I am currently employed as an English language teacher at a vocational school for the creative industries. The professional field can be considered to be very broad indeed so, to be more specific, my students are being trained to become Game Artists, Developers, Video Editors, Photographers, etc. I have always found it particularly enjoyable to see what magnificent things they manage to create. Most of them are capable of expressing themselves creatively in a plethora of different ways.
Insecurity
It is interesting though that although they come across as highly confident in terms of their creativity, in terms of their Dutch this seems less so. This may be due to the fact that most of them either live in or around the Eindhoven area, located in the southern province of North Brabant. When talking to students, I occasionally ask them if they feel insecure about their use of the Dutch language, in which case four out of five students will typically reply with a resounding ‘yes’, especially when they are conversing with someone living ‘above the rivers’. That is, generally, from the provinces of North-Holland, South-Holland, Utrecht and Flevoland. In their speech the use of shibboleths such as the pronoun ‘hun’ in subject position, ‘als’ in comparisons where standard Dutch would use ‘dan’ is widespread. Also in terms of pronunciation they may unconsciously give themselves ‘away’, as with their pronunciation of the g-vowel, the so called ‘soft g’.
The article title suggests that I am of the opinion that an equality exists among various varieties of Dutch, for example Brabants and Limburgs, or Achterhoeks and Rotterdams. This is based on the fact that if you ask a random person about their opinions on one of these accents, you will almost always get a highly stereotypicalized answer. As a rule of thumb, political correctness and open-mindedness have yet to arrive with respect to different accents, and therefore, people are generally not quick to mince their words. For example, people from Brabant rank highly on traits such as ‘gezelligheid’ and ‘hospitality’ but rather low on ‘open-mindedness’ and ‘intelligence’. Now of course this is, most of the time, a broad generalisation. Students from the TU/e may speak round and about with Brabants accents, but one cannot escape the fact that a 20-year-old who helps build a solar-powered car capable of achieving 98% fuel-conversion efficiency can rightly be deemed ‘unintelligent’ on the basis of saying ‘Hun’ rather than ‘Zij’.
That brings us to the core issue of this article: should teachers be concerned with the generalisation of traits linked to certain accents and varieties, and, if yes, should they teach their students about this?
A good argument in favor of teaching children explicitly about different varieties and accents is that this will encourage them to become more open-minded and tolerant toward their peers who speak differently. If, say, a student from Limburg moved to a school in Haarlem, being made fun of by his or her fellow classmates because of another accent may have a markedly bad influence on the child’s scholastic career. Similarly, classes in language variation may boast my Eindhoven students’ confidence and lessen their insecurity about using their Brabant accents.
Prescriptionists vs. Descriptivism
A complication with the above may emanate from the prescriptionists’ view on language. Prescriptionists are people who prescribe language in terms of correct or incorrect. They prefer to adhere to a standard way of using the language and are generally rather conservative in their views. In their opinion, teaching children that all accents and dialects are created equal, tantamounts to deceiving them. After all, if speaking and writing the standard language elicits more positive responses from people, and therefore, more chances of landing a job after they graduate, encouraging them to keep using their own varieties would be flying in the face of what a school is supposed to do: help students become succesful citizens and help them get jobs.
Meeting in the middle
As a language teacher, I have personally always been dumbfounded at why the prescriptivist tradition and more liberally-oriented views have never been able to meet somewhere in the middle. In the Netherlands, apparently, it seems a goal of sorts to stigmatize language variation and label it either correct or incorrect. This consequently makes my job as a teacher heaps and heaps easier and infinitely more difficult at the same time. Admittedly, clear-cut, unambiguous language rules make teaching students a piece of cake. One is correct and the other incorrect. End of story. The problem lurks in that some aspects of language are very difficult to ‘unteach’. Every person knows how daunting it can be to break a habit, let alone change something that is ingrained in your brain and intricately connected with your personality, such as language, and, more specifically, the accent you speak. And this is exactly why the seemingly absolute dichotomy between proper and improper language use makes my life really difficult as well. On the one hand, I am a teacher and know that I am supposed to teach students AN, otherwise known as standard Dutch. This is not because I subscribe to the prescriptivist tradition, no this is because I want my students to thrive in life, have succesful careers and not be wrongly judged when going on job interviews. On the other hand, I feel the responsibility to teach my students about language variation and the fact that some people speak differently, does not mean a lot in terms of their social economic background, status or intelligence. Rather, if you meet a person who speaks with a different accent, approach this person and their accent as if they are wearing glasses: wearing glasses does not necessarily mean you are exceptionally bright. Instead it may simply mean you just do not have perfect eye sight. But as always stereotypes and generalisations are hard to weed out. You can test this yourself by taking a train ride and listening to the different accents that you hear. People are typically shy to admit their opinions, but sociolinguists are keen to reveal these using matched guise tests.
To conclude, I would like to bring things to a broader point. We should not deny the fact that it natural for people to draw conclusions based on their experiences and form generalised opinions based on these. However, if, as an increasingly pluralistic society there is one big thing we have to learn, it is that generalisations about people and their behavior rarely, if ever, work out advantageously for the individual. Therefore, first off, I think we should teach students that no variety of Dutch is linguistically better than the other. Aside from that this sounds like the politically correct thing to say, research-based evidence actually suggests that a dialect is no less capable of expressing complicated ideas or that it is more logically structured than the standard variety. Secondly, we should also help students distinguish between two forms of the language: the variety they learn at thome in their own sociolinguistic speech community, and the variety that is widely accepted as the standard and which is typically heard on the news, radio and other via other media to help them apply for jobs and giving presentations. Thirdly,students should be taught that their local dialect or accent complements their proficiency of the standard language. A person who speaks a dialect or accent should be conceived of rather like someone who knows a foreign language: nobody would claim people who are bilingual or perhaps even multilingual to be of average or low intelligence. This will inspire confidence in students and help them to feel good about their own language skills. All in all, it is language teachers who play a key role in shaping students’ attitudes towards accents and the standard language. In my opinion, we should definitely play a role, but I would not go as far as to say that from now on any variety is as good as the standard variety. Purely linguistically it is, but sociolinguistically, even ethically, the student comes first and. In the end, your main goal as a teacher is to help your students advance in their scholastic and professional careers.