ABSTRACT
I was born in a small town in upstate New York and lived in that region for the first 19 years of my life. I was taught from a very early age that the grammatical structure of my oral language was a reflection of my intellectual ability-I was corrected often and was required to speak what my parents considered to be Standard English.“May I go outside?” was the required alternative to the colloquial “Can I,” and verb tenses were expected to be in perfect agreement with the subject. No “got” for “have” and “ain’t” was countered with the childhood rhyme: “Don’t say ain’t, your mother will faint, and your father will fall in a bucket of paint.”When my family traveled, we would comment on the variations of American English and even teasingly mimic the New York City and Boston accents. I understood my dialect as being superior-those “others” were wrong.
