Erasmus did
it regularly between Dutch and medieval Latin; there's nothing bad about
asking Stephani to join those who can do it between General American
English and Eastern Kentucky English.  It's not a matter of asking her to
give up something; it's a matter of proposing to her that she should
acquire an additional communicative code for outside Easten Kentucky.

Patrick Hanks
Editor, Dictionary of American Family Names (forthcoming);
Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Brandeis University;
Formerly Chief Editor, Oxford Current English Dictionaries;
Formerly Chief Editor, English Dictionaries, HarperCollins Publishers;
Formerly Visiting Scientist, AT&T Bell Laboratories;
Formerly Research Fellow, University of Birmingham, England;
Formerly Teacher of English for International Purposes, Furudals Bruk
Kurscentrum, Sweden;
Formerly British Council Course Organizer, In-Service Teacher Training,
Universities of Lodz and Katowice, Poland; etc., etc.

[I thought it might be good to throw in a few of my credentials here,
although the current ones are least relevant]

***********************************

Date:    Fri, 6 Dec 2002 11:41:04 -0500
From:    Beverly Flanigan <flanigan@OHIO.EDU>
Subject: Re: Eastern Kentucky accent and UK accents

But recall my comments on the difficulty of acquiring a second
dialect/accent past adolescence, for which there is considerable research
evidence.  However, that said, some accommodation may be made, certainly
in lexicon, somewhat less in grammar (as in giving up "needs washed" in
favor of "needs to be washed" or "needs washing"--not at all easy for
native users of the first form), and maybe to at least a "comprehensible"
degree in pronunciation (as Spencer suggested).

Hiring practices are a toughie.  Our ESL program refused, until just a few
years ago, to hire anyone but native American English speakers of a
"general" Northern/Midwestern accent--no Brits need apply!  The first
outsider they hired was a Malaysian English speaker with a long history of
EFL teaching and a semi-British English accent; the next two were actual
Brits (one RP-ish and the other resolutely not); another was a Scotsman
who reluctantly used SBE in the classroom but protested its "forced"
spread around the world; and now it has hired a Bulgarian guy whose
English is closer to AmEng than BritEng but who clearly has a NNS accent.

And in between, it has finally hired several Southern and South Midland
Americans.  But one TA commented just the other day that the Southern
Alabama TA last year "changed" her speech for the sake of her ESL
students--not at all true, in my hearing, but testimony to the power of
the prescriptivist myth that even twists listeners' perceptions of their
own colleagues' speech!

On attitudes:  One of the British teachers in our ESL program did a
subjective reaction test (using taped voices but no other identifiers) of
ESL students for my Sociolinguistics class and found that "very
comprehensible" was the key factor; it happened to correlate positively
with another Brit voice, but written comments said "she talked slow,"
"repeated and rephrased often," "used varied intonation patterns," etc.
"Pleasant," "cultivated," "highly educated-sounding," etc. ranged all over
the various voices.  She interpreted this as common sense; training in HOW
to talk with new listeners (whether NNSs or others unfamiliar with the
local or national speech) is the critical factor.  My grad students
jokingly call me Road Runner because of my fast Minnesota speech, but I
know how to adjust when I have non-natives in the class!  I'd suggest the
same approach to Stephani and others.

Frank, perhaps you could forward this to Patrick Hanks, who's obviously
had experience in this area too.  (But the Everly Brothers?!)