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Kenneth ClarkKenneth Clark
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vocabulary cassettes, you know, cassettes to increase-- and it says something about you're judged by your language and your vocabulary. “Buy this cassette and it will increase your vocabulary.” I don't know about the cassettes, but it was Harold Lasky who said that one way in which the British could deal with its class system was to help cockneys to speak middle-class English. That might be an over-simplification, but certainly there's some validity to the fact that differential status and class distinctions can be perpetuated if educational authorities do not help to bring children into a common language. Grammar, for example. I have to believe that grammar isn't working.

Now those questions were focusing on Black English or on the black dialect or whatever term is most appropriate. Are you familiar with something that may be equivalent or analogous to this among certain Hispanics, and I'm speaking specifically of the Puerto Ricans? I used to be able to understand a good deal of Spanish. I could understand-- I don't know whether they call it High Spanish or Castillian, modified for this hemisphere, where the C is pronounced differently between Spain and America. But vowels are dropped in the street language of Puerto Ricans. I could hear a Puerto Rican broadcast in San Juan and understand it all, and that same broadcaster, you go out on the street, he's dropping vowels all over the place.

Clark:

I guess they can, I think that's an educational matter, and one the responsibilities of education, it would seem to me, would be to





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