Sociolinguistic Awareness
Did you know that linguistic discrimination is a thing and that it dovetails with pretty much every other form of discrimination? Most of us are taught that language is neutral and, therefore, there is such a thing as "good" and "bad" forms of language, even if we're open minded about other forms of identiy and recognize that there's no such thing as "good" and "bad" cultures, ethnicities, genders, and identities. But language is inextricable from culture and identity, and treating someone differently because they use "inappropriate" or "bad" langauge is just a subtler way to discriminate against them because of their identity. If you've never thought about this before, don't worry! Unlearning bias and privilege is an ongoing process for all of us, and you can start unlearning linguistic bias now! Below is a handy set of bloglets that I compiled a few years ago to give people a basic introduciton to sociolinguistics and how to identify linguistic biases you might have. All of these are things that I myself learned as an adult, and there're here because I found them eye-opening at some point. I hope you learn something, or if you already know these things, feel free to share this with others!
Beautiful languages
There’s no such thing as an objectively beautiful language or dialect! Just like in any aesthetic domain, standards for what is considered beautiful are heavily influenced by culture. Which languages/dialects have you been told are beautiful? What do they have in common? Think about power, prestige, familiarity, and politics and see if you can guess why Americans are told certain languages or dialects are more beautiful than others. On the flip side of the coin, this goes for “ugly”, “harsh”, or “grating” languages/dialects as well. Next time someone uses a negative descriptor about a language or dialect, think about who benefits from that belief.
Difficult languages
Have you been told that some languages are more difficult to learn than others? Which languages have you been told this about? How true is this, objectively speaking? Well, if you want to be completely objective, you should ask a baby. Babies learn language from scratch and therefore are the most objective language learners, and guess what? No matter what language a baby is acquiring, babies all around the world go through the same stages of language acquisition at about the same times. What that tells us is that, objectively speaking, all human languages are equally easy for humans to learn.
So why does it seem like some languages are more difficult than others? The answer is that once we’re past infancy, we are no longer objective learners. The language(s) we acquired earliest will always be the easiest for us, and when learning new languages later in life, the more similar a language is to our first language(s), the easier it will be for us to learn. Therefore, if you’re an English speaker, Spanish and French aren’t “easier” to learn because they’re somehow more systematic or logical or simple, it’s because they’re historically related to English, and you’ve likely been exposed to them to some degree. Chinese may seem more difficult for you to learn, but that’s because Chinese and English are not at all related and therefore you can’t use much of your existing language knowledge when learning it (note: Chinese written language is actually objectively more difficult to learn than pretty much any other written modern language, but writing is not the same as natural language. Korean has arguably the most logical written language, but English speakers would find it no easier to learn spoken Korean than Chinese). In sum, just because a language is difficult for you, doesn't mean it's an objectively difficult language.
Language complexity
In the same vein as “no language is objectively more difficult to learn than any other” and “no language is objectively more beautiful than any other”, it’s also the case that no language is objectively better for expressing complex ideas than any other! Again, this myth stems from the assumption that English is a neutral point of comparison, and any languages that do things differently are deviating somehow. Obviously this is not true. Some languages do more work in the complexity of vocabulary, some with complexity of word derivations, some with grammar, some with tone, etc. If you’re not a speaker of that language, you might misunderstand the nuance that can be expressed in different ways by different languages. This goes for dialects as well! All languages are equally capable of expressing the same abstract, complex ideas, they just may do it in different ways.
Signed languages
There are a lot of harmful myths about signed languages that need to be addressed. First of all, signed languages are not a monolith. There are hundredes of different signed languages—across countries and even within countries—that all have distinct vocabuaries, grammatical structures, and social norms. The major variety used in the US is American Signed Language, which is closely related to French Signed Language, due to historical accident. There are different, unrelated signed languages in the UK, even though we think of them as countries that we share a language with.
Which leads to the second point: ASL is not signed English. It is not related to English at all, except by geographical contact. There are ways to express English through sign, but these varieties are not very natural, being restrained by the structures of a language that exists in an entirely different modality. Natural signed languages make use of all of the visual cues available to them in complex and dynamic way, drawing on 3 dimension of space, speed, orientation and location, body position, and facial expression. ASL doesn't have its own widely-used writing system, so speakers of ASL are typically literate in written English, something that is not easy to acquire for those who struggle to hear the phonetic components of spoken English (because despite what disgruntled English students claim, English writing does correspond to English pronunciation in many systematic ways). Those who can speak ASL and write English are essentially bilingual, and should be respected as such.
Finally, signed languages can be acquired by children in the same way as spoken languages are, through exposure to people using the language around them, and it is not necessary for them to acquire a spoken or written language at all to be fully functioning adult language users, except as societal limitations dictate. This may seem obvious to some, but deaf children are still frequently lingustically deprived based on a false assumption that if they learn a signed language then they will never be able to acquire proficiency in the local spoken language, leading to situations where deaf children end up acquiring no language proficiently, because they simply can't acquire a spoken language with no basis for understanding how languages work first. There's a lot to be said about Deaf culture and ideologies around language acquisition that I don't have the authority to say, but keep in mind that deaf and hard of hearing people come from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds, some traumatic, and if you are a hearing person, it's never your place to judge the choices they've made as an adult with regard to how they use language. At the very least, don't perpetuate harmful myths about what signed languages are and how important they are to deaf and hard of hearing children.
African American English
African American English (AAE) is not just American English spoken badly. This may seem obvious to spearkers or AAE, but it’s very typical in white American culture to label AAE pronunciations (such as “aks” for “ask” and “dis” for “this”) and grammatical constructions (such as double negatives and different usage of “to be”) as errors rather than what they really are, which is dialectal features. AAE pronunciation and grammar are both completely systematic and internally consistent, it’s just that they follow different rules than other varieties of American English. In fact, the rules for AAE are so distinct from other varieties of English that some linguists consider it to be a separate language entirely (though this is a complex issue). In general, though, if you’re familiar with some of the features of AAE, take note of when people refer to them as errors or “bad English” and consider who benefits from that assessment. No dialect is inherently better, more logical, or more formal than any other; the status of dialects is entirely determined by the power structures of who the speakers of those dialects are.
AAE slang
While African American English (AAE) is often considered “bad English” and not accepted in formal spaces due to discriminatory attitudes toward it, ironically it is also considered “cool” and frequently adopted by white youth to portray certain personas. This is true in verbal slang as well as on the internet, and many people don’t even realize they’re using AAE borrowings. “Yaas” and “bae” are not just cute internet spellings of “yes” and “babe”, they’re representations of AAE pronunciation. “Sometimes it be like that” isn’t just a funny meme phrase, it’s an example of a systematic AAE grammatical rule called “habitual be”, which is a common feature of AAE. And vocabulary like “fleek”, “basic”, “salty”, “thicc”, “wig”, “woke”, “extra”, “snatched”, and many more originate in Black communities. While it’s not inherently bad to borrow words and phrases from other languages or dialects (and in fact, cultural exchange is healthy!), the problem is the attitudes towards these words. All of them are considered, “slang”, “informal”, and their use is often negatively construed. And simply because they come from AAE, people often use them to indicate being “hip”, “street smart”, “sassy”, “tough”, and other characteristics that are common stereotypes of Black people. The solution isn't to completely remove these words from your vocabulary, but everyone should make an effort to be aware of where cool new “slang” comes from, listen when members of a community tell you not to use a word or not to use it in a certain way, and if you do use it, make sure you’re not perpetuating harmful stereotypes by doing so.
Variations in Black Englishes
Did you know that there’s a lot of variation in the language spoken by Black people in the US? I’ve been using the term African American English in my posts (which is a debated term, but currently seems to be the most widely used in linguistics), but it’s really an umbrella term. Just like with any language variety, there’s regional variation in AAE across the US. For example, AAE and Southern American English varieties have historically had a lot of influence on each other, and in regions where these varieties are still in contact AAE will sound a bit different than it will in other regions. Urban AAE vs. rural AAE may be different from each other too. And like any dialect, AAE interacts with all of the other identities a speaker may have, such as gender, sexuality, age, education, socioeconomic class, being a public figure, etc. While AAE does tend to be more similar across different regions of the US than White Englishes (due to the role it plays in maintaining community identity for Black Americans, as well as continued social segregation), it’s worth remembering that AAE speakers are not a monolith.
While this is not a variety of English, Black American Sign Language is also a language used in African American communities. BASL is similar to American Sign Language in the same way that AAE and White American English are similar. Which is to say, they are generally mutually intelligible, but differ in grammar, vocabulary, and phonology (i.e. the way signs are produced). Like AAE, BASL arose out of segregation (specifically in schools for the deaf) and maintains its differences from ASL due to both cultural significance and identity as well as the social segregation that still exists in the US.
The Dictionary
Dictionaries should not be used as objective authorities on language! Contrary to popular belief, dictionaries are not intended to lay out rules for how language *should* be used, but rather to document how language is actually used. Using the dictionary to “prove” a definition doesn’t actually prove anything except that a particular usage is established enough to have made it into that edition of the dictionary. Dictionaries are adding new words and definitions all the time, but because of the complex processes involved in adding words, they are often several years behind on new vocabulary and definitions. In other words, when a word like irregardless getting added to a dictionary doesn't mean English is deteriorating, it means that enough people are already using this word with a commonly understood meaning that lexicographers determined it was worth recognizing, and that's how every word ended up in the dictionary. Likewise, if a word isn't in the dictionary, that doesn't mean it's not a real word, because it might just not be used widely enough yet to have made it through the dictionary-writing process. Keep using it, and if enough people agree on its definition, you may see it added eventually!
Here’s a great example of how dictoionaries can get updated! This woman noticed that the definition of “racism” didn’t fully represent how it is actually being used, so she reached out to the dictionary, and now it is being updated! This is a great way to make sure dictionaries are up to date on language related to communities that tend to be underrepresented in dictionaries.
Language pet peeves
Do you have any pet peeves about language that you hate hearing people say? How many of those pet peeves represent actual language errors and not just things you’ve been told not to do for arbitrary stylistic reasons? Probably most of them! The word “ain’t” is a perfectly valid word in many English dialects. The use of “literally” to mean “figuratively” has been around for almost a century and is completely understandable by most speakers of English. Splitting infinitives was never a problem in English until some stuffy grammarian decided English should be more like Latin. Pronouncing “espresso” like “expresso” is a natural evolution of a loanword to make it more pronounceable in English. Most linguistic “errors” people correct each other on are actually either dialectal features which happen to be dispreferred in school/formal English or new forms that are a result of natural language change. Correcting these kinds of “errors” is almost always elitist (assuming the speaker must have a high level of formal education and use formal English in all situations) or ageism against youth and fear of change. Language is not static and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to use language to keep certain people out of formal spaces! I would argue that the only actual language “errors” a native speaker of a language could make are complete accidents caused by speaking too quickly or being drunk, etc. Anything systematic enough for you to be peeved about is probably not an error.
Accents
Do you have an accent? Yes, of course you do! Did you think the answer was “no”, or did you have a moment where you had to remind yourself that yes, you probably do? Then you are linguistically privileged! Linguistically, there is no such thing as a “neutral” accent, since the technical definition of accent is literally just the systematic way you pronounce (or sign) your language. Do you speak or sign a language? Congrats, you have an accent! So why do we learn that some people have accents and others don’t? It has nothing to do with objective features of a particular accent or dialect and everything to do with power structures in a society. Who runs the schools where language is taught? Who decides what accent people should use on national news programs? Who tends to get cast in leading roles in media? The public figures with the most power in a society get to set the norms for a language and decide what counts as “formal” language, regardless of whether this norm is truly representative of the population. This is true all over the world and across time, so it’s on us as individuals and communities to recognize this imbalance and call it what it is. Don’t say “this person speaks normally and that person has an accent,” or you are continuing to uphold the system that punishes and degrades people for deviation from the accepted power structures. Instead, try saying “this person speaks the standard/privileged variety and that person speaks a less-privileged variety”.
Dialect and intelligence/education
Can you guess how intelligent a person is based on how they speak? No. You might be able to judge how intelligent a person is based on what they say (if you believe in the concept of general intelligence), but how they say it really shouldn’t be a factor. There is definitely a dialect (or set of dialects) that are commonly used by people who are highly educated (usually using Mainstream White American pronunciation and lots of big words and “formal” grammar that must be learned in school), but the opposite is not true! There is no specific dialect that indicates that a speaker is uneducated! Yes, this even applies to people you don't like. For example, do you think Trump is stupid? Fine, but don't mock the way he says things, because there other people out there who use similar dialect features but aren't massive shitheads.
Dialects are a function of where you grew up and the groups of people you identify with and have nothing to do with your intelligence. While you can acquire an additional dialect if you spend enough time in higher education, this generally doesn’t replace your native dialect(s), and most people are able to use several different dialects based on the situation. Speaking a dialect that is not common to school doesn’t mean that a person is either untillegent or uneducated, but unfortunately we’re used to the media using certain dialects as signifiers of intelligence, such as uneducated characters having African American English or Southern American English accents and really smart characters having British English accents. Be careful in your own speech that you’re not using non-mainstream dialects or accents to indicate lack of intelligence, because you may be unintentionally perpetuating classist, racist, and/or ableist stereotypes! This is something I still have to fight even after years of studying linguistics, so don’t feel horrible if you catch yourself doing this, but you have to make a point to work on it if you want to change.
Academic language
The language of academia is intentionally exclusive. All of the obscure and technical vocabulary, the use of Latin, the overly-complex sentence structures of academic writing, and the emphasis on eloquence over clarity make it inaccessible to people who haven’t been exposed to it for a long time. And who *does* get exposed to it? Mostly children of people who have had some higher education themselves, which is part of why it can be so difficult for first-generation college students to adapt to the language of academia. The consequence is that those with fewer resources and less family experience may feel stupid for not being able to understand academic writing/speaking and think they must not understand the topic, when the reality is that they’re just not accustomed to this particular variety of English. It doesn’t have to be this way though! Academics should work towards using clearer, more colloquial language so that their research is more accessible to a wider range of people and not exclusive of those with different backgrounds.
Eye dialects
How do you represent non-mainstream speech in writing? Lots of writers turn to spelling to represent dialect variation. Here’s an example from a 2009 book by Patrick Ness:
“Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don’t hurt?”
What do these non-standard spellings tell us about the character being portrayed here? Before you answer, first consider: do you know any English speakers who don’t pronounce the abbreviation of “because” as “cuz”? Do you know anyone who never abbreviates “because” to “cuz”? When you’re speaking quickly, don’t you pronounce “your” as “yer”? These spellings, along with examples like “iz”, “ov”, “enuff”, “wimmin”, etc. are all examples of “eye dialect”, which is the phenomenon of spelling words the way they sound in order to represent dialectal pronunciation. The problem is, “eye dialect” words are words that are pronounced the same in casual speech by most speakers anyway. So this raises the question, why would you write a character as saying “iz” instead of “is” when they’re both pronounced the same? Typically this spelling is used to indicate that the speaker is uneducated, or simply to “other” them by suggesting that something is weird about the way they speak. This is a classist and often racist way to portray character speech, but it’s easy to buy into because we associate standard spelling with “standard” speech.
Something that does NOT count as eye dialect is respelling words to represent actual differences in pronunciation. If a dialect pronounces words spelled with “th” the same as words with “d”, then it may make sense to write the words with “d” instead. Many speakers of non-mainstream dialects use respellings to better represent their own speech. Think of Scottish Twitter or Black Twitter! Personally I think this is a great way for communities to take ownership of a written language that historically hasn’t represented them well. These communities may use eye dialectal spellings for themselves too, which is totally fine if that’s what they want. However, if you are not a speaker of a particular dialect, consider very carefully what you are implying if you use dialectal spellings for characters in your writing.
Accents in Disney and beyond
What does the dialect or accent that a person speaks with tell you about them? In real life, it can only tell you where or with whom they grew up, but in the media, it’s used to represent a lot more. Let’s look at some examples from Disney. The Lion King (1994) was made in the US and most of the characters have American accents, including Mufasa, but Mufasa’s brother Scar has a British accent. Why? What was it about the voice of this actor that made someone decide he would make a great upper-class villain? And why is Rafiki the only character with an accent that sounds like it could come from an African language (note, the voice actor was American)? And how about those hyenas, the lower-class, stupid henchpeople? What kind of accent do they have? Considering that this is an American-made film and none of the characters are human, what are their accents telling us about the characters?
Beauty and the Beast is set in France, so why is Lumiere the only character with a French accent? Why is Sebastian the only character with a Jamaican accent in Little Mermaid? How about Mushu’s African American accent in Mulan? In all of these examples, funny sidekicks have non-standard accents and the princess speaks with a Standard American accent. A lot of classy villains get British accents, such as Jafar in Aladdin (and remember, the only character with an "Arabic" accent in that movie was the shifty shopkeeper). And characters with African American accents, especially in older Disney movies, are usually fun-loving animals who are not central to the plot, such as the jazz cats in Aristocats and the crows in Dumbo. And lets not forget the monkeys in Jungle Book who speak AAE, sing jazz, and desperately want to be human!
As a society, we’ve developed such a strong association between certain accents and character traits that those accents are often used to represent character traits, thus reinforcing the stereotypes. And these are all just examples from children’s media! Is it any wonder that adults have linguistic prejudices when we start learning this so young? And this is common in all kinds of media, though animated media usually has it the worst due to the ability to divorce a character’s appearance (or even humanity) from the actor. There's a whole field of linguistics on this, with one of the most well-known scholars being Rosina Lippi-Green, if you want to know more.
Obviously the solution to this is to be more diverse in casting in media in order to break these stereotypes, but if you’re not a casting director for Disney, the next best step is to at least start being aware of what is being done, and to teach our kids to be aware too. What are some examples of this in media you watch? Villains with British/German/Russian accents (it’s politics, baby!)? “Exotic” characters with accents from Asia, Africa, or the Middle East? Sexualized characters with accents from Romance languages? Stupid characters with Southern American English accents? Once you start hearing it, it's hard to un-hear.
Educational Privilege
You’ve probably noticed that the info above is largely things that you weren’t taught in school, or things that explicitly counter what you were taught in school about language. Part of that is because what linguists do and what English teachers do are completely different things, but part of it is also that public schools are part of a system that upholds the privilege of the dominant social group. Not necessarily on purpose, but I’ll break it down.
First, as I’ve mentioned before, most things people consider language “errors” are not actually errors, and many of the “correct” ways of saying things are actually outdated, unnatural, or entirely made up, but the school system teaches them to us anyway, so that the people who are able to master such arbitrary language rules can use them to establish that they are educated and therefore deserving of being in a higher social class. And who tends to be able to master these rules? The white middle class, because they come into school already speaking a dialect very close to the expected language of school, and therefore have less to learn.
If you’re a white middle class English speaker, imagine what it would be like to begin going to public school only to discover that everyone in school expects you to speak a different dialect than the one you grew up speaking. It’s doable, but it’s hard, because no one is going to help you learn it. Instead they’ll just tell you that you speak poorly and must not be very smart, and they’ll punish you for using your native dialect (at best with poor grades, at worst with actual disciplinary consequences). So now you feel bad about speaking the way your family speaks and think you must not be very smart. Maybe you try to learn to speak the way the school expects you to, but it’s hard, because you’re already trying to learn math and science and history, but unlike your white, middle class classmates, you ALSO have to learn a whole new dialect, so maybe your grades suffer in your non-language schoolwork too. Or maybe you don’t play along and you rebel. You get labeled as uncooperative and unintelligent and are put in lower level classes. One way or the other, you struggle against a system that wasn’t built for you. And when you graduate, how likely do you think you’d be to want to become a teacher and stay in that system?
It’s not by chance that people of color are not equally represented in higher education and in teaching, but it’s not because of a lack of motivation, intelligence, or desire to help people, it’s often because the system privileges white, middle class people (both in regards to language and other aspects), and those who are privileged are more likely to succeed, and those who succeed are more likely to want to both remain a part of the system and to keep the system the way it is, because it worked for them. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, because the people who run it are the people it was designed to work well for.
Is there a solution here? Honestly, the whole education system needs to be redesigned and teachers retrained to understand and respect dialectal differences. Personally I think a better understanding of linguistics in primary and secondary schools would go a long way towards dealing with some of these disparities, but maybe I’m just biased. After all, I was someone who benefited from my privilege in this system. I was the most annoying kind of grammar nerd as a highschooler! I only hope that now that I know better, I can help others do better for the next generation of kids.
Pronouns
What’s up with pronouns? Every language has pronouns in some form, which are simply words which are used to refer to a person who is already salient in the conversation without using their name. Different languages do pronouns differently, but in English, pronouns are different depending on person (1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person), number (singular vs plural), and gender (but only in the 3rd person). This last issue, the issue of gendered pronouns, is a current hot topic due to the increased visibility of varied gender identities. So let’s get a few things straight here, from a linguistic perspective.
Singular “they” is a totally valid word. “They” has been used for centuries to refer to singular persons of unknown gender, and if you are a speaker of English, you have absolutely used it this way at some point in your life without noticing it (probably recently, even). If this is what you need to tell people to make them believe that singular “they” is valid, go right ahead, but linguistically speaking, a word doesn’t need to be centuries old in its usage to be valid! Language changes, and at some point someone has to be the first person to use a new word or use a word in a new way, and in linguistics we understand that this is very normal and in fact healthy for living languages. So the use of “they” for a single person of unknown gender is super old, and the use of “they” for nonbinary perople is a more recent development, but both are equally valid, because language users get to decide how they use their own language.
You may have heard that pronouns are a “closed class” of words and that they actually can’t change because they’re so common. It’s true that some classes of words change more easily than others, and pronouns are on the more difficult side (which is why it’s been hard for a lot of people to pick up the new uses of “they”), but it’s nonsense to suggest that it can never happen. How often do you use the word “you” to refer to a single person? Why don’t you use “thou” instead, and “you” only for groups of people? Because English’s pronoun system changed pretty significantly within the past few hundred years, that’s why.
My point about newly invented words still being valid also goes for neo-pronouns like “ze/hir/hirs” and “ey/em/eir”. These are going to be a bit more difficult to adapt to than simply taking an already-used pronoun and altering its meaning, but that doesn’t mean they will never catch on, and it certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them when asked to. The more people use them, the more normal they will become to younger generations, just like any language change.
A few points about pronouns in other languages. Like English, many languages are adding or reassigning pronouns to be used for people who are not comfortable using either male or female pronouns. Languages like Spanish, where adjectives also have to agree with the gender of the person your talking about are adding whole new endings (“-x” or “-e”) for nonbinary people. Languages that have a 3rd, neuter gender can sometimes use this for nonbinary people, but it has its own problems, because it’s often associated with inanimacy or infantilization. Some languages don’t distinguish gender at all in their pronouns, such as Chinese, in which the words for “he”, “she”, and “it” are all pronounced the same, but this doesn’t mean cultures without gendered pronouns are gender-free havens. Some languages just happen to highlight personal gender more than others, which can lead to different challenges for trans, nonbinary, and non-gender-conforming individuals in every language.
In the end, linguistics says that change is normal and that it's healthy for a language to keep up with changing societal values, so pay attention to the preferred pronouns of all people and use them! Normalizing sharing of pronouns along with names is a good step toward adapting our linguistic norms to fit our changing awareness of gender.
Slurs
How do you know what words are ok or not ok to use to describe a person or marginalized group of people? This one actually has a very short, easy answer: ask! With a slightly more difficult caveat: actually listen! And to be more specific, ask the individuals or community members who will be affected by this language, not just your friends. What if you don’t know anyone from that community? Google it! There’s lots of great writing out there that can explain why a word or phrase may or may not be ok to use, but make sure you check to be sure it’s coming from members of that community. Lots of people with good intentions but who are outside of a community have opinions on what might be ok and what isn’t, but it’s the feelings of the people affected that really matter. And if you didn’t ask, but someone voluntarily tells you that you shouldn’t use a word or phrase, congratulations on your free lesson!
Here are some things you should NOT do. Don’t try to use the dictionary to prove that a word is or is not ok to use. As I’ve explained above, dictionaries attempt to reflect how language is actually used, but they can often be behind the times or missing input from marginalized voices, so if the dictionary says it’s ok but a member of the community says it's not, listen to the person, not the book. On the other side, keep in mind that language changes and determining the true origins of a word can be difficult, or, despite an obviously offensive origin, the definition may have changed, so using etymology to argue that a word is offensive is not great either. Overly-censored language can make people feel “othered” sometimes too. Again, just ask!
And don’t be surprised if what counts as a slur changes over your lifetime. Language changes with society, and people always seem to find ways to make descriptive words sound nasty when they don’t like a group. This is a lifelong process, so keep an open mind!
Words don’t exist in a vacuum, they’re products of society, and therefore you should choose to use or not use words as befits the kind of society you want to live in. Want to live in a safe, just society? You may have to make an effort to be careful about the words you use in order to do so, but it’ll be worth it for the social impact you’ll make, and that’s the whole point of language anyway! I recommend looking up lists of words that are commonly considered to be racist, sexist, ableist (there’s so many in this category you might not realize you use!), homophobic, transphobic, classist, and so on. It’s not easy to fix them all at once, but the sooner you start making yourself aware, the easier it will be to start noticing before you say it!
Literacy
Up to this point I’ve mostly been talking about spoken/signed language, since that’s what most of linguistics focuses on. Now I want to clarify a few of the more basic aspects of written language and literacy.
First of all, literacy and language competence are not the same thing! Except in extremely rare cases (e.g. damage to certain parts of the brain or severe language deprivation), all people are competent in at least one language. It’s only very recently that a large portion of the population has become literate in at least one language, and many people aren’t literate in one or more of the languages they speak even today. This may be due to a complete lack of formal education, but more often it’s due to either the language not having a formal written form or the speaker being formally educated in a different language (e.g. children of immigrants or speakers of minority languages). From this situation, we can easily see that writing/reading is something that must be taught, since not everyone can do it, but speaking/signing is completely innate, since all children learn to do it as long as they are exposed to natural language early.
Therefore, ability to read/write a language is not really related to ability to speak a language. Literacy is also not at all related to intelligence! Since written language has become such a prevalent part of modern culture, it can be difficult to forget this sometimes, but judging a person’s language ability or general intelligence based on their reading/writing ability is classist, ableist, and linguistically incorrect. This includes spelling ability, understanding of formal punctuation rules, and even the particular grammatical features typical of writing. Spoken language and writing are very different in more ways that we might realize, even though we’ve been trained to see them as reflections of each other, but writing is a learned skill (involving memorizing lots of arbitrary rules) and speaking/signing is an innate ability that does not need to be taught to be acquired.
This isn’t to say that literacy isn’t important, of course. However, it is factually incorrect to use literacy as a measure of other language abilities. Literacy should be treated like driving: a very useful skill that most people of a certain age have but which is absolutely not necessary to be an intelligent, functional member of a society, as long as reasonable accommodations are made to include everyone.
Multilingualism
You may have heard that kids who grow up exposed to two or more different languages have a more difficult time learning to speak than kids who are exposed to just one, because they have to sort out the two different languages, so they’re more likely to struggle in school. You may also have heard that multilingual kids are smarter because they have access to multiple different language frameworks. The truth is that neither of these things are really true, because multilingualism is actually just incredibly normal. A vast majority of people in the world are multilingual, and many of these people grow up exposed to multiple languages from a young age, so multilingualism is actually the norm from which we should be judging monolingual kids as deviant.
That’s not to say that only knowing one language makes people less intelligent or more focused or anything like that. Largely, the consequences of knowing more than one language are social, not intellectual. Knowing more than one language exposes you to a wider range of people, cultures, and ways of thinking, but that’s about all we can say for certain in linguistics. There’s still a lot more research on multilingualism yet to be done!
The point I want to make here is that, in the US and many other Western countries, we consider monolingualism to be the norm, and that’s just not the case for humanity as a whole. It’s not hard to learn more than one language, as long as you’re exposed to them early in life, but we tend to think of multilingualism as a “skill” here, because so many people have to work hard to learn a new language because they don’t start until high school or later. However, we tend to subtly discriminate by selectively applying the “skill” label to white people only. If you’re a white immigrant from France, you’re a skilled professional in two languages. If you’re a white American learning Chinese, you’re so worldly! If you’re a non-white immigrant, you’d better work on perfecting your American accent, because you wouldn’t want anyone to know it’s not your first language. If you’re a non-white American who grew up in a multilingual household, you might need special classes to make sure you keep up with your monolingual peers in school. Do you see the double standard here?
There are a lot of elements that contribute to the way we as Americans view multilingualism in regards to different ethnic groups and different languages, but we’re only able to make this distinction at all by assuming that monolingualism is the baseline, which it objectively is not. America is an outlier for having such a large monolingual population, and while you shouldn’t feel bad if you personally are monolingual, it’s worth keeping some perspective on the bigger picture to avoid making those discriminatory judgments about multilingual people.
Official languages
How many countries around the world have English as an official national language? Several dozen, but interestingly, the USA, UK, and Australia are not among them! The US does not have any national laws specifying any official language (though several individual states do). This makes it especially ironic and nasty when people insist that “this is America, speak English!” But the US can get away with not having to have an “official” language because of the assumed dominance of English. Obviously all our laws are written in English. The countries where English is an official national language are primarily countries in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Caribbean with a British or US colonial history. Chew on that one for a while.
Youth language
Kids these days have such poor language skills! They can’t spell because they’re always using spellcheck, their reading comprehension is poor because they don’t read books, and they’re causing English to degrade by inventing a bunch of silly slang instead of learning real words, right??? (I’m sure you already know what I’m about to say) Wrong!!!
Spellcheck is great, I love spellcheck, and I'm a professional editor! But I, like most spellcheck users, am not blindly beholden to the little red line. If it marks something as wrong that I know is right because it’s a name, loan word, newly coined word, very technical word, or even an intentional misspelling, I am happy to ignore it (and maybe even yell at it). Many young people turn off their device’s autocomplete options because it doesn’t allow them the creativity and flexibility to express themselves! And anyway, English spelling conventions are totally arbitrary and honestly very difficult compared to other languages with phonetic alphabets (mainly because we’ve borrowed words and spelling conventions from a bunch of different languages), and as I’ve explained above, the ability to write well is not at all related to general language ability.
So kids don’t read enough books anymore? Even if this were true, it’s really not an issue. Kids these days read SO MUCH MORE than any previous generation has, it’s just not traditional books! Younger and younger kids are getting online and learning to communicate with their friends via text, engaging with various forms of text-based social media, getting involved in fandoms and the accompanying fiction/discourse, and so forth. This all contributes to very high levels of literacy! Of course, the specific variety of literacy valued by school is a different kind of literacy, one which prioritizes strict writing conventions, expressivity through wordiness rather than style, and formal, mainstream English norms. And while there may be a time and a place for having this formal skill, it’s frankly irresponsible to brush off the incredible literacy young people are developing online.
Lastly but definitely not leastly, English is not degrading! In fact, no language is degrading except maybe those that are losing speakers at an alarming rate due to collonialism, genocide, and aging speaker populations. If you speak a major world language, your language is completely healthy and, by definition, part of being a healthy language is constant change! So kids have stopped using words that are part of your vocabulary? So what! At some point, young people stopped using “thy” and “bethink” “whence” and no one complains about that anymore. Once you’re dead, no one will complain about the loss of your words either (sorry). Same deal with new words being added! It’s all part of healthy language change, and in a few generations, new words will be totally normal (remember the debate about whether to use “hello” or “ahoy” when answering the phone when it was first invented? Yeah, didn’t think so).
For those of you who speak non-English languages who are worried about them degrading because of the increasing number of loanwords from English, I hate to tell you that this is also totally normal. Languages that are in close contact share vocabulary (and often other features too), and while there are certainly debates to be had over the effect of English as a global language on politics and identity, borrowing words from English is very much expected from a linguistic standpoint. English also at one point borrowed a lot of words from French (due to the Norman invasion), but it didn’t turn into French. The words changed to match the pronunciation and use in English, and now we wouldn’t even recognize most of them as French loanwords (words like “beef”, “mansion”, “conceive”, and “maternal”). It’s very likely that the same will happen with many of the loan words from English to other languages of the world. Don’t worry, regional and ethnic identity are strong enough to motivate keeping languages distinct, even as they evolve!
As a last point, if you are the youth I’m talking about now and you’re thinking “yeah, respect my language!”, just keep in mind that someday you will no longer be youth, and you should offer the same respect to the language of the next generation as you want your elders to offer yours!
Language variation
What do linguists think about language variation? I keep saying that all languages are “objectively” equal in their ability to express ideas and their logical structure, because realizing that there’s no linguistic justification for linguistic discrimination is the first step towards understanding how language and dialect really work. However, knowing that all languages are objectively equal doesn’t remove the fact that society doesn’t (and probably never will) treat them as such. “All dialects should be treated equally” is the “I don’t see color” of linguistics. Ok, great, you recognize that there are no *inherent* differences, but not recognizing the social differences will cause you to minimize or outright ignore the lived experiences of people who are farther from the mainstream accepted language. So a good, linguistically supported attitude toward language is something like “I recognize that your language/dialect is linguistically equal to mine, but I also recognize that because of the social structure of our culture, there may be concrete differences in how we experience our linguistic identities.”
Language acquisition and the "Word Gap"
The “Word Gap” or “Vocabulary Gap” is a concept that comes from a study done in the 90’s which suggested that kids from lower income households struggle more in school because they are exposed to an average of 30,000 fewer words in their first few years than kids of higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Parents in lower income families might have to work more jobs to support the family and thus not have as much leisure time with their kids to talk to them, or they may not know how to appropriately expose their children to language early on, as the assumption went. This study inspired Head Start and many similar programs aimed at improving educational outcomes for lower income kids by exposing them to more language and teaching parents to talk to their kids more. But this study had some problems.
The study itself, in addition to being nearly 3 decades old now, was conducted on only about 40 families and had some questionable methods. More recent replications of the study have not been able to find word gaps of more than a couple thousand words at most. Also, in the original study, there were many more Black families in the lower income brackets than the higher income ones, which adds an element of culture and language that was not sufficiently addressed, not to mention the possible effects of having a white researcher record Black partents talking to their children and the differences in power dynamics between the researcher and the family in lower class Black vs upper class white households. In addition to these critiques of the original study, there are some issues to be raised from a general linguistic standpoint as well.
Did you know that you don’t have to teach kids to speak their native language? Learning language is a lot like learning to walk: you might give your child some help or encouragement as they try out their first few steps, but even without this help, every child who is able to walk will start walking. It’s the same with speaking. Is pointing to objects and saying the name of the object over and over again helping your child learn language? Maybe it’s helping speed it up, but they would figure it out eventually anyway. Kids are language sponges! As long as they are exposed to at least one language, they will pick it up by a certain age.
But test scores consistently show that lower income kids really do struggle more in school, so what’s the deal? Well, part of it is dialectal differences, because lower income students are more likely to come from different language backgrounds than the mainstream English of the school. It’s difficult to even make a meaningful comparison between the “vocabulary” of kids who are learning different languages or dialects at home, because different language varieties can distinguish unique “words” in different ways, and the type of vocabulary that’s likely to come up on standardized tests will certainly be from the mainstream variety. Another part of the problem is the subtler issue of style. Some ethnic and socioeconomic groups tend to value formal education more highly and have more experience with it, and thus the way they talk to their children will be very similar to what kids will encounter in school. Pointing at an object and saying “What’s that? That’s a doggy!” is very much a white, middle class style of speech which imitates the question/answer format of formal schooling.
In sum, language acquisition comes naturally to all kids (barring cases of language deprivation or injuries/differences in the brain), so if some kind of “word gap” or educational outcome disparity exists, it may not be as closely tied to socioeconomic class as many suggest, but rather to dialectal, cultural, and stylistic differences between different households and the amount of difference in language variety between home and school. And as a final point, how many words you know doesn’t really correlate with intelligence. If you can express yourself clearly using more words but simpler vocabulary, that’s just as good as someone who uses fewer words but more obscure vocabulary.
Summary
If you got this far, hopefully you’ve learned to think a little more critically about popular assumptions related to language. It’s truly amazing how many “facts” people think they know about language that are actually just myths designed to reinforce pre-existing social hierarchies. And if you realized you’ve been holding a harmful belief (or several) about language before now, join the club! The point is that these ideas are so prevalent that we rarely think to question them, even if we are members of a group that is being hurt by them. Now that you’ve learned to notice them, you can join me in actively working toward avoiding causing future harm and helping spread the truth!
The harsh reality is that all of the subjects above show that linguistic discrimination is very real, very harmful, and subtle enough that even those who are progressive in other ways may not realize that they’re participating in it. If you are an employer and you decide not to hire someone because they don’t sound articulate or educated enough, you may think that you’re making a judgment based on the applicant’s ability or personality, but you’re actually judging them based on their membership in a (probably disadvantaged) group, which means you’re probably making a racist, classist, ageist, anti-immigrant, etc. judgment.
If you think you would never do that, you need to take a deep breath and commit to really examining your thoughts and actions from now on. You may not explicitly think “this person sounds uneducated”, it may be more like “this person doesn’t sound like a good fit for this job” or “this person sounds disrespectful” or “this person sounds crass” or “the way this person talks makes me uncomfortable”. It’s something we’ve been trained to do by society, and I guarantee everyone has done it at some point. I’ve been studying linguistics for years, which means I’ve been aware of these issues a long time and I’m especially aware of language use in daily situations, and I STILL catch myself having these thoughts. Just like unlearning any other kind of discrimination, unlearning linguistic descrimination takes time and conscious effort in order to overcome the unconscious ideas we never even realized we were being taught. And this goes for people in groups that are linguistically discriminated against too! These kinds of harmful thoughts can make you feel bad about yourself and pit you against others of your same linguistic group, and of course, you are not exempt from discriminating against speakers of other disadvantaged varieties.
So if you're looking for ways to be a better ally to minority groups of any kind, add language to your list of things to be conscious of! Employers and landlords have been proven to subtly discriminate against people who speak differently than them, and just imagine what the same prejudices might do in the hands of the police! Who sounds like a suspect? Who sounds like they’re being disrespectful or resisting arrest? Who sounds “other” and therefore untrustworthy? On the other end, who sounds sympathetic and worthy of being listened to? Who sounds authoritative? Who sounds honest? Language is a social justice issue that is inseparable from group identity, but which too many people take for granted. If this is your first exposure to linguistic justice, I hope the most important thing you’ve taken away from my posts is that there’s no such thing as a “neutral” language or language judgment, and that you should think critically about who benefits from your ingrained language attitudes. That’s the first step toward becoming a linguistically-conscious ally.
Thank you so much for reading! I hope you will use this knowledge in your own life, and feel free to share this page with others! Go forth and use your language proudly and justly.