Talking Back, Talking Black by John Mcwhorter

Author:John Mcwhorter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942658214
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2016-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

Joual:

“Tway, kuh SAY-kuh tu FAH?”

The distance from Standard French is quite similar to that of Black English from Standard English, and, in fact, more. Yet no one is writing about how joual needs to be stamped out in favor of Standard French, or insisting that you can’t use it in a job interview—because no one does, unless by chance the interviewer is a fellow joual speaker and wants to bond. A joual speaker has two ways they can talk, and c’est la vie.

There are cases like this all over the world. In Finland, nobody speaks the standard language casually. There is a different kind of Finnish, a kind of universal colloquial alternate, that real Finnish life is lived in, and that someone learning the language has to master alongside the standard forms. The differences between standard and colloquial are similar to these between Standard English and Black English. A Finnish textbook simply lists the colloquial forms along with the standard ones and calmly, in true Finn style, explains that you have to know them, too. No one in Helsinki thinks of colloquial Finnish as something to worry about.

Many Italians call cappicola ham gabagul. That’s because that is the word for cappicola in the Sicilian dialect of Italian: Gabagul is basically cappicola after being said a billion times. The standard’s word cappicola preserves a past state, as standard languages tend to. Gabagul is how the word has come out when left to its own devices. In Sicily, casually people speak Sicilian rather than the Tuscan standard. Really, Sicilian is so different from Italian that in an objective sense, it is a different language—it’s almost as different from Italian as Portuguese is from Spanish, and if Sicily were a separate country, Sicilian would strike no one as a kind of Italian. This is why media depictions of Sicilians talking among themselves, such as in The Godfather, The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire, are scrupulous about having the characters speak actual Sicilian rather than Tuscan Italian, which would seem not just imprecise but absurd to any Italian watching. But to Sicilians, as different from schoolroom Italian as their daily speech is, a discussion assuming that to master Standard Italian requires letting Sicilian go would sound absurd—they don’t doubt that people can speak both.

There is a term for people whose casual and formal speech differs to this degree: diglossia, from the Greek for “two tongues.” However, I have held off on introducing that term, because giving this bidialectal linguistic existence a label implies that it is exotic, when in fact it is extremely common and even a norm. Around the world, if a language has a strong written tradition and is also spoken widely, then often its spoken versions have drifted from the conservative written standard to varying degrees. As often as not, this means that there is a gulf between the way people chat and the way they speak. They speak the written version; they talk the other version. As such, there is ample

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