Language variatins, language ideologies

Before reading Lippie-Green's Chapter  I had never considered to view non-accent or "standard English" as a myth or abstraction.  When you think about it, it almost makes perfect sense.  We always hear these concepts spoken of and we read about them all the time, but have we actually ever heard a non-accent or standard English spoken before?  What does it mean to have a non-accent, Standard English language lexicon?  Because the word "accent" itself cannot be easily defined, making sense of "non-accent" could be that much more complicated.  I had also not given much thought to differences among first and second language accents.  Individuals who are native English speakers have an accent that varies from region to region.  Individuals who are native speakers of a language other than English and acquire English, on the other hand, the term accent is used to refer to the breakthrough of native language phonology into the target language.  For example, my mother, who is a native speaker of Spanish has an L2 accent when speaking English.  Although she has been here in the United States for over 30 years, she will never be able to get rid of her accent when speaking English. 

                I found Mr. Kahakua’s story to be very bothersome because he was discriminated against based on his accent.  The simple fact that he had twenty years of experience and considerable educational background would make him, in my eyes, more than qualified for his promotion.  It is unfortunate that these kinds of things exist in our society today.  His story really hit close to home because something similar happened to my mother.  She has been without work for a while now, but has been applying at different places.  She has told me about one employment where she has applied numerous times and spoken to the hiring manager a couple of times.  On both occasions the manager pretended to remember my mother and has told her they were in fact hiring and that he would call her back to follow up- he never called her.  My mom expressed to me that she knew that he was just dismissing her because of her minimal English speaking abilities and accent, although the position she applied for would require little to know English proficiency.  Unfortunately, I think her suspicions are correct, and I do strongly believe that discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and language are extremely prevalent in our society today.