Thoughts on Language/Dialect Application

“Go grab yer guns, kids. With all them A-rabs ‘round, we gotta pro-tect arselves, they may look nice ‘n all, but they’re damn sneaky.” My mother says in a grossly exaggerated Texan accent at our family dinner table. It’s Tuesday night, and we were just discussing a CNN news report on Middle Eastern Americans suffering the affects of Islamaphobia. My family speaks a general American bland accent with hints of New York from my father, Boston from my mother, and the Mid-West from my brothers and myself. We speak the accent of Capitol Hill, of well-traveled and upper-middle classmen of a technologically homogenized United States. We speak with the accent of those who have money and power and who read enough about the country and the world around them to generalized regional peoples. This is why my mother speaks in a medley of strong regional accents to emphasize a point of view my family finds backwards or comedic.
A feminine and proper Southern drawl is used when emphasizing manners. A thick Bostonian accent is used for swearing and dark sarcasm. And an Ebonics dialect is taken up to make a statement comical. “…Language is one of the most important factors determining the identity of both the jokers and butts [of the jokes] and in defining the relationship between them…” (Davies 40) Much like the members of the Western Apache group discussed in Keith Basso’s “Indian Models of the Whiteman”, we use our imitations of different groups as an expression off comedy as well as a symbol of the relationship my family’s socio-economic identity, and many of the people in our identifying category, have with other such identities (i.e. the rural Texans, Bostonians and Black people), and our relationships with them.
The characteristics of my family’s identity put us in a position of power. The color of our skin, the income we earn and, subtly, the way we speak reflects our social standing and impressions we give out to those around us. For instance, historically, black people in the United States have not had a high degree of power. Because they tend to speak in an accent (or dialect as some prefer) that is substantially different from that of many other American accents, the way they use their language is an identification marker and thus, a symbol of their status’ power, or lack of.
The linkage between people’s language and power they hold in their broader environment is solid. In the specific case of my family’s use of different accents to emphasize a mood or a point, the jokes are not integrated into our ideologies of power structure, as many linguistic/ethnic jokers are. However, understanding how “people make sense [of the world around them] can be very difficult…” (Basso 3), and a good example of clarifying this point, is by observing the linguistic/ethnic jokes that they make amongst themselves