"In class - in my English class - you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call "Standard White English" because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people. [RESPONSES at this point vary too widely to standardize.] I'm respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it's racist and unfair and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I'll tell you something - if you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you're going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself... And [STUDENT'S NAME], you're going to learn to use it... because I am going to make you."
- David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage
"4. If you don't have functional English, learn it.
"As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it to function in the hacker community.
"Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as a second language use it in technical discussions even when they share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons, translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all).
"Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.
"Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong--and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to."
Not that being a "Rails Rockstar" necessarily implies being a Hacker--what I like about your quote is that it shows the phenomenon is everywhere. One nice thing for programmers though is that with online text communications you can hide a thick accent that would otherwise be held against you even if what you speak is grammatically perfect.
Some people are simply not good at languages, while at the same time they are extremely skilled coders. I know many people like this, in particular Japanese, Chinese and Russian-speaking coders. It's apparently quite a task to learn proper English when your native language is one of these and you weren't exposed to English soon enough.
Dismissing this guy because of his poor English is plain and simply xenophobic prejudice. In this case it came back to the Rails/Github guys and bit them in the ass.
Teaching standardized languages helps to reduce discrimination. Discrimination against African Americans (in general) is rare now, but discrimination against people who speak Ebonics is high. So is discrimination against people who sound Hispanic, and to a lessor extent many regional accents.
If SWE is taught well, it helps people from poor neighborhoods get taken more seriously. If it wasn't taught, only people from richer neighborhoods would know it, and would be used by rich people to exclude upstarts.
That said, using SWE to discriminate is a bad thing. It's just a little less unfair than discriminating based on the fluency of a dialect that poor kids never had a chance to learn.
I agree with all you're saying here, but I just want to point out that it doesn't attack the source of the problem.
A 19 year old Russian male who wasn't taught English properly will need A LOT of effort to learn proper SWE. For some people, it will simply not be feasible. Ability to learn human languages - as opposed to computer languages, much easier to an introvert/math person - is a very distinct ability and you'd be surprised how little correlation it has to intelligence and other skills.
Help reducing discrimination by teaching SWE is akin to help fight discrimination against other races by cosmetics and plastic surgery. Sure, it works on an individual level, but it doesn't help the people who truly have a problem: the ones discriminating.
You're right - it's a band-aid (or maybe a bandage, given that it can be effective) - it's fixing a problem that shouldn't be there. But if it allows some well-spoken members of minorities (i.e. Obama) to fly under the radar, succeed, and set a good example; so it does help fight discrimination.
Yeah, this was quite a revelation to me when I realized it. I have a bias towards this dialect and an instinctive bias against, say, AAVE since it sounds "uneducated". I've been trying to correct this, thinking about how, say, British English sounds different and has different grammar but I don't think any less of it or its speakers.
Does anyone have links to great videos of educated, intelligent discussion in typically looked down-upon accents (e.g., AAVE, deep south, etc)? For instance, I read once that the Queens accent was stigmatized until Feynman became so popular. When I hear videos of him, I notice his distinct speech, but it sounds "smart" because Feynman speaks it!
Aside from being about the US, he's talking about written English. Standard Written English is fairly similar even across regional accents in the US, and I'd say written English is more similar across the majority of the English speaking world than spoken English. (there are the gratuitous spelling changes introduced in the UK in the 1800s/early 1900s to differentiate from US convention, and some different words and conventions for group noun plurality, but aside from that very similar, whereas I have a harder time understanding some Scottish or East London speech than I do French or German.)
(there's also the accent/dialect/creyole/pidgin distinction, which often revolves around who has an army)
- David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage