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Problems of Linguistic Insecurity in Multicultural Speech Contexts

A wide range of sociolinguistic problems may arise wherever speakers of nonstandard varieties of English must communicate with speakers of the standard forms. In most of the important institutions in our multiethnic urban centers in schools, businesses, government offices, and medical and psychiatric clinics standard English is the dominant mode of discourse, spoken by the persons in authority; speakers of nonstandard forms of English enter these settings in search of services that are of crucial importance in their lives. The problems that arise range from total communication breakdowns involving foreign language speakers to subtle difficulties involving bilingual and bidialectal speakers of nonstandard English dialects. In this paper we first discuss several major types of communication problems that were observed in a study of a psychiatric ward and examine the impact of these problems on the patient's treatment and adjustment to the therapeutic milieu. We then introduce a procedure that we have developed for detecting one such problem, linguistic insecurity, and present a pilot experimental study testing this approach. The pilot procedure was carried out with a group of dialect speakers in a remedial English class at a community college in New York.