IDS2935 Linguistic Prejudice Test 1 Review

Linguistic Prejudice

is directed against people who speak
with a “nonstandard” accent or grammar; ways of speaking
are often connected with race, ethnicity, gender
identity/orientation, geographic location, linguistic
background, and socio-economic status

Communicative Effectiveness

the ability to convey a message clearly and accurately

Language Subordination

– Social categorization is constructed

– Social Groups are linked to ways of speaking

– Language is mystified,

– Authority is claimed,

– Misinformation is generated,

– Targeted languages are trivialized,

– Conformers are held up as positive examples, Non-

conformers are vilified or marginalized,

– Explicit promises are made, Threats are made

Second Langauge

(L2) 

Overt Prestige

formal

Symbolic Revalorization

This pattern of using language as a stand in for other attitudes

Discrimination

Matched Guise Technique

Matched guise technique: use the same speaker for the

recordings, with the speaker using different languages/

varieties/accents

– Can also take a single recording and manipulate the

acoustics of it (though danger of sounding artificial)

■ Better at revealing attitudes towards the language itself, not

extraneous speaker characteristics,

Indexical Meaning

points to something about a person

three levels

• category: demographic or narrower

• trait: types of people

• stance: momentary wat of acting (ex. emotional states)

Race vs. Ethinicity

ethnicity: “clusters of people who have common cultural traits

that they distinguish from those of other people” (for

example: language, religion, tradition, values, food

habits, etc.)

race: opular understanding joins physical features and behavior

Ethnicity is treated as something that can change. Race was

unchangeable, caused differences that couldn’t be transcended

African American English (AAE)

Native Americans

mocking

descriptive

describe and analyze how language is used by speakers

accent

pronunciation generally, including

stress, consonants, vowels, intonation, rhythm, but not other

varietal/dialectal differences (syntax, morphology, lexicon...

standard English

acquisition

covert presitige

casual

prejudice

a negative attitude toward a group or toward members of the group—- based on stereotypes

implicit bias

when we have attitudes towards people or

associate stereotypes with them without our conscious

knowledge

observer’s paradox

people will behave differently to appease what they believe the observer wants

indexical bleaching

when the association between a

form and its indexical meaning becomes weaker (

racialization

the process by which objects, ideals, individuals, or social

practices come to be drawn into racial discourses” (

i variation connected with communities that share other aspects of

identity (including race and ethnicity)

– different ways of speaking become linked with racial categories and

serve as indexical markers of racial and ethnic identity

– beliefs about variation reproduce racial difference

hispanic american english

Phonetics/phonology:

– dental stops (t

̪, d

̪) for ‘th’ fricatives

– /z/

 [s] for example in ‘easy’, ‘raise’, ‘save’ (all with [s] )

(same with /v/

 [f] )

– merge /ʃ/-/t͡ʃ/ as in teacher pronounced with /ʃ/ (first sound

of ‘shop’)

– intonational differences (pitch rises and falls)

Some linguistic features

■ Grammatical:

– double negatives “he’s not doing you nothing” (EWAC p. 108)

– copula deletion “this a school”, “they too old” (like AAVE)

■ Lexical:

– Barely: He barely got here = He just got here

– Borrowings: Aguila= be alert, Orale = right on,

– ¿Y qué? = so what?,

– Mij(o)(a) = my son/daughter

American sign language (ASL)

double negatives

prescriptive

associated with standard language, prescirbes rules and norms for language use

variety/ variation

first langauge

aqcuired naturally, without effort (L1)

bilingualism

communicative burden

stereotype

represent the traits that we view as

characteristic of social groups, or of individual members of

those groups, and particularly those that differentiate groups

from each other.”

implicit attitude tests

measures attitudes and

beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report

measures the strength of

associations between concepts (e.g., black people, gay people) and

evaluations (e.g., good, bad) or stereotypes (e.g., athletic, clumsy).

sociolinguistic interview

Goal: elicit variation across styles, systematically (both
the elicitation & the variation)
■ Goal: to get primary evidence for sociolinguistic
stratification and language change
Analysis can

– look at specific linguistic features,

– quantify differences across different styles for individuals

– quantify differences across groups/speech communities

made up of individuals sharing social characteristics

cultural appropration

production experiements

Target list of words/sentences designed in advance

– ask large number of people to say same things & compare

– especially useful when studying something relatively rare

■ Better and more direct comparisons

– control the factors you’re not interested in, like context,

frequency, priming by previously mentioned words/ideas, etc.

– you’re more sure that the results you find are not due to

extraneous factors (big advantage over interviews)

Asian Amricans

code-switching

reflecting the speaker’s ability to switch between languages
or language varieties dependent on a large number of factors.

rhotic/ non-rhotic

Ideology: Standard language ideology

a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous

spoken language ...

 which names as its model the written language, but which

is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper

middle class” (p. 87, Lippi-Green 2013)

 a rationalization for discriminating against stigmatized

accents/varieties/people (p. 65 EWAC 2023)

Ideology: monolingualism= natural

Monolingualism is presented as the normal state of humans:

one person, one language

Ideology: bilingualism = deficit

where

knowing a language other than English is considered a

disadvantage.

one nation= one langauge

or “the myth of the monolingual nation”, suggesting that

bilingualism will cause social division in a nation

Ideology: nativism

protecting intrests of naitve born against those of immigrants

Ideology: oralism

belief that spoken language is better than or more

necessary than sign language (“manual” language

What are the drawbacks to oralism?

– lip-reading: doomed to only partial success

– focus on speaking orally: time & effort not being used

for other areas of education

– denying access to signed language prevents children

from acquiring it early

Ideology: audism

belief that one who can hear

typical range of frequencies at the typical volume is superior

to someone who cannot. Leads to...

– conclusion that sign languages are inferior to spoken (or

aren’t languages at all)

– view anyone who can’t live as the hearing do as inferior

– deaf/hard of hearing seen as disabled, have a deficit

linguistic facts of life

There is a finite set of potentially meaning-bearing sounds (vowels, consonants, tones)

which can be produced by human vocal apparatus. The set in its entirety is universal,

available to all human beings without physical handicap.

Each language uses some, but not all, sounds available.

Sounds are organized into systems, in which each element stands in relationship to

the other elements (phonology). The same inventory of sounds can be organized into

a number of possible systems. Children are born with the ability to produce the entire

set of possible sounds, but eventually restrict themselves to the ones they hear used

around them.

Children exposed to more than one language during the language acquisition process

may acquire more than one language, if the social conditioning factors are favorable.

At some time in adolescence, the ability to acquire language with the same ease as
young children atrophies.5
There are as yet poorly understood elements of cognition and perception which have
to do with the degree of success with which an adult will manage to acquire a new
phonology, or accent. In summary, the phenomenon that we call a foreign accent is a
complex aspect of language that affects speakers and listeners in both perception and
production and, consequently, in social interaction (Derwing and Munro 2005: 379)

discourse vs. Discourse

Discourse” refers to “broad social narratives and ways of

speaking that serve to support social structures” (EWAC pg. 5)

• “discourse” refers to language in use, typically everyday

interactions