Page 254 - Beyond Methods

242 Ensuring social relevance
Hillbilly is a reference to the fact that Clinton hails from the South and speaks “Southern,” a variety of English that is not considered “standard” in the United States.
Realistically, then, a variety is considered “standard” only be- cause it is spoken by those who control the social, political, and cul- tural power centers within a nation. Thus, the standard variety of French is based on educated Parisian French. The standard variety of British-spoken English refers to Received Pronunciation (RP), historically derived from the speech of the Royalty based in south- ern London. Similarly, standard American English refers to the va- riety spoken and written by persons
• with no regional accent;
• who reside in the Midwest, far west or perhaps some parts of the northeast (but never in the south);
• with more than average or superior education;
• who are themselves educators or broadcasters;
• who pay attention to speech, and are not sloppy in terms of pro- nunciation or grammar;
• who are easily understood by all;
• who enter into a consensus of other individuals like themselves about what is proper in language.
(Rosina Lippi-Green, 1997, p. 53)
A standard variety, thus, gets its prestige owing to social, political, and economic factors and not linguistic ones. Linguistically speak- ing, a standard variety is neither superior nor inferior to any other. Given these facts, it is easy to conclude that “the custodians of standard English are self-elected members of a rather exclusive club” (Widdowson, 1994, p. 377).
The issue of “standard” becomes even more complicated in the context of several varieties of World Englishes because of colonial history and national identity. Colonialism used language as an in- strument of political, social, and cultural control. Postcolonial the- orists tell us that language “is a fundamental site of struggle for postcolonial discourse because the colonial process itself begins in language. The control over language by the imperial centre— whether achieved by displacing native languages, by installing itself as a ‘standard’ against other variants which are constituted as ‘impurities,’ or by planting the language of empire in a new place—