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Concepts about Bidialectalism
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In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird

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Language and Oral Expression IV

Eugenia Nascroile

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Introduction

While attending my Teacher Training course in 2010, I had the marvellous

opportunity to meet Calpurnia in Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. This
character was the Finches’ black cook and the children’s bridge between the white
world and her own black community. Throughout the novel we can see how
Calpurnia uses language as a tool to belong to two separate worlds since she
speaks differently in the Finch household (a white people’s house), and among her
neighbours at Church (the Black community). The children notice the difference in
Calpurnia's speech at church and ask her about it when they are walking home.
What Calpurnia answered was my inspiration to write this paper.

“It's right hard to say,” she said. "Suppose you and Scout talked colored-folks' talk at

home it'd be out of place, wouldn't it? Now what if I talked white-folks' talk at church,

and with my neighbours? They'd think I was puttin' on airs to beat Moses."

"But Cal, you know better," I said.

"It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike—in the second place, folks don't

like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do. It aggravates 'em. You're not

gonna change any of them by talkin' right, they've got to want to learn themselves, and

when they don't want to learn there's nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or

talk their language”. (Lee, 1960, pp. 138-144)

This paper/article is intended to study the reasons why people develop

bidialectalism in the context of language and ethnics groups trying to differentiate it
from bilingualism and also exploring examples of code-switching, dialect
boundaries, productive and receptive bidialectalism and dialect continuum. The
aim of this paper is to explore language varieties making a contribution to

2
sociolinguistic studies on bidialectalism and finding examples in literature to
exemplify them.

1) Language and Ethnic Groups

In the past, there was a belief about a probable connection between the way
people used the language and their race. History provides us with many examples
of this as in the case of Hitler and the Nazis’ theories about the Germanic ‘master
race’, or the term Indo-European, which was created during the nineteenth century
and came to have racial connotations.

Trudgill1 (2000) argues that what marks a difference in language for all speakers is
the close contact with certain characteristics of those who speak it, but never the
fact of being black or white. The author considers that “there is no racial or
physiological basis of any kind for linguistic differences of this type […] any human
being can learn any human language, and we know of many well-attested cases of
whole ethnic groups switching language through time” (p. 43).

However, it is certain that many ethnic groups use language as a very important
element to ensure the sense of belonging to a particular group. In Harper Lee’s
novel, Calpurnia knows that she must speak the way her people speak at church if
she does not want to be rejected by them. In other words, language is used as a
condition for membership. In any case, this feature is related to social and cultural
facts but never to biological or racial characteristics.

1
He is an English sociolinguist, academic and author. Throughout this research paper we will analyze some
chapters of his book Sociolinguistics. An introduction to language and society.

3
Trudgill (2000) distinguishes a defining criterion for ethnic group membership and
an identifying one. In the first case, language itself is involved while in the second
varieties of the same language are concerned within the group.

For example, in Canada, the European-origin ethnic groups are distinguished by

language (English or French native speakers). In this case, membership is a
defining criterion.

But in cases of the second type, the difference is more interesting. Trudgill points
that “the separate identity of ethnic group is signalled, not by different languages,
but by different varieties of the same language […] we can suppose that ethnic
group differentiation acts as a barrier to the communication of linguistic features in
the same way as other social barriers” (2000, pp. 45-46).

One of the most controversial examples of this type is the difference between the
speeches of black and white Americans.

For many years, there was a tendency to consider the English black people’s
speech to be inferior. In To kill a mockingbird, Calpurnia is a black woman living in
a white house as a nanny since she was considered part of the family.
Consequently, she uses the language white people use in order to be at the same
level, in order not to be ‘linguistically inferior’. That is the reason why Scout gets
surprised when she listens to Calpurnia talking to her people. ‘But Cal, you know
better,’ she says.

This racist view has influenced the studies of Black American English throughout
history and has also affected the debates about it.

If Blacks and Whites spoke differently, this simply meant that there were different

(linguistically equally valid) ethnic-group language varieties. Today, therefore, linguists

are agreed that there are differences between black speech and white speech and,

4
 since there is no way in which one variety can be linguistically superior to another, that

it is not racist to say so (Trudgill, 2000, pp. 51-52)

The study of African American Vernacular English2 (AAVE) is used by linguists to

distinguish those Blacks who do not speak the Standard American English from
those who do. In order to identify the origin of the differences between AAVE and
other forms of English, we have to mention some grammatical features:

 -s in the third person singular present tense forms: many AAVE speakers do
not pronounce it although there are different opinions about whether this
feature comes from the Caribbean creoles, the old East Anglia or Africa.

 The absence of the copula (the verb to be) in the present tense: Trudgill
(2000) explains that this characteristic comes from the English-based
creoles spoken by Blacks in the Caribbean3:

She real nice

They out there

He not American

If you good, you going to Heaven

 The use of the form ‘be’ as a finite verb form: this is one of the most
important characteristics of AAVE and it is the so-called ‘invariant be’. In this

2
African American Vernacular English is a variety (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of American English, most
commonly spoken today by urban working class and largely bidialectal middle-class African Americans.

3
Example provided in Trudgill’s book Sociolinguistics. An introduction to language and society on page 55

5
 case, there is a verbal contrast in AAVE which is not possible in Standard
English4.

AAVE Standard English

He busy right now He’s busy right now

Sometime he be busy Sometimes he’s busy

Trudgill explains that “In Standard English the verb form is the same in both cases,
whereas they are distinct in AAVE because, while the first sentence does not refer
to some repeated non-continuous action, the second does” (2000, p.56).

 Omission or change of auxiliary verbs5:

Standard English: We were eating –and drinking too.

White nonstandard: We was eatin’ –and drinkin’ too.

AAVE: We was eatin’ –an’ we drinkin’ too.

In this case, the AAVE form takes features from the white nonstandard and also
from the Creole speech which omits the auxiliary verb rather than the personal
pronoun.

 Question inversion, ‘existential it’ and ‘negativized auxiliary preposition’

a) I asked Mary where did she go

b) It’s a boy in my class named Joey (instead of there is)

4
Example provided in Trudgill’s book Sociolinguistics. An introduction to language and society on page 55

5
Examples provided in Trudgill’s book Sociolinguistics. An introduction to language and society on pages 56
and 57

6
 c) Can’t nobody do nothing about it

Considered the examples analysed, although we are able to recognize differences

between AAVE and Standard English, we cannot assert that those are related to
the speakers’ race. White speakers who have lived all their lives amongst African
Americans will probably have a tendency to speak AAVE. On the other hand, black
people growing up in a white dominant area will also probably sound like white.
Finally, there is a possibility as well that speakers who have to move constantly
from a white area to a black one develop a type of bidialectalism that allows them
to belong to both areas without having any trouble at all.

2) Definition of dialect

Kirk Hazen6 (2001) defines dialect as “a set of linguistic features

distinguishable both qualitatively and quantitatively from other dialects of the
same language” (p. 86). Thereby, we may say that a person manages a
dialect only when he is able to produce all the linguistic features of it. For
instance, the absence of the copula (e.g., She real nice) is associated with
AAVE but if a speaker does not use other AAVE features, it is not proper to
say that the person manages that dialect. Therefore, a dialect involves
aspects of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.

6
Professor Kirk Hazen is a linguist in the Dialects Department of West Virginia University and directs the
West Virginia Dialect Project. He published An Introductory Investigation into Bidialectalism in 2001 in a
collection of Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 7.3

7
 2.1) Accent and dialect

Accent and dialect are often taken as synonyms but, in fact, they describe
different aspects of language. Yule7 (1996) argues that all speakers have an
accent in terms of pronunciation with the difference that it is easier to
recognize it in some people than in others: “The term accent, when used
technically, is restricted to the description of aspects of pronunciation which
identify where an individual speaker is from, regionally or socially” (p. 237).

2.2) Dialect boundaries

Dialect boundaries are immediately associated with isoglosses. An isogloss

represents a limit of a certain linguistic feature within two areas. For
example, if the majority of the inhabitants in a given area use the phrase ‘get
sick’ while the majority in a close area say ‘take sick’, we may draw a line
across a map in order to separate these two areas. According to Yule (1996)
“when a number of isoglosses come together in this way, a more solid line
indicating a dialect boundary, can be drawn” (p. 229).

2.3) The dialect continuum

Dialect boundaries are useful to identify the different dialects spoken in

some regions but it is not true that a dialect can drastically turn into another
when we move from one area to another one. There is a smooth change
between neighbouring areas, and when travelling in any direction these
differences are accumulated in such a way they eventually end up becoming
the regional dialect spoken in that region. Thus, regional variations “exist

7
George Yule has taught Linguistics at the Universities of Edinburgh, Louisiana and Hawaii. Throughout this
research paper we will analyze some chapters of his book The study of language, second edition.

8
along a continuum and not as having sharp breaks from one region to the
next” (Yule, 1985, p. 230).

3) Bidialectalism

Bidialectalism is defined as a speaker’s ability to move from one dialect to

another in a range along a continuum by using both of them. Those who
move back and forth across the dialect boundary areas by using their
varieties easily are considered as bidialectal.

The question of bidialectalism may be an answer to a social necessity in

which people develop this characteristic in order ‘to belong’. We have
already said that in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Calpurnia has many
reasons to be bidialectal. She is a black woman living in a white family
house but still she takes part in a community that demands ‘being like us not
like them’. There is a degree of control over the two dialects that lets
Calpurnia going back and across the two worlds.

3.1) Productive and receptive bidialectalism

Hazen (2001) claims that all human beings are able to understand multiple
dialects of their native languages. However, this is a matter of having had
enough exposure to those dialects.

On the contrary, the production of them is a much more complicated

process since speakers tend to use the language they learned at home. A
child who is regularly exposed to two dialects may develop comprehension
skills for both of them but he will produce only one.

Here, Chomsky’s theory (1965, pp. 3-15) about competence and

performance is taken into account not only for language acquisition but also
for a second language (or dialect) acquisition. While competence is the

9
linguistic ability to create and understand sentences, performance is the real
world linguistic output. In other words, receptive bidialectalism is connected
with receptive competence while productive bidialectalism with productive
competence.

3.2) Differences with bilingualism

According to Yule (1985) bilingualism “is not simply a matter of two dialects
of a single language, but a matter of two quite distinct and different
languages” (p. 231).

There are varying degrees of bilingualism. Thus, speakers do not need to

manage both languages with equal fluency because there is always one
‘dominant language’.

As it occurs with productive and receptive bidialectalism, there does exist a

passive bilingual, the speaker who has the ability to understand a second
language but is unable to reply in that language, and an active bilingual the
speaker who can understand and produce the language.

3.3) Code-switching

In linguistics, code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two

or more dialects or languages using more than one linguistic variety in a
manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety.

In the case of Calpurnia in To kill a mockingbird, code-switching relates to

her use of different dialects when she is at home or at church because of a
need to show social group membership in her community. It seems to be
that Calpurnia has a ‘social motivation’ to move from nonstandard English to
a Vernacular one.

10
Sociolinguists have long explained the phenomenon of code-switching for
bilingual (or multilingual) speakers but there are still debates regarding the
bidialectalism question. Hazen (2001) argues that “speakers of a language
have a mental grammar for that language, and multilingual speakers have a
Grammar G for every language L. Since every speaker produces a
particular form of a language, a speaker's grammar G1 is set to produce a
particular dialect D1. To recast the bidialectal question in this framework,
although a speaker can become bilingual by building another grammar G2,
we do not know if speakers can bifurcate their G1 to produce D1 and a
second dialect D2. If a speaker produces D1 and then acquires features of
another dialect, will that speaker acquire those features with the same
qualitative and quantitative constraints found in the second dialect area? Will
the speaker be able to switch between sets of dialect features instead of
mixing linguistic features from two dialects into an unbifurcated dialect? If
the speaker is past the critical age of language learning, will the speaker
achieve fluency with those features of the second dialect as a native dialect
speaker would?” (p. 88)

4) Conclusion

Bidialectalism may occur in an infinite number of forms since we speak

differently according to the situation we experience (at school, at work, in
the street, belonging to a community, to a ghetto, etc.). Bidialectalism also
occurs when speakers of one dialect live within close proximity to speakers
of another dialect (Calpurnia’s case when living with the Finches and seeing
her people at church).

Whatever the circumstances, the phenomenon of bidialectalism occurs

because we live in a world of diversity where distinct dialects, languages,
cultures come into contact all the time. It may be manifested unconsciously
11
 or it may be a conscious act. Whatever the reasons, it can asserted that in a
society in constant growth bidialectalism is becoming a tool that allows
speakers to form part of more than one speech community without losing
their personal identity and sense of belonging.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his
point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in
it.” Atticus Finch – To Kill a Mockingbird

5) References

 Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: M.I.T

Press.

 Hazen, K. (2001). An Introductory Investigation into Bidialectalism. In

Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 7.3. Virginia: West Virginia University
Press.

 Lee, H. (1960). To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: Lippincot

 Trudgill, P. (2000). Language and Ethnics Groups. In Sociolinguistics. An

Introduction to Language and Society (4th ed.). London: Penguin Books.

 Yule, G. (1996). Language Varieties. In The Study of Language (2nd ed.).

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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