Sub-Language as Social Badge
Goodman, Paul
INNUMERABLE SENTENCES that are said are mainly social cement, keeping people together by engaging in the sociable action of speaking and listening, playing with the common code like any...
...The same can be seen with adults who are sexually infatuated or infatuated with a political cause, and unconsciously mimic a new accent and speech rhythm...
...It is radical, puts off restraint, but stays close to the objective common-sense world of things...
...Why...
...Twice it was touch and go, during the Danish conquest and especially the Norman conquest...
...they think that because the language is childish, the reasoning is, but it's not...
...Sechrist: "Slang pays no mind to the routine activities of life...
...So Partridge says, "Slang is the only speech in which linguistic process can be observed in unrestrained activity...
...and although he says "It John book," he can say, when necessary, "It is John's...
...I have not heard of anything comparable to liberate the speech of middle-class children, and if the attempt were made it would be strongly resisted by middle-class parents and school authorities...
...In these descriptions we are hovering around age two...
...Intimate language is superior language...
...The teacher can go along with the child's sub-language as he has it and help him to say and do more with it...
...They are not allowed to use their own dialect, and certainly they are not encouraged to improve it...
...Do you mean all old movies, or some of them, or just the ones you have seen...
...The case is very different in depressed rural areas or big city slums when the poor are powerless, segregated, unable to get into the inflationary general economy, unskilled to cope with a centralized high technology, and many of the city youth are the children of uprooted rural migrants...
...They interrupt you in the middle of the sentence because they know all about it beforehand, and often they do...
...It appears here with the kind permission of the publisher...
...So long as decent poverty is possible, poor people may have an exceptionally good, intimate language selected from the common code, concrete, realistic, and feelingful, at least as good as any other speech in the society...
...You know what I mean...
...What do you mean...
...he tries to make it do more than it can or should, and so he immobilizes himself and loses vitality...
...V T T HE MIGHTY DEVELOPMENT of our language from Old English may be instructively regarded as winning its way from being colonized as a sub-language...
...Black argot began to become slang through the jazz musicians, but now it has come in strongly through the civil rights and black liberation movements, and the association with blacks by the youth of the white majority...
...And the upper speakers are fatally put off by the bluntness and violence, much of which is ritual insult precisely to calm things down...
...dren to regain their free speech without class limitations...
...Various students of slang all bring out the lawlessness and the language-creating...
...It is plausible that the upper group would find the lower speech simpler and something like their own careless speech.' But though the lower speakers hear the others' words, they do not really hear the distinctions, the concessions, the subordinations, and the abstractions...
...Nothing...
...During the same era Jefferson wanted to rely politically on freeholding SUB-LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL BADGE yeomen for their independence, morality, and democracy...
...he is correct to control his spontaneity...
...Bernstein says, "Middle-class children will have access to both forms of speech, which will be used according to the social context...
...But then they have still less access to the common goods...
...Skip it...
...Inherent in the middle-class linguistic relationship is a pressure to verbalize feeling in an individual manner...
...In effect, it happened a third time, with the influx of academic Latin during the Renaissance...
...the middle-class child's speech has the human virtues of prudence, selfreliance, subtile distinction, the ability to move abroad, and responsibility to the verbal truth (but they are already terrible little hypocrites...
...he rationalizes and deceives himself...
...But the other lives too much by language...
...But class sub-languages thin out the class's experience and language and depoverish the common code...
...Jespersen made the remarkable empirical observation that a child of immigrant parents may learn the new language at home but he takes on the accent of his (slightly older) peer group on the street...
...To make explicit subjective intent...
...I11 W W HEN THE RICH become squeamish and the poor become a caste, social classes develop sub-languages...
...p. 83...
...Middle-class children use "accurate order and syntax, complex construction, frequent use of prepositions for logical, temporal, and spatial relation, frequent use of `I,' discriminating use of adjectives and adverbs...
...Contrariwise, the children of immigrants may, as they grow older, retain or revert to some of the old language—perhaps their parents' foreign accent—as a self-naming defensive maneuver against assimilation...
...he has plenty of Chomsky's innate algebra...
...yet I think there is truth in them: what they imply is that speech is not so big a deal for the communication of London poor children as for London middle-class children...
...the English, who did the farm work, said "ox" "calf" "swine" "sheep" and "flesh," and these might have become debased words...
...Then they are made to feel stupid, as if they did not have intellectual powers.' Humanly, they have no alternative but to affirm their language all the more tenaciously...
...Speaking is here again a direct act, naming, self-naming, selfappointing...
...and they may prove to be colorful, exciting, or to have a valuable new nuance of meaning...
...Slang creates new language just like poetry, and it can be regarded as a kind of folk poetry...
...When the boundary is broken, there is a different kind of language, not self-naming and defensive but common and wild...
...There are two possible strategies...
...Jews have done a lot of this...
...What do you mean how is she feeling, do you mean physical or mental...
...It is a return of the repressed...
...Sometimes, for purposes of self-defense, it tries to be commonly incomprehensible, like thieves' language or jive...
...One may meditate also on the absence of mixing where it might have been expected, the paucity of Celtic in Old English or of red Indian words in American English —but they are not so rare as references to red Indian people in Classical American Literature...
...The situation is explosive...
...We at once come to a different kind of language that defines and affirms the group's identity and commits the members to it...
...If black children do not have the patterns to succeed in school, the plausible move is to change the school rather than to badger the children...
...Consider a pep talk before a ball game or a political rally during a campaign: the purpose is solidarity for action, to win, to get out the vote...
...To avoid blankness of mind is the reason for most reading of newspapers, which must be the largest proportion of all reading...
...IV D D IALECTS AND CREOLES are simply languages...
...A Yiddish or Black English spoken spontaneously, as by a child, is a creole or mixture, but it is a native tongue like any other...
...In the history of English, indeed, there has been a secular tendency to drop the case endings and softpedal the copula, so that this dialect is not even out of the mainstream...
...VI M M UCH OF SLANG IS FIRST INVENTED as a neologism of a gang or special group, e.g., "take the rap" or "kibitzer," yet it comes into circulation as slang precisely by breaking out of its sub-culture...
...Like dada in art, they mean to destroy the convention, either for spite or as an act of liberation...
...There is a willful withdrawal from the common code, creating what amounts to a proper sub-language as PAUL GOODMAN a badge...
...I mean how is she feeling...
...But whereas the sub-language is purposeful, to affirm and defend and be a new code, slang tends to be wildly gratuitous and it sometimes enriches the common code...
...The goal of education must be for chil a In this particular comparison, also, Cockney is possibly unusually more inarticulate, compared to Bailey's American "lower-class speech...
...And the lower-class child will use many more phrases to ask for his speech to be validated, like "you see...
...but these adult cases are more pathetic, for such a commitment is not likely to last long—if speech is labile, so is character...
...Spite is the vitality of the powerless...
...Why...
...the child has a world, but he is not sure that speaking is the way of asserting it...
...Class boundaries were broken and the language was enriched...
...The lower-class child learns a form of language which symbolizes the norms of a local group, rather than the individuated experience of its members...
...But then, unfortunately, Bernstein concludes that the middle-class speech is far superior...
...In Walter Scott's classical illustration, the French conqueror said "beef" "veal" "pork" "mutton" "meat" for the food on the table...
...Drop dead...
...As a native speaker of his own dialect, a poor black child has, of course, as much linguistic power as any other child...
...Weekley says, "Phonetic laws have no control over argotic formulations...
...but off-campus they will talk only pidgin and they have scorn for anybody who treasonably speaks English...
...Consider when the children go to an official school...
...What's the matter with you...
...To borrow examples from Labov, if he says "He a'way' look' fo' trouble when he red [past tense of "read"] de news," he obviously uses "look'" as past...
...But in one important respect it is not poetry at all, and this tells us something important about poetry...
...But there is nothing wrong with their intellectual faculties...
...It is possible that both authors may be superficially correct, but from my limited experience, in street and campus troubles, I think they are both profoundly wrong...
...The lower-class mother says, "Sit down...
...Both are defensive languages...
...Wordsworth famously singled out the language of "humble and rustic life" as the source for his poetic diction, because it came from a beautiful scene and natural affections, it was under less restraint and was plainer, it was "far more philosophical . . . because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived...
...Basil Bernstein has a profound but confused study of the differences of syntax be "Correcting" a child's Ianguage, as if he did not have a proper language, is identical with the theory of Read Start that disadvantaged children need special training for their intellectual faculties to prepare them for learning...
...It has more standard subject-predicate sentences and probably better pronunciation, if only because to deviate far from the expected would jeopardize harmony and be bad manners...
...whereas the middle-class child takes speech more for granted as asserting what it says...
...Usually they are transient...
...And a little later, Marx singled out the Elizabethan yeomanry as the best condition so far achieved by humanity...
...2 Bernstein gives a typical comparative sequence of sentences...
...in effect to live through the old traumas in the more favorable circumstances of her school...
...The Jews are a striking case in that, as a people in exile, their own common code was already a self-naming amalgam, Yiddish or Ladino, and the revived Israeli Hebrew must itself for a time be a self-conscious language, though no longer a sub-language...
...In both types, however, we can see developing the outlines of pathological speech...
...This has been the line of a number of teachers in American ghetto schools and of Paolo Freire in Brazil, whether to help poor kids write poetry or to formulate political demands...
...When the atmosphere heats up, communication breaks down badly...
...It is plausible that the lower speakers may hear the upper speakers better because the speech of the latter is more articulate and more like the standard speech of, for instance, the mass media...
...Let me quote some of his comparisons: Poor children use "short sentences, poor syntax, active voice, repetitive use of conjunctions, no subordination, limited use of adjectives and adverbs, infrequent use of `one' or 'it' as subjects, stereotyped idioms...
...They do not really use the dominant code...
...In fact, poor children—not only in London—do an enormous amount of punching, nudging, hand-stroking in lieu of speaking, whereas this almost never occurs in the middle class...
...A clique attitude depoverishes experience rather than enriching it by making it deep and intimate...
...He had his students go home and insist on the literal meaning, and truth or falsity, of the chatter...
...Carnoy: "Slang is a particular vocabulary in which purposeful fantasy plays a predominant role...
...they take the stereotypes too literally...
...Usually such willed languages are pretty weak...
...City poverty too has had good language, slangy, polyglot, rapid, and argumentative...
...Let me give an extreme example...
...And Partridge mentions acutely, "The instinctive desire to speak bad English...
...The adolescents are doubtful that they have a world to assert...
...The middle-class mother says, "Sit down...
...he has to diminish anxiety by impulsive reactions and can become totally confused and lose all prudence...
...A child is learning to speak...
...Intimate language develops naturally, to be able to convey people's real interests better than the common code can...
...to connection and sequence, and if one set of reasons is challenged, another set of reasons is elicited...
...But by the same token, it is necessary This essay will be part of Speaking and Language: A Defense of Poetry, copyright © 1972, by Paul Goodman, and to be published next spring byRandom House...
...In the recent trial of Black Panthers in New Haven, the defense attacked the disproportion of whites on the jury rolls because, as their linguistic experts put it, "blacks had developed a significant and unique nonverbal form of communication" and "whites were apt to miss or misunderstand meanings of the Black English dialect and the voice inflections unique to black communication...
...II T IS DIFFERENT, however, when this kind ' of talk is used to glue together not people in general but a specific group, clique, adolescent gang, or thieves' gang...
...I have no statistics but my impression is that, on the whole, small talk sticks closer to the constant and supra-individual code than more concerned or intimate talk...
...It is not hard to fill in the economic background of both groups, and he tells us something very important about the psychology of verbalizing...
...Yet C. J. Bailey categorically says just the opposite, "It is known that speakers of a prestige idiom have genuine problems in understanding a fairly similar idiom of low prestige, that do not exist on the other side...
...He tries out his own expressions till he finds the ones that work...
...I wish you would be more specific...
...Harold Garfinkel ran a poignant experiment to show the need actively to prevent communication in small talk...
...he becomes stupid out of spite...
...He gets the corresponding satisfaction of defying the corrector...
...All these old movies have the same kind of old iron bedstead in them...
...But note that such efforts are made with lower-class children...
...but the poet, like every fine artist, is himself the law-giver, he speaks universally, though he has no warrant whatever.— In Rorschach tests it is hard to distinguish artists from psychopathic personalities...
...That is, as he psychologically draws away from his parents at age five and six, he models himself on his ideal gang, like putting on a hockey shirt, and speech is the badge...
...All this is beautifully analyzed...
...For instance, if a group becomes generally interesting or newsworthy, some terms of its language may become widespread because they are topical...
...he is guiltridden...
...It would be disastrous if anybody made sense...
...Let me give two excerpts: "Hi, Ray, how is your girl friend feeling...
...I don't know whether class conflict should be moderated or not, but it should make sense...
...it gives everybody more articulate experience and so enriches the common code too...
...it does not aim to modify the common code, it just does it...
...Both sublanguage and slang are a violation of the common code...
...New Reformation...
...Thus, there is an essential difference between such an argot and the selective and intimate use of the common code by family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers...
...PAUL GOODMAN tween lower-class and middle-class children in London...
...Consider a sad example: large numbers of Spanish-speaking kids in the New York public schools apparently speak English quite fluently to talk about public nonsense, but they cannot say "I am hungry," "I have a toothache," "My pal is dying in the basement...
...It results," says A. C. Baugh, "from an instinctive desire for freshness and novelty of expression...
...Adolescents at the University of Hawaii, which is an uneasy place for many of them, speak perfectly good English while they are on campus, even when they are at the same table in the cafeteria...
...An argot affirms itself, consciously or unconsciously, against the common code...
...INNUMERABLE SENTENCES that are said are mainly social cement, keeping people together by engaging in the sociable action of speaking and listening, playing with the common code like any other game, and telling enough information to avoid the pain of a blank mind...
...He is resentful when he is corrected...
...These terms, so far, are rather valueladen...
...they have learned to speak and can make practical syllogisms very nicely if they need to and are not thwarted...
...his consciousness of "I" isolates him and makes SUB-LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL BADGE him needlessly competitive...
...For a moment, when slang is introduced, it obliterates altogether the distinction between langue and parole, given code and spontaneous speaking...
...Also, "the lower-class child is not given much instrumental teaching"— at least in words, although he may be shown as much—"whereas the middleclass child is continually verbally exposed 2I do not think that the child's "you know" is the same as the "you know" of embarrassed adolescents...
...But will, pride, suspicion, and fear are a bad way to be in the world, linguistically as otherwise...
...Hey, are you sick...
...They have to say these in Spanish, but then the teacher or cop does not know what they are talking about...
...A badge language may or may not communicate more accurately or relevantly...
...What's the matter with you...
...if his stereotyped sentence is not accepted at face value, he has no back-up, is acutely embarrassed and bursts into tears...
...The poor kid's use of language does not get him enough of the cushioning protection that symbolic action can give...
...The introduction of French words into English," A. C. Baugh points out, "followed the adoption of English by the upper classes"—when the elite gives up its PAUL GOODMAN squeamishness, it can do some good as well as harm...
...they quickly dismiss it all as bullshit...
...Whitman says, "Slang is the lawless germinal element below all words and sentences and behind all poetry...
...In a circle of junkies the sub-language seems (to me at least) to be as appallingly limited as their purposes...
...Urban blacks claim that their southern language and country food have soul...
...Just explain a little clearer what you want to know...
...Neither group has much access...
...whereas the upper and middle classes and the new industrial proletariat were bitched up in various ways...
...Because I say so...
...Each has its virtues, which are not class virtues but human virtues: the poor child's speech has the human virtues of animality, plainness, community, emotional vulnerability, and semantic bluntness (though not frankness—they are frightful little liars...
...Because you're a big boy, you see how all the other people are doing...
...to avoid saying much, whether giving information, explaining, debating, or having any instrumental purpose...
...The common code may then be pretty useless to them as a basis for practical communication...
...The other kid escapes from physical and emotional contact by verbalizing...
...But here too, in order to choose what suits them out of the common code, people have to be free in their own homes and neighborhoods and have access to the rest of society...
...But luckily the language was creolized instead...
...But under conditions of alienation, there develops a self-defensive and self-affirming sub-language against the common code, a language to fit the sub- "culture of poverty," as Oscar Lewis used to call it, which is not an independent culture...
...you know what I mean...
...in middle-class language the child's intent becomes important...
...The speaker of slang still retains the feeling of being "wrong," of breaking the law, of being an individual...
...A Jewish second generation kept many Yiddish words as part of its identity, but since these Jews have been important in entertainment and business, the words have become common slang...
...The poor kid has to prove his potency...
...To call it cement describes better the talk in a bar, where people might otherwise be lonely...
...But to call it the chatter of a communal species better describes the small talk of chance meetings on the street or across the back fence, drop-in visits, talk around card tables, ordinary (pleasant) family life, ceremonial dinners...
...It is the factor of artificial boundary, whether willed or resignedly recognized, that makes a sub-language...
...as Kurt Goldstein puts it, he is liable to catastrophic reactions...
...Slang is not a sub-language...
...The common people of Rome, Paris, and New York have all been written up as vivid talkers...
...I don't think so...
...They may rationalize that the old language has phrases that say what the common language can't say, and which, of course, affirm their feeling of having a special cast of mind...
...In general, Lower-working-class children have a society limited to a form of spoken language in which complex verbal procedures are made irrelevant by the system of non-verbal closely shared identifications—plus more naked, less internalized authority...
...Or the teacher can try, like Sylvia Ashton-Warner teaching reading to little Maoris, to evoke from the children their own primary words, rising from their fear, hunger, loneliness, and sexuality...
...Or we can put this in a way that is not quite the same: we are communal animals, an important part of our communal nature is speaking, so when we can we speak...
...And he explains, "By expressing direct authority, the lower-class language tends to discourage the experience of guilt...
...sometimes they become a permanent part of the common code...
Vol. 18 • December 1971 • No. 6
