Engelse mentor: 'Straattaal ontneemt jongeren hun stem'

quote:

Ghetto grammar robs the young of a proper voice
In the wake of the riots, last Thursday evening, there was only one topic of conversation among the young people I mentor in Peckham. Thankfully, none of my mentees were involved in the disturbances. Yet almost all told me they had received the mass BBM broadcasts, written in street slang, inviting them to join in the thuggery.

The English language is an incredibly rich inheritance. Yet it is being squandered by so many young people of all races and backgrounds. Across London and other cities it is increasingly fashionable for them to speak in an inarticulate slang full of vacuous words such as "innit" and wilful distortions like "arks" for "ask" or tedious double negatives.

It's not a question of being a staunch lexical purist. It's about our attitude to young people and how we educate them. Language is power. The ability for young people to communicate articulately and intelligently is of huge importance, not only for themselves but also for the way in which they are perceived by others.

Their educational opportunities and job prospects are all directly affected by the way they choose to speak. Moreover, the more we are unable to express our feelings through words, the more frustrated we get. For young men and women in the inner-city, that can only be a dangerous thing.

So in my mentoring work I have zero tolerance towards inchoate street slang. As I constantly tell these young people, words are the best weapon you can have in your mental arsenal. Each week in Peckham we have a vocabulary slot, where we teach five new words. Be it ubiquitous, judicious, sardonic, ephemeral or plethora, we teach these young people words which can assist them, be it in GCSE English essays or everyday conversation.

Young people speaking street patois is a spectacular own goal. True, the patois limits their conversation to a select coterie of other young people, making it hard to penetrate if you don't know the lingo. But in so doing, young people are effectively rendering themselves unintelligible to - and often unemployable by - mainstream adult society. This is really why street slang is anathema to me: it is reckless self-sabotage.

Some educators take a position of cultural relativism. They assert the legitimacy and value of street talk, or at the very least, the importance of teaching young people to "code switch" - how to differentiate in which milieu it is socially acceptable.

I have no time for such an approach. In my experience, young people find it very hard to code switch. Text-speak, poor grammar and street patois routinely pervade the essays I set them, let alone their conversations with me.

Acceptance of "ghetto grammar" amounts to a betrayal of young people, trapping them in stereotypes. The young people I mentor are not stupid - yet their street slang makes them sound stupid and uneducated.

The better they speak, the more others - especially in positions of authority - will be inclined to take them seriously. Embracing street slang leads to disenfranchisement, marginalisation and ultimately the dole queue. Embracing "proper English" unlocks an intellectual feast.

But to help them do so, we must confront this insulting and demeaning acceptance of street slang. We owe it to them: as adults, we do have a duty of linguistic care.