Sounding Right: Dialect, Rhetoric, and the Language Society Rewards
This week's Literacy Guide term is dialect and dialect differences, and the more I sat with it, the more it turned out to be less a language question than a power question. Every English speaker uses a dialect, including anyone who thinks they don't. What gets called "proper" English is just the dialect that happened to end up standing behind a podium, reading the evening news, or teaching at the front of a classroom.
Before getting to rhetoric, it helps to back up to a more basic question: what is language, actually? Cowley (2019) argues against picturing language as a fixed internal system waiting to be used correctly or incorrectly. He frames it instead as languaging, an ongoing, distributed activity that arises out of people coordinating with each other and their surroundings, not something anyone simply "has." Under that view, dialect variation isn't noise around some pure, correct signal. It's what languaging looks like when it happens inside different communities, histories, and circumstances. That reframing matters for a classroom, because it means a dialect difference is evidence a student's language is working exactly as expected, shaped by wherever they picked it up.
Where things get political is in what counts as appropriate for a given rhetorical situation, and that's where dialect stops being a neutral fact and starts being a lever.
Politics. Rozina and Karapetjana (2009) look at how political speech leans on allusion, metonymy, and metaphor, borrowed from domains like war, sport, and medicine, to move an audience while sounding like it isn't trying to move anyone. Politicians don't just choose words; they choose a register, a way of sounding trustworthy and authoritative to whichever audience they're addressing. Van Dijk (2009) supplies the theory behind why that register shifts from speech to speech: his context models describe how speakers constantly, and often unconsciously, build a mental model of who they're talking to and what's relevant right now, and it's that model, not some fixed rulebook, that actually shapes the language. His extended case study of Tony Blair's Iraq speech shows how even a single interruption in Parliament gets read through layers of shared political knowledge that have nothing to do with grammar and everything to do with who's allowed to sound authoritative in that room. A regional or working-class dialect in that same room would carry different, usually lower, social weight, not because it communicates any less clearly, but because of what listeners have been trained to associate it with.
Journalism, pop culture, and mass media. The same dynamic shows up well outside of parliament. Rozina and Karapetjana (2009) note that in today's media-saturated societies, persuasion travels overwhelmingly through mass channels, which is a large part of why broadcast news, in most countries, is delivered in a narrow, standardized dialect. Regional accents and dialects show up in media constantly, but usually to signal something, comic relief, "authenticity," working-class grit, rather than to deliver hard news. Van Dijk's (2009) theory of context applies here too: a newsroom has its own context model of what sounds credible to a mass audience, and that model quietly filters out dialect variation long before a single word reaches a viewer. Pop culture pushes back against that filtering more than news does (music and film are full of dialect worn with pride), but journalism as a genre still mostly rewards the same "neutral" dialect that political speech does.
None of this is really about correctness. It's about which dialect a given rhetorical situation has decided to reward, and that's exactly the distinction I want my future secondary ELA students to be able to name. NCTE's 1974 resolution affirms students' right to "the dialect that expresses their family and community identity" (National Council of Teachers of English, 1974), while still holding teachers responsible for helping students write and speak effectively in edited written English. My job isn't to tell a student their home dialect is wrong. It's to help them recognize which rhetorical situation they're in and what that situation currently rewards, whether that's a job interview, a political debate, or a text to a friend, so shifting registers is a choice they're making, not something being done to them.
I grew up watching this play out across eleven languages long before I had any of this vocabulary for it. Teaching it explicitly now feels like handing students the map I had to piece together on my own.
References
Cowley, S. J. (2019). Languaging evolved: A distributed perspective. Chinese Semiotic Studies, 15(4), 461–482. https://doi.org/10.1515/css-2019-0026
National Council of Teachers of English. (1974, November 30). Resolution on the students' right to their own language. https://ncte.org/statement/righttoownlanguage/
Rozina, G., & Karapetjana, I. (2009). The use of language in political rhetoric: Linguistic manipulation. Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, (19), 111–122.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2009). Society and discourse: How social contexts influence text and talk. Cambridge University Press.