Sara Introspective

[saraintrospective-blog]

This Twitter post plays on the assumed stereotypes and identifiable difference between male and female written language as depicted on social media. Here, males convey their friendship in a seemingly emotionless, plain way, whereas females enjoy sharing emotional and personal connections to provide evidence for friendship. The stereotype is that men are informative, and females are expressive. Female “rapport talk” versus male “report talk” is how Deborah Tannen would categorize this language-gender intersection. Rapport talk “establishes and maintains social relationships” while report talk “conveys straightforward information rather than emotion or gossip” (Tannen 1990:74ff). 

What makes this Twitter post humorous is that it is based on assumptions. Speaking for myself, I laughed out loud because of the commonality in which I have seen this pattern via Instagram or Facebook birthday posts. Scrolling through social media, my female friends are those whom I see posting long, “sappy” birthday messages. My male friends hardly post for their friends’ birthday. If they do post, it is very simplistic and direct as shown in the Twitter post here. This naturally makes me thinks that girls verbally share more, and guys verbally share less.

The pattern affirms my assumptions, however the patterns I see in my social circle do not represent gender language behavior universally. Psychologist Janet Hyde and researcher Matthias Mehl have actually conducted quantitative research to test whether or not females are more talkative than male. Mehl’s results show that “the data fails to reveal a reliable sex difference in daily word use” (Mehl et al. 2007:82). However, the assumptions of how females and males think and communicate still remains quite established socially. This is what initiates the humorous response evoked by posts like the Twitter one above.

[saraintrospective-blog]

GIF from:https://tenor.com/view/debate-presidential-debate-debate2016-donald-trump-bad-hombres-gif-6196074

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign set off waves of attention to ethnic discrimination, both subtly and openly. Trump, on speaking about immigration, vows to get the “bad hombres” out to protect the country from drugs. Repeatedly, during the debate he uses the word, “bad” in referring to Mexicans who attempt to come to America. Finally, using the term “bad hombres”, Trump positions himself as “elevating white authority” (Ahearn 233). The Spanish speaking immigrant is now stereotypically portrayed as a drug dealer whom America must protect its people from. Trump a privileged white male basks in the superiority he has used to mock the Mexican man. He poses white America as the emblem of defense and righteousness, while Spanish-speaking America is portrayed as a menace to society.

His term, “bad hombre” can be viewed as “Mock Spanish, “ a way of racializing Spanish speakers in the United States”( Ahearn 232). In reference to Mock Spanish, Jane Hill states, “Unlike the direct indexicality involved in Mock Spanish, which explicitly indexes the speaker as humorous or cosmopolitan...indirect indexicality implicitly indexes negative stereotype of Mexicans and other Latin Americans as treacherous, lazy, politically corrupt...”(1998:683, Ahearn 233).What is interesting is that Trump’s combination of direct indexicality produces the same negative stereotypic effects of indirect indexicality. He intentionally implied to label Mexican immigrants as criminals or malicious by purposefully adding the Spanish word hombre in his speech for the sake of humor on his part.

This humor works against his favor as much of America is appalled by such an ignorant statement as this. With the creation of memes that pose Trump as foolish and unintelligent, opponents of Trump work together to negate the consequences of “conversational agreement” (Ahearn 235). Conversational agreement works to reinforce negative racist conversation. While Trump’s statement is extremely ignorant and only further indexes his narrow sighted white supremist tendencies, others may use his Mock Spanish to “emboldened [them] to make more blatantly negative and eventually outright racist remarks”(Ahearn 235). Trump’s single incident of ethnic profiling, in the sense that he defined what a typical immigrant apparently embodies, is only one of many examples in which Trump’s language has promoted racial discrimination to thrive. The use of language in white America to mock other cultures further establishes the negative views and stereotypes that divide our society.

  See also: http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/10/19/third-presidential-debate-trump-immigration-bad-hombres-sot.cnn

[saraintrospective-blog]

The emphasis of an African American English (AAE) sentence in the amidst of a Standard American English (SAE) sentence highlights the important truth that AAE is a grounded language that ought to be respected and regarded as any other language is. Too easily, American society labels African American speech as slang or lazy because they compare it to a standardized normal way of speaking. However, those who judge in this manner reveal their ignorance to the idea that language is an embodiment and enabler of socialization, identity, and agency.

If that is not enough to convince society to acknowledge AAE, we cannot ignore the “rule governed nature of AAE (Ahearn, 216). Ahearn takes note of AAE’s consistent grammatical structures, such as the reduction of final consonants or the invariant “be.” ‘Nothin’ be wrong does not mean that nothing is currently incorrect with my speech, but rather it means that nothing never was, is, or will be wrong with my speech. The way African Americans “be talkin’” is exactly that: a constant, consistent structure of communication that indexes directly implicit intentions. In this textual image, the perpetual nature of the “be”  reflects an ideology that African Americans have no need to ask for forgiveness for the structure of their language, for it has always been their history, identity, and unity.

This post promotes the African American community standing in solidarity in the wholeness of their language. What I think would add more to this image, is the use of “we” rather than “I” in “the way I speak.” In the documentary, “Do you Speak American?”, I noticed that vernacular language was freely expressed in community with people of the same culture. For example, the local urban music group facilitated a familial bond to further portray their music and “local street talk” (51:00-54:00).Here, individuals were open to communicate and “practice” their normal conversation. The use of “I” in this image denotes an African American defending himself. As noticed by the unity depicted in the African American culture and in the documentary, the African American community supports each other---a value necessary for any thriving language.