I was with a casual friend on Saturday who is a (white) college professor. I haven’t had many opportunities to speak with him other than a hello from time to time. Anyway, he was telling us about a course he teaches, and how he wants to make an online version of it. He said it’s a “very popular” course and the kids love it. It was called something like the History of Englishes. So we asked him what he meant, and he said it was about the many different English languages we have here in America. He wasn’t just talking about dialects, though he said that’s part of it.
He told us (very seriously in tone) that the reason so many kids these days can’t pass the entrance exams is because they are written in languages they didn’t grow up with, and don’t understand. The example he gave was along the line of people these days struggling to understand books or essays written in “Olde English” or Shakespeare style, instead of the English we use currently. This is akin to POC not understanding “standard” English, because they don’t hear it at home. They are unfamiliar with it, and tests written in standard English don’t make any sense to them, so they guess. It’s like a foreign language to them. I wonder how he communicates with them in his classroom.
Mind you, this conversation took place while we were on his 40’ yacht anchored in a lake that we had been invited to for the day by his wife. She’s in my card club where we get together once a month for fun. I tend to wonder if his students would think differently about him if they knew he had that yacht. He and his wife were, of course, very generous to include us in their weekend plans. I still wonder why.
I agree with your casual friend that their are numerous versions of English used in America. In my experience, many “people of color” function well enough in several of these, and jump between different versions depending on the audience.
Other countries have analogous situations. Muslims commonly know the Koran in “Classical Arabic”, but normal spoken Arabic varies so much that people in different regions don’t necessarily understand each other. In Iran, school students are required to learn Farsi as the “standard” language for official use; it is not the most common mother tongue. Similar story for regional forms of Chinese. Students who want to succeed in higher education learn to function in the Standard Language of their country. Only in the US is this an arena for excues and whining.