Last time we considered contemporary assaults on Standard English. I conceded that there’s a point in not making schoolchildren feel as if the language spoken at home is somehow “wrong,” “low,” or “dirty.” As children learn Standard English — becoming bidialectal — teachers mustn’t denigrate whatever dialects are spoken in their homes.

When that column appeared, I was in Tokyo speaking to 15 graduate students in a linguistics class. All of them had some teaching experience, and they were a diverse group — from Japan, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. Because we were discussing notions of “correctness,” I mentioned the issue of sensitivity to diverse dialects.

“Nonsense,” they collectively said. “Just announce that this class is being conducted in Standard English, and demand Standard English.”

“They can do whatever they want outside class,” one student said, “but in class they’ll be expected to speak and write in Standard English. The teacher may acknowledge the existence of other dialects, but the whole point of language education is to teach them the standard forms. There should be no apology for this.”

These students, most of them pursuing Ph.D.s, seemed unanimous in this view. They spoke of their own experience teaching Standard Cantonese in Hong Kong, Standard Mandarin in Beijing, and Standard Japanese throughout Japan.

Another student said, “There are more than 50 ethnicities in China. If your parents send you to Beijing to study, it’s because they want you to go to a good school and get a good job. If you speak Standard Mandarin, people will always assume that you went to a good university. You can get a good job anywhere.”

But these views clash with another current view — that favoring Standard English necessarily entails giving preference to it and therefore marking down any departure from it. To some extent then, that all nonstandard dialects are stigmatized in the classroom. Hence the strong tendency among American linguists to say that one major purpose of dialectology is to “destigmatize” linguistic variation. On this view, any recognizable variety of English should be accorded respect and in no way criticized as “wrong.” This conflict — which is part of today’s culture wars — isn’t new.

On the Standard side of the debate are two linguists of old, Max Black and Otto Jespersen. In his book The Labyrinth of Language (1968), Black posited the sentence *The men is home. (The asterisk, in linguistic texts, shows that the sentence is nonstandard.) Black wrote: “The grammatical rules of English . . . unequivocally brand the sentence as wrong, ungrammatical. Tolerance and interest in novelty are here beside the point. Treating the man who says *The men is home (unless he has some abnormal purpose, such as that of mocking a linguistic abuse) as merely eccentric in his habits . . . is no more sensible than adopting the same attitude to a child who gets the wrong answer to his sums.”

In the same camp was Otto Jespersen, another 20th-century linguist. In his last book — Mankind, Nation, and Individual from a Linguistic Point of View (1946) — Jespersen urged standardization: “If we think out logically and bravely what is for the good of society, our view of language will lead us to the conclusion that it is our duty to work in the direction which natural evolution has already taken, i.e. towards the diffusion of the common language at the cost of local dialects.”

Three rationales underlie this position: (1) Because Standard English is the lingua franca of educated people, anyone who seeks real education should acquire it; (2) only by acquiring Standard English will most students have any opportunity to fulfill high aspirations; and (3) a standard form of any language is good because it leads to social cohesion, upward mobility, and literary continuity with the past.

But let’s consider the other side of the conflict, which holds that “all languages, and correspondingly all dialects, are equally ‘good’ as linguistic systems.” (Linguist Peter Trudgill, 1974.) This view has gained ascendancy in the academy. On July 26, the New York Times reported on two linguists who have been studying “Miami English” as a new dialect. In this variety of English, it’s common for people to say get down from the car (not “get out”), she recommended me this (not “she recommended this to me”), and make the line (not “get in line”). Those three examples, resulting from translating Spanish idioms, illustrate a special form of Spanglish spoken by some social groups in Miami.

One of the linguists studying Miami English, Phillip M. Carter, was quoted as saying: “People are really tired of being told that they’re wrong, and tired of being corrected. Those linguistic differences are a really important part of people’s identities.” He added that he’s on a mission to destigmatize Miami English — which might involve no longer “privileging” Standard English in Miami schools.

On this view, standardization, with the concomitant stigma attaching to whatever diverges from the standard, is a form of tyranny. As yet another linguist, Simeon Potter, wrote in 1960: “Language then ceases to be a mere means of communication and becomes an emblem or token, tied up with the whole complex problem of personal liberty.”

This question of public policy is rarely discussed among American intellectuals, even those interested in “identity politics.” And so, dear readers, I take the unusual step of inviting you to write in with your views. After all, you have a stake in the issue.