Journal of Language and Linguistics Volume 1 Number 3 2002 ISSN 1475 - 8989

Many specialists still ask themselves if what is out there is language, is culture. While they ask themselves that, looking down at the tips of their toes, they exclude themselves from knowing others, from living with others, from hearing others. They exclude others.

Carlos Skliar

Introduction

At this moment in time, the issue of inclusion/social exclusion is part of the political and educational scenario, where the reigning ideology proposes a school capable of embracing all children, each with his or her singularities, be they psychological, social, historical or political. At the heart of such debates, the social movements of minority linguistic groups gain force (Native Brazilian Indians, immigrants and the Deaf, etc.), defending their rights to education in the tongue of their communities. Such movements eventually exert strong pressures on official discourse and literature, which, apparently, seem to announce a certain governmental inclination to re-evaluate its position, and, in so doing, propose bilingual schooling not only for the Deaf but for the children of immigrants as well. In this line, we read in the volume on Foreign Language of the National Curriculum Parameters (Brazil 1998:23) the following recommendation:

Using the above proposal directed to schools by the Ministry of Education in Brazil (MEC) as a springboard, this paper addresses the issue of linguistic heterogeneity in this country, not only in its multilingual, but also multidialectal nature. Our purpose is to verify whether the new discourse in education as expressed in the National Curriculum Parameters does in fact escape an homogenising ideal of language, subject and culture.

Our reflections are founded on the assumption that language and identity are interrelated. Subjects constitute themselves by means of language, which is equivalent to saying that linguistic mechanisms for producing meanings are at one and the same time mechanisms for producing subjects. In other words, identities are constructed within and through language.

We also argue that conceptions of language and culture are interconnected; culture is understood as defined by Calligaris (1997) as a "discursive flux", discursive production in process, articulated both orally and in writing (with signs, in the case of the Deaf). What is spoken (written, or signed) finds meaning within the human social group to which one belongs.

In this paper, we look at the case of Deaf children ("students with special needs") and children who are socially underprivileged.
The reason for picking these two subject groups (children from unfavourable or marginalised backgrounds and Deaf children) is due to the fact that the daily challenge in education of making a language (Portuguese, in this case) functional, socially relevant and meaningful for Deaf citizens is not an isolated issue, as one might suppose at first glance. If we consider the teaching of writing standard Portuguese to minority groups or socially underprivileged groups (slum children, street children etc.), it becomes clear that this discussion is part of a broader landscape. Perhaps the problems shared with other groups within the broad and complex historical contexts made up of numerous linguistic minorities, which have constructed national histories and identities, become more visible in the case of the Deaf, where differences are not easily erased.

The Deaf person, sign language and schooling

In this section, we deal with the issue brought to us by a number of Deaf citizens who are preoccupied by linguistic, and consequently, cultural singularities that mark them as a group. Put more clearly, one of the most common themes in meetings and encounters on Deafness is the discussion about what is meant by inclusion in schools, from the point of view of the Deaf. We deem to formulate their concerns in the following way: how can we conceive of a school capable of truly acknowledging cultural and linguistic singularities, instead of merely proposing to include the Deaf in an order of language where sound is inescapably lost in the labyrinths of their ears?

When the Deaf question us in this manner, they unveil an ideological barrier have not yet overcome: taking the postulate of the benefits of inclusion, which seems to have become a consensus in many areas of human studies, to its ultimate consequences. In fact, it has become accepted that where a living language is found, reference systems about the world are woven, narratives, texts and literature (albeit not necessarily in written form) are produced, as are social forms which permit the identification of the subject with a certain reference group. In other words, where there is language, there is also a web of cultures and people, becoming subjects by processes, at once linguistic and cultural. From this standpoint, subject, language and culture reciprocally constitute each other in a never-ending process.

There are two basic theses that sustain the triadic relation of language, culture and identity. (a) Reality does not present itself to the subject in a complete or trasparent form; if this were so, language would have the sole function of labeling a ready-made reality and serving as means of communication for mankind. (b) It is not possible for any subject to live outside the inscription of language; although the so-called wild children are biologically human, the notion of subject we are defending transcends the phylogenetic level. To the contrary, those who defend the reciprocal constitution of language/culture/subject centre their arguments on the view that reality itself is a given of language, or, in other words, a product of historical, discursive and ideological constructions, made by human communities through language.

Several authors from distinct epistemological approaches ascribe to this thesis. This view can be perceived in texts by the psychologist Vygotsky in the late nineteen twenties (Sirgado 2000); in the thesis of critical multiculturalism defended by the educator McLaren (1994) or in the works of linguists on the relations between language and identity (see Signorini 1998, for a series of texts which address this issue).

This apparent concurrence among such authors, however, becomes unbalanced when Deaf researchers (Perlin 1998; Wrigley 1996) call attention to the fact that their sign languages, Brazilian Sign Language (known as Libras), in Perlin's case and ASL (American Sign Language), in Wrigley's, should be considered by the school as the language used for teaching. We might add that this is exactly the concern which is supported by the PCNs (Brazil 1998). However, at this point we encounter the first obstacle: in the inclusive public school, where there is speaking and hearing, Portuguese is, by law, the language used for teaching.

In the case of the Deaf, various extremely negative consequences result from officially adopting the majority tongue, according to Kyle (2001). Hearing teachers in public schools ignore signs, or use sign language merely as a gesturing tool for converting sounds into signs. The school is responsible for obstructing Deaf children from having access to a language they would have no trouble acquiring (signs). Consequently, they end up with lower academic achievement, resulting in a process marked by extreme personal suffering in school (Perlin 1998; Souza 1998; Paiva e Silva 2000). At the end of the day, as one could expect, they end up being labelled as having learning problems (supposedly from intrinsic causes, due to hearing loss) and are discussed in light of discourse on mental handicap.

Personal histories of Deafness (Perlin 1998) show that as teenagers, when there is more independence from home, the Deaf prefer to leave school, joining Deaf communities and feeling a deep resentment towards the (hearing) group that was so intolerant of them. In Deaf associations, they learn to portray themselves as Deaf, and see themselves as subjects who have a common language and culture, not as hearing impaired (a label that emphasises an organic deficit and connotes an "identity of handicap" in relation to the condition of the hearing).

Even though old doubts about the linguistic nature of signs might still hover in the background for lay people in this field, there is ample literature available to dispel them (Bellugi & Kennedy 1980; Sorenson 1975; Stokoe 1960 and 1978; Volterra, Laudanna, Corazza, Radulzky & Natale 1984; Wilbur 1984). However, signs, when tolerated by schools, are not considered to be language, but rather codes for transcription, like Braille (Souza, D'Angelis & Veras 2000).

With this understanding, schools silence everything the Deaf produce in sign language, such as signed literature, theatre and folklore; in other words, they deny these languages the possibility any other language possesses of having the capacity for production of culture and knowledge about the world. Another way of saying this is that the school avoids the discussion of whether sign language is a language or not - this matter becomes irrelevant when sign language is reduced to a mere code for translation and as technical support at the service of teaching. As a result, the whole disturbing issue of the cultural aspects woven into the identity of Deaf subjects, as constituted through sign language, is avoided. In this way, as often happens in multilingualism, schools erase historical differences, which could have enriched diversity in the various school communities, promoting understanding of each other's needs.

Multilingualism, multidialectalism and their subjects

Based on the analysis of writings and documents of different periods (including religious discourse from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as scientific texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), Vieira da Silva (1998) shows how certain affiliations between religious and scientific discourse fabricated conceptions of students based on oppositions - to be literate/civilised or illiterate/uncivilised. Such affiliations also produced as a discursive result the illusion that Brazil is a monolingual country. Historically interwoven into public policies in education, conceptions such as these have led to the annihilation of Brazilian ethnic and cultural minorities, maintaining the general belief that all of the millions of people who live in Brazil are monolingual in Portuguese. The school system, one of the most efficient resources ever conceived for the pasteurisation of language and culture, has collaborated in the process of absorbing, naturalising or generally eliminating languages and dialects that make for a highly heterogeneous national whole in Brazil.1

This becomes even more important when we consider the following two facts. The first one is pointed out by Mahler (1997:22): "in Brazil today, an estimated 203 languages are spoken, by native Brazilian citizens". The second is related to the fact that, with the intention of diluting linguistic plurality, for the first time in Brazil, the Constitution of 1988 defines that the official language of the Brazilian State is the Portuguese Language 2. That year, Brazil implicitly determined that Portuguese was to be the language used for teaching in public schools. The determination of the 1988 Constitution did not cause any strong social impact, because all it did was reinforce earlier tendencies.

It did, however, bring important consequences as to how citizens who spoke other tongues were viewed by official legislation. In Brazil, it is known that the last Lei de Diretrizes e Bases (LDB)3, sanctioned on 12/20/1996, determines in Chapter V that students who have special needs should be placed in the "regular school system" (apud Saviani 1997: 180).

Who would these students be, then?

We find the answer in the National Curriculum Parameters under the section entitled Adaptações Curriculares (Curricular Adaptations), published and distributed by the Ministry of Education in 1999 (Brazil 1999). In this document, one reads that, for the effect of public education, students with special needs are those who come from ethnic and cultural minorities (such as Native Brazilian Indians, children of immigrants and even the Deaf), street children, nomadic groups, the gifted, those from underprivileged or marginalised groups and, at last, those with "physical, intellectual, social, emotional and sensory conditions which are differentiated" (Brazil 1999: 23). The Deaf, however, can be considered in both categories: either in the one that encompasses all ethnic minorities or in the one for conditions that are physically differentiated (read "disabled").

In order to cover-up the striking differences between these groups, they were all brought together into one generic category, i.e. "students with special needs". By qualifying these students as intrinsically possessing "special needs" (meaning deviation on the downward side of the scale), the National Curriculum Parameters create conditions in discourse which defend that the curricular program be reduced, diminished or adapted. Diminished expectations will, then, guarantee inclusion. Automatic approval will corroborate, at least for the sake of statistics, the effectiveness of teaching.

It should be mentioned, however, that if we were to agree to the exclusion of "minorities" fluent in other native tongues, the other children considered in this group (street children, nomadic communities, the gifted, those from underprivileged or marginalised groups, as well as those with physical, intellectual, social, etc.) would all belong to a stable monolingual community, which is not the case.

The answer to this has already been given, and at this point we cannot avoid mentioning Paulo Freire, who, in the sixties, insistently called attention to the fact that schools must respect the plurality of language and/ or the variations of dialect inside the classroom. Not only did he teach that formal singularities should be respected, but also that these languages resulted in distinct ways of reading the world, due to social and historical labour of these language users (Freire 1985; Freire & Macedo 1990).
In this sense, the term culture in the singular form is not very useful. Distinct human groups, marked by unique histories, weave distinct reference systems by means of language. The ways they read the world, the rules and values they design for living together, the narratives they produce about themselves and their group, all this enables them to establish a certain feeling of belonging. We do not consider, in the least, that applying the prefix "sub" to characterise such productions as sub-cultures would be equally relevant: for this purpose, we would have to suppose that one culture, a standard culture, was above the others. From this standpoint, the culture of the other would always be, for us, the sub-culture.

In the wake of these premises, we still have to consider how the heterogeneous nature of dialects of the underprivileged is to be treated, in case they are seen to exist and are deemed worthy of consideration.

The "tongueless" (languageless) or the case of socially underprivileged children

We must clarify that in the National Curriculum Parameters, there is a certain amount of ambiguity about which school socially underprivileged children should attend. A first perusal of the legislation (Brazil 1999) leads us to place them in the same group as the Deaf, considering both subjects as belonging to the group of students with special educational needs. However, this insertion is not so clear if we take into consideration that the National Curriculum Parameters also state that the curriculum should be construed according to the identity of the educational institution, and to the pedagogical project of each school. They also indicate that the educational projects should be constructed based on the aspirations and expectations of the society and culture where it is set. According to the logic of the Parameters, the only justification for including both street children and those from underprivileged or marginalised groups in the category of children with special educational needs would be if they constituted a minority group within the school community. We understand that if these children constitute the majority of students, they should be taught within the scope of regular educational procedures.

Thus, for schools situated in slum areas, there is no reason to speak of "curricular adaptations" or "adaptation for access to the curriculum", except in the case of students who present specific needs which are different from others in academic achievement expected for their age group.

Nevertheless, we wonder if this way of conceiving special needs might not be concealing another illusion: that these groups have nothing in common or that they can be maintained isolated one from another. In actual fact, what we have here can be called miscegenation, that is, distinct social classes intermingling inside the school setting. At the present time, with an inclusive program, we also have the presence of the Deaf, the visually impaired and others. What one must ask is: whose place is it to decide what the "majority group" is, and what will be the criteria for this definition; how do we cope with those who do not fit in, as invariably we must. In this case, the curricular adaptations serve as instruments to enable the school to avoid the issue of social, political and economic differences that are a part of its very structure. In other words, this allows society to steer away from resolving such differences.

Having made these considerations, we focus in the following section on the discourse of the National Curriculum Parameters as related to the issue of linguistic diversity and to the language instruction in the regular school system. We are still addressing education in an underprivileged socio-economic situation.

The proposal of bilingual, or rather bidialectual education, for children of social and economically underprivileged classes, began to find an echo in Brazil during the seventies. Nevertheless, it was only during the eighties that this proposal actually met with repercussions on a national level, within a broader project of the changing understanding of language and language acquisition. Researchers from a few universities in the country, as well as educators and some State Education Councils initiated the movement for conceptual transformation.

This movement resulted in rich linguistic and pedagogical production, in the form of official and non-official documents forerunner of the National Curriculum Parameters4. With the intention of acknowledging diversity and defending the various levels of heterogeneity, in the Portuguese language, these documents argued against the traditional view that has striven for the safety of the ideal of a pure tongue. Thus, the aim of these documents was to overcome the hegemonic traditional view, which had defended the unity of the Portuguese language for all of the national territory.

However, we must say that, in all these pioneering documents of the eighties, teaching of the standard language is still explicitly defended. The official stance is that differences should be acknowledged and respected, but the standard form, irrespective of the majority of the population's condition, has an essential role in guaranteeing all citizens´ social participation, as well as serving as a means of access to all manner of assets of society. Thus, teachers were instructed to conduct their students to alternate between speech forms (home version and standard form), in accordance to the dictates of what was required in the situations of verbal interaction. Teachers "should resist the idea of eliminating the non-standard variety in favour of the standard form" (Castilho 1988: 58).

Thus, the new way of understanding language and the process of language acquisition, which acknowledged linguistic diversity, was unable to advance much beyond mere "acknowledgement" and "respect" for the varieties which were off-shoots of the standard form. The true maxim for those linguists and educators who were committed to the proposal can be summarised as it follows: "not to learn the standard form instead of the Portuguese that you speak, but rather to learn the standard form as well as the Portuguese that you speak so as to use one or the other according to circumstance".

When the first volume on teaching the Portuguese language (Brazil 1997 a) was published, the authors stated that the text was a synthesis of advances achieved in the eighties "when the democratisation of educational opportunities begins to be taken into consideration on a political dimension" (p. 20). Thus, based on earlier proposals, the document establishes that one of the overall objectives of teaching the Portuguese Language in the elementary school is to "understand and respect the different linguistic varieties of spoken Portuguese" (idem, p.41).

The issue of linguistic diversity is also treated in another volume of the National Curriculum Parameters, whose title translates as Cultural plurality and sex orientation - Transversal themes (Brazil 1997 b:46-47). According to this document, the following are examples of bilingualism and multilingualism:

We would like to point out that this document, which commits to acknowledging and valuing the existence of ethnic and cultural differences, as well as having overcome earlier relations of domination and exclusion, even so maintains a bidialectic conception which is still quite restrictive. As in earlier germinal proposals of the Parameters, the final text continues to suggest an initial phase of integration and assimilation of the student into a dominant society. Diversity, with reference to that which is properly linguistic, is circumscribed to a pre-determined region or geographic space, as in the case of the Native Brazilian Indians, or to "regionalisms", as in the case of children from peripheral neighbourhoods in large urban centres, who generally are victims of rural migration. As in earlier documents, the connotation is of a difference in relation to a "non difference", which would be the Portuguese Language:

"Addressing bilingualism and multilingualism is a way to portray a wealth of diversity, where there is development from preserving elements that are common as well unique. It is possible to show the importance of language as part of the identity of an ethnic group, while presenting the structure and usage of the different languages of ethnic Native Brazilian groups existing in Brazil, or while maintaining the language of the country of origin in immigrant colonies. At the same time, addressing the role of the Portuguese language for unification offers the child tools for understanding determining factors of cultural life on a national level" (Brazil 1997 b: 78).

As is the case of the whole of the new proposal, the underlying idea behind this document is that without fluency in the standard norm of the National Language (read "written norm"), "linguistic minorities" are not allowed the possibility of ample participation 5. In other words, the Portuguese language, as an overbearing cultural, regional, dialectal entity, is imposed as a unifying national principle. Without fluency in this language, all linguistic minorities remain on the border of society. Thus, schools are viewed as a possibility for integration, because they are the main locus for learning Portuguese. And students from socially underprivileged strata would have to learn the majority language or so-called non-dialect, in order to avoid becoming part of the contingency of the already numerous lines of the "languageless":

However, to label all Brazilians who are not fluent in the standard norm as "languageless", as quoted above, evokes, to our understanding, the idea of annulment of systems which produce subjects and cultures, an even greater disservice to subjects who, through dialect and language, are constructing identities and history.

It would seem that the Parameters dedicated to the Portuguese Language for the first grades of elementary schooling (Brazil 1997 a) try to avoid the pitfalls of labelling people as languageless, by emphasising the need for "respect" for the forms of oral expression of the community the student belongs to. They also defend that there should be "great endeavour" in teaching them to "adapt" their speech to the context of communication. However, by electing the standard form of speech as the one that should be taught, the text betrays its hidden agenda:

The National Curriculum Parameters also betray their true views on the matter of textual and discursive genre. They ignore the written material which students of social-economically underprivileged classes produce and interpret daily in their social ambience. The document states, however, that one of the primary objectives of schooling is to make available to the student texts that circulate socially, teaching him to produce and interpret them.

In regard to teaching Portuguese in situations where communities use more than one language, it is interesting to note that in the fore-mentioned volume on cultural plurality (Brazil 1997 b), the Brazilian government suggests the possibility of maintaining the "language of the country of origin of colonies of immigrants", while at the same time stressing the "unifying role of the Portuguese Language" (p. 78). We must ask ourselves what innovations such possibilities could bring to schools situated in bilingual communities. We understand that answers lie elsewhere, in other volumes of the Parameters.

We glean some understanding by reading the volume on Língua Estrangeira para 5ª a 8ª séries (Foreign Language for 5th to 8th grade levels) (Brazil 1998). The proposal contained in this text is that the inclusion in the local curriculum of the language of the immigrant children is allowed. This means that, in such cases, Portuguese would continue as the language for teaching, while inclusion of the language of the majority of the community would be optional. Note that this option is supposedly available after the children have been taught to read and write, since foreign language occurs usually at the 5th grade level.

The only cases where there is a justification for "teaching Portuguese as a second language" (Brazil 1998: 23) is in the case of Native Brazilian Indians and the Deaf. This means that schools for the Deaf and for Native Brazilian Indians would not fall under the same linguistic policy as schools for other children, who are not Deaf or Native Brazilian Indians, since in those schools, Portuguese would be the first language, the language used for teaching.

In theory, the position of the Ministry of Education is not surprising. Regarding the Deaf, this is perfectly in accordance to Article 21 of the Salamanca Declaration of Principles, Policy and Practice in Special Education (Spain, June, 7 to 10, 1994). In practice, however, these recommendations are disregarded, which means that in the daily activities at school, the possibility that Deaf and hearing students might not be speaking the same language is not even considered by the school.

Although one would expect to find the issues of bilingualism and multilingualism in a specific volume entitled, for instance Linguistic Policy and Public Schools, this important theme is treated along with other topics such as gender, sexual choices, folklore, ethics, ecology, etc. in the volume on Transversal Themes. The decision to regard bilingualism as a transversal theme suggests that the government sees cultural and linguistic differences only as programmatic content to be apprehended by the student. In other words, linguistic diversity is reduced to the level of curricular content. That way, the state becomes exempt from formulating a linguistic policy that could adequately encompass linguistic diversity in Brazil.

Final considerations

In this paper, we have shown that acknowledging and respecting cultural and ethnic plurality on the one hand, while maintaining the teaching standard Portuguese, on the other hand, might reproduce the same type of discriminatory attitude as the one which produced earlier educational policies. It is our opinion that a school which actually intends to guarantee support and incentive to all children, by valuing and divulging cultural manifestations of all kinds, should not value formal standards and the texts produced by the erudite variety in detriment of other varieties. By the same token, it should not value erudite discursive genres produced by this same variety, silencing others, if it aims to change mentalities, overcome prejudice and fight discriminatory attitudes. Unless, of course, the annulment or the placement of cultures in a hierarchy is not considered discriminatory.

In the case of a supposedly monolingual country like Brazil, in which dialects are seen as differences in relation to a standard norm, and not necessarily systems which produce subjects and cultures, the task of a system of education which is truly bilingual or multicultural is still waiting to be done. This task means really taking linguistic and cultural differences into consideration, not with the intent of erasing them, but so as to perceive them as possibilities of new resources to be shared.

In specialised discourses on education, as well as in the discourse of everyday life, linguistic and cultural diversity is always seen as a "problem" to be overcome by the student. Influenced by such discourse, schools pressure learners belonging to linguistic minorities to be monolingual in standard Portuguese and to behave according to norms of interaction and interpretation of the privileged middle class, based on the assumption that this will be the only means of enabling his inclusion and participation in society.

At last, in spite of the fact that renowned specialists and educators (including university professors, technical personnel from municipal councils of education throughout the country) were called by the government to have an active role in writing the Parameters on a national level, we still feel that there is room to challenge this document. The final draft has silenced the discourse of the Deaf, the Native Brazilian Indians, minority groups, their teachers and their class representatives.

Nevertheless, we must admit that the government has echoed, albeit in a contradictory and anachronistic way, fragments of our own voices, creating the illusion that, in some way, our wishes have been taken into account. In other words, it makes each of us compose abstractly that which we call the State government. It turns us into co-authors, though disappointed ones, of that which we call the "official discourse".

About the Authors

Silvia Helena Barbi Cardoso (PhD in Linguistics from UNICAMP- UNIVERSIDADE DE CAMPINAS - BRAZIL) is supervisor of the Language Course at Faculdade de Americana; collaborator and professor in post-graduate programs in Language and Linguistics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais as well as at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.

Email: silviabarbi@uol.com.br

Regina Maria de Souza (PhD in linguistics from UNICAMP - UNIVERSIDADE DE CAMPINAS - BRAZIL) is a Clinical Psychologist and teacher in the field of psychology and language studies in graduate and post-graduate courses of the School of Education at the State University of Campinas, Brazil (UNICAMP); chairwoman of the Language and Deafness Work Group of the Associação Nacional de Pós Graduação em Letras e Lingüística (ANPOLL).

Notes

(1) On the subject of the school as subjectivity, a mechanism of rarification, read Foucault 1971;1979;1998. On the relations between language, diversity and teaching, substantial literature has been produced in recent times by authors of various approaches. One aspect which is frequently discussed is the higienic and homogeneic effect of teaching standard language writing to communities without writing or to linguistic minorities (Gnerre, 1987; Viñao Frago, 1993; Melo, 1997; among others). For a discussion of schooling in a bilingual context in Brazil, see Cavalcanti (1999).
(2) Data obtained from Doctor Eduardo Guimarães (professor at Unicamp, Institute for the Study of Language - IEL), during paper entitled Língua, História e Enunciação (Language, History and Enunciation) presented at the Faculdade de Educação at Unicamp on 10/09/2000.
(3) The LDB comprehends the major Law and Guidelines for Education in Brazil.
(4) These texts began to be published in the mid eighties, when the first version of what was to become the Proposta Curricular de Língua Portuguesa da CENP (Curricular Proposal for the Portuguese Language of the Coordenadoria de Ensino e Normas Pedagógicas of the Office of Education for São Paulo State Government). The fourth and last edition of CENP's Proposal was published in 1991. During this year, another document was published: Programa de primeiro grau da Secretaria Municipal de Educação da Cidade de São Paulo (which can be translated as the Elementary School Program for the Municipal Office of Education for the City of São Paulo). Proposals for the other states of Brazil were published in 1992 and 1993. Geraldi, Silva & Fiad (1996) examine 14 of these official documents, representative of the period between 1985 and 1994. Four basic themes are discussed: the concept of language, the notion of text, linguistic diversity and teacher orientation in language teaching through reading, writing and linguistic analysis.
(5) According to Freeman (1998), linguistic minorities include not only students whose first tongue is not the official one of the country, but also students whose linguistic variation is distant from that which is considered the standard norm.

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