ch 11 Language, Race, and Ethnicity

Multiple Dimensions of Difference and Inequality

  • Language use is influenced by various dimensions of difference and inequality, including gender, socioeconomic class, age, regional identity, caste, and profession.
  • This chapter focuses on race and ethnicity and how they are shaped by linguistic practices.

Key Issues to Address

  • The rule-governed nature of African American English (AAE).
    • Despite misrepresentations of AAE as "sloppy" standard English, scholars have demonstrated its regularities at every linguistic level.
    • Understanding AAE relates to language ideologies and indexicality.
  • Racist language.
    • Examining linguistic practices that constitute racism, such as Mock Spanish.
  • Language and racial/ethnic identities.
    • Exploring how complexities arise from individuals belonging to or interacting with multiple races and ethnic groups.
    • Considering the influence of mass media and popular culture on linguistic practices.
    • Understanding the heightened awareness of issues related to race and ethnicity in the context of movements like Black Lives Matter.

Defining Race and Ethnicity

  • Misconceptions surround the concept of race.
  • Many white Americans hold an inaccurate "folk theory" of race and racism.
    • Belief in race as a basic category of human biological variation.
    • Belief that each human being can be assigned to a race, or a mixture of races.
  • This folk theory is widespread but mistaken, according to anthropologists and social scientists.
  • Official statement on race of the American Anthropological Association (AAA):
    • Human races are not natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences.
    • Human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.
    • Genetic analysis indicates that most physical variation (about 94%) lies within so-called racial groups.
      9494
    • Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes.
      66
    • There is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them.
    • Neighboring populations interbreed, maintaining humankind as a single species.
    • Physical variations occur gradually rather than abruptly over geographic areas.
    • Physical traits are inherited independently of one another.
    • Attempts to establish lines of division among biological populations are arbitrary and subjective.
  • Race is an important social category that influences people’s life trajectories and identities.
  • Race is viewed by many scholars as a central organizing principle.
  • Reflection upon the paradox that, because of the so-called “one-drop rule,” a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman cannot give birth to a white child, leads to appreciate the social rather than biological foundations of the concept of race.
  • Race is better thought of as a process of racialization or racial formation.
  • Race signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.
    • Selection of particular human features for racial signification is a social and historical process.
  • Race provides insight into the cultural and social meanings people associate with perceived or actual biological differences, such as skin color or hair type.
  • Groups now considered “white” were initially not included in this category.
    • Benjamin Franklin wrote that Swedes and Germans were “swarthy” and did not include them among the “white people”.
  • Irish immigrants were initially subject to discrimination and excluded from white society but allied themselves together in opposition to African Americans.
  • Jews have been shuttled from one side of the American racist binary to the other.
    • At the turn of the last century, Jews in Europe and the United States were considered a separate, inferior race.
    • Contemporary white supremacists define Jews as nonwhite.
    • One white supremacist publication states that Jews are “not a religion, they are an Asiatic race, locked in mortal conflict with Aryan man”.
  • Racial classifications in countries other than the United States vary.
    • In Brazil, scholarly debates have focused on the meanings of multiple Brazilian racial categories that intersect with class, gender, and sexuality.
    • In Nepal, caste, ethnicity, and religion have been the most salient forms of social differentiation.
    • During the 1990s, activists from various Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups posited three races in the world.
    • A politician in eastern Nepal invoked this outdated tripartite racial classification to unite linguistically and culturally diverse ethnic groups under the umbrella of one political party.
    • One person stated, “We didn’t know that we were Mongols until the MNO came here”.
    • Ethnic formation is more accurately studied as a phenomenon having to do with economics, politics, and nation-state formation.
    • Cultural elements are often foregrounded, posited, or brought into existence as part of this ethnicizing process, but the origins are often material rather than purely cultural.
    • “Ethnic groups are thus not fixed phenomena but are constantly being created and re-created anew; objective realities such as differences of language, territory, religion, and custom are transformed into the basis of a subjective consciousness or self-awareness”.
  • Ethnic discourses “frame group origin in cultural terms”.
  • Racial discourses “frame group origin in natural terms”.
  • Racialized people are considered out of place; they are dirty, dangerous, and unwilling or unable to participate constructively in the nation-state.
  • The cultural differences of ethnicized people are considered safe, ordered, and “a contribution to the nation-state offered by striving immigrants making their way up the ladder of class mobility”.
  • Language differences are often racialized.
    • An inability to speak English marks someone as disorderly and unlikely to experience social mobility.
  • Language is central to the ways in which race and ethnicity are constructed, conceptualized, and experienced.
  • Race and language have been mutually constructed as natural, pre-existing entities in tandem with each other throughout the history of specific societies.

The Rule-Governed Nature of African American English

  • African American English (AAE) sounds like incorrect or sloppy Standard American English (SAE) to many Americans.
  • AAE is a linguistic system with its own phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
  • Many of AAE’s features are shared with other dialects of English.
  • Not all African Americans speak AAE, and there are regional differences and language ideologies regarding the advantages, disadvantages, and meanings associated with speaking AAE.
  • There are broadly overarching similarities in the linguistic practices of AAE speakers in all regions of the United States.
  • Some African Americans speak absolutely no African American English.
  • AAE is a language variant learned in particular social settings.
  • African Americans can code-switch between SAE and AAE.
  • There are also more “standard” variants of AAE that some individuals use in certain circumstances.
  • Code-switching can help build subtle alliances or identities or can index unequal power relations among speakers.
  • The use of invariant or habitual “be”.
  • Copula deletion.
  • Double negatives.
  • The reduction of final consonants.
  • Pronouncing the word “ask” as “aks”.

Invariant or Habitual “Be”

  • The use of “be” in its unconjugated, or invariant, form is a widely stigmatized and misinterpreted feature of AAE.
  • The invariant “be” indicates habitual behavior or a usual state of being.
  • Replacing the “be” with “is” or “are” would change the meaning.
  • “She be happy” would indicate a perpetual state of happiness, whereas “She is happy” (or simply, “She happy”) would indicate only a momentary feeling of happiness.
  • The invariant “be” is only one of a whole class of auxiliaries that enable AAE speakers to choose among a much wider array of moods and aspects in their verb forms than are available to SAE speakers.
  • The use of such aspectual and preverbal markers as “come,” “go,” “done,” and “steady” provide AAE speakers with semantic possibilities and nuanced eloquence that cannot easily be translated into any other dialect of English.
  • Non-AAE-speaking individuals who attempt to come up with examples of AAE often misuse the invariant “be”.

Copula Deletion

  • Copula deletion is the omission of the conjugated form of “to be”.
  • In AAE it is perfectly grammatical to say, “She happy,” rather than “She is happy”.
  • Copula deletion follows rigorous rules, even though they operate largely below the level of awareness in the minds of most AAE speakers.
  • These rules are similar to the ones in SAE that let speakers know when it is appropriate to use a contraction.
  • Many other languages in the world, including Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Swahili, feature copula deletion in some or all of the tenses of the verb “to be”.

Double Negatives

  • Double or even triple negatives are grammatical in AAE, as well as in many other languages and in other dialects of English.
  • Working-class Londoners who speak the Cockney dialect regularly use double negatives.
  • Multiple negatives were common in Chaucer and Shakespeare.
  • Multiple negatives seem to have fallen out of favor during the eighteenth century when grammarians attempted to set a prescribed way of speaking and writing English for “polite” or “cultivated” members of society.
  • It is an accident of history, however, that has stigmatized double or multiple negatives in English.
  • In many languages such as French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Hungarian (to mention only a few), not using a double negative is ungrammatical.
  • The preference of one dialect over another is one based on social, political, or economic factors – it cannot be based on linguistic factors because all dialects are equally logical and grammatical.

The Reduction of Final Consonants

  • AAE differs from other dialects of English not just in its morphology and syntax but also in its phonology.
  • The phonology of AAE is also rule-governed and therefore highly regular.
  • It is necessary to know that “stop consonants” include the letters p, t, k, b, d, and g.
  • Some consonants are voiceless and therefore involve no vibration of the vocal cords, and some are voiced.
  • A stop consonant at the end of a word may be omitted (and usually is) if it is preceded by another consonant of the same voicing.

Pronouncing the Word “Ask” as “Aks”

  • AAE also contains a few idiosyncratic phonological features, some of which it shares with other dialects of English.
  • One of these is the pronunciation of the word “ask” as “aks”.
  • Critics, such as a call-in viewer of the “Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1987, say things like, what makes me feel that blacks tend to be ignorant is that they fail to see that the word is spelled A-S-K, not A-X. And when they say aksed, it gives the sentence an entirely different meaning.

Racist Language and Racism in Language

  • Language ideologies that are dominant in the United States, combined with a widespread American folk theory of race, ensure that the everyday talk produced by average white, middle-class Americans and distributed in respected media continues to produce and reproduce White racism.
  • Racism is a vital and formative presence in American lives, resulting in hurt and pain to individuals, to glaring injustice, in the grossly unequal distribution of resources along racially stratified lines, and in strange and damaging errors and omissions in public policy both domestic and foreign.
  • Racism is largely produced in and through everyday talk through unintentional, indirect uses of language that reinforce racist stereotypes.
  • Mock Spanish is a way of racializing Spanish speakers in the United States.
  • A key element of the American folk theory of race and racism is that it is a quality of individuals, and only of those few individuals who are virulently racist, such as white supremacists.
  • Racism is more a function of institutions, norms, and practices that facilitate the production of racist effects, so even when individuals do not intend to be racist or discriminatory, their actions may have these effects because of the institutions and norms they act within.
  • Mock Spanish is a way of elevating whiteness and pejoratively racializing Spanish speakers through a process of indirect indexicality.
  • People who use Mock Spanish are not in any way being intentionally racist.
  • Direct indexicality explicitly indexes the speaker as humorous or cosmopolitan, and is usually fully acknowledged by the speaker.
  • Indirect indexicality implicitly indexes negative stereotypes of Mexicans and other Latin Americans as treacherous, lazy, politically corrupt, or sexually loose.
  • The stereotypes are reinforced when they are invoked in this sort of indirect indexicality.
  • There are undoubtedly many such instances of covert racist discourse in Mock Spanish – and in Mock AAE or Mock Asian (also called “Yellow English,” see Reyes and Lo 2009) – that are illuminated in a valuable way by Hill’s analysis.
  • Utterances often accomplish many social tasks simultaneously, so it is not difficult to imagine instances of Mock Spanish that not only directly index the speaker’s humor and indirectly index negative stereotypes but also challenge or parody those stereotypes in some way, for example.
  • Examine the anti-hegemonic racial humor that used to be shared on the social media platform Vine.
  • “In any form, anti-hegemonic sociopolitical humor must represent dominant discourses and beliefs in order to position them as objects of critique, and comedians who use this form of humor must do so in a way that clearly conveys that they do not subscribe to the ideologies they present”.
  • Racism is not a quality that individuals have in a static way but rather something that they do – that is, rather than being inherently racist individuals, Pagliai argues, some people enact racism through their behavior and conversations.
  • “The role of conversational agreement cannot be understated. It inevitably works at reinforcing racializing or racist discourses already present in the society, by reproducing them and creating consent around them”.
  • Racism operates in language through the process of what John Baugh (2003) calls “linguistic profiling.”
  • Feelings of prejudice can influence perceptions of comprehensibility and credibility, these studies have found.
  • “Facts conveyed in a non-native accent are heard as less true. Analyses of legal settings around the globe suggest that those who speak stigmatized dialects are often misunderstood, misheard and mistranscribed”.
  • Racial categories and racialized language ideologies can influence perceptions even without our being aware of the process.

Language and Racial/Ethnic Identities

  • There are distinctive semantic and pragmatic features of AAE.
  • Scholars have studied AAE-specific oral traditions such as the call-and-response patterns often found in African American churches, gospel music, and hip-hop; linguistic practices such as “signifying,” which involves indirectness and cultural allusions; “instigating,” the fabricated conflicts Goodwin (1990) studies among African American girls in Philadelphia; and “the dozens,” which is a competition between two speakers, usually young African American males, involving humor and ritualized insults.
  • African American beauty parlors and barber shops have also been sites for social and linguistic research on the intersections among language, race, and identity formation.
  • Some research by scholars explores communities in which race and language are intertwined in unexpected or hybrid ways.
  • Cecilia Cutler (2003) looks at how some white, middle-class teenagers in the New York area have adopted elements from AAE in their speech as a result of their affiliation with hip-hop.
  • Such linguistic practices raise complicated and interesting questions about identity formation, authenticity, and racialized language use.
  • Asian Americans are uniquely racialized” in the US context.
  • Asian Americans comprise an extremely diverse group of ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and linguistic practices, and yet they are often lumped together as “model minorities” and “honorary whites,” or else as “forever foreign”.
  • A distinctive ethnic dialect is not necessary for the formation of an ethnic identity.
  • The identities that emerge through linguistic and cultural performances and practices are complex, multifaceted ones.
  • It is nonetheless extremely fruitful to see how these individuals “do” ethnicity through their linguistic practices.

Conclusion

  • Language relates to race and ethnicity in controversial, indirect, and fascinating ways.
  • The rule-governed nature of AAE can be seen in the various phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of the AAE linguistic system
  • Overt and covert racism can be found in a number of linguistic practices – in some Mock Spanish (or Mock AAE or Mock Asian), for example, and more subtly in conversational co-constructions.
  • Race and ethnicity are intertwined with other dimensions of difference, inequality, and identity, such as gender, class, age, and region.
  • Research on these topics involves close attention to language use and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, because these are the methods that are best able to shed light on the complex, systemic, and controversial areas of language, power, and agency in the contemporary world.