Students and teachers alike can use sociolinguistics to think about the words they and those around them use. 

The expression “Watch your language!” usually implies something along the lines of “Don’t say what you just said!” But watching your language doesn’t have to have such a negative connotation. It can also mean simply choosing your words based on where you are and whom you’re with. This type of contextual awareness is crucial for young people coming of age in today’s hashtag culture, where a single offhand comment, thoughtless tweet, or poorly worded Facebook post can have lasting consequences. Paying attention to language is just as important for educators, as they grapple with bullying in schools, strive to create inclusive classrooms, and seek ways to communicate openly and honestly with students and parents alike. 

So how can we develop heightened forms of language awareness in ourselves and in our students?  

One way forward is with inquiry: When befuddled by someone’s language use, talk to the person who just used the word or phrase in question. What does it mean to them? Why did they use it? Then ask a few more people. Look around, listen, and observe how people talk about language. Google it. Check out YouTube. And then share and compare the answers you get — inevitably, they will range widely.  

These simple steps can take teachers and students on an important journey, one that they can start today. I call this practice of paying attention to how people talk about language citizen sociolinguistics (Rymes, 2014; Rymes & Leone, 2014). 

Why talk about language? 

It may sound like a waste of classroom time to talk about the words we use, when we could be teaching academic content or tackling more pressing problems. But in fact, some of the most important challenges students face in schools — for example, figuring out how to deal with bullying and social stigma, defining one’s identity in a diverse society, or managing one’s digital life — make themselves known through language. We come to understand these challenges by labeling them and discussing them.  

Powerful learning often results from conversation about words.  

Language is much more than just a means of sending messages back and forth. For instance, the expressions, slang, and references we use in conversation often serve to shield us from others, drawing together the members of our in-group and creating boundaries between all our tiny social comfort zones. But talking about language can enable us to engage meaningfully with other viewpoints and, in the process, develop shared understandings across those social boundaries. Powerful learning often results from conversation about words.  

A good time to start talking about language is when you notice something distinctive about your own or someone else’s speech. Two very different entry points into these conversations are what I call wonderment and arrest. The spark of wonderment or the sting of arrest can bring on conversations about language that take down barriers between speakers by raising their awareness of how language has different meanings in different contexts. Let’s take a look at each. 

Language wonderment  

If you want to start a lively discussion in even the sleepiest classroom or among the most disaffected youth, ask about the language they use with each other, outside school, at sports practice, or in other extracurricular activities (Spill the tea! That’s gas!). Then talk about some language you used when you were their age (Grody! Rad!). Or ask about and share knowledge of language quirks in your local community.  

In Philadelphia, where I live and teach, you might talk about the common use of hon’ — as in, “Can I get you anything else, hon’?” Or see if students can define the word jawn. The ensuing conversations about language will likely be a blend of admiration and awe, sometimes touched with silliness, fear, or skepticism. I call this type of conversation sociolinguistic wonderment. 

Sociolinguistic wonderment was on display in a conversation I had about language use with four high school boys during their English class in January 2015. I had been doing some language activities with the class throughout the semester. One day, Ben, one of the students who had taken part in these activities, had just returned to suburban Philadelphia after a weekend in New York. He noticed that New Yorkers call a sandwich made on a long roll a hero instead of using the Philadelphian word hoagie. He speculated that maybe nobody outside of Philadelphia says hoagie. This led to some reflection from three other boys:   

TOM: I mean, he is right that there’s more people saying hero than hoagie, prob — I mean, where else do they say hoagie, dude? 

BILL: Nowhere else. 

MARC: Nowhere else. 

DEAN: Nowhere else. 

TOM: Nowhere else, really? That’s sad. HOW? 

BILL: I don’t know, it’s weird to think about. 

TOM: Say down the shore [the New Jersey Oceanside] they say hoagie. 

BILL: Also they say like, they say shaved ice instead of water ice. Like — 

TOM: Where? Everywhere else? 

DEAN: Everywhere else. 

MARC: Wow, that’s — 

DEAN: Wait, really? I feel so like, closed. 

TOM: WHY? It feels really — it’s unsettling. 

BILL: I like it. 

BETSY: The shaved ice? 

MARC: Shaved ice. 

BILL: Well, no, not the shav— Heh heh — that even in like the few places that are close to us, like Pittsburgh, in the same state. That they have many different words for the things, it’s like — 

DEAN: It’s like a completely different planet. 

This discussion was provoked by wonderment about New Yorkers’ language — specifically their use of the word hero to describe a sandwich that most Philadelphians would call a hoagie. The other three boys seemed to savor Bill’s suggestion that the word hoagie exists nowhere else, with each of them echoing his words, “nowhere else . . . nowhere else . . . nowhere else.” Notice that they didn’t judge New Yorkers for saying hero instead of hoagie or insist that New Yorkers change their ways. Instead, this difference sparked the boys’ curiosity about other differences and distinctions, as more examples continued to enter the discussion: water ice versus shaved ice and, later in the conversation, sprinkles versus jimmies. The boys were having a citizen sociolinguistic discussion. Their state of wonderment propelled them along an inquiry-laden conversation about language and its many peculiarities.  

Once language becomes an object of discussion, students start experiencing language wonderment more often and recognizing it as an opening for conversation and learning:  

• Why do you say lightning bug instead of firefly? What does your grandmother say? Where did you grow up?  
• Do you use the phrase the itis to talk about that full and sleepy feeling we get after a large and satisfying meal? Where does it come from? Is it offensive to some people? 
• Would British people really use the word fag for a cigarette? Is it offensive in that context?  

These conversations start in the realm of the trivial and nonthreatening. As such, they can be pathways into discussions about difference and distinction in our classrooms and society. Through discussions about language, students gain the awareness needed to watch their language and the language of others in a respectful and curious way.  

Citizen sociolinguist’s arrest 

Just like the spark of wonderment, the sting of a citizen’s arrest can lead to important conversations about language. A citizen sociolinguist’s arrest entails calling someone out or explicitly drawing attention to them for their use of language, maybe with a hint of moral censure. The “arresting” citizen might say something like, “We call ‘freshmen’ ‘first years’ now.” Or more indirectly, “Hey! Ladies are present.” Or simply, “Watch your language!”  

Ideally, this type of incident will lead to productive conversation, as it did in January 2019 at Duke University, when the director of the biostatistics master’s program in the Duke School of Medicine sent an e-mail version of a citizen sociolinguist’s arrest to Chinese graduate students, advising them not to speak Chinese in the building — even in the break room during lunch. The e-mail mentioned that their use of Chinese could jeopardize their chances for internships at Duke. After one student took a screenshot of the e-mail and circulated it widely on Twitter and Weibo, some important deliberation about language ensued. Thousands of comments accumulated, fomenting what I call “counter-arrests” about the professor’s advice and subsequent dialogue about its appropriateness. In the Twitter exchange below, for example, DM took issue with the assumption behind MS’s comment that Chinese-speaking graduate students are not good speakers of English (shenbot, 2019): 

 MS: Speaking from personal experience, a lot of Chinese students backed [sic] in my high school didn’t speak English unless they had to, and their English skills remained about the same four years later…” (133 likes) 

DM: I scored top 1% on the GRE, 119 on TOEFL, and hold a B.S. in philosophy with distinction from @UBC. Do I get to speak Chinese with my friends on my own time when I’m on a university campus w/o my professional dev opportunities getting stripped away? (2.3K likes) 

MS: That is super impressive! You’re right. I need to think more about this situation. (381 likes) 

As this exchange (one of thousands) illustrates, the original citizen sociolinguist’s arrest led to deliberation, prompting MS to rethink his assumptions. Eventually, Duke University also had to rethink the assumptions behind the original “don’t speak Chinese” e-mail. Within days of the e-mail’s public circulation, the professor who sent it stepped down from her role as director. At the same time, the dean of the medical school issued a memo about language on campus, telling students that “your career opportunities . . . will not be influenced by the language you use outside the classroom” (Wang, 2019).  

In this case, the director’s original citizen’s arrest and the vociferous response to it built a cycle of language awareness that brought attention to the campus climate around multilingualism, which, in turn, led to changes in how people thought about language at Duke. This is the ideal cycle of language awareness (see Figure 1). Because that e-mail entered into the cycle of citizen sociolinguistic deliberation, points of view that might have stayed in the shadows were openly expressed and challenged. 

That cycle of deliberation continues indefinitely. No doubt, some readers might agree with the point MS makes above, when he states that English learners need as many opportunities as possible to hone their English skills at school. In addition to DM’s retort about her own multilingualism, other counterarguments might surface if there are open discussions about this issue, and airing and deliberating over these different perspectives can beneficial. Considering alternative perspectives may be difficult, but as we continue to have discussions like this, everyone can improve their abilities to talk about language.  

On being tone-deaf 

When we don’t watch our language or when we speak without regard for the perspectives of others in a community, we are likely to come across as tone-deaf. Tone-deaf use of language can involve ordering people to not speak their own language, as in the Duke case. Children and adults alike tend to be tone-deaf when they say things like fag or mental or use the N word in ways that are out of tune with the people around them or when they use any turn of phrase in a way that’s inattentive to the effects those words might have on others.  

A tone-deaf use of language, if unchecked, can have the opposite effect of either wonderment or arrest. Instead of sparking conversations about language, it can silence less powerful voices. Using derogatory language to describe members of a particular group, for instance, can alienate members of that group from the larger community. Even well-meaning responses to those uses of language can lead to discord or silence: When someone shames another speaker, rather than opening up a conversation, they shut it down, and nobody learns or changes. Unless someone speaks back in a way that promotes and extends the discussion, including by drawing in new voices, that tone-deaf perspective and the polarizing reaction to it become the only voices people hear. People can take sides, but nobody learns about different perspectives.  

Being tone-deaf can be the result of a privileged and overly standardized language education that positions teachers or grammar books as the only experts. While a tone-deaf individual may have excellent language skills according to one context and set of criteria, they have never learned to carefully consider the context in which they and others are speaking and how their words come across in those contexts. They might be highly educated in the traditional sense, but they are undereducated in the sense that they never developed a dynamic language awareness.  

How do we remediate this undereducation? Not simply with new vocabulary or abstract concepts from linguistics, but with ongoing conversations about language in our lives. The boys talking about hoagies, for example, were honors students — yet the idea that they spoke a variety of English that wasn’t universally recognizable was new to them. Talking about abstract linguistic concepts like language variation, translanguaging, or code-switching will probably have little impact (Rymes & Smail, in press), but engaging in more conversations about language can illuminate those concepts through everyday examples related to students’ relationships with people in and out of school. Starting with easygoing conversations of wonderment, teachers and students, together, can develop that habit of talking about language—discussing hoagies versus heroes, film versus movie, or water ice versus shaved ice. With the growing understanding that we learn habits of language from the communities in which we participate, teachers and students can then move on to talk together about language we hear in our environment that may be more controversial — including phrases like fake news, OK Boomer! or the use of gender-neutral pronouns like singular they.  

Building the cycle of dynamic language awareness  

When we have conversations about language in which we explore the language of others and compare different perspectives, we develop awareness of other ways people around us use language. The more we talk about language, the more deeply we understand how language may be hurtful or powerful, how words like hoagie or hero and firefly or lightning bug come from different walks of life, how THOT may be an offensive expression (I leave it to readers to Google that one), or how an individual speaking Chinese may also be highly accomplished as an English speaker. We can all benefit from this form of expertise because it fosters the ability to listen to others and to engage with different perspectives. 

We can begin building this expertise in classrooms by giving students the tools to engage in inquiry as citizen sociolinguists, to follow the spark of wonderment or the sting of arrest, to learn more about how language affects people in different ways and in different contexts, and to understand how language is always changing. Precisely because language is always changing, we need to stay attuned to how language is being used around us. There are no fixed rules that tell us what is right and wrong, who can and can’t say this or that, and where and when they can say it. This does not mean there are not better and worse ways to use language. (There are terrible ways to use language!) But we can only know how language works if we are aware of how a variety of people use it and understand it. We can’t rely only on our own language use or that of our families, our teachers, or the so-called language experts to understand how language varies according to time, place, and situation. To build our knowledge about language, we must listen, investigate, learn, and then share what we have learned to spark more conversations. Through these conversations about language, students and teachers collaboratively develop habits of sociolinguistic awareness. We learn together how language shapes who we are and how we can flourish together.  

Harvard education professor Adriana Umaña-Taylor’s Identity Project offers a useful comparison. Umaña-Taylor’s curriculum encourages students to learn about their cultural identity by looking into and discussing the details of their own lives and families. She and her colleagues found that as students’ awareness of their ethnic identity grew through inquiry into their history, family, and community, they developed habits of perspective-taking, simultaneously engaging with their own and others’ distinctive backgrounds (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2018). I am encouraging something similar, a “Citizen Sociolinguistic Inquiry Project,” through which students (and their teachers!) grow as individuals by developing sociolinguistic awareness of their own language and the language of others around them.  

Any classroom, from preschool through graduate school, can embark on this type of citizen sociolinguistic inquiry. Listen to your students: What word, turn of phrase, or way of speaking has led to wonderment and sparked conversation in your classroom? Hoagie? Lightning bug? Creaky voice? Eyebrows on fleek? Chinese? What sorts of citizen sociolinguistic arrests have students experienced? These experiences — good and bad — can be springboards to inquiry.  

Over the years, I’ve developed a guide to push high school, college, and graduate students to explore their own language questions — whether sparked by wonderment, arrest, or something else — and to dwell with multiple possible answers to any of them (see Figure 2). I encourage educators to use and adapt this guide to set students free to explore the various perspectives related to language and to build flexible and thoughtful habits with language in their lives as citizen sociolinguists. When teachers spark and facilitate sociolinguistic awareness through everyday conversations and inquiry about language, we build students’ sense of belonging at school, foster their growth as individuals, and amplify their voices as participants in a diverse democracy. 

References 

Rymes, B. (2014). Communicating beyond language: Everyday encounters with diversity. New York, NY: Routledge. 

Rymes, B. & Leone, A. (2014). Citizen sociolinguistics: A new media methodology for understanding language and social life. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 29 (2), 25-44.  

Rymes, B. & Smail, G. (in press). We call this translanguaging — We, my friends, call this ‘wenglish’: language researchers scaling up and citizen sociolinguists scaling back. Applied Linguistics Review.  

shenbot [@MarkSon69402256]. (2019, January 26). Speaking from personal experience . . . [Tweet]. http://bit.ly/languagetweet 

Umaña-Taylor, A.J., Douglass, S., Updegraff, K.A. and Marsiglia, F.F. (2018). A small Scale randomized efficacy trial of the identity project: Promoting adolescents’ ethnic–racial identity exploration and resolution. Child Development, 89 (3), 862-870.  

Wang, A.B. (2019, January 28). Duke professor apologizes for telling Chinese students to speak English on campus. Washington Post.