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)
