terry notes
Chapter 6 -
Standard English as a social construct: Lippi- Green discusses how “standard English” is not inherently superior or more “correct” than other dialects, but is rather a socially constructed form of language that reflects power dynamics in society.
Historical context; The rise of Standard English was linked to social, political,a nd economic changes in the United States, particularly the spread of education and mass media, and the influence of the upper class.
Language and power: Standard English is often associated with social prestige and power while non-standard dialects (like African American Vernacular English, or AAVE) are stigmatized, contributing to societal hierarchies.
Social consequences of non-standard speech: People who speak nonstandard English are frequently discriminated against in educational, legal, and professional settings. This discrimination often perpetuates social inequality, as individuals from marginalized groups maya be seen as less capable or less intelligent due to their accent or dialect.
Key Points :
Standard English is a socially privileged dialect, not linguistically superior.
Language ideologies contribute to the marginalization of speakers of non- standard dialects.
Linguistic discrimination reinforces social hierarchies.
Non-standard dialects, such as AAVE, face systematic stigmatization.
Chapter 7: Language and Discrimination
Linguistic profiling: Lippi- Green highlights the phenomenon of “linguistic profiling,” where people are judged or
Implicit Biases: Individuals often hold unconscious biases against speakers of non-standard dialects. These biases are rooted in cultural stereotypes, which can lead to discrimination without individuals realizing it.
Legal Implications: Lippi- Green discusses several legal cases where accents and dialects have played a role in discrimination, highlighting the challenges of addressing linguistic discrimination in the courts.
Language as a social marker: A person’s language, particularly their accent, can serve as a social marker that indicates their socioeconomic status, education, race, or regional origin. These markers can be used to justify discriminatory practices.
Cultural consequences; the stigma surrounding non-standard dialects can undermine individual self-esteem and lead to a sense of inferiority among speakers of non-standard varieties of English. This can further perpetuate social exclusion.
Key Points From Reading:
Linguistic profiling involves discrimination based on accent or dialect.
Implicit biases lead to unfair treatment of speakers with non-standard English.
Legal systems often fail to protect against linguistic discrimination
Accents and dialects act as social markers of identity and status.
Discrimination based on language can lead to psychological harm and social exclusion.
Race, Language, and Linguistics Diversity 3 - Lecture terry
Two ways we have connected language and race:
Analogy between languages/ dialects and races
An examination of the role of language use in racial categorization and construction of racial identity.
Are races like languages / dialects ? : Languages/ dialects do not exist as objectively real individuated entities. They are epiphenomenal. (secondary or additional - related to a by- product that comes from but does not casually influence one or more processes.
Are languages/ dialects “socially constructed” ? Being socially constructed, epiphenomenal does not mean unimportant or without consequences. Definition said that epiphenomena lack casual power, but we may need to qualify that statement. Ideas exert a special kind of power.
Although languages/ dialects may not be “real” they are geographically separated people and populations.
Somewhat similar to populations, linguists define “speech communities” and “communities of practice”.
These groupings are defined in terms of social spaces/ practices and geography.
Two ways connecting language and race:
Analogy between languages/ dialects and races.
An examination of the role of language use in racial categorization and the construction fo racial identity.
Lippie green says “we use variation in language to construct ourselves as social beings, to signal who we are and who we are not and do not want to be”
She is interested in language discrimination and language as a proxy for other types of discrimination including racial discrimination.
Her view: It's not the language, it's the beliefs about the language and institutional practices that follow from them.
She introduces the idea of a Standard Language Ideology (SLI)
Ideology “ the promotion of the needs and interests of a dominant group or class at the expense of marginalized groups, by means of disinformation and misrepresentation of those non-dominant groups”.
“ a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language which is imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions and which names as its model he written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class”
Connects to traditional : Standard and vernacular are dialects
Labovian: Standard and vernacular are styles.
11/19 → Rishika
Readings:
The position of indians in england has changed a lot but the group is still identified by a few characteristics without thought for the distinction factors → wave 1
Must tale gender, history, and class into account → wave 2
Must look at the individual → wave 3
These characteristics are inseparable from other dimensions of social life
Even the name Kachowski has been indexed to working-class in Pittsburgh
Andres has an essence of hispanicness which leads to him getting more chips are banditios…hes also a man so they think he needs more food
Leads to the erasure of important internal differences
IMPORTANT STUDY
Examined three generations of Punjabi Londoners
Have social meanings conveyed by community accent features changed over time?
Do we see systematic links between ethnic and other social meanings?
Are these interactions idiosyncratic at the individual level
Phase 1: migration of visible minority of asians and racial conflict. Far-right, anti-immigration rallies, riots, hate crimes
Phase 2: second gen being exposed to this and more multicultural schools
Racial identities are indexed with gender, class, and historical context
Ethnic speech features: broadly limited to accent or grammatical features that are derived from indian language influence (or perceived derivation)
Using how an individual shifts their language with situations (wave 3) by collecting recordings in daily life
Found major differences in ethnolinguistic variation but more related to gender and time than just ethnicity
Network Diversity Index: how diverse each individual’s personal social network was (how many unrelated groups the person interacted with on a regular basis) → gendered reversal in network diversity
Women are employed outside the community
Men are socialized within the the community
Lecture Notes:
Analogy with languages/speeches and races
Language is one aspect of human variation
I. populations that are set apart geographically nad socially, traits that are heritable (passed down)
So we can look at this other aspect of human variation
Language's role in racial groupings
Functionally when people are grouping into races they use various criteria that is standardized (there is no singular biological criteria they are basing_
This is why we look at wave three (language variation as part of its function for group formation)
This gets caught in the language that we perform
We looked at how languages role in racial groupings
Language subordination: language is connected to all these different notions of groups so we use language as a proxy…language discrimination/subordination as a proxy for the more essentialized notions of race
I. Mechanism:
Ii. Model for how that gets implemented by institutions that allow us to pick up on how peir spoke..hierarchical notion
Ch 7. Case study with children’s stories in the big bad wolf… how particular language associated with particular people get spoon fed
Labov’s language v. vernacular v. a style that one had to learn which let him make that connection to race and class and how we construct our ideas around race
Changing dialects of Punjabi in London by Sharma
Revisiting conventional versus indexical meaning
How do ideas about race affect our use/experience of language?
Jocks and burnouts this idea of coconstruction of language groups is important…seen in the third wave
Those categories that people were examining (Indian middle class girls use this language (fixed easily identifiable groups that are self-defined) is 1st wave. Going back to piers Roth article, people’s different conceptions of race and in the first wave you cut out what the speaker thinks
How do our experiences with language affect our ideas about race?
Interested about how people read race into ideas of language, class, gender and how they then perform
Speech (sounds)
Linguistics (style)
Language is more than sound and all the parts of language are given racial weight
Syntax: the rule for organizing words into sentences
operating in systems and internal rules that you follow…how do you organize words into sentences
Chompsky: colorless green ideas sleep furiously…as someone that speaks standard english that is a well structured sentence that has no objective meaning
Put what table on…not well formed but communicated meaning well
You should have different systems that interact but they should let you make different judgements
Semantics: the meaning of words and sentences
The literal meaning of words and the pieces of them (pre-, suffix, etc)
Pragmatics: the meaning derived from context beyond words
The weather…we all talk about it, we all experience it, we all call it weather
Medorologistics: the experts talk about pressure systems and calc 3
The average joe doesn’t think about more indepth
Meaning, outside of specialists, what words means…we think much faster than we can speak…if you want to convey meaning you don’t but everything into words
We extract meaning in other ways
How's the food? People are leaving…There is not a single word that says the food is bad but that meaning is conveyed
Phonology: the organization of speech sounds in a language
When we talk about giving these parts of language racial significance we are talking about giving them a social meaning
Social meaning identifies the constellations of traits that linguistics
Beltrama 2020
Semantic Meaning V. Social Meaning
Semantic -
Conventional
Presupposes intentionality
Morpheme: smallest piece of sound (i walked(t)) but not (t)able
Social Meaning
Indexical
You say that (t) like someone from other there that thinks like that
We can index anything and any piece of language
Only requires legibility: i don't have to intend anything i just have to notice something or think that i notice something
Units spread across the grammar
Social meaning is spread across the entire grammar but that doesn’t mean it is evenly spread
Many argue that phonological units and patterns are better carriers or social mean than either words or their syntactic arrangements
Pragmatic meaning is something that blurs the lins
You’re driving home and you stop at the read light because the red light means stop → as a group of people we’ve decided on a convention
We see smoke coming out of a house so we think fire → observation leads to judgements
Its counterintuitive → we think that social things are made on conventions and choices but no
Sociophonetics (although this social meaning is across the entire grammar people argue that phonological units tell us things better)
A lot of people get syntax, semantics, and phonological units early
(p)aper v. sto(p) → we put these two sounds in the same category even though they are different
There are words in hindi that differ completely if you use the different p sound
Babies are very attentive to the different speech sounds of people…if something interested them they suck harder…once they are 10 months old they stop perceiving the distinctions
That's why its so hard for people to lose their accents (its about what they perceive and hear)
Indexing
The kinds of information that each of these systems are carrying and how they are indexed
Index a particular morphine to give it some social meaning…if we change it we might also change the conventional meaning (propositional meaning)
Ed indexing is harder than (t) or (p) because they don’t have a purpore persay
How stable are social meanings?
Things that have one type of social meaning now can be different later
The groups might have different social meanings
Associating the way you say this with x group and so i'm associating a characteristic with x group (stacking indexing)
How unique are social meanings?
Lanague difference to construct and perform social differences in jock and burnouts.
How they pronounce their vowels…they pronounce this x way is jock
Burnouts (anti-establishment, outside of the school system): they borrowed how the intercity kids at another school spoke. They said thats tuff…the way the black intercity kids spoke…they associated that group with anti-establishment
Indexing is a way to put social meanings together
How we use our experiences to put indexes together
Today’s reading
Typical Asian form:
Typical British form:
Different ways of pronouncing the /t/
We might produce different sounds by where we produce our tongues
Butter…a glottal stop (a brief pause/stop)
Sharma is talking about “styles” here not dialects or varieties
They are able to see many styles in london
The posalbeolar a
Gen 1 - does not orientate to British prestige associations for either forms in terms of class
Gen 2 (immigrant populations) - start seeing shift
Gen 3 - siginifgant correlations with formality for both variables (what started as an ethnic meaning takes on a more class based meaning)
The younger speakers still have ethnic forms they use to differeiante ethinically
We get this reindexing
We associate types of music with different types of people
UNC Indian international students
The delphi accent might seem like lower class/out of place/dumb to the average student
Is different to how an indian-american student sees the international accent. It distinuishes people
11/21
Lecture Notes:
The meaning of Ching-Chong: Language, Racism, and Response in New Media
Indexical and social
How is this racial meaning shaped and converyed especially in twitter and instagram
A young women went on a rant and said ching-chong
Chun picks this incident and this word because if we think in our terms it doesn’t have any conventional meaning
Even though it is meant to be a mockery of asian people it doesn’t follow any phonological pattern of any asian language
We’ll be connecting this to the full span of the semester
Phonological patterning
Indexing
This that don’t have conventional meaning a lot easier
I now pronounce you man and wife…it does something by virtue of speech
The song was intended to sound like english to an italian audience even though there wasn’t any english other than the words “alright”
+
The guy on the talk show with the piano
Do they sound like english…do they sound alike
What a language sounds like to people who don’t speak it, can be very different from how the language sounds to native speakers
Ching-Chong is made up of Englishs sounds and pattern of aniphonoy (ding-dong, sing-song) → it uses english phonetics and phonology to mock non english phonology
Phonetics: the study of speech sounds (out in the world as you speak → babies being in tune to all the possible phonetics)
Phonology: the organization of speech sounds in a language (how you organize things in your brain)
People put together language trees
Different inventories of speech sounds (phones)
We can make clicks (physical ability) but the language of english deos not make use of this inventory.
Chun: what do clicks sound like to use: they sound like gibberish and with the behaviors of acting like a monkey that trevor noah was doinging can index clicks to being less evolved and “smart”
Different categories of speech sounds (phonemic inventories)
Phoneme → mental category / /
Allophone → physical realization of a phoneme [ ]
sto/p/ v. /p/aul→ paper doesn’t move (no aspiration v. aspiration), its a different sound but in the same category; in hindi they would be a different categories because they are as different as /p/ and /k/
Different phonological rules (allophonic variation)
You know when each allophone is exerted
How sound categories change
What sounds are around…how do you
These rules differ by variety
Ex. E. v W. Masseuses In W. they don’t say park the car in harvard yard. Its not a difference in the speech inventories (theyh can make the r sound), but they do have different phonological rules. The rules that tell them that r sound gets pronounced or gets dropped (its very predictably).
Sometimes we think of people with different phonological rule systems as being lazy with their language but it is every bit as sophisticated
Each one o these things is something we can index to give social meaning to the structural
Participation in sound shifts (rearranging of contrasting phones in words)
Language is always changing
Sounds collapsing into the same categories or diverging
Vowel system moving around
Will Labov: northern cities vowel shift → mass of cities around the great lakes (cleveland, detroit, etc)
Nbc standard: what newscasters were tought; were not just thinking about variation were introducing that standard variation ideology. This is the variation that is standard.
The misunderstanding of block and black because of a single vowel
North Americans are growing apart linguistically even though we all watch the same tv
Happening in those locations but not within african american speakers…labov would think this because of one of the three myths: endangered language endangered people
This is a very first wave way of asking (we are looking at the group from the outside..asking do they do this? no) we get averaging that looses nuance
Shes concerned with overally generalizing what any group of people are saying…who is indigenous to a place and whose language are we speaking…we give the standard language to the dominant group even if another group has been there for longer
Theres a lot of different things people are doing in biker communities in black communiites, black intercity people that are on the path of upward economic mobility, black intercity peopel that do not want to leave. They are all doing something slightly different with their vowels that only they can perceive.
Prosody (stress and intonation)
11/26
Lecture summary:
-Historical Linguistics: the history of individual languages; helps in determining which languages are related and what their common ancestors were like
-Somewhat related to sociolinguistics: variation in one language over time can affect how language changes over time
-Language difference can be led by formation of different social groups
-Dialect Continuum Problem: languages are a mix of social and structural properties, and as a result there is no real idea of individual languages
-Somewhat contradictory to historical linguist thought, but historical linguists are aware there are some principles that their interpretation doesn’t support (they simply form groupings to learn from them, this doesn’t mean they’re the only ones or “right ones”)
-Language trees can be created (similar to phylogenetic trees), but no one speaks the proto-languages anymore (therefore linguists have to use comparative method)
-Potential reasons words from two different languages are similar in sound and meaning: languages come together and mix/borrow same word, languages have roots in other languages, physiological reasons (it’s easier to say certain sounds), onomatopoeia reasons, new words could have been recently invented, people bring words from place to place, chance resemblance, etc.
-How to tell which reason is right > Comparative Method: compare geographical and historical reasons and look for systematic sound correspondences that occur across many words/morphemes (can’t just be in one part of language)
-Genetically related languages: have the same common lingual ancestor (this doesn’t mean the people that speak them are genetically related)
-Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin; Spanish, French, and Italian
-Consonants: voicing (whether or not you vibrate your vocal cords), place of articulation (whether sound is far back in your mouth), oral/nasal sounds (air flow & whether it’s through nasal passage), additional descriptors when needed, & constriction type (air released or cut off at the side of the mouth- fricative)
-Phonological Rules: rules that apply to classes of sounds, not particular sounds
-Grimm’s Law of Sound Correspondences: systematic correspondences between proto-indo-european and Germanic languages
-Kard, heart, and cardio
-Voiceless stops in Sanskrit/Greek/Latin become voiceless fricatives in Gothic and English
-Comparative Reconstruction: finding systematic sound correspondences, identifying genetically-related languages, & reconstructing ancestor language; can be done with any aspect of linguistic structure (morphology, phonology, etc)
-Proto-language: reconstructed ancestor language
-Campbell’s reasons why languages and genes might not coordinate:
-A person only has one set of genes for life, but a person can be multilingual
-Individuals/communities can abandon one language & adopt another, but ppl can’t abandon their genes
-Language shift is common, but there is no deterministic connection between languages and gene pools
-Languages become extinct in populations that survive genetically
NO READING
11/26 Lecture Notes:
-Race is a system to categorize other people with; it’s important for us to think about what race is not
-We’ve looked at human diversity through formal linguistics (how does the mind structure language? What do all human beings share that allows them to acquire language?) and socio-linguistics (how does social context influence language use? What are the social functions of linguistic diversity) (Very 20th century method of thinking)
-Collection of fairy tales part of a linguistic effort to classify sound changes; matched sounds to a particular essence of people
-We can consider a third branch of linguistics: historical linguistics (the history of individual languages)
-General principles of change in human language
-Determining which languages are related and what their common ancestor was like
-Related to sociolinguistics: variation in language at one point in time can affect how language changes over time
-Language difference can be led by the formation of different social groups (Jocks and Burnouts)
-There is no real idea of individual languages b/c dialect continuum problem (languages are a mix of social and structural properties) (Contradictory to the definition of a historical linguist?)
-Historical linguistics are aware that there are some principles of language that their interpretation of it does not support
-Simply form a group to learn something from it, doesn’t mean this is the only possible grouping
-Historical linguists can produce a language tree (slide is that of Proto-Indo-European language)
-Historical linguists are more liberal in their use of the word “language”, but sense of security in that concept has changed
-Proto-Mayan language trees show similarity to phylogenetic trees
-People often confuse human groupings with the race concept using phylogenetic trees (have essentialist notion of people)
-Do lingual phylogenetic trees match with what we know about gene transfer?
-How do we map these lingual trees if no one speaks these proto languages? Through comparative method
-Ex: Why is it that two languages have words that are similar in both sound and meaning? Two languages come together and share the same word (mix and somehow combine and change a word, or borrow), lots of languages have roots in other older languages, could be some physiological reasons (it’s easier to say) or onomatopoeia reasons, if a word is new it might be something recently invented, people bring different words from place to place, chance resemblance, borrowing from a preexisting language, mama (bilabial sound, so visible and made easily) very easy for children to say early
-But how do we tell one of these reasons from another? How do we make a case for two words having a common ancestor? See if multiple words are very similar, compare geographical and historical reasons, the divergence of words can also be the way we’re trained to make sounds different depending on culture, you have to look for something systematic (not just in one place)
-When two languages are descended from a common ancestor language, linguists say that they are genetically related (this has nothing to do with DNA or human Biology)
-Heritability vs genetics
-Spanish, French, and Italian are genetically related because they’re descended from a common ancestor language (doesn’t mean speakers are related in Biological sense)
-Finding similar words is not proof alone of a genetic relationship between languages
-To identify genetic relationships we should look for systematic sound correspondences that occur across many words/morphemes
-Similar sound correspondence in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin (may feel less related than language groups with the same chance borrowings)
-Consonants are described as: voicing (whether or not you vibrate your vocal cords when you make a sound), place of articulation (whether the sound is back far in your mouth), oral/nasal sounds (air flow through nasal passages or not through nasal passages), additional descriptors where needed, and constriction type (air is completely released or cut off in the side of the mouth (fricative)) (describe in terms of apparatus we use to make them)
-We have rules that apply to classes of sounds, not particular sounds (phonological rules)
-Every sound is slightly different, we pay attention to the rules of the categories
-Grimm’s Law of sound correspondences; sound changes in Germanic; there are systematic correspondences between proto-indo-european and germanic languages
-Kard would turn into heart (English is Germanic, look at the corresponding letter even with those in bolded) (cardio is borrowed, but still related to heart because heart is genetically related to kard)
-Voiceless stops in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin become voiceless fricatives in Gothic and English
-Once we find systematic sound correspondences, they can be used to identify genetically related languages, then use this to reconstruct the ancestor language (this is called comparative reconstruction)
-Can be done with any aspect of linguistic structure (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc)
-Reconstructed ancestor language is called a proto-language, that’s how we get the linguistic trees
-Do languages and genes correlate? (kind of the reading for this class) Campbell gives two reasons they might not
-While a person has only one set of genes for life, a person or population can be multilingual, representing multiple languages
-Individuals and communities can abandon one language and adopt another, but people don’t abandon their genes and cannot adopt new ones
-Language shift is common, but there is no deterministic connection between languages and gene pools
-Languages become extinct in populations that survive genetically
-Think about these differences in the way that we’re grouping variation and how they inform each other
-When we look through more complicated notions of language, it makes the whole notion of the idea of race more complicated