Abstract:

In this essay, we were given the opportunity to talk about an issue specifically about languages. I decided to pick a topic that I thought was rarely talked about and in most cases dismissed: linguistic discrimination. Linguistic discrimination is discrimination against someone’s language, dialect or accent. It is usually more prevalent in public places, such as workplaces, schools and other places where people meet and interact. I mentioned the Standard Language ideology, the idea that if people don’t speak the standard form of a language then it should not be spoken, and how because of the fact that it is so prevalent and ingrained into our society that it makes it hard for people to tell between what’s discriminating and what isn’t. Another thing that I did, was try to offer solutions to this issue; by having people embrace bidialectalism and understand the people who speak with different dialects.

Exploratory Essay:

Kevin Ramirez

Language & Literacy

Miller & Nagales

11/7/18

Discrimination against Tongues

Language discrimination is when a person is treated unfairly and differently based on one’s ability to either speak a language fluently either because of one’s native language or accent. Most commonly, language discrimination occurs at workplaces where employers have the ability to demand their employees speak a certain way and can even deny jobs to certain people with certain accents. A question that needs to be asked is: what is one of the driving factors that cause language discrimination? One of these factors, according to Rosina Lippi-Green, a linguist, author and teacher, who wrote the academic article “English with an Accent”, is the Standard Language Ideology, who coined the term. Standard Language Ideology or SLI is the idea and bias that certain accents and dialects that aren’t accepted by the dominant institution of American English are inferior. The way that SL ideology is implemented in American Society causes for this kind of discrimination to not only exist but also to be tolerated. Also, due to the fact that most of these dialects are considered to be inferior, we dismiss most of them as uneducated and broken forms of speaking English. I believe, however, that if we were to drastically change how we view a Standard Language, it can be much more beneficial to our society; by making Standard English a language of education and professionalism only and using Standard English to communicate when other accents become too difficult to understand, like a lingua franca. Another thing would be to embrace bidialectalism, by having people speak Standard English and their own regional dialect/accent, making teachers be bidialectal and also more importantly allowing for written works to be in these regional dialects. By implementing these new definitions, having a Standard Language could benefit greatly our society and get rid of language discrimination.

One thing to note is how greatly the SL ideology has been ingrained into our minds and psyche, that even the most unbiased people are affected. According Patreese D. Ingram, an associate professor at Penn State, it’s not just foreign accents that are view negatively, but other American accents as well, such as Northerners considering a Southern dialect and thinking that their accent is better than the Southern accent. We “are [also] so conditioned to expect an accent that we sometimes hear one when none is present. People who look different are expected to sound different, even if they are monolingual native English speakers.” (Ingram) For example, Ingram states that in an experiment people were given two audiotapes, with one being marked as a Caucasian and the other being marked as an Asian. People claimed to hear the accent on the Asian speaker, when in fact both of the audiotapes were of the same speaker. Many people have this perceived notion that accents or having an accent means that one cannot speak properly and in turn is not smart. Even when a person can speak English with proper Standard English grammar, their accents make it seem as though they are speaking broken English. One of these instances where one’s accent caused for people to think less of one, was when Sulochana Mandhare, an immigrant from India, came to the United States and completed her education receiving her master’s she became a librarian at an elementary school and then at a small library. Her responsibilities included were to oversee the library, read to the children and introduce them to using the library resources. When she was supposed to renew her contract the following year, she was shocked and angry to see when she was told that due to her heavy accent, speech patterns and grammar problems. “She investigated her options; and because she understood that the U.S. Civil Rights prohibits discrimination by national origin in the workplace, she filed suit. This civil action was decided in Mrs. Mandhare’s favor, but the decision was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals in favor of the school board.” (Lippi-Green, 164) In this instance we can see how tolerated language discrimination is not only amongst ourselves but also within our institutions. The thing is though, language discrimination is sort of a gray area; because of the fact that employers can decide and demand certain things from their employers, such as wanting to have a certain type of education or being a certain age. However, if an employer were to deny someone based on something superficial such as their gender or race or based on where they come from, certain legal and societal repercussions will surely come to one’s business. But there seems to be an exception to discriminating against one’s accent, most likely due to how SL ideology has been ingrained into our minds and our society. June Jordan, an essayist and poet, wrote in her essay “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You” in which she talks about having her students read a book written in Black English or AAVE, and most of them claim that they were unable to read it despite speaking the same that it was written. “At this, several students dumped on the book. Just about unanimously, their criticism targeted the language. I listened to what they wanted to say and silently marveled at the similarities between their casual speech patterns and Alice Walker’s written version of Black English.” (Jordan, 161) Something similar happened in Hawaii, where the Hawaiian Board of Education proposed a policy that would have outlawed Hawaiian Creole English, students were surveyed and were asked whether or not they support this idea. About “54 percent of public students supported the idea,” most of the students considered HCE as a broken form of English, with many believing that it was detrimental for speaking “properly”: “Comments ranged from ‘Pidgin English fosters illiteracy,’ ‘Pidgin is a lazy way to talk; it promotes backward thinking,’ and ‘Correct English will get you anywhere…” (Lippi-Green, 168) We can see that most of the kids had become indoctrinated with the SL ideology, however, not all of the kids shared this mentality. A student said that outlawing HCE would be an infringement on one’s freedom of speech and another student that “pidgins are natural languages.” SL ideology has become so ingrained into our minds that even the own people who speak the different types of accents, consider their own accents and to an extent themselves as inferior for speaking said dialects.

Due to SL ideology, one of the things that people don’t understand is how many accents are there in America, and how all of them are very unique. In Rick Aschmann’s map, we can see that the North American continent is split into 8 distinct English dialects, with each region having unique features, for example certain parts of California have something which is known as the pin-pen merger, where the words pin and pen sound the same, but also a lot of parts of the South and Midwest have the same feature. A lot of different regions have similar regions also share a lot of unique features, such as both the South and the North do something that’s called r-dropping, where in at the words that end in r, the r is dropped. Looking at the map, we can see that the entire map is covered with accents and regional dialects. There is not one region that speaks a Standard form of English. That’s the thing with accents, everyone else has an accent except for you. One of the regional dialects that I want to focus on, mainly because it barely gets any recognition as a dialect that is AAVE or African American Vernacular English, being a victim of SL ideology and being spoken by a group that has been discriminated and mistreated since the creation of America, it has largely been ignored amongst linguists. Xidnaf is a YouTuber who’s channel focuses on linguistics and the special features in each l In Xidnaf’s video “The Linguistics of AAVE” he talks about the AAVE’s unique features. One of these include changing the “th” sound into “t”, “f”, “d”, or “v” depending on the context, another is the fact that AAVE tends to drop words where in Standard American English or SAE there would be a contraction. Something that exists in AAVE but doesn’t in English is the fact that there exists something called the Habitual Tense or the Habitual “Be”; it has all of the Standard Tenses plus this one which acts a tense in which something will happen, is happening or happens, depending on the context of the sentence. Despite of its unique features, most Americans consider AAVE as a slang or a broken form of English. “You’d think that after all this we would’ve figured out that people who speak differently than you do aren’t doing it just cause they’re dumb, that whatever people are raised with winds up sounding correct to the them […] no one’s language or dialect is inherently better or worse than anyone else’s.” (Xidnaf, The Linguistics of AAVE)

Looking at all of this, we can see that the effects of SL ideology causes more problems in our society, from causing language discrimination to causing people to think less of other dialects that aren’t considered standard are considered less than and ignored. But I think that if we were to change the way that we look at standard languages and standard English we can see a change in how we treat each other’s accents and dialects. The way that I think we could change this is by having Standard English as just a language of education and used in professional settings we could and have regional dialects to be used in casual settings. This is sort of how it is in America, however the use of regional dialects and being bidialectal is frowned upon by people who are in high institutions or in power, and they force only the use of SAE on everyday live. By understanding the different dialects and forms of speech we can get rid of language discrimination. We could also use SAE as a lingua franca, or a language used to communicate with different people who would otherwise not be able to speak to each other. One of the ways that I can relate this too is the use of Modern Standard Arabic or MSA and Arabic dialects. MSA is only used in professional settings such as schools, and news and literature. But no one really speaks MSA in the Arab world, rather everyone speaks their own unique regional dialect. But one thing that they do is that they have media that gives exposure to different people of different dialects, allowing for people to better understand each other. I think that American society should do something like this. However, it would be much harder to pull off because people here are much different than Arabs and they are also living in different countries whereas here, we are living in the same country. We must, above all, embrace bidialectalism in a professional setting and learn about that there are multiple ways to speak English, with varying dialects and understand the different people who speak those varying dialects. With this we can come closer to ending linguistic discrimination, in not only the workplace and other professional settings but also in our own homes as we can better understand other people who speak differently rather than just dismissing them.

By understanding each other’s dialects, we can come to understand each other, as one’s way of speaking is by default an extension of who they are and how they are able to express themselves to the world. SL ideology without a doubt is a damaging part of our society which allows and promotes for the discrimination of people’s dialects and accents. The thing is most people don’t realize that they are being discriminatory because of the SL ideology, as it has become ingrained into our psyche, with most people having perceived notions of who talks better and what way of speaking is acceptable. If we as a society come to realize our prejudices and discrimination, but also come to understand the different dialects and the people who speak them, because as we’ve seen they are rich and unique with very similar features and very different features from Standard English, then we could rid our society of linguistic discrimination or at least come to not accept it.

 

Works Cited:

Aschmann, Rick. “North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns.”   American English Dialects. 2 May 2018. https://aschmann.net/AmEng/.

Ingram, Patreese D. “Are Accents One of the Last Acceptable Areas for Discrimination?” The Journal of Extension (JOE), 2009, www.joe.org/joe/2009february/comm1.php.

Jordan, June. “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 58, no. 3, 1988, pp. 363–375., doi:10.17763/haer.58.3.d171833kp7v732j1.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. Routledge, 2012.

“Modern Standard Arabic.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Oct. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Standard_Arabic.

Xidnaf. “The Linguistics of AAVE.” YouTube, YouTube, 12 Aug. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkzVOXKXfQk.

 

 

Cover Letter:

In writing this essay, I gotta thank you guys for giving me the tools to better open my mind and allow for me to understand something that for me I didn’t know was so prevalent in our society and something that was ingrained into my mind. I knew that there are multiple accents and different ways of speaking in different regions, but I still held the belief that speaking Standard English was the way to go. I always thought of it as the people being wrong, rather than the system but now I know that it’s the system that is wrong rather than the people who speak it. I now know that there’s a serious problem with this, as it’s greatly overlooked by almost everyone in the country, and it has become so ingrained into people that the people who speak are told that they speak “wrong” tend to believe and try to change the way that they speak. Because I want to maybe have a career in language or language history, I think that learning about these forgotten and oppressed dialects will better help and allow to understand my future students, I am glad that now I know about this. One thing I had trouble was coming up with one singular idea for my essay, I felt like throughout my essay I had many points and ideas however, I think that I nailed it by trying to make it so it was like I was answering a question, or two questions rather: How does linguistic discrimination affect our society and how can we change the SL ideology so that it can improve it rather harm it? I tried my best to also make it so that these two questions connect so that I can get more out of it. However, finding a solution for a problem that has been ingrained into our society is hard because there is no one right or easy way to get rid of the problem that we have, however, the first step in solving a problem is to understand that one has a problem, so I think I did good in bringing awareness to this issue.

Self-reflection:

This essay explored the largely overlooked problem of linguistic discrimination, and how it affects our society in negative ways. However, I wanted to offer possible solutions to this problem. I’m aware that these problems are very complex and the solutions to fix them are going to require everyone to work together to solve them.