Rickford_King Language and Linguistics on Trial

Rachel Jeantel Case: Language and Linguistics on Trial

John R. Rickford and Sharese King from Stanford University analyze the case of Rachel Jeantel, a key witness in the George Zimmerman trial, whose testimony was dismissed due to her use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
The article addresses the prejudices and fictions surrounding vernacular speech, emphasizing the need for linguists to help vernacular speakers be better understood in legal and social settings.

Introduction

The article begins with quotes from Rachel Jeantel, August Wilson's play Two Trains Running, and Ferdinand de Saussure, highlighting the themes of language, justice, and prejudice.
Rachel Jeantel, a friend of Trayvon Martin, was a crucial prosecution witness, but her AAVE speech was disregarded by the jurors, leading to Zimmerman's acquittal.
The phrase 'Black lives matter' was coined in reaction to the systemic racism seen in Trayvon’s killing and Zimmerman’s acquittal.
August Wilson's plays feature characters speaking in AAVE, reflecting the everyday language of the African American community in Pittsburgh.
Ferdinand de Saussure's quote emphasizes the importance of speech and the need for linguists to dispel prejudices and fictions about language.
The authors argue that linguists should work towards justice by listening to vernacular dialects more closely and ensuring fair treatment for their speakers in various settings.
Rachel Jeantel's background as a student at Miami’s Norland High School and her role as a key witness are noted.
George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch coordinator who was advised against confrontation and using a gun.

Intelligibility Issues Involving English Vernaculars

Vernacular dialects are often spoken by ethnic minorities and/or less educated, working-class, or poor people worldwide.
Vernacular speakers are often misunderstood or unfairly misjudged in court.
Examples from Australia, the UK, and the US illustrate cases where vernacular English speakers faced intelligibility issues in legal settings.
In Northern Territory, Australia, an Aboriginal witness used the term 'half moon shining' to refer to a crescent moon, which was initially misunderstood by the cross-examining counsel.
In Central Australia, the phrase 'Charcoal Jack, properly his father' was mistranscribed as 'probably his father,' due to p/b variability in Aboriginal English (AE) and unawareness that correctly in AE means ‘real’.
In the United Kingdom, a Jamaican Creole (JC) speaker's testimony was mistranscribed, leading to a potentially dangerous error that was corrected by a JC interpreter.
The US Guide to Judiciary Policy requires interpreters only for speakers of a language other than English.
In England, 'Jamaican Patois' is recognized as a 'rare language' for which interpreter services are provided.
A Krio speaker from Sierra Leone encountered difficulties in a New York court, where the judge had to classify Krio as a separate language to allow for an interpreter.
African Americans are disproportionately incarcerated compared to White Americans.
Examples from 1955 to 2015 highlight cases where AAVE has been misunderstood or mistranscribed in court.
In the 1955 Emmett Till trial, a witness's phrase 'Thar he ∅!' may have been mistranscribed or reflected a Southern African American usage.
In a 1965 California case, Young Beartracks's AAVE testimony was deemed incomprehensible, leading to his conviction for second-degree murder.
Omissions and mistakes in police transcripts of AAVE speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area highlight potential miscommunications due to unfamiliarity with AAVE features and preverbal tense-aspect markers (e.g., come, done, finna/fitna).
A court reporter expressed the need for Ebonics interpreters in court.
The DEA has recognized the need for AAVE translators for police investigations.

Jeantel’s Language Analysis

Jeantel's testimony was crucial to the prosecution's case, directly contradicting Zimmerman's account.
Analysis of Jeantel's morphosyntax reveals highly vernacular usage, including unmarked possessive -s and plural -s tokens, and absent present-tense singular copula tokens.
Jeantel's speech was widely criticized on social media, with many deprecating comments about her language skills and intelligence.
A careful analysis of Jeantel's usage in trial-related events shows that her speech is a systematic exemplification of AAVE grammar, with some Caribbean Creole English (CCE) influences.
Jeantel lives in a city and neighborhood with people originally from Jamaica and other countries in which Caribbean English creoles or vernaculars are spoken, and additionally her mother is from Haiti and her father from the Dominican Republic, and she is fluent in both Haitian Kweyol (Creole, French-based) and Spanish.
AAVE grammatical features in Jeantel's speech include auxiliary-subject inversion in embedded indirect questions (e.g., 'I do remember him asking me have I ever got a gun before') and existential it (e.g., 'Monday it was a rumor going around his school.').
Other AAVE features include stressed BIN as a remote phase marker, invariant habitual be, preterit had, preterit ain’t, and negative concord.
Table 1 shows the relative absence in Rachel Jeantel’s speech of three -s suffixes repeatedly studied in AAVE and other English vernaculars: third singular present tense -s, possessive -s, and plural -s.
Figures 1, 2, and 3 show comparisons of Jeantel's absence of third person singular -s absence rates rates rate with others from East Palo Alto, California, Harlem, New York, and Detroit, Michigan, and of her possessive -s absence and plurals -s absence.
There appears to be a Caribbean influence on Jeantel's speech.
Jeantel's plural -s absence rate plummets to 11% in the Piers Morgan interview, showing style-shifting toward Standard English, and she seems sensitive to a major grammatical constraint in AAVE.
A higher rate of -s marking for plurals than for possessives or third singular present tense is also found in Caribbean and other creole varieties.
According to processability theory, plural marking on nouns occurs earlier in second language acquisition than subject-verb agreement.
Concerning copula/auxiliary absence, Jeantel follows the qualitative rules of AAVE and never deletes first-person singular am.
Figure 5 compares Jeantel’s rates of copula absence for is and are combined to similar figures for the AAVE teenagers from East Palo Alto (Rickford 1992, Rickford & Price 2013), Harlem (Labov et al. 1968a), and Detroit (Wolfram 1969).
Jeantel's usage, shown in Table 2, follows the classic deletion or absence of the copula is favored by are over is, by pronoun over NP subject, and by a following gonna, Verb + ing, and adjective over locative and NP.
Table 3 shows the Fixed-effects logistic regression modeling of Jeantel’s is + are copula absence, by copula type (control = is), subject type (control = NP __ ), and following grammatical environment (control = __ NP).
Fixed-effects show a favouring of are over is and of pronoun over NP sub- ject still evident in the estimates, but the associated probabilities are nonsignificant.
Jeantel's PIN/PEN merger is associated with the South.
Figures 6 and 7 show Jeantel’s vowel formants.
An influence of Haitian Kweyol is observable with respect to the vowel /i/, and /i, a, u/ were very monophthongal, which is more characteristic of Caribbean Anglophone Creoles and less characteristic of AAVE and other American Englishes with diphthongal offsets, especially for the tense vowels.
Figure 8 addresses consonant cluster reduction.
Figure 9 shows the percentage of consonant cluster reduction by phonological and grammatical environment in syllable final clusters ending in t or d for Jeantel annd various AAVE and caribbean groups.
One striking lexical feature in Jean- tel’s speech that seems to reflect Haitian influence is her use of for in the sense of ‘in order that’, which functions syntactically and semantically like Haitian pou.
Another instance of possible Haitian influence is Jeantel’s use of the phrase live under my mother, which is perhaps derived from haitian viv anba kay X (‘live under roof [of] X’).
The incendiaries nigga and creepy-ass cracka, words Jeantel quoted Martin as saying, helped to strengthen the case for Zimmerman’s acquittal by making it seem that Trayvon was racially profiling Zimmerman rather than the other way around.
Jeantel also spelled out for piers, that nigga (with that spelling) is unspecified for ethnicity and can ‘refer to anyone of any race or ethnicity’.
As for creepy-ass frame, few people have focused on the ‘creepy’ modifier, although Cobb (2013) did note that Trayvon had ‘seemed fearful of the man following him around the subdi- vision’.
The collocation of creepy with ass was even more bewildering and off-putting to non-AAVE speakers.
The nigga and creepy-ass cracker incendiaries are striking examples of dialect misunderstanding or clash in the courtroom.
From our analysis of selected features of Jeantel’s grammar, phonetics, phonology, and lexicon, it is clear that her lin- guistic variation is systematic and not random (no surprise to linguists, since it accords with what we know about language from studies of many varieties), and that character- izations of her as speaking the ‘blather of an idiot’ were simply uninformed.
It is also clear that, while she shows some striking examples of Haitian Kweyol or Caribbean English influence (no surprise given her mother’s background and the Miami speech community in which she lives), her system is primarily that of AAVE (no surprise since she was born and raised in the United States).
Morrison points out the dangers of racism for people always having to justify their language.

Jeantel's Intelligibility and Credibility

Analysis of Juror B37's interview reveals a distancing use of 'they' in reference to Trayvon, Jeantel, and their community, and a selective hearing of Jeantel's testimony.
Jeantel was found neither intelligible nor credible.
The judge kept having jurors interrupt to have Jeantel clarify her answers.
The answer as to why Rachel Jeantel was not understood or believed can be divided into factors involving: (i) dialect dif- ference and unfamiliarity; (ii) Jeantel’s underbite and voice quality; and (iii) attitudes, including dialect bias and institutionalized racism/prejudgment.
Jeantel's AAVE features likely made her less understandable to the non-AAVE-speaking jurors, as highlighted by Bloom (2014).
Examples from Paley (2000) and Shuy's (p.c.) workshops demonstrate non-AAVE speakers' difficulty in understanding AAVE speakers, like the jurors from the 1965 trial of Young Beartracks.
Readers on Language Log contributed anecdotes and comments about their or others’ experiences with Jeantel or otherAfricanAmerican speakers, and about cross-dialect comprehension in Europe and elsewhere.
Tests show that AAVE lexical items like mother wit (‘common sense’) and ashy (‘gray, dry, of skin in winter), often test as unknown among White respondents from areas such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.
Black and Whites also have different understandings of gestures such as the African Calque cut eye (‘a visual gesture which communicates hostility, displeasure, disapproval’), (94% among african americans, 1.1% among whites), or gestures such as suck teeth.
Researchers are beginning to see just how wide the lethal and cultural gulf posed by nigga, creepy-ass cracker, and other words of Trayvon’s and Jeantel’sthat surfaced in the courtroom might have been.
Also having a huge impact are preverbal tense-aspect markers (“aspectual markers’ - Green 2002), such as stressed BIN, completive done (which denotes completing an action), and habitual be.
Rickford (1975:172–73) reports on the responses of twenty-five Blacks and twenty five Whites to four questions that tested their knowledge about the meaning of stressed BIN in sentences like she BIN married ‘she has been married for a long time’.
In addition, Jones and Kalbfeld (2017) report on a pilot court-reporter experiment testing for understanding of 32 AAVE sentences with six AAVE speakers and ten nonAAVE speakers.
Sumner and Samuel (2009) found some of the experimental evidence on cross-dialect word recognition and processing involving pho- netic features, showing perceptual cost in word-recognition tasks when speakers process regional dialect forms which they have limited experience.
During her CNN interview, Jeantel attributed much of the mockery she faced to her underbite, and recent research has done much to support that claim.
Linguistics faculty advisor Alicia Wassink has noted her plans to continue exploring “to tease apart the acoustic outcomes of the linguistic and clinical factors”.
Linguists such as Shelley L. Velleman, chair of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Vermont, have pointed us to literature indicating that people with malocclusions are often viewed negatively.
At our request, Mark Liberman analyzed the amplitude and other acoustic qual- ities of Jeantel’s voice, also concluding there was probably an overall effect of her accent, lexical and grammatical differences, courtroom acoustics, and voice quality.
The ‘blame’ for the jurors’ and public’s poor assessment of Jeantel’s intelligibil- ity and credibility was placed primarily on production properties of the speaker.
Considerable re- search, much of it summarized in Lindemann and Subtirelu 2013, demonstrates that speech perception and evaluation are significantly influenced by listeners’ attitudes, often by biases from factors like race, ethnicity, geography, and social status.
For example, there is Rubin(1992:518)’s study where students are played a four-minute speech sample recorded by a Ph.D student who is claimed to be Asian. However, after people were told the speaker in a recorded audio track was Asian (even if they were from Ohio), the teacher rated the same English audio track as sounding ethnic-standard when associated with white children as opposed to Black or Mexican American children.
There have been many studies which suggest that all main effects and interactions were significant, for example DeMeis and turners testing of race with dialect, all rated black students, Black-English-speaking students, and low attractive students as lower.
Frumkin 2007 highlights this concept in her paper that accent and ethnic background impact the reception of eyewitness testimony and criminal trials.
Her findings showed that the same testimony delivered by the same witness was perceived as less favorable if the witness testi- fied with an accent.
Lindemann and Subtirely 2013 highlights that ‘speech that certain listeners report as lacking (I/C) may be intelligible or comprehensible to other groups of listeners’.
Tucker and Lambert's 1969 study highlights the concept that negative societal and language expectations are projected upon people in legal systems. For example, speech from educated white southerners was shown as less trust worthy and credible when coming from an educated African American.

Beyond The Court Room - Hearing Vernacular Speakers In Other Contexts

Beyond the courtroom, similar mishearings occur in other contexts, also with profoundly negative consequences for vernacular speakers, an area we are now beginning to understand.
For example, education has strong implications, and the trial of Rachel Jeantel has also suggested that when Jeantel, high fluent in AAVE, may not be a proficient leader.
Moreover, the low reading scores in the Miami-Dade school district mentioned here by the report, are suggested to be due in part to the lack of english as a second language programs for students who need them.
Also having negative impacts are the telephone calls by African Americans seeking to rent housing.
In the text we have already discussed, we highlight Baugh’s insidious linguistic profiling that often results which has sparked HUD to advertise the illegality of phone discrimination.
Areas that have remained to be researched are those of job interviews and doctor-patient communications.

Summary and Call To Action

This conversation has now shifted from the courtroom, and this report suggests speaking AAAE in the United States often exacerbates biases rooted in race and class in cross dialect domains like schools, job/housing searches, doctors' offices, and so on, a problem shared by vernavular speakers from ethnic, language, and regional groups across the united states, to have more vulernerability than those of Mainstream origins from police, to employers.
So the question becomes what we can and should do, and the linguistics involved in the central human issues involving language in law, learning, poverty, etc.
The text suggests we need to get out from behind our offices and begin to see the differences theory and application can make.
The author mentions ways we can begin to create a change.
Do More research on cross-dialect intelligibility and evaluation, and the way speakers of AAVE and other vernaculars are heard in courts, schools, work- places, hospitals, and so on.
Say yes to invitations to work on cases, projects involving AAVE speakers in court, police encounters, and so on.
Continue to push for vernacular speakers to be heard (listened to, valued, given a fair hearing) in the courts and other domains.