Southern American English & African American Vernacular | Dialects Explained

[00:00:01]greetings folks and Welcome to our second of three talks on North American English this time around we'll be talking about southern English in the United States and africanamerican vernacular of course with some history thrown in as well to put everything in context there are I think some very valid reasons for discussing these two dialects or dialect groups in the same talk and I'm hoping I can make that clear by the end of the lecture we'll start with the South the southern American dialect is as with the northern city shift primarily a white dialect though it does influence African-American vernacular in some very interesting ways as mentioned last class as well the South was settled or much of the South rather was settled out of the South and Southwest of England and the settlers of course brought with them their speech patterns they also o brought with them many elements of their culture the time of much of the settlement dates to around the time of the English Civil War with a split between royalists those Defenders of the monarchy and parliamentarians there was a large concentration of royalists or Cavaliers many of them aristocratic by birth who came to the American South and brought with them a very strict social hierarchy which in the slave economy that grew up in the South basically became a social hierarchy on steroids there was a strict sense of public honor this also coming out of the aristocratic background of the English settlers which quite possibly was self-consciously exaggerated for sociopolitical reasons or performative reasons as almost maybe even a form of political or social theater this isn't surprising when people leave a culture when they leave a country they often bring with them an attachment to the ways of the old country that in many ways becomes more devout than in the people who remain what often occurs is a sort of a sense of cultural nostalgia in which your identity becomes not so much a function of where you are as where you or where your ancestry are from so it becomes a cultivated affectation in many ways and sometimes even almost a sort of a fetish in any case this is the cultural foundation for the plantation aristocracy which of course revolved around the institution of slavery in terms of General patterns shared by if not all at least many Southern dialects we do have a few things we should get out on the table right away before we get down to specifics one quite famously is the tendency to draw vowels the the famous Southern draw taking a long time to say things this seems to be a self-conscious Mark of aristocratic station or affiliation perhaps Associated again going back to the English Civil War period with a self-conscious differentiation from the Parliamentary forces that is it was actually arguably a mark of belonging to a high culture group as opposed to a low culture group often described as being or portrayed as being borish certainly most of the parliamentarians were not aristocratic they were associated very often with the dissenting denominations as opposed to with the high church and accordingly had less patience with such things as ritual and of course even after the break with Rome the Church of England remained highly ritualistic and the Cavaliers were associated of course with the church of England which became the Episcopal Church in the colonies that is the draw the aristocratic draw May well be simply a a cultivated verbal marker of being civilized other common patterns include lexical variations such as AXS rather than ask which we also saw with Jamaican Creole by the way just to remind you and which does go back to the old English verb axan for to ask that is this seems to be a lexical holdover with many centuries of history behind it another variation is ain't rather than isn't which again May well be although this sounds probably counterintuitive to people who grew up being told that ain't is bad English this May well be a cultivated aristocratic usage dating back to about the 17th century of course as with much of the English of Southern England the southern dialects of American English tend to be non- rotic not all of them but many of them without a doubt though the most distinctive feature of Southern American dialects in fact their defining feature is the southern shift or Sou Vowel Shift yet another chain shift and incidentally a continuation of the Great Vowel Shift so we should probably talk about that now it begins with the monop thong isation that is the reduction to a single pure vowel a monop thong of the dipthong I so the vowel in ride this effectively completes the transformation of that vowel which began round about the time of char to have followed fairly closely on the monop onization of I is vowel breaking particularly the vowel breaking of a the vowel in cat what breaking is is the insertion of a consonant in this case Y into the middle of the vowel so cat becomes cayat additionally we also see the raising and breaking of the a vowel as in the word red this too is more common Inland than in the Southeastern coastal regions but if you want to push it to its Extreme as it might be pronounced say for example in Inland Georgia the word red would more likely be pronounced red similarly the I vowel and the E vowel tend to be slightly dip Thung IED this pronunciation is a little harder to detect but it is present so rather than hit for the I vowel it's hit and rather than me for the E vowel it's me so rather than he hit me it would be he hit me now if we move toward the back of the mouth and take a look at the highback tense vowel ooh as in school this tends to be slightly fronted especially in the southeast so South Carolina Georgia Louisiana where you're more likely to hear rather than school school also for the back fowls these tend to be dip Thung ised upward so for example we have the dip thong a as in how being pronounced depending on where you are maybe higher and maybe ha similarly the lower back vowels also tend to Glide upward so a becomes ow so you don't have a dog as a pet you have a dog as a pet and you don't speak with a Southern draw you speak with a Southern draw and as long as we're on the topic of the a vowel as in southern this too tends to go through a bit of a change it is fronted sometimes fronted quite considerably so for example not Southern but Southern and if you're in Georgia you ain't going to give me a hug yall going to give me a hug additionally as I think I mentioned last class many parts of the South partake of the pin pen merger moving the vowel toward I rather than e so you will stick a pin into something but you will also write with a pin not a pen and as a final couple of bits of Southern vow stuff we have the relative absence of something called happy tensing what happy tensing is is the tensing up of the vowel in a terminal Y sound in a terminal e as in happy or nappy or Slappy that final vowel in standard English is quite tense in southern English it tends to be more LAX so happy rather than happy On a related note we also have the unstressing of the O vowel when it is terminal that is fellow for example becomes fella it just moves toward the neutral vowel it doesn't get a full realization I think this and the absence of happy tensing both follow a same pattern of just relaxing the mouth a little bit toward the end of a word and this is I think consistent with the over overall relaxed tone of the southern accent which is also Illustrated in its its draw the relaxed paces and cadences of much of Southern speech quite frankly I do find it quite lovely to listen to but of course vowels aren't the only things that distinguish Southern American English from General American English most southern dialects as I've said before are non- Ric sometimes very strongly non- Ric so whereas for example [Music] the hard pallet to an N with the tongue against the alviola so rather than singing I might find myself singing and as a final little detail and this is not something that occurs in every Southern dialect but it does occur in many we find a shifting of accent from the second syllable of some words to the first syllable so rather than calling the police you'll call the police rather than pouring the cement you'll pour the cement and rather than having a friend come and visit you from Detroit your friend will come and visit you from Detroit now rather than just listen to me you should probably listen to other people so I am providing a link here which you should definitely check out it'll give you an example of several very interesting and lovely Southern dialects I'll post this one to the Moodle page as well that said I think it might be useful to take a look at a sentence in a couple of different dialects just to get a sense of what the differences are not just audibly but visually so here's a sentence which I would pronounce I'm walking my red dog to my kid school after attending to some business with the police first how does that look if we render it in IPA into General American well it would look something like this and in the transcription I've tried to take into account rendering unstressed vowels with the appropriate symbol rather than paying attention to spelling and so we have I'm walking my red dog to my kids school after attending to some business with the police pretty much the same way as I pronounced it when I read it just above there are relatively few differences between General American and Canadian English now how might this sentence sound if spoken by someone living in the South here I've tried to transcribe it as closely as I can to a Southeast Inland dialect and it would go something like this I'm walking my red dog to my kid's school after attending to some business with the police and you can notice that while many of these differences are actually quite small they do tend to add up to a very distinct sound don't they and what also changes in southern English and this seems to go hand inand with the pronunciation is the cadences the cadences are much slower in southern English than they are in general English or in Northern English in fact I find the language quite musical General American is a very flat dialect and this also applies to much Canadian English that is the voice doesn't rise and fall all that much and I remember the first time I was teaching this course I had someone in the class who was from Yorkshire I believe and and his impression of North American English as as he'd experienced it which of course was Northern English basically was that it's very monotonous it's very monotonal southern English Rises and Falls much more musically than does General American or Canadian English and in this regard it's actually more similar to British English which does which also has a stronger or more distinct rising and falling Cadence not the exact same Cadence in the South but there is a rising and falling Cadence in much British English that you don't see in North American English that is I think there's maybe something that's generally being lost in the prestige dialects of North American English that perhaps some of the other dialects for example many of the Southern dialects have actually held on to that is at least aesthetically relevant that said Southern dialects as with any dialect or dialect group are not merely linguistic phenomena they're also social phenomena and as such they they don't exist in a political or social vacuum historically going back at least as far as the Civil War and I think further back Southern dialects and Southern Accents have been seen as backward or insular or uneducated this is especially true since the end of the Civil War and I think became even more current or more pervasively true during the Civil Rights Movement which was initially a primarily Southern phenomenon though it did spread to the entire us also though since the 1960s the Southern Accents have often been portrayed as legitimate American or All American accents they're among the most recognizable American accents abroad so that is they are markers of American identity of self-conscious American identity and also tend to embody challenges to what we might call traditional liberal values often they will be cultivated as a way of conveying a sense of approachability or downto worthless or hominess most Presidents since 1964 have if not having been from the south themselves chosen to live there and I'm thinking largely right now of George W Bush's Texas accent which was very much a cultivated accent Bush went to Yale his family's from New England and yet his Persona was very much tied to his texy down hominess that is a Southern accent can also be a social marker of political or social conservatism and will often be attributed as such even if that that attribution is incorrect but for the last few decades there actually has been a gradual decline in many elements of the Southern dialects the draw is becoming less pronounced and is audibly much less pronounced now than it was say 50 years ago the same thing is true with rotic and non- rotic areas where non- rotic was the norm are becoming more rotic particularly urban areas there are of course reasons for this one is an increase in education both primary and postsecondary more and more speakers are coming into contact with speakers from dialect regions other than their own who themselves are in positions of linguistic Authority teachers for example educated at universities outside of their particular dialect region Sim similarly of course as more and more people attend University they are mixing with a broader range of people and therefore a broader range of accents than had been the case typically even just a couple of generations ago this influence of non-southern speakers on Southern students will tend to produce sort of a coin sort of an accommodation a drift towards a more neutral accent neutral of course being relative to the other accents that are in play in a given situation in many cities as well there has been a steady influx of White Collar professionals from out of the region what this results in is people in positions of social or economic Prestige speaking with accents other than the distinctive Southern drawling non- rotic Accents that are maybe more common locally and what emerges from this influx of outof town White Collar professionals is a relative reduction in the status of the Southern dialects themselves so increasingly the southern dialects the Deep South accents are being associated with even more than before ruralness lack of Education cultural backwardness and I suspect that there is also a political element here too among the most conservative places in the United States are rural counties in the American South so that pattern of speech is associated with increasingly political conservatism and as we've seen in the last election and in the last few elections cities on the whole tend to be politically more Progressive than rural areas so this decline of Southern Accents in southern cities as opposed to Southern rural areas does seem to at least reflect an increasing political divide between urban and rural areas in American politics I don't want to say too much more about that there because I don't want to extrapolate too far beyond the data I'm just positing that as a possibility in the meantime I think it's probably time to wrap up with the South and move move on to African-American vernacular as for what African-American vernacular English is it is a dialect or soci elect spoken by many African-Americans and this in itself is interesting as the dialect is widely dispersed across the country while absent in many of the regions connecting those areas in which it is spoken if you want to get a sense of what it sounds like then listen to the YouTube clip that I've posted with this slide and pay attention to how the speakers in the clip understand the language because they're actually describing their relationship with African-American vernacular in the clip and it as you listen to them you will find that there is a an a relationship here with the language that of course goes beyond mere communication there there's a sense of belonging also and of Rec recognition that accompanies the use of the language or the use of the dialect among native speakers so give that a listen hit pause on this recording if necessary and then we'll continue in the next slide with a more formal discussion of what the dialect actually is the origins of African-American vernacular lie of course in the South and there is much in common in the phonetics of this verac and many Southern dialects as we'll see in the forthcoming slides it also has quite a lot in common with various Creoles that we've discussed Caribbean Creoles as we saw with Jamaican and of course the Gula Creole which we've also discussed during and in the Years following the Great Migration so from about 195 onward African-American vernacular also became an identity marker particularly as held against the English partaking in the northern cities Vowel Shift where these two dialects seem to have pushed against each other as verbal markers of racial communities or racialized communities whose interests were often at least perceived as being at odds with each other this dialect or soci elect has had and continues to have a profound influence on the PO on the popular culture of the United States and thus of english- speaking North America as a whole largely but not exclusively through music this makes sense I think considering that for the first few centuries during which African-Americans were in the United States it was illegal to teach them as slaves how to read so the only cultural the only means of cultural continuity available to that Community for a long time were oral storytelling and music so the fact that this culture broadly speaking has had such an impact on the mainstream culture of North America is in many ways a testament to its ability to survive for centuries literally in the face of profound adversity as for what it actually is African American does as with any other dialect have its own internally consistent grammar pronunciation and stress patterns it's often depicted by the mainstream I think in very racist ways as simply being an inferior form of English broken English as is the case and as we discussed with a number of the Crees from also formerly slave areas that is very often the linguistic authority of standard English is actually used to press down or to undermine the cultural authority of formerly enslaved peoples this continues down to this day one of the distinctive patterns of African-American vernacular which we'll discuss below is their use of the forms of to be which has a number of very interesting conjugations in African-American vernacular some of which are actually held in common with the cre that we've already discussed in terms of social class and its correlations the dialect is most common among uneducated people and unskilled laborers that is it is a dialect of what we might call an underclass and as people move up the social ladder fluency in African-American vernacular tends to become less common so many people in the middle class are bi dialectal which makes sense because these in many are people who worked their way up into the middle class from poorer Beginnings but in order to get into the middle class had to be fully fluent in general American among upper middle class black Americans African American vernacular is actually not that widely spoken is not that common and this also makes sense because among this population those who have risen to the upper middle class tend for the most most part not to have come from the lower class but from the middle class itself that is they're further removed from the community for which this dialect is actually the home tongue in terms of how this dialect works or looks formally let's just take a look at it the same way we took a look at Southern American English one of the things that the two dialects or dialect groups have in common is their non- rotic in African-American terminal RS tend to be vowelized in one of two ways IR or r as in dollar or color tend to be vowelized as uh so rather than saying $1 you might say $1 or or our syllables tend to be vowelized as o so rather than having $4 do you might have four doll and just to be clear if I mispronounce any of these there's no disrespect intended it is simply a matter of my not having being raised in this dialect and not having practiced it to the point of Mastery now along with non- rotic we also have the vowelization of L's now you remember that RS and L's are both classified as liquid consonants they can both function sometimes as consonants and sometimes as vowels so it's not entirely surprising that what happens with RS might sometimes also happen with L's so for example rather than paying a toll you would pay a toe so the o sound becomes o now when the vowel is an a rather than an o that is when it's an open rather than a Clos vowel the vowel itself tends to be maintained but of course the L is still eliminated or vowelized so something would be not your fault but not your fault or as we'll see in a couple of slides not your fault to continue with consonants generally speaking a voiced Dental frickative so will become aive so them becomes Dem just as we saw with both Jamaican and Gula in medial position it tends to become a labiodental fricative so an F sound so nothing becomes nothing it can also sometimes become a stop in a terminal position if it's followed by certain other sounds so it could become a t sound or perhaps sometimes a CH sound that is a t sound followed by what we would usually spell as an sh with you therefore becomes something like with you and that sh becomes a Glide between the T and the Y another feature of African-American vernacular though by no means Universal because of course there is variation within the dialect is the glottalization of terminal stops particularly unvoiced stops such as t or k t or so rather than saying got a speaker of this dialect might say got or rather than saying back a person might say back which means be right back might sound more like be right back and as long as we're talking about terminal consonants let's talk about terminal consonant clusters unvoiced consonant clusters tend to be reduced that is simplified so the SP stsk ft and PT clusters tend to be reduced toward the first of the two sounds so rather than fast a person might say fast rather than soft a person might say soft where voiced clusters are concerned that is clusters in which both consonant are voiced there also tends to be a reduction toward the initial consonant in the cluster so and becomes an old becomes old mixed clusters on the other hand that is clusters that contain both one unvoiced and one voiced consonant tend to be maintained these are not reduced so a camp is still a camp don't is still don't think is still think built is still built Etc in terms of the triple consonant cluster represented by St so stir as in strength or Street this tends to be reduced by having the T the middle element taken out so rather than Street a person might say Street another feature of African-American vernacular with consonants is a tendency to reduce or lose the voicing in a terminal voiced pive that is a b d or G sound so a bug for example might be a buck and a club might be a club and similar to Southern American English the as in thing or nothing tends to be fronted as well so it becomes an N so nothing becomes nothing and that for the most part covers the consonants when we turn to vowels the first thing we might notice are a number of similarities with Southern American English one is the monop onization or reduction of some dip thongs for example I is reduced to a so my becomes Ma just as in Southern American English but also in some dialects of African-American vernacular the oi dip thong is reduced to a so boil becomes ball just as in southern American English there is generally a pin pen merger and that merger is toward the I sound so pen becomes pin get becomes git or it can also become a dip thong git which also has much in common with the dip Thung isation of i as I in southern American English there tends as well to be an upglide on back vowels you remember that dog becomes dog this is also the case in African-American vacular though perhaps not with quite as long a draw and a word such as talk for example would be pronounced more like talk there is no CAU caught merger in African-American vernacular and most vowels aside from the ones I've mentioned are realized more or less as they are in general American there is some variation of course but the differences are not as Extreme as the differences for example with the consonants another element that African-American vernacular has in common with southern white English is the shifting of stress patterns in some words so as with for example a white speaker from Georgia a speaker of this dialect would refer to the police not the police cement not cement and Detroit rather than Detroit double negation in this dialect is fine as it was in standard English up to about the 18th century so ain't nobody going to find out or ain't never heard nothing about that are perfectly fine these are not bad English these are simply African American vernacular now I mentioned a few slides ago that there is also in this dialect a distinctive use of forms of to be so now seems like a good time to me to talk about the African-American vernacular verb forms in the simple present so we might say he walks in standard English in African-American vernacular we have Hew walk pronounced Hew walk this is used for express ing a general truth the present progressive which in standard English would be pronounced he is walking could be pronounced he is walking or he walking this of course as in standard English refers to an action that is ongoing at the time of utterance there's also and this is where the B verb comes in a construction he be walking be here is used to indicate habitual action so he be walking by at 5:00 means he habitually walks by here at 5:00 if we look at the past Progressive this also is made with a form of be but not was as in standard English in which we might say he was walking well in African-American vernacular this is he been walking when we come to the present perfect so he has been walking in standard English we find he been walking that is the same words are used but the stress pattern is changed he been walking is past Progressive he been walking is present perfect so you've got to have your ear open to the tone as well as the actual words this implies of course protracted action we might say in standard English he's been walking since 5:00 well a speaker of this dialect might say he been walking since 5:00 there's also a difference in the simple past and this uses the verb do so whereas in standard English we might say he walked in African-American vernacular one would say he done walked when we come to the Future there is also a different form especially where near future intentions are concerned so we might say he fin walk fin coming from fixen to and this means he's intending to walk or he intends to walk in standard English the closest we can come to this probably is he's going to walk for the future perfect which in standard English would be he will have walked in African-American vernacular we have he'll be done walked and this tense I think is no more common in a than it is in standard English we don't use it all that often in any case the uses and tones here are perfectly consistent they're no less consistent and no less rational than any other verb conjugation system and with the use of be and finna and sometimes do there is a fair bit of overlap as you may recall with both Jamaican and Gula and this is not surprising of course given the common history that these dialects and their speakers share of course any dialect is going to have its own vocabulary and a ve is no exception one thing that is notable though is that the vocabulary in this dialect is very flexible here I think it might have something in common with Cockney rhyming slang not in terms of how the vocabulary is arrived at but in terms of how it functions as a social marker as I mentioned above this this is a community that has had a profound effect on the popular culture of North America what this means is that many words that begin as part of the spoken culture of African-American vernacular tend to become part of the general currency of popular culture well when that happens the words lose some of their initial function of marking the speaker as belonging to that particular community so as words migrate out from the communities in which they originate to the North American pop culture Community they tend to be dropped by their original speakers and new words to pop up that is to say any vocabulary that I can give you is probably going to be outdated by the time I give it to you I provided here a list of some examples that are pretty well attested and a number of them are already no longer current they do however at least give you a sense or a fairly good sense of the types of word that tend to be in common currency so just to take the same approach here we took with Southern American English let's take a look at a sentence that I came up with all on my very own and transcribe it into the International Phonetic Alphabet so we can get not just an audible but a visual sense of of how this dialect works and again in my pronunciation just be clear it's an approximation at best and it is certainly going to miss some details of both phonetics and intonation but the sentence for this example is I lost my cell phone when I was coming back from my friend's place in Detroit and here we have it in general American transcribed into the international fanatic alphabet I lost my cell phone when I was coming back from my friend's place in Detroit pretty straightforward as I said Canadian English and general American are not that far apart and there's really nothing in this sentence that would be terribly different between the two of them now if we try that in a again using the international fanatic alphabet it goes something like this I lost my S when I've been coming back from my homeboy in Detroit so details you might notice here include of course the vowel change the a for I the reduction of consonant clusters so loss for lost a few changes in vocabulary of course the pin pen merger the use of Bin as a copular verb in the past progressive tense the glottalization of terminal posive consonants and the shift in stress in Detroit for example to Detroit I tried to include as many typical examples as I could as we' and as we've been talking about but again do bear in mind I'm not pretending to be fluent in this dialect at all now before we wrap up I should probably say a little something about politics because there are very few things more political in American society than race especially when face is associated with Blackness and the language spoken by black people is no exception to this as I said along with other versions of English spoken by formerly enslaved peoples African-American vernacular has long been seen by white linguistic authorities and by the white popular press or media as simply an inferior version of English a broken version of English what I hope you've gotten the sense of over this last little talk is that just as Jamaican Creole and Gula it does everything a language needs to do for the speech community that uses it and therefore is deserving of none of the scorn that's often directed toward it there have been however a few specific historic points or incidents rather where the language itself has become embroiled in social conflict some of these is quite widespread in 1979 for example the Board of Education in an Arbor Michigan released a statement to the effect that students should be allowed to learn how to read in their home dialects in whatever version of English they happen to have been raised in and from that position then be taught to read in standard English this makes linguistic sense one of the reasons why people from poor black communities for example have difficulty learning how to read Standard English is that they're actually having to learn to read in a dialect they don't speak or think in whereas white middle class students for example tend to be learning how to read in what is more or less their home dialect the policy of the Ann Arbor Board of Education was directed at correcting that deficiency in the education system and allowing teachers to approach their students on the students own terms and then guide them from there toward the language that they were actually supposed to be teaching them this is sound pedagogy unfortunately it caused quite a Kur fuffle when well how do I put this when Oso sensitive white people got wind of it but I'm going to hold off on those details until I talk talk to you about the Oakland Unified School District decision of 1996 in Oakland in the 1990s it had become apparent to Educators that the system was failing its black students now this is a district in which in many schools the vast majority of students are black and yet they were being taught in something like standard American English and corrected away from the dialects that they used at home that is they were being taught that their own dialect was bad English this has definitely uh demonstrable and negative effect on a child's development and self-image but it's not just about self-image as I said with the an arbor case or the an arbor decision there was a recognition here that children ought to be taught in their home dialect simply so they can learn more effectively and then from there be led to whatever it is that the teacher's job is to teach them which in this case is standard English which will practically serve them better if they or when they want to move up the social ladder as I said Prestige dialects are Prestige dialects for pragmatic reasons and as long as one understands that and doesn't take them too seriously I think it's a good idea to use them to one's Advantage but the Educators in Oakland went one step further they recognized black American English as a language they gave it official recognition so after all of those decades and really centuries of black people being told that they were inferior according to a white standard all of a sudden their language had legal standing and oh my goodness did the latent racism of white American society ever come bubbling to the surface then and honestly I'm old enough to remember this I remember editorials showing up in newspapers and on news programs and various Talking Heads usually but not always white decrying the decline of proper English proper American English in favor of what then was often referred to as ebonics generally by non-linguists just to be clear now it's worth pointing out I think that for most of the time in which children have been going to school for example in the American South they've been instructed in their home dialects which in some cases aren't standard or general American English but all of a sudden when Blackness was thrown into the mix that really did change everything there was of course a misunderstanding of the intent many people either accidentally or deliberately and probably some of both misinterpreted the intent to be that this would be a main streaming of African-American vernacular at the expense of standard American English and while even if that were the case the argument against instructing children in their home dialect is still very weak that was actually not the case as I said the intent was simply for teachers to meet students where they were at that is what good teachers do and then guide them toward whatever the learning objectives happened to be and the learning objectives hadn't changed by the way just the means of getting there and they changed so that more people could get there but when the more people getting there happened to be black all of a sudden this became an issue now that controversy of course is you know 25 years ago it's largely died down and one of the reasons why it's died down is that the folks in Oakland were right there have been a number of studies since then indicating unsurprisingly that students taught in their home dialect learn more effectively and show better academic performance overall across across all subjects not merely in language in any case the reason I bring this up is simply as a reminder that even down to the present day we are still dealing with the legacies of colonialism and the often latent and for a long time invisible assumptions of the superiority of essentially white ways of being as opposed to non-white ways of being and these come up in various and often surprising ways as for example we see with language instruction or rather the language of instruction because of course what adequate instruction does what adequate teaching does is level the playing field education is an equalizer and socioeconomically the American education system is actually set up to keep poor people poor and rich people Rich it's funded by County so the Richer the county the better the schools are going to be so the more advantages those children are going to have that's not how we do things in Canada and well it's one of many things that I think we do better here not everything but many things in any case I think this has been an important chapter in the story of of English Forest to explore even if just for a few minutes and if some of you wanted to tackle this in your final essays I would be very very interested to see what you actually come up with I've got some material I can recommend for you if you like in the meantime it's probably getting on time for me to be signing off so as always thank you very much for listening or perhaps for indulging me as I get the feeling I've rambled on a bit with this one as well please make sure that you listen to the YouTube clips that I posted to the Moodle page these are very useful in giving you a concrete sense of what I've been talking about rather abstractly and for next time we will be looking at Canadian English for the entire next lecture not just Canadian but also for a while at least specifically at Maritime English because it would be wrong to leave that out and also because godamn it it's fun but until then I hope you're all well and I do look forward to talking with you on Friday bye for now