Translator: Marianela Paletta Reviewer: Robert Tucker
Hi, thank you!
Just to speak to that,
never feel weird about speaking in front of a linguist.
We love all language.
I'm going to be talking about linguistic discriminations.
So, how we judge others for the way that they speak,
and actually write as well,
and why we should stop.
Here is an e-card that was floating around recently:
"I don't judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender.
I judge people on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure."
Okay, this seems good, right?
Well, at least we're not being racist or sexist or other-ist,
we're just judging language.
Wrong!
When you're judging language, you are actually judging on these things,
as I will show you.
So, first, I'll talk
about why we do this judgment in the first place.
Then I'll talk about what we are actually judging,
things we're picking up on in someone's language,
and then why it's actually bad to do this.
So, why do we judge?
Because we're kind of told to, right?
Especially, think back to your elementary and high school teachers,
they explicitly tell you
that this is good language, and this is bad language.
So, we are supposed to judge.
We're often taught by our parents, our friends,
the society in general, actually.
But also because it makes us feel good, right?
It makes us feel like we're better,
that we're higher on the social hierarchy,
that we have better education.
So it's a form of snobbery.
And when we do this, we're reinforcing the hierarchy.
Okay, so what do we judge?
Well, there are many features that I could talk about,
but then I'd be here forever.
I could talk about gender,
I could talk about the features we associate with social class,
race, sexuality, region, age, and so on.
But I'll just focus on the first three.
So, I'm going talk about the features that we associate with gender,
the features we associate with social class,
and the features we associate with race.
Let's talk about gender first.
So, vocal fry has been talked about a lot recently.
Vocal fry is a quality of vowels.
We also call it laryngealisation or creaky voice in linguistics,
and it's very frequent.
In fact, I'm using it probably,
and you've heard it every day of your life,
and you didn't even realize it.
But we associate it with people like Kim Kardashian, okay?
But, men and women use this equally.
So it's not actually a thing that women do only;
it's a thing that we all do.
But we only associate it with women,
and it becomes stigmatized when women use it,
not when, say, Ira Glass uses it, or Bill Clinton.
Uptalk is also associated with women, especially younger women.
That's when you end a sentence in the question intonation,
but it's actually a statement.
(Laughter)
I used to use this all the time.
However, because it's stigmatized I stopped using it, right?
Now, it turns out in Australia many men use it,
and it's not stigmatized when men use it.
And then also there's this myth that women talk more than men.
It's been shown over and over again not to be true.
Men talk more than women.
So, even just talking, women talking, is stigmatized.
So, in general, women's speech is more stigmatized than men's.
Why?
Because men are higher on the social hierarchy.
So when you stigmatize women for any of these features,
you are reinforcing the hierarchy.
There are many features associated with social class,
but let's take double negatives.
Double negative is when you have two negative words in a sentence,
like: "I don't know nothing."
So you have "don't" and "nothing".
Two negative words.
Now, this is considered by many people to be illogical,
because if you multiply negative and negative,
you get a positive.
But if you add them, there still negative, right?
And if you look at a language like French: "ne" and "pas",
you have two negative words in a sentence,
and that's not considered to be illogical.
So, we are only stigmatizing it in English,
not other languages,
and we're only stigmatizing it
because of the social class of the people who use it.
"Ain't" is another one.
"Ain't" is a great word, I think,
but many people don't even consider it to be a word.
One of my friends,
his young son is in elementary school,
and his teacher told him, straight up: "'Ain't' is not a word."
So now this little kid runs around telling everyone, "'Ain't' is not a word."
I don't know what criteria she is using,
because anything that I can think of, it would count as a word.
And it also fills in a gap in the paradigm.
So: you aren't, he/she isn't, I - "amn't"?
No: "ain't," right?
So we need that word, I think.
But we stigmatize it because of who uses it.
And then things like, "I seen it yesterday."
"Seen" is a non-standard use of a past tense instead of "saw".
But there's no logical reason that "saw" is better than "seen",
if you just think about it.
They're just different ways of pronouncing the same word.
It's only because of who says it, that it gets stigmatized.
So, if you're lower on the social hierarchy,
your variety of language will be stigmatized.
We also have many features associated with race,
and this really depends on the race too.
But there are many non-standard features of English.
For example: double negatives, "ain't", "seen" for "saw",
which are shared with social class.
But let's look at African-American vernacular English
or Black-English specifically.
So there's this use of "be"
that doesn't exist in the standard dialect of English.
It's called the habitual "be".
So you say something like, "She be walking the dog," and it means:
"She walks the dog all the time," or, "Customarily, she walks the dog."
Again, there's nothing wrong with that,
it's a completely good use of the word "be",
it's just different from the standard.
And, in the same dialect,
because "be" is used for this particular meaning,
it's no longer used in things like "they're angry",
instead "they angry" would be the correct way to say that sentence.
So, in this case, the more stigmatized the race is,
the more stigmatized the features of language
associated with that race will be.
Okay.
I could also talk about all these other features,
like sexuality, region, age, etc.
But I won't for time.
In all of these cases, the lower status,
the "x" - sexuality, whatever - is,
or considered to be,
then the more stigmatized the variety is.
What else do we judge?
We judge people who speak other languages than us.
So, here is a case that just came up this last week.
"She goes to see Wales rugby star Jamie Roberts,
who, despite being taught in Welsh until he was 18,
is now a qualified doctor
and currently studying for his Master of Science degree
in Queen's College, Cambridge."
What on earth does speaking Welsh have to do with anything?
Let alone being able to be a doctor or study science?
Right?
They got a lot of trouble on Twitter as you can imagine.
We also judge the way people write,
and this is almost entirely based on social class and/or race.
So: its/it's,
they're/their/there, whose/who's,
Gee, I wonder why we mess those up, right?
I mean, even I do this; I've got a PhD. in linguistics,
and I still mess these up sometimes.
So, we have a high expectation
that everyone is going to be able to write perfectly all the time,
and that's unfair.
There's also things like using "whom" correctly.
It's a pretty simple rule, but we don't teach it properly.
Also I feel like it's dying out, so maybe we should just let "whom" go.
It doesn't really do much for us.
And then there's a bunch of made up rules like not splitting an infinitive.
There is no reason for that rule, which is completely manufactured.
Also, "to boldly go" sounds a lot better
than "boldly to go", or "to go boldly".
Right?
If you'd learn nothing else from this, please at least ignore that rule.
But, anyway, so you have to go to the right kind of school
to learn all of these.
So if you're mocking someone for not learning these,
you might be mocking the fact
they didn't get as good an education as you,
which is not a nice thing to do.
So, why should we stop?
Well, it's unattractive, right?
It makes us feel good to be snobby, but it's not actually a good thing.
And it tells the world more about you, than the person you're judging.
And there are also, and I would say this is even more crucial,
there are legal implications for this type of judgment.
Relatively recently, there was the famous Trayvon Martin murder case,
and his friend, Rachel Jeantel, was a witness.
She was treated horribly for many reasons.
She was judged for her gender, her size, her race,
but also, more importantly to this, for her language.
Because her variety of English was different from the standard,
and she was treated as if she didn't even speak English
by one of the lawyers.
So, if we really want our justice system to be truly blind,
we have to stop judging people for their language.
So I am going to argue that
linguistic discrimination is just as bad as any other kind of discrimination;
we just think it's more socially acceptable.
And crucially, really, when you're judging people for their language,
you're just sneakily judging them for all these things, right?
And you're pretending it's about something else,
like, "Oh, this is just a better version of a language
that makes you a better person."
That's not true.
So, instead of judging people
for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure,
I think we should follow God's lead.
[I only judge on whether or not they're an asshole.]
Thank you.
(Laughter)
(Applause)