#language discrimination

[this-is-asiaphobia]

omg i'm so happy this blog exists

asiaphobia is us having to tell my (japanese immigrant to america) grandfather (who does speak english but prefers talking in japanese cause it's his native language) to stop talking in japanese during 2020 cause we were afraid he was going to get attacked (a lot of asian people were at the time for "causing covid" or some stupid thing)

his response was that it's chinese people that were getting the accusations, and while that was obviously very terrible, we are japanese and therefore are not subject to this. grandfather. if someone is racist enough to attack someone for speaking chinese they are racist enough to not check which east asian language you are speaking. like i know they sound different. however not to a racist they don't.

thankfully nothing ever actually ended up happening to him, but i remember being genuinely scared that it would

-- 🗾🎭

This is asiaphobia.

[red-hibiscus]

A paraphrased excerpt from the speaker at my (linguistics) department graduation:

"Language discrimination is thinly veiled racism, classism, and xenophobia"

This being about how people, including professionals, look down upon certain accents or dialects because they're somehow less than. The distinction between prestigious accents and dialects and those deemed as 'lower class' should not exist. And as linguistics it's our job to set things straight.

Through my years of study I was always taught that linguists were descriptivist, simply studying and analyzing what the world presented to them. We're not prescriptivists. We don't tell people how they should speak. It goes against what I've been taught. That all languages and dialects, spoken or signed, carry the tools needed to communicate high level concepts.

It's one thing to give someone speech therapy because they have trouble being understood due to an actual speech problem. It's another thing to look down upon 2nd language learners and speakers of dialects that aren't the prestigious standard.

As a linguist from an immigrant family I'd like to slap everyone who looks down on others for the way they speak.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

English universities have grounds for legal action to counter tuition hike, lawyer says - Montreal | Globalnews.ca

Constitutional Rights Lawyer Julius Grey believes anglophone universities have grounds for legal action against the CAQ government.

Constitutional Rights Lawyer Julius Grey believes anglophone universities, and the province’s English-speaking community as a whole, have grounds for legal action against the CAQ government. “Its essence is to reduce the role of the English language and therefore it constitutes discrimination as to language,” Grey said of the recent tuition change. On Thursday, Quebec Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry confirmed she’d be moving forward with planned tuition hikes for out-of-province students.

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada

[tejanaculturalstudiesminjares]

“Welcome to America, Indeed” by CGP Grey on Flickr. August 13, 2010

[no-passaran]

The public radio station France Bleu Occitanie has decided to stop airing any song in Occitan in its musical hours. Only songs in French and English will be allowed now, and not in the language of the country where it's emitted.

This is censorship and linguistic imperialism.

It's already hard enough for bands and singers who sing in Occitan or the other languages of the nations under French rule, denying them an opportunity like being aired on the radio of their own country is a way of making them reach less people, and so in the end eliminate these languages completely from people's lives.

In the post above (by the account occitania.independenta on instagram) there's the channel's phone number and address, if you want to contact them to protest.

(News from 19th September 2020)

[snowgall]

In Sorry to Bother You, “Sounding White” Means Success. But Linguistic Prejudice Isn’t Limited to Fiction.

In fact, it’s one of the last ways it’s acceptable to be racist.

Dialect discrimination doesn’t just have an impact on people in the housing market. It also affects how likely you are to be believed when it’s most important: in the justice system. A 2016 paper by John R. Rickford and Sharese King argues that George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the Trayvon Martin murder case was based in part on linguistic discrimination. Jurors described the prosecution’s star witness, Rachel Jeantel, as “hard to understand” and “not credible” because she spoke AAVE. Her testimony was not mentioned once in the more than 16 hours of jury deliberations, which no doubt contributed to Zimmerman’s acquittal.

Linguistic prejudice also harms children in the educational system, where nonstandard English may be judged unintelligent or lazy. This has lasting impacts, as teachers put these children in less challenging classes and expect poorer performance from them, which is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[bookofmirth]

I don’t want to hear another person say that language discrimination isn’t a thing after seeing that video of the woman in the nail salon being a heinous bitch telling an immigrant to learn English and that she sounds like she came out of a hermit crab (????)

The thing is, if she commented on the woman’s ethnicity or the specific country she had come from or her culture, she would have been called out in a hot second. She would have known that was wrong and not done it for fear of censure - even if she actually believed it and wanted to say it. Honestly it’s a miracle that people recognized her attack as racist in the first place, since she fell back on “you can’t speak English” as a roundabout way to be bigoted, and usually people think that... somehow it’s ok to attack a person that way.

[i-ibportfolio-blog]

Human Experience Project: Linguicism

Written Research:

 Linguistic discrimination, defined as the unfair treatment of an individual based solely on their use of language, is a tool used in order to further divide people into different groups based on arbitrary reasoning.  The impact of language discrimination, or linguicism is deeply rooted in today’s society. It is tightly fused with systematic racism and can be seen in America through the way we treat refugees and immigrants (generally from more  versus European tourists and the like. This nation insists that undocumented workers, or even, fully legal citizens, “speak english” because, they are “in America now”.  This is a highly multi-faceted issue as it covers so many different types of linguicism in American society. Along with immigrants, it factors into the African American English Vernacular vs. Standard English, as well. In determining one way of speaking a particular language as ‘the right way’, we close the doors for all the possible adaptations to be made to further enhance the language.

Linguicism, as all ‘isms’, is another unfortunate way of putting people against each other by making them fear diversity, rather than embracing it. The beauty of language is that we may all have a different way of communicating, but when it comes down to it, all languages have words for love, or happy, or pain, or family or death. The human experience at its base, is relatively universal for everyone. We all experience family, and friends, and hurt, and failure, and total joy. We all laugh and cry and bleed. As an aspiring linguist, the concept of this infuriates me. Language is such an incredible thing. All of these languages on Earth have developed separately and have intertwined together; thus, allowing us to understand each other sometimes, even when neither party knows the other language at all. Language is an impossibly complex and beautiful thing and we as a society must learn to embrace that.

 Action Research:

For my action research portion, I went to Walmart’s Garden Center alone, and did my best to converse with strangers in german, a foreign language with which I am very comfortable. 

My action research portion does not quite encapsulate the mass of linguicism as german still benefits from being a European (re: white) language, and has a generally positive reception from Americans, especially Wisconsin Americans, as there is a high degree of German heritage concentrated in this area. Being in the Garden Center for me was so maintain a slight level of comfort in doing something so foreign to myself. (I also generally felt that people in the plant center would be nicer, so maybe I cheated a little.) I began simply, stating things like, “Hallo, kann ich dir eine Frage fragen?” and then got into things like, “Ich hab mein Schlüssel verloren, brauch ich Hilfe, kannst du mir helfen?” I did my best to accentuate the words I was speaking with relatively universal body movements to convey the message. Most people just stared back at me, a lot asked if I knew any english, to which I would reply “Keine Ahnung was du sagst, tut mir leid”. From this point in the interactions, things tended to vary, most people kind of left me on my own once they realized I couldn’t be helped through a mutual language and had more important things to do in their lives. Overall, I think that while people generally accepted this language better more outright, the notion of not having a shared language really put people off, as it was too frustrating trying to communicated.

Thinking of people whose first language is not english, and considering how many first generation immigrants work in this country knowing nearly no english amazes me. These people work so hard and endure so much strife in terms of communication, and there are a trend of people thinking immigrants are stupid, due to factors influencing their mindset such as racism and linguicism. Immigrants tend to pick up english as they go along, which is also amazing to me, as immersion is a language is not the best way to learn a language if you do not already know it to a comfortable extent.

The diversity of language and communication is a beautiful thing, for concepts that simply cannot be expressed in one language, have the possibility of being done in another. Knowing multiple languages, or simply being knowledgeable in multiple languages can open up so many opportunities and experiences that will enrich your life.