The silent dangers of everyday dialect discrimination – MIR

When the founder of Lululemona popular sportswear brand, revealed that he chose the name of the company to make fun of how Japanese immigrants couldn’t pronounce the English “L”, many people were shocked by the discriminatory intention of the origin of the mark. However, the Lululemon name is just one example of dialect discrimination that is often subtle, but nonetheless seriously harmful and pervasive.

Dialects are the natural result of diverse societies where distinct speech patterns develop because people speak similarly to those in social and regional proximity around them. As social groups inherently differ from each other, the ways in which members of these groups express themselves also vary. For example, in the United Kingdom and the UNITED STATESmany regional English dialects and accents exist due to immigration stories. Studies have shown that people associate these accents with social characteristics such as class, raceAnd geography because a person’s accent or dialect often reflects their community.

Assuming social characteristics from accents can, however, become mental shortcuts which lead to discrimination. Often unnoticed, these mental shortcuts are particularly problematic because they exacerbate existing prejudices against minority communities. Speakers of less valued dialects often belong to historically marginalized groups, leading to further discrimination against them due to assumed social characteristics, while speakers who are part of a powerful social group may have “prestige accent”enjoying the social privileges that flow from their dialect.

Silencing the minority president

In the major English-speaking countries of Europe and North America, wealthy, white, educated populations often enjoy accent prestige because they are the most dominant and powerful social group. Years of historical prejudice against marginalized groups have generated stigma against their dialects, and the value of “prestigious dialects” is still taught and learned early in schools. Many European and North American education systems apply Standard Academic English (SAE) when teaching English grammar. SAE neglects the variation in English spoken by minority speakers and reinforces the idea that there is only one “correct” English for work and education.

The implicit preference for the “glamorous accent” then carries over into the workplace as children grow up. For example, in the hiring process, interviewers typically make assumptions about an interviewee’s social class characteristics and education based on the way they speak, perhaps neglecting some aspects of the actual content of their conversation. For speakers of stigmatized dialects, investigators can usually assume negative stereotypical characteristicslike wrongly assuming that black people who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE) are less educated and less culturally adapted to the job than their white counterparts. Automatic and unnoticed biases against speakers of certain accents can interfere with a fair job evaluation. In severe cases, this can even lead to a lack of job offers or salary differences for those who speak a dialect generally associated with those of a marginalized group.

“Moving away” from stigma

When surrounded by speakers of the prestigious dialect, stigmatized speakers may face even more prejudice. In the workplace they can be harassed by colleagues because of the way they speak or neglected for employment opportunities due to a perceived lack of professionalism. To deal with prejudice, speakers can turn to code switching, meaning changing their speech and other behaviors to meet those of the dominant environment, and then reverting to their more natural speech and behaviors in other situations, such as when surrounded by those who share their dialect. When environments are hostile to the dialects of marginalized speakers, code-switching becomes a way to try to fit in and avoid harassment and missed opportunities.

However, the code change is taxation emotionally and mentally, and this can lead to stress that strains performance at work or school. Code-switching also affects culture and society at large. If people from marginalized groups cannot fully be themselves, the normalization of linguistic homogeneity pushed by prestigious dialect speakers only grows. Exclusive culture then becomes a cycle with ways of speaking as a mechanism to create and reproduce these systems of power.

Apply control, not correction

The prestige of SAE at the expense of other dialects is also reinforced on a global scale. Many other non-English speaking countries teach SAE. For example, China’s investment in English education is expected to increase 12-15 percent annual. A similar increase in spending on English education is seen in other East Asian countries due to the increased work and education opportunities available to English speakers across the world. The global standard of English as a lingua franca today reflects the way linguistic norms have developed through the legacy of British And American colonialism and imperialism.

For example, Great Britain imposition of English as the dominant language in India, was an integral part of their strategy to maintain power and control over the colony. Established as an official language in Higher Education in the early 1800s, English was the way to go to better job prospects, so non-English speakers found themselves at a disadvantage and local languages ​​weakened due to the pressure to learn English. The history that made English so widespread and persists today also influences how accent bias preserves this legacy of power and control.

Those with a foreign accent often face more careful analysis of their grammar and pronunciation, which of course has errors. Native speakers of English, even with the “prestigious accent”, also make many other types of mistakes, but their accent is not as scrutinized because their accent is considered “normal” rather than “foreign”. “. As sociolinguistics, Vershawn Ashanti Young valorize “examples of white speech that goes unanalyzed because it comes from someone in power or of a different race. It is not that the dominant English dialect spoken by groups who occupy the most privileged position in society is more “correct” than those who occupy historically marginalized positions. Instead, those with the most powerful status decide what is “standard,” even if their speech itself is riddled with errors.

Resisting the power of “prestige”

Despite the overwhelming pressure, even physical and financial threats, to maintain one’s own stigmatized dialect, many refuse to give power to the problematic idea of ​​a singular, “standard” version of English. Rather than switching between the dominant form of English and a lesser-known dialect, some people adopt code mesh: when people mix their personal dialect of a language with the dominant language. Both varieties interact with each other to shape speech patterns in all situations and neither has superiority over the other. The coded mesh itself then becomes a form of resistance, an implicit way of allowing all dialects of a language to have equal value and not reducing the less used and stigmatized dialects to fit into a stifling mold. .

Using code mesh to level the imbalance between the dominant dialect and other varieties starts from the ground up. For example, Black educators in the UK have created a space for students to share their cultures and histories, as well as their dialects. Teaching children how to appreciate other varieties of English, as well as the cultures and histories behind them, makes children more accepting of those who speak differently than they do. They may even become more resistant to the mental shortcut of judging someone based on how they pronounce certain words. Allowing code meshing in the classroom has a particularly significant impact for children who speak stigmatized dialects. Students get to see someone in authority teach the value of all dialects, and they also learn to freely use their own less common dialect alongside their peers who speak the dominant variant in an often linguistically homogeneous setting.

While dialect stigma remains pervasive, the slow shift of people toward code-meshing rather than code-switching, and the active support of minority and majority dialect speakers for the acceptance and use of dialects previously stigmatized people can slowly break down the misconception of a single “standard” form of language. English. English-speaking countries are home to many cultures and identities, and the many varieties of English reflect this diversity. Adopting the dialect varieties of others or oneself alongside their cultures and identities reduces dialect discrimination and facilitates more acceptance and equality for people who speak less common dialects.

Edited by Juliet Morrison

The featured image: “High school English teacher with three students” by Alliance for Excellence in Educationlicensed Act CC BY-NC 2.0»