One time in a sociolinguistics class, just to see what would happen, I said a word in a heavy NYC accent and apologized for it (I think ‘caw-fee’ or something). Immediately, as I somewhat suspected, the class unanimously chastised me. “Don’t apologize for how you talk!” “Oh, no!” Etc. It was curious (and utterly prescriptivist) to me that expressions of shame about one’s idiolect should be stigmatized. These are valid feelings, emerging from real conditions: certain dialects coming from certain mouths carry more prestige than others. That’s like, sociolinguistics 101, and this wasn’t a 101 class. Instead of shaming language shame, linguists should see it as an opportunity to investigate hard-hitting questions about the relation between “universal grammar” and specific, context-embodied performance.

The expectation of unilateral linguistic pride is a way of avoiding such questions, since invalidating the performance of language shame centers a model of fluidity that is (to me) at best idealistic. In opposition, I’d actually posit that code-switching— moving between different languages, dialects, or registers of address such as formality/familiarity —more often manifests in shades of failure as opposed to seamlessness or fluidity. I’m not implying that acquisition and proficiency come from errors (though errors have learning value), but that fluidity among different linguistic codes is more aspirational than anything, serving as an aid for people to build the context-determined mental models we need to parse and produce the speech signal.

Further, aligning language shame with failure in the mental models/linguistic processing subtly promotes the lie of the positivity of language success. Using language effectively doesn’t always bring joy, and failing to use language effectively doesn’t always bring shame or pain. So, at least to me, it turns out that the idealistic fluidity model I mentioned before is actually a front for a rigid performative alignment between language shame and language failure, as well as between language pride and language success. And fluidity as linguistic-performative aspiration only strengthens this notion. But is this rigid link necessarily a bad one to argue for?

There’s a kernel of truth in it since at least in some contexts there does exist a rigid link between performing language well and happiness— say, if it will make me happy to get a certain grade on a French test, or whatever. So if one instead locates fluidity in context, the problem of this rigid link overdetermining one’s analysis of performance actually kind of disappears. Sometimes it is the case that performing language well brings joy, and/or that performing it badly brings suffering. Sometimes this is not the case. But since these rigid links are now contingent, and no longer ‘problems,’ I can turn to the question of why they were ever posited as absolute.

I already mentioned the idealistic fluidity model of code-switching. To posit it as absolute burdens the speaker to live up to such expectations (out of this falls out unilateral pride of one’s language), and nullifies the value of failing to be fluid. Hence the class’s dismay at my fake shame. To me this kind of positivity is toxic. Further, it promotes bad scholarly habits, since indexicalization (a linguistic feature’s relation to some aspect of the world, such as my ‘caw-fee’ denoting NYC) is context-determined, and for the class to expect me to be proud of an indexicalized feature implies their expectation that it indexicalizes the same way in every context.

This kind of idealism is vestigial of old Chomsky stuff. He talked about focusing on the internal or “I-language,” the mental mechanism of linguistic production. He wanted to abstract away from performance, errors, affect, etc. But it’s kind of a new age and that gulf isn’t a necessary one to argue for anymore.