Who Carries the Weight

Them first time I understood what I had been doing all those years had a name, I was sitting in class reading a book review. Summarizing Rosina Lippi-Green’s work on language and discrimination in the United States, Elizabeth Laurence quotes a passage about what happens when a person with a foreign accent tries to communicate with someone from the dominant language group. The dominant speaker, Lippi-Green writes, can simply decide not to engage, leaving the accented person to close the gap alone. Members of that dominant group “feel empowered to reject their responsibility, and to demand that a person with an accent carry the majority of the burden in the communicative act” (Laurence 310). I had to put the page down for a second.

I was eight years old the first time I translated for my mother at a parent-teacher conference. My teacher was talking about my reading performance, and I was converting her words into Bengali in real time, trying to find equivalents that made sense, softening the things I thought would worry my mother, probably getting some of it wrong. No one asked if this was an appropriate arrangement, it wasassumed. My mother didn’t speak standard English, so the institution passed the communication burden directly to her child.

That is standard language ideology in practice. It is the belief, rarely stated out loud, almost never examined that one variety of English is the correct one, and that speakers of other varieties, or other languages entirely, are responsible for managing the gap. Lippi-Green’s book, English with an Accent, builds a detailed case that this belief is not neutral. It determines who does the work in any interaction, who gets access to institutions, and who gets dismissed. Laurence’s review frames the argument plainly: the burden of communication gets distributed unfairly, and it lands on the person with the accent (310). Amy Tan writes about a version of this in “Mother Tongue,” an essay that most people read as

a story about a daughter embarrassed by her mother’s English, it is also something else. Tan describes watching her mother get ignored, dismissed, and condescended to in hospitals and banks, treated as less intelligent because of how she spoke. At one point, Tan calls a stockbroker on her mother’s behalf, using her own “perfect English” to get information her mother had been denied (Tan ). The broker who couldn’t Hear Tan’s mother heard Tan immediately. It was the same request but with different English and outcome. Tan doesn’t use Lippi-Green’s vocabulary, but she is describing the same thing: the gap was her mother’s problem, and when her mother couldn’t close it alone, it became her daughter’s problem instead.

This ideology doesn’t stay at the level of individual interactions, it gets built into policy. Heath Rose and Nicola Galloway, writing in the RELC Journal, document Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement, a government campaign pushing Singaporeans to drop Singlish, the local English-based creole, in favor of standard English. The stated reason is economic: standard English is the language of international business. What goes unsaid is what disappears when a government campaigns against the variety its citizens actually grew up speaking, the one that carries their humor and their history. When Rose and Galloway ran a structured debate about the movement at a Japanese university, most students rejected it. They saw Singlish as “a legitimate variety of English with important cultural attributes, which contributed to a national identity” (294). These were students with no personal stake in Singlish. They still saw that the logic was unfair which was that you cannot tell people their language is wrong and call that a neutral position.

Lippi-Green names the problem structurally, where as Tan shows it in a specific, lived moment. Rose and Galloway show it institutionalized at the level of national policy. What connects them is the same pattern: the person speaking non-standard English is expected to manage the gap. The institution; the school, the bank, the hospital, the government office almost never adjusts.

The counterargument deserves a real hearing as well. Standard English, whatever its costs, provides something, a common reference point in a country with hundreds of languages and millions of speakers. Rose and Galloway don’t pretend this is nothing. Singapore’s government isn’t wrong that standard English carries utility in a globalized economy. Tan doesn’t argue her mother should never have learned more English. The real question is not whether standard English has value, it does. The question is who is expected to learn it, at what pace, at what cost, and whether institutions accept any responsibility for the gap in the meantime. The answer to that last part, mostly, is no.

The parent-teacher conference I sat in at eight did not have a translator. The hospital visits did not have a Bengali-speaking staff member. The forms my parents needed help with did not come with multilingual support. Every one of those gaps was closed by me, or by my parents struggling through, or not closed at all. As of 2013, more than 25 million in the United States were classified as having limited English proficiency—an 80 percent increase since 1990, according to Zong and Batalova’s analysis for the Migration Policy Institute. Nearly. 4.7 million of them were born in the United States, most to immigrant parents (Zong and Batalova). That last number is the one that tends to get left out of the conversation about language barriers. The institutional assumption is that English acquisition is the family’s problem to solve. The institution provides the timeline. The family provides the labor.

What bothers me, looking back at it now, is not only the workload. It’s what the arrangement assumed about my family. That my mother’s way of communicating was insufficient. The Bengali she thinks in and the language she prays in was not something the institution needed to accommodate. That accommodation was ours to make. Standard language ideology, as Lippi-Green argues, is not just a preference for a particular accent it is a mechanism of power. It decides, at the level of institutions and daily interactions, whose language counts (Laurence 310). My mother’s did not.

The harder question is what changing this would look like. Rose and Galloway point toward one answer: when people are given space to examine standard language ideology critically, most of them reject it (294) but that examination happened in a university classroom. My mother was never in that room. What would it mean for the institutions she depended on to examine their own assumptions? To take on some of the communicative burden rather than pass it entirely to the family? At minimum: translators or forms in multiple languages. Staff trained to slow down and find another way in. None of that is logistically impossible it is a choice about who the institution is actually for.

Standard language ideology keeps that choice invisible by making it look like nature. Of course the hospital uses English and of course the parent-teacher conference is in English. These are not presented as decisions. They are presented as how things work. What Lippi-Green’s argument, and Tan’sessay, and Rose and Galloway’s research all insist on is that naming the ideology is the first step to questioning it. Once you see it as a choice, you can ask who benefits and who pays. My mother and I paid the price. Most immigrant families I know paid something similar, not because they refused to learn English, but because the gap between where their English was and wherethe institution expected it to be was their problem to close alone, on the institution’s schedule, with whatever resources they could find. That is the burden Lippi-Green names. That is what I was carrying at eight years old in a conference room, translating in real time, not knowing yet what it was called.

Works Cited

Laurence, Elizabeth. “English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and

Discrimination in the Unitevd States.” Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, vol.

15, no. 2, 21 Jan. 2014, p. 310,

https://doi.org/10.14483/udistrital.jour.calj.2013.2.a012.

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Zong, Jie, and Jeanne Batalova. “The Limited English Proficient Population in the

United States in 2013.” Migrationpolicy.org, 7 July 2015,

www.migrationpolicy.org/article/limited-english-proficient-population-united-states-

2013.

Rose, Heath, and Nicola Galloway. “Debating Standard Language Ideology in the

Classroom: Using the “Speak Good English Movement” to Raise Awareness of

Global Englishes.” RELC Journal, vol. 48, no. 3, 6 Jan. 2017, pp. 294–301,

https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688216684281.

Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” The Threepenny Review, 1990. Course text.