How many times have you heard someone say “you can’t say that – it’s not a real word!!!”? Or heard someone’s dialect (maybe your own) referred to as “poor grammar” or “not proper” or “slang”? Or maybe even as”not even real language”? Maybe you think of someone you know (or maybe even yourself) as a “grammar cop”? And don’t even get me started on how we police each other’s language on social media!

In order to foster language equity, we MUST let go of the idea that some forms of language are inherently “better” or “more proper” or “more correct” than others. When speakers fluent in academic English assume they are entitled to critique and disparage other forms of English as “less than,” they perpetuate the ideology of a language hierarchy, in which the people who use the most valued and privileged dialect – what Lisa Delpit and others have called the “code of power” – get to dictate to speakers of less-privileged dialects how they should and shouldn’t speak. I see this all the time on Facebook and Twitter – if someone uses a grammar construction or different spelling than academic English prescribes, other commenters descend like vultures to inform them in no uncertain terms that the spelling or grammar “error” invalidates what is otherwise a perfectly plausible point. In the ideology of the language hierarchy, people can (and according to many, should) be excluded from discourse and connection with their community if they don’t use the privileged form of language – the code of power.

One of the central assumptions of Language Science is that all languages and dialects are equally good at empowering their speakers to communicate with each other. We can challenge the ideology of the language hierarchy by making sure all of our students feel welcome to participate as fully as they can in the academic and social life of our classroom community, and by welcoming, representing and lifting up linguistically diverse forms of expression.

We can create language equity for speakers of all language backgrounds and abilities by focusing on language as an exchange of meaning between community members, by helping our students express meaning in the most effective way they can at that moment, and by limiting our critique of any specific element of grammar or transcription to instruction that addresses that particular level of grammar or reading/transcription skill. For example, if you’re teaching a unit on phonology, you might ask a student to demonstrate the pronunciation of a particular phoneme in standardized academic English, but if you’re asking students to analyze semantics in a literary text, it’s more useful to focus on the meaning a student is expressing rather than on “correcting” a difference in pronunciation.

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