I am not a libertarian, but this kind of thing really rankles my inner libertarian:

PHOENIX — When Guadalupe V. Aguayo puts her hand to her heart, faces the American flag in the corner of her classroom and leads her second-graders in the Pledge of Allegiance, she says some of the words — like allegiance, republic and indivisible — with a noticeable accent.

When she tells her mostly Latino students to finish their breakfasts, quiet down, pull out their homework or capitalize the first letter in a sentence, the same accent can be heard.

Ms. Aguayo is a veteran teacher in the Creighton Elementary School District in central Phoenix as well an immigrant from northern Mexico who learned English as an adult and taught it as a second language. Confronted about her accent by her school principal several years ago, Ms. Aguayo took a college acting class, saw a speech pathologist and consulted with an accent reduction specialist, none of which transformed her speech.

As Ms. Aguayo has struggled, though, something else has changed. Arizona, after almost a decade of sending monitors to classrooms across the state to check on teachers’ articulation, recently made a sharp about-face on the issue. A federal investigation of possible civil rights violations prompted the state to call off its accent police.

[snip]

The Justice Department joined the inquiry, but federal investigators closed Mr. Garcia’s complaint in late August after the state agreed to alter its policies.

“This was one culture telling another culture that you’re not speaking correctly,” Mr. Garcia said.

That’s exactly right — and it’s wrong. If a teacher’s grammar is incorrect, that’s a big deal. But if her accent is wrong? Well, who decides whose accent is “wrong,” and whose is “right”? It’s all about cultural power — and in this case, about white folks coming down hard on Hispanic folks for the way they pronounce words. I am open to correction based on more information, but based on what I read in this article, this sounds like a crude attempt to resist the Hispanicization of Arizona. I’m not saying, and I wouldn’t say, that this massive cultural shift is nothing to be concerned about — see Ron Unz from the new TAC on this topic; I’ll have more to say about this in another post — but this particular situation seems like a case of petty harassment of teachers, based on cultural resentment.

Coming from a part of the country where people — white people and black people — pronounce the English language rather unlike the whitebread elocution of the people who come into our homes from TV Land, I feel compelled to stick up for the Latino teachers in Arizona. It’s not as bad today as it was when I was growing up, but it’s still the case that having a pronounced Southern accent gets you branded by many people up North as a hick. It’s unfair and it’s untrue, but this is how it goes. In the UK, of course, class politics having to do with one’s accent are even more pronounced, and vicious. Anyway, I love the accent of the part of the South where I was raised, and would resent the hell out of it if the government took it upon itself to send in agents to punish teachers for not speaking its idea of standard English pronunciation. So what if a teacher says “waw-tah” instead of “wah-terr”? In my town, black folks and white folks pronounce some words differently. For example, black folks say “Bat’n RUDGE” for the capital city, while whites say “Bat’n ROOZH.” Nobody corrected anybody else; everybody knew what was being said by the other. In point of fact, both blacks and whites pronounced “Baton Rouge” incorrectly — the original French is “Ba-tawhn ROOZH” — but so what? French people don’t live there; American people do, and that’s how they say it.

And shall we talk about the differences within Louisiana between those who live in Acadiana, the Cajun heartland, and those who don’t? West Feliciana, where I come from, is English Louisiana. Take the new bridge across the Mississippi, and you enter French Louisiana. In our part of Louisiana, you say the word “time” as “tyme” — sounds like “rhyme,” with the “i” sound stretched out. But in French Louisiana, even if you don’t speak a word of French, you will tend to pronounce the word differently, as … well, it’s really hard to find a way to express in writing, but it’s halfway between “tyme” and “toyme.” If a teacher from Mamou moved to St. Francisville and taught in a Cajun accent, people would notice but wouldn’t care. Why should they care? Listen to the old Cajun man in this news report (he starts 20 seconds in) talk about a crime; you cannot tell me that this accent differs in degree from the Hispanic teachers in Arizona. Within living memory, the Anglo power structure in Louisiana actively suppressed the Cajun French language and other aspects of Cajun culture, trying to stamp out, via stigmatization and worse, a minority culture they considered to be inferior and some sort of threat. Thankfully, in the late 1960s, people began to understand how cruel, needless, and foolish that was. But a lot of damage had been done — damage that CODOFIL is trying to repair.

And don’t even get me started on the New Orleans accent — or rather, accents; there are a number of them, and none sound like a whole lot like people from other parts of the state. If the state of Louisiana sent accent police into the classrooms, where would they even begin?

Sometimes there is a legitimate problem with teacher accents. I took a remedial college math course at LSU — cipherin’ ain’t my strong suit — taught by a Vietnamese immigrant math student. His English accent was so atrocious that few of us could understand a word he was saying. In this case, it was not a matter of being nitpicky about how he said certain words; this was about a teacher whose grip on English pronunciation was so poor that he could not convey basic information to his students. For him, his accent was a crippling disability, and he ought not to have been teaching a class of English speakers. LSU ought to have been on top of that situation, because allowing a teacher that deficient in communication skills to teach a class was inexcusable.

That situation sounds like a world away from what went on until recently in Arizona. From the Times:

“It was a repeated pattern of misuse of the language or mispronunciation of the language that we were looking for,” said Andrew LeFevre, a spokesman for the State Department of Education. “It’s critically important that teachers act as models when it comes to language.”

But the federal review found that the state had written up teachers for pronouncing “the” as “da,” “another” as “anuder” and “lives here” as “leeves here.”

Note this passage from the Times story:

In the Creighton Elementary School District, where about a dozen teachers attracted the attention of the state monitors, an accent reduction specialist, Andy Krieger, was brought in from Canada last year.

Mr. Krieger, who has taught actors, business executives and others from around the world to speak American English, said some of the teachers had what he considered heavy accents.

“I don’t think there was one who didn’t need the help,” he said. “If 10 is really bad, some were 7 or 8, and some were probably 10s.”

I am shocked, shocked, that a government contractor whose livelihood depends on diagnosing people as pronunciation-deficient so he can treat them with his services would have discovered such a critical problem in the Arizona schools.

This much should be said: fair or not, in the real world, you will be judged on your accent.

That’s just the way the world is. We all make those judgments, even if we aren’t conscious of them. My sister used to tease me, and not in a particularly friendly way, for losing a great deal of the accent with which we were raised. At some point after I left home, I began enunciating more clearly, making sure to put the letter “g” at the end of my words, that sort of thing. Most people outside the South could detect some Southern accent there, but to my sister, I talked like a Yankee — and she thought I was a fraud who was ashamed of where he came from. (Class politics around language, even in one’s own family!) But my sister lived all her life in our hometown, except for the four years she spent at LSU, 30 miles south. She had no experience of the need I faced to do what linguists call “code-shifting” — speaking in slightly different ways to different audiences. Slate  once wrote about the way Hillary Clinton does this. Excerpt:

Our accents develop as we acquire language and speech skills in early childhood—before the age of 6, for most people. By the early teen years, our accents are pretty firmly entrenched, matching the cues provided by those around us.* A conscious attempt to change your natural accent can take some time. It depends on how good a mimic you are, whether you want to be able to stay “in accent” all the time or just once in a while, and other factors. Those who succeed won’t have made a permanent shift. A Southerner who moves to New York and wants to drop the twang will often pick it up again when he visits home (or has a few drinks).

As a Southerner who has lived in Yankeeland for a good portion of my adult life, this is absolutely true. But as Slate points out, it’s not evidence of bad character, or of being ashamed of where you come from. It’s necessary to be successful when you live and work among different groups of people. As another Slate article explained, politicians are the most active code-switchers of all — and they have to be. Excerpt:

Code-switching—or code-mixing, or style-shifting—is as universally derided as it is universal. In day-to-day life, it’s seen as somehow deceitful—a betrayal of one’s true self. In politics, it’s considered the worst kind of pandering. Hillary Clinton was mocked when she affected a drawl for black audiences. John Edwards got smacked by William F. Buckley for putting on “a carefully maintained Southern accent.” “Poor-mouthing,” as one Edwards fan put it to me on the campaign trail.

But these kinds of adjustments are as endemic to politics as campaign slogans—and a lot more telling. “The gut reaction is it’s a form of dishonesty, but a lot of people would say it’s being a good politician,” says Carol Swain, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who studies race relations. Code-switching occurs anytime a politician is trying to represent more than one group of people. In other words: pretty much always. As a senator, LBJ brought out the full drawl when he went home to Texas, versus his speeches on the national stage. Huey Long mastered the switch between his Louisiana dialect and a Washington patois.

Anyone who wants to represent a state or a country composed of different ethnic groups needs to find ways to relate to each of them. In New Mexico, that might mean learning some rudimentary Spanish. In South Carolina, it’s droppin’ your G’s. In Wisconsin, it’s knowing your cheddar varietals. Some call it pandering. Others call it campaigning.

Not only is code-switching standard in U.S. politics, it’s necessary. The last president who spoke in a flat, patrician, newscaster style was George H.W. Bush. Every president since then has spoken a mixture. Bill Clinton could turn on the Southern twang. George W. Bush could, too, with an evangelical flavor. Those who can’t, suffer. John McCain, says John McWhorter, a linguist at the Manhattan Institute, lost in part because of the way he talks—stiff, nasal, unfolksy.

Back to the Arizona teachers speaking in a Latino accent. If their students can understand them, and their grammar is correct, I see no reason for the state to harass them. The kids educated in those schools will suffer no penalty for speaking that way if they remain in that community. The kids who leave the community for other opportunities will learn quickly and naturally to code-shift — it’s what we all do. It’s as natural as me saying “Bat-tahwn ROOZH” when I’m speaking French to a French person, and “Bat’n ROODGE” when I’m talking to someone from Louisiana (but I wouldn’t say “Bat’n RUDGE” to a black Louisianian, nor would he say “Bat’n ROODGE” when speaking to me — interesting). Language has rules, yes, but it’s a living thing. It adapts to social realities.

We can’t help being affected by the speech patterns of the people around us. Starting out a summer spent backpacking around Europe when I was in college, I was on a train in England, sitting across from a Canadian college student who had been studying there for a couple of years. Her accent was a mess — a mixture of North American English and English English. I could tell talking to her that she had no idea what a hodge-podge her accent was. She loved living in England (she told me), and it was obvious she had been working hard (if unconsciously) to fit in. I thought she was something of a poseur. Six weeks later,  having traveled through France, Italy, and Germany, I found myself in the Netherlands for a two-week stay with my Dutch pals. We spoke only English, but at one point I heard the word “France” come out of my mouth as “Frawnce” — the way the French pronounce it, but also the way the British and the English-speaking Dutch do. I was mortified — what a poseur I was! But I had unconsciously begun to adapt my spoken English to the patterns of the people I had been living among all summer. I had caught myself code-switching. Far from being inauthentic, to code-switch can be the more authentic response. Our spoken language, like our identities, are far more fluid and socially determined than we may suppose.