Linguistic Prejudice: The Importance of Recognizing and Respecting Other Languages

I didn’t notice my mother’s Persian accent until my friend pointed it out in my third year of Elementary school. When she commented on the way my mom spoke, I automatically assumed it was an accident—why would my mother purposely speak English incorrectly? As a 10-year-old, I was aware that my family’s language and culture was a separate part of my “American” life, but I had never considered that communication was also affected by the way we spoke. As a 17-year-old, I now understand and appreciate my family’s language, seeing it as a way that brings us together instead of alienating us from my peers. This idea was reinforced in my mind when I listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her TED Talk—her central point emphasized that we as a society only think of things from the perspective of which we know. This way of thinking is applicable to a variety of aspects of our lives; while our upbringing can shape our values and priorities as adults, the way we speak can be altered depending on who we surround ourselves with. I had only seen my mother as speaking “correct” English because that was how I knew the language to be, while my friend viewed it in a different way because of her family. Ultimately, there was no “wrong” way to speak English; we had simply viewed the language in various ways due to how we were taught as children. 

In Laurel MacKenzie’s video discussing linguistic prejudice and privilege, she argues about the faulty and misconceptualized existence surrounding the “correctness” of a language through key points such as historical variability, power dynamics, and social consequences. First, MacKenzie argues that language “correctness” is subjective and widely perceived as correlating to intelligence. For example, some may immediately make decisions about the intelligence of someone speaking in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), despite it being a well-known dialect in the American south and Canada. While some words of the dialect are considered slang in other parts of the world (e.g. “finna”, gonna”), much of AAVE is seen as a “lazy” version of English, which is not the case. On television and in TV shows, AAVE (along with many other mistreated dialects) is portrayed in a superficial and particular manner to appeal to audiences who wish to see their own language dialect in a superior way. MacKenzie also brings up an array of fluctuating pronunciations throughout history that have been constantly shifted to accommodate a more modern version of English. Words like “jeopard,” “thou,” and “aks” have been altered from the 19th century to “jeopardize,” “you,” and “ask”, respectively. Double negatives have been mostly emitted from the English vocabulary, along with very formal sentence structures. These are just a few examples of the changes that language is constantly undergoing, once again highlighting the misconceptions surrounding the “true” version of a language. This reveals the importance of having an open-mind and accepting the variable ways people may speak English, since there is no true form to base correctness off of. MacKenzie concludes by encouraging viewers to combat arbitrary norms of linguistic prejudice and encourage lingual diversity in society. 

Gregory Guy’s comparable video on linguistic prejudice dives deeper into the “standard English” myth, which causes bias against those who speak maltreated dialects of English. Guy focuses on the misconceptions surrounding AAVE and Latino English, focusing on how language bias causes people of such communities to experience social inequality. He further argues that social inequality due to prejudiced language can lead to reduced academic opportunities and lower grades from pressure. Guy brings up an example of this with his childhood friend, Daryl, who ended up with a vocational job as a car mechanic because of people’s treatment of him as less capable as an AAVE speaker. This was caused by persistent torment from teachers and peers about Daryl’s pronunciation of merged vowels (“pin” instead of “pen”) and omitted copulas (“he sad” instead of “he’s sad”). He continues to emphasize this point by illuminating that a child’s way of speaking reveals their culture and family instead of their intelligence or intellectual standing. This is extremely important to recognize as the way people speak can reveal an enormous amount of their upbringing, family, culture, and experience with multiple languages. As I watched the Olympics these past couple of weeks, I have listened to athletes from around the globe speak in their native language and English on television, allowing me to listen to many different accents, see a variety of body language, and learn common linguistic practices in different countries. Just by watching I have seen the different ways athletes have interpreted and learned the complex English language, and have compared it to my own experience in school. I have been learning Spanish in my middle and high schools for the past four years, yet I lack the ability to quickly form sentences with a perfect accent and speed. Just imagining people perceiving me as unintelligent due to my pronunciation of a foreign language angers me simply because it is not the way I was originally taught to communicate; putting my feet in other’s shoes helps perceptualize how bias towards language pronunciation is unfair and discriminatory. 

Hopefully through understanding and emphasizing with others and their linguistic differences, society can recognize the community and diversity language brings to our world. Maybe if I had known that my mother’s accent didn’t separate her from my friend’s family, I would have been able to shape the rest of my childhood in a way that applauded the diversity of the English language. Laurel MacKenzie and Gregory Guy’s experiences and arguments surrounding linguistic prejudice not only opened my eyes to the experiences faced by thousands of people everyday, but emphasized the importance of recognizing linguistic differences in my community. 

Sources: Columbia University Pre-Collegiate Intro to Linguistics Course