english dialects and the reason behind it.

For this questionnaire, I got responses from 5 of my friends who are Vietnamese with different backgrounds in English: My is an international student in Texas, US; Anh Nguyen is a Vietnamese Canadian who moved here since she was 10 and is now a UofT student; Lilo is a UTM student in Canada; Linh is a university student in HCMC, Vietnam; Hieu is an international student in Sydney, Australia. The age range is from 20 to 24 with 20 years old being the youngest and 24 years old being the oldest. According to the answers, the 2nd sentence is the most commonly judged as grammatical with the agreement from everyone, the 1st sentence comes next with 4/5 people. For the least grammatical sentences, the 6th sentence is the most voted one with 4/5 people and the 3rd, 4th, 5th come nest with 3/5. They seem to understand and accurate interpret most of the sentences, with the exception of the 6th sentence as one cannot understand it at all, and the others eliminate “been” from “been knew” and grammatically correct it instead of it being “have known for a while”. In the 5th sentence, the ones correcting it add auxiliary to the sentence, but the tense differs. Among the participants, they don’t seem to have consistent stereotypes about the speakers, but there are some consistent elements to their impressions. All of them mention middle-aged or older workers at some points in the 1st sentence. In the 3rd sentence, some people claim it to be young speakers. The other sentences have drastically diverse answers. Since the answers are so different, I can’t generally agree or disagree to their responses. Instead, I will provide my own analysis and if there’s something similar to their answers, that means I agree to those elements of their answers. First of all, I disagree with all the class or wealth or education assumptions that come after identifying an ethnicity. The sentences may fall into certain dialects or ethnolects and indicate the accents someone may has. However, it is not a good indicator of an individual’s social status, and it is feeding into the existing mainstream stereotypes. Also, there has been some exploitation of AAVE on the internet as young people of any race use it and call it the “internet language”, making it harder to identify the individual based on the dialects they use. Secondly, I will now analyze each sentence. In the 1st sentence, the word “needn’t” is used as an over-application of verb negation or a term in older English and “shall” is used in textbooks and not a lot in modern English. It could be from non-native English speakers or from older generations of native English speakers. The 2nd sentence lacks the pronunciation /ŋ/ in their -ing and it’s common among all English speakers, both native and non-native to not finish words while verbalizing. “Might could” is used in the 3rd sentence. It’s a non-standard English term used in Southern America so it could be used by Southern Americans and people who live there and adapt the term. The 4th sentence has negative concord “ain’t” and “nothing” which is a rule of AAVE as well as a rule from other languages in the world. So, it would be spoken by African Americans or English speakers whose first language is not English. As I mentioned the “internet language” incident, unless it’s their own accents, it could be anyone online. In the 5th sentence, they don’t pronounce their shortened auxiliary “is” which is common among any English speakers, although it could be more common toward non-native ones as native speakers instinctively add -s when they speed up. The final sentence uses “been knew” and “livin’” with no auxiliary after “he”. This sentence follows AAVE rules of stressed been as remote phase marker and the absence of copula is. Therefore, it would be African Americans if it’s their true accents, or literally anyone if it’s on the internet. All sentences have some patterns of skipping pronunciation, shortened auxiliary or words, so they are most likely spoken in casual conversations rather than in formal settings. The volunteers identify the speakers based on their knowledge of different people’s social and stylistic variations. Some factors that may influence the participants’ impressions are their social exposure with different groups of people, the stereotypes existing on mainstream medias and the knowledge they have from being taught English. Their different backgrounds affect their experience of meeting people from different areas or ethnicities. International students in English speaking countries are more likely to depict speakers more accurately than those living in a non-English speaking country whose knowledge is through western medias. People who spend more time in English-speaking countries are more likely to meet different groups of people and have different impressions than those who believe in stereotypes. It’s interesting how 2 of them have the impression of a girl speaking in the 5th sentence even though there is no indicator of gender from the speaker. It might be based on the stereotype of teenage girls from the media that they are spoiled and full of arrogance or jealousy. One even mentions “Mean Girls” and “Gossip Girl” which are two pieces of media that portray young girls as such. Since all participants are not native English speakers, the way they were taught English affects their impressions of what should be “proper English”. Foreign teachers teach standard English and usually make both descriptive and prescriptive rules equally important and therefore anything else other than the standard dialect is taught as wrong and incorrect. The advantage of teaching the standard dialect is that it would be widely understandable among people with varying degrees of English comprehension. As for enforcing it, it is convenient for non-native English speakers not to be discriminated by their accents. The disadvantages are that it glorifies one kind of English as prestigious and make people speaking non-standard English dialects ashamed of their own accents. It is the most beneficial to people who grow up speaking it as they have the linguistic privilege and some of them use their power to gatekeep and put other people down. It benefits people of color the least as it stigmatizes their accents, increases the discrimination toward them and they are forced to lose their unique accent, a beautiful part of their cultures.