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Language ideology and


language prejudice
RO S I N A L I P P I - G R E E N

Editors' introduction

This chapter is about an issue that has occupied Americans for centuries – and especially
since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is about prejudice (adverse pre-judgment) against
people based on specific traits, like ethnicity or religion. The trait on which the chapter focuses
is language, a discriminatory trait about which we are much less conscious and much less
concerned. The chapter begins with a list of nine examples where people’s intelligence, job
effectiveness, or other personal and professional characteristics are unfairly evaluated on the
basis of the varieties of English they speak.
In this chapter, Rosina Lippi-Green concentrates on the existence of a “standard language
ideology” in the USA – “a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, non-varying spoken language” –
and the various institutions (schools, the media, the courts) that promote it. She exposes some
of the fallacies in this ideology (non-mainstream accents can be difficult if not impossible to
change and they often do not impede communication per se) and the uneven, discriminatory
ways in which it is used to effect language domination (not all ethnic or foreign groups are
asked to change). But she also documents the different responses such domination elicits from
the dominated (resistance versus acquiescence). The author also constructs a model of the
language subordination process (including the uses it makes of authority, mystification, and
misinformation) in order to expose and undermine it.
Although all linguists are to some extent aware of and critical of language prejudice, this
chapter takes the radical position (like Sledd 1972) that the burden of change should rest on the
discriminators alone. Alternatively, or additionally, some linguists encourage the dominated
to keep their non-mainstream dialects for informal use but to become bidialectal, developing
competence in a standard or mainstream variety for work, school, and other formal contexts in
which it is preferred (see Alatis 1970).

Let’s begin with the experiences of real people in everyday situations:

A young woman comes to the United States from Uganda. After receiv-
ing a Master’s Degree from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, she
accepts employment in that university’s Office of Affirmative Action and
Equal Opportunity. During the next four years three different supervisors
are so satisfied with her performance that she is promoted to Administrative
Program Specialist. Then a new Assistant Chancellor for Equal Opportu-
nity, an African American woman, is hired. In the next few months, the new

289

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supervisor makes numerous and documented demeaning and hostile remarks


about the woman’s Ugandan accent, excludes her from making oral presen-
tations that she has been making successfully for four years, and restricts her
responsibilities in other ways. After complaints and counter complaints to
the Chancellor and to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commis-
sion, the new supervisor issues notice that the young woman’s employment
contract will not be renewed. (Kyomugisha v. Clowney)
A woman phones into an Oprah Winfrey taping on “Black English” to make
her opinion known: “I guess what I’d like to say is that what makes me feel
that blacks tend to be ignorant is that they fail to see that the word is spelled
A-S-K, not A-X. And when they say aksed, it gives the sentence an entirely
different meaning. And that is what I feel holds blacks back.” (1989)
In 1992, 403 residents of Westfield, Massachusetts (a town of about 36,000
people and a broad ethnic mix), sign a petition and present it to the school
board. The petition specifically urges that no teacher be assigned to first or
second grade classrooms “who is not thoroughly proficient in the English
language in terms of grammar, syntax and – most important – the accepted
and standardized use of pronunciation.” (Associated Press 1992)
A professor originally from the south, later employed by a university in the
midwest, relates this story of his first job search: “I got an interview with an
extremely elite undergraduate college in the northeast. They conducted the
first substantial part of the interview in [another language] and it went well.
When they switched to a question in English, my first answer completely
interrupted the interview . . . they broke out laughing for quite a while. I
asked what was wrong and they said they ‘never would have expected’ me
to have such an accent. They made a big deal about me having a [prestigious
accent in the second language] and such a strong Southern accent. Of course,
I had been aiming for bland standard English. After that, I got a number of
questions about whether I’d ‘be comfortable’ at their institution. Subtle, but
to me it was not ambiguous.” (Lippi-Green 1997)
In a Seattle bank, a Cambodian-American man with a long history of excellent
work evaluations is repeatedly denied official promotion to a position he is
already filling and performing well, but not being paid for. A managerial level
employee tells him that he is not being promoted because he cannot speak
“American.” (Xieng v. Peoples National Bank)
The novelist Orson Scott Card (2003) writes: “When I was at Brigham Young
High School in Provo, Utah, the town of Lehi was seen as the ultimate hick
town. Its major landmark was a grain elevator; its speech was the most extreme
version of that hard-R rural Mormon accent that semi-sophisticated people
like me delighted in scorning (unaware, of course, of our own less-than-elite
accents).”
A doctoral candidate relates this story about her fieldwork: “The passenger in
the seat next to mine asked about [the recording equipment], and I explained
briefly about my research . . . He told me that he worked in sales for a large

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Language ideology and language prejudice 291

company in San Diego, and that it was his job to hire salesmen. He told me
quite frankly that he would never hire anyone with a strong foreign accent,
and especially not a Mexican accent. I asked him why. His only response
was, ‘That’s smart business. I have to think of the customers. I wouldn’t buy
anything from a guy with a Mexican accent.’” (Spicher 1992: 3–4)
The Internal Revenue Service removes an agent with a solid work history
from working with clients “because of concern about the effect of her accent
on the ‘image’ of the IRS, not any lack in either communication or technical
abilities.” (Park v. James A. Baker III, Secretary of the Treasury)
A official elected to the state Assembly in California notes the multilingual
commerce in his home town with considerable trepidation: “. . . you can go
down and apply for a driver’s license test entirely in Chinese. You can apply
for welfare today entirely in Spanish. The supremacy of the English language
is under attack.” (from a report on pending English-Only legislation in
California, “CBS Evening News,” October 1986)

These stories, and thousands of others just like them, provide evidence of what
many people would acknowledge without dispute: we rely on language traits to
judge others. This is not a cultural phenomenon particular to our place and time,
but a human behavior that is characteristic of all language communities. Language
is – among other things – a flexible and constantly flexing tool for the emblematic
marking of social allegiances. We use variation in language to construct ourselves
as social beings, to signal who we are, and who we are not – and cannot be. Speak-
ers choose among sociolinguistic variants available (alternative pronunciations,
expressions, grammatical structures), and their choices cluster together in ways
that are obvious and interpretable to other speakers in the community. This pro-
cess is a functional part of the way we communicate. It is not optional, but rather
a basic design feature of spoken human language.
These sociolinguistic behaviors are specific to the spoken language alone; they
do not transfer to the written language. Writing systems are a strategy developed
in response to demands arising from social, technological, and economic change;
the purpose of a writing system is to convey information over time and space –
removed from its original context. We write things down because our memories
are not capable of storing masses of information for ourselves or those who come
after us or because we consider the message worthy of preserving beyond the
limitations of memory.
The demands made on written language are considerable: we want it to span
time and space, and we want it to do that in a social vacuum, without the aid of
paralinguistic features (such as intonation and gestures) and often without shared
context of any kind. Thus, the argument goes, written language needs to be free of
excessive variation. This lack of variation – the variation that is an essential part
of spoken human language – is the most distinctive characteristic of our (and most
other) writing systems. The discussion in this chapter has to do exclusively with

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spoken language and particularly the way speakers use and interpret variation in
spoken language.
Independent of issues of language effectiveness or communicative success,
most people believe that there is such a thing as good language and bad language.
Many assume that it is perfectly reasonable to judge others on the basis of language
variety rather than on the content of what they have to say. Most would be surprised
(if not shocked) at an employer or a teacher who turned away an individual on
the basis of skin color; most would find nothing unusual or wrong with a teacher
of Puerto Rican students who sees her students as a problem to be solved:
These poor kids come to school speaking a hodge podge. They are all mixed
up and don’t know any language well. As a result, they can’t even think
clearly. That’s why they don’t learn. It’s our job to teach them language – to
make up for their deficiency. And, since their parents don’t really know any
language either, why should we waste time on Spanish? It is “good” English
which has to be the focus. (cited in Zentella 1996: 8–9)

And most people are very surprised, disquieted, and even angry to learn that
this fund of commonsense knowledge about language on which they – and this
teacher – depend so heavily is filled with inaccuracies, false assumptions, and
simple mythology.
There is a great deal of evidence to indicate that what people believe they
know about language is very different from the way language actually works. This
phenomenon has been observed widely by linguists of many different theoretical
orientations. One psycholinguist notes this:
Most educated people already have opinions about language. They know that
it is man’s most important cultural invention, the quintessential example of
his capacity to use symbols, and a biologically unprecedented event irrevo-
cably separating him from other animals. They know that language pervades
thought, with different languages causing their speakers to construe reality
in different ways. They know that children learn to talk from role models and
caregivers. They know that grammatical sophistication used to be nurtured
in the schools, but sagging educational standards and the debasements of
popular culture have led to a frightening decline in the ability of the average
person to construct a grammatical sentence. They also know that English is a
zany, logic-defying tongue . . . In the pages that follow, I will try to convince
you that every one of these common opinions is wrong! (Pinker 1994:
17–18)

What is of interest in this chapter, however, is how people use false assump-
tions about language to justify judgments that have more to do with race, national
origin, regional affiliation, ethnicity, and religion than with human language and
communication. In public situations it has become unacceptable to reject individ-
uals on the basis of the color of their skin, but some can and do reject individuals
because of the variety of English they speak or the accent they speak it with.
Somehow, many have come to believe that some types of English are “more

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Language ideology and language prejudice 293

English” than others; that there is one perfect and appropriate kind of English
that everyone should speak; that failure to speak it is an indication of stupid-
ity, willfulness, or misguided social allegiance. Many hold this belief so firmly
that they have convinced the very people who speak the stigmatized varieties
of English to believe it too. Because these behaviors and beliefs are in them-
selves interesting and important, linguists have studied language ideologies, their
origins, propagation, evolution, and effect.
In the most overly simplistic terms, ideology can be defined as a “belief sys-
tem” or “body of ideas.” On this basis, everything is ideological and everybody
has multiple ideologies, as in an advertisement promoting the consumption of raw
food: “This tape is a MUST for anybody who actively propagates the ideology
of raw-foodism.” Taken so broadly, ideology has little descriptive or analytical
power. But there are other approaches, and in the examination of language in its
social context, ideology provides a framework for what has been called critical
language studies, where much of the work on language subordination (see below
for more on language subordination) and the limiting of discourse takes place.
For example, to understand arguments for standardization or for English only, we
begin with the cultural conceptions that underlie such arguments (for example,
“English has always been dominant; it must remain dominant”). To first under-
stand how such arguments are linked to particular power structures and interests
is to understand how and why they work.
Theorists provide dozens of possible definitions of ideology. In critical lan-
guage studies ideology is taken as the promotion of the needs and interests of
a dominant group or class at the expense of marginalized groups, by means of
disinformation and misrepresentation of those marginalized groups. More specifi-
cally, when looking at the larger issues of language standardization, linguists often
refer to a “standard language ideology,” that is, a bias toward an abstracted, ideal-
ized, non-varying spoken language that is imposed and maintained by dominant
institutions. Of course, everyone speaks a dialect, and a uniform language is an
impossibility.
Ideology has been linked to language by many thinkers, but it was the French
philosopher Michel Foucault who considered the way in which discourse is
“controlled, selected, organised and redistributed” – what he called disciplined:

. . . as history constantly teaches us, discourse is not simply that which


translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and
by which there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized.
[Foucault 1984: 110; italics added]

In the simplest terms, the “disciplining” of discourse has to do with who is


allowed to speak on a topic – and, thus, who is heard on that topic. A standard
language ideology, which proposes that an idealized nation-state has one perfect,
homogeneous language, becomes the means by which discourse is seized, and
provides a rationalization for limiting access to discourse.

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Authority that is associated with education is the most often cited and best
established type of rationalization in this process. Thus, it might be argued that,
in a culture like that of the USA, which obliges everyone to participate in the edu-
cational system, access to discourse is at least theoretically possible: marginalized
groups can, by coming through the educational system, make themselves heard in
their own languages. Foucault anticipates part of this argument by pointing out the
fallacy of the assumption of education as an evenly distributed and power-neutral
cultural resource: “Any system of education is a political way of maintaining or
modifying the appropriation of discourses, along with the knowledges and powers
which they carry” (123).
Of course, access to education itself is controlled and disciplined, in part on
the basis of language variety and accent; the educational system may not be the
beginning, but it is the heart of the standardization process. Asking children who
speak non-mainstream languages to come to the schools in order to find validation
for themselves, in order to be able to speak their own stories in their own voices,
is an unlikely scenario.
Dominant institutions promote the notion of an overarching, homogeneous
standard language. That language is primarily white, upper-middle class, and
middle American; it is often claimed to be “unaccented.” But of course it is
accented, like all other language varieties. It just happens to be the accent of
the mainstream. Whether the issues at hand are larger social or political ones or
more subtle, whether the approach is coercion or consent, there are two sides to
this process of standardization: first, devaluation of all that is not (or does not
seek to be) politically, culturally, or socially mainstream; and second, validation
of the social (and linguistic) values of the dominant institutions. The process of
linguistic assimilation to an abstracted standard is portrayed as a natural one,
necessary and positive for the greater social good.
In the USA at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the “dominant group
or class” is a matter of both race and economics: the social and political power
is predominantly white and upper-middle class. Some would claim it is also a
matter of education, but education is an extension of economics and, arguably, of
a developing class consciousness. Of course, individuals work together in insti-
tutions, and thus much of the work on language subordination focuses not on
the behavior of individuals (what John said to Maria) but on how language ide-
ologies become part and parcel of larger institutional practices. “Institution” is
often used to refer to social relationships between individuals, as in “the insti-
tution of marriage.” Here, institution can be defined simply as any organization
that has social and structural importance and a specific set of goals important
for continuing the established social structures of the community. Such institu-
tions include the educational system, the news media, the entertainment indus-
try, the business sector, the government and the legal system (which in large
part exist to define and delineate social institutions), the military, and religious
organizations.

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Language ideology and language prejudice 295

The institutional approach relies on a simplistic model: language is communi-


cation; communication must be clear to be effective; to be clear, language must be
unvarying, static, standardized. This model may seem reasonable on the surface,
but because it rests on basic fallacies it is not reasonable. We know with certainty
that spoken language is not homogeneous and can never be homogeneous, that
communication is more complicated than the simple sharing of surface informa-
tion, and most crucially that the goals we have developed for written language
cannot apply to spoken language any more than our expectations for automobiles
(speed and mileage) can be applied to the way we walk.
Given the serious and detrimental repercussions of speaking certain varieties
of English and some foreign accents in the USA, you may wonder why the indi-
viduals described earlier don’t just give up and assimilate linguistically: Why
don’t they just join the mainstream? This question is often asked but rarely exam-
ined very closely. Many people assume it is possible to substitute one accent
for another. In fact, there is reason to believe that such a thing is impossible.
Even more important is the fact that linguistic assimilation is not demanded of
everybody. Because some people speak a distinctive regional or social variety of
English that is not overtly stigmatized (e.g., the strong upper midwest English
of radio entertainer Garrison Keillor or television newsbroadcaster Tom Brokaw
or the Boston English of Senator Ted Kennedy), they are not asked to assimilate.
Other individuals do speak a less favored or stigmatized variety of English but
they possess other kinds of currency (social power, political power, or economic
power) that offset the effect of their stigmatized speech. It is hard to imagine
anyone insisting that political figures like US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,
Mexican president Vicente Fox, US president John F. Kennedy, United Nations
Secretary General Kofi Annan (of Ghana), or Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott (of
the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia), or actors Antonio Banderas and Arnold
Schwarzenegger attend classes for accent reduction or “better” English.
In the USA at the beginning of the twenty-first century, an Irish accent will
rarely be overtly stigmatized, but Irish accents were often greeted negatively when
immigration from Ireland was at a high point in the nineteenth century. Those
varieties of English and non-native accents that are out of favor at any particular
time reveal a great deal about the cultural and political climate of the moment.
At the time of writing this, the accents that seem most stigmatized are associated
with New York City and the deep South, as well as with immigrants from Asia,
Africa, the Near East, and Central and South America. By contrast, none of the
recent cases heard in US courts concerning alleged violations of Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act (a topic to which we return below) involve speakers with French
or Scottish or Norwegian accents, which all enjoy a certain social prestige at the
moment.
Even if it were possible simply to exchange one variety of English for another,
to adopt or drop a particular accent at will, then two questions would remain:
first, would it make any difference, if the underlying animosity is not really about

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language, but about race, ethnicity or some other less-than-pleasing affiliation?


And most relevant to the USA as it looks back on a century in which civil rights
battles were fought and won at great cost, should it matter? Is it right to ask
individuals to reject their own language? We do not – under US law cannot – ask
a person to change religion, gender, or skin color, but we unhesitatingly demand
of some people that they suppress or deny the most effective way they have of
situating themselves socially in the world. Accent serves as the first point of
gatekeeping because we are forbidden by law and social custom, and perhaps
by a prevailing sense of what is morally and ethically right, from using race,
ethnicity, homeland, or economics more directly.
What we don’t understand clearly, what remains mysterious but is important
to comprehend, is not so much the ways in which dominant groups deny non-
dominant groups permission to be heard in their own voices, but more so how
and why those groups cooperate. How do institutions manage to convince whole
groups of human beings that they do not fully or adequately possess an appropri-
ate human language? Even more mysteriously, why do those groups hand over
this authority? One critic puts a more personal face on this question when he
summarizes one way that ideology works:

The study of ideology is among other things an inquiry into the ways in
which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness. It is because
being oppressed sometimes brings with it some slim bonuses that we are
occasionally prepared to put up with it. The most efficient oppressor is the
one who persuades his underlings to love, desire and identify with his power;
and any practice of political emancipation thus involves that most difficult of
all forms of liberation, freeing ourselves from ourselves. [Eagleton 1991:
xiii–xiiv]

When persons who speak languages that are devalued and stigmatized consent
to the standard language ideology, they themselves become complicit in its prop-
agation against themselves, their own interests and identities. Many are caught
in a vacuum: when an individual cannot find any social acceptance for her lan-
guage outside her own speech communities, she may come to denigrate her own
language, even while she continues to use it.
Standard language ideology provides a web of commonsense arguments in
which the speaker of a non-mainstream language can get tangled at every turn: at
school, in radio and television news, at the movies, while reading novels, at work,
people are told that the language that marks them as Mennonite, Hawai’ian, or
Ugandan, for example, is ugly, unacceptable, incoherent, illogical. This is coun-
tered, daily, by experience: these same people do communicate, effectively, with
those who are closest and most important to them, who mark their language sim-
ilarly. They even manage to communicate with the people who are criticizing
them, in spite of the complaints. The things being said about their home lan-
guages, about family and community make them uncomfortable and unhappy.
The promises they hear about the rewards of assimilation may be very seductive:

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Language ideology and language prejudice 297

money, success, recognition. They may think about trying to change the way they
talk, pay some attention to grammatical points that have been criticized, but they
can do little or nothing about accent.
This day-by-day, persistent devaluation of the social self has repercussions.
While many accept this devalued notion of themselves and their language com-
munities, others react with anger and personal resistance. If there is a group of
people going through the same experience, consistent negative feedback might
bring organized resistance. There are occasional signs of this: an accent reduction
class scheduled in a South Carolina school that must close because of lack of stu-
dent interest; a movement to validate Hawai’ian Creole in public forums; a group
in Wisconsin that publicizes their commitment to African American Vernacular
English and their wish to have it recognized for the functional language it is;
individuals who file suit against employers who reject them on the basis of lan-
guage traits linked to protected categories; teachers who stand up for the rights
of bilingual students.
But the language mainstream does not let these small acts of resistance go
unnoticed; its representatives strike back, and hard. The institutions that see them-
selves as protectors of the values of the nation-state wage an ongoing effort to
validate their favored place in that state, in part on the basis of language. This
resistance and counter-resistance that pits the empowered language mainstream
against small groups or individuals who struggle for recognition is an ongoing
process.

A model of the language subordination process

There have been many models of ideological processes, not all of them having
to do directly with language. But the elements of subordination are surprisingly
constant in the case of language. The first step is the seizing of authority, in which
those who claim to have better or superior human language set themselves up as
good models.
Of course, linguists also claim authority about language, but it is to a large
extent authority based on training in observation, experimentation, and deduction.
The announced goal of linguistics is descriptive rather than prescriptive, so that
the claim “All living languages change” is not a matter of faith or opinion or
aesthetics, but observable fact (which is not to say that all claims by linguists are
equally supportable by fact).
Other parts of the subordination process include mystification (where some
persons and institutions convince others that they alone understand what language
is about and are the only possible resources and authorities) and misinformation.
Misinformation about language is rampant. It can be found in any newspaper
every day of the week and ranges from the truly trivial (“I am disturbed by the
way young people these days misuse the word like”) to the historically unfounded
(“Shakespeare spoke the best English, and since then it’s been all downhill”) to

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the divisive and discriminatory (“If those people don’t want to learn English the
way it’s supposed to be spoken, they should go back to where they came from!”).
A great deal of misinformation and commonsense argumentation centers on
communication, and this is also where most persons who discriminate on the basis
of language will focus their rationalizations. “I’ve got nothing against [Taiwanese,
Appalachians, Blacks],” the argument will go; “I just can’t understand them. So
maybe they can’t do anything about their accent, but I can’t help not understanding
them either.”
Communication seems to be a simple thing: one person talks and another
listens; then they change roles. When the discussion focuses on accent, however,
the characterization of communication becomes overly simplistic. The social
space between two speakers is not neutral, in most cases. Think of the people you
talked to today. Each time you begin an exchange, a complex series of calculations
begins: Do I need to be formal with this person? Do I owe her respect? Does she
owe me deference? What do I want from her, or she from me?
Or we might simply refuse to communicate. In an adversarial position, we may
understand perfectly what our partners, parents, friends say to us, but still respond
with “I simply cannot understand you.” Magically, the listener is relieved of any
responsibility in the communicative act, and the full burden is put directly on the
speaker. “I can’t understand you” may mean, in reality, “I dare you to make me
understand you.”
When native speakers of USA English are confronted by an accent that is
foreign to them or with a variety of English they dislike, they must first decide
whether or not they are going to accept their responsibility in the act of com-
munication. What can be demonstrated again and again is this: members of the
dominant language groups feel perfectly empowered to reject their portion of the
burden and to demand that a person with an accent (that is, an accent that differs
from their own accent) carry a disproportionate amount of the responsibility in
the communicative act. On the other hand, even when there are real impediments
to understanding – a bad telephone line, a crowded and noisy room – speakers
make special efforts to understand those toward whom they are well disposed.
When speakers are confronted with a new person they want to talk to or must
talk to, they make a quick series of social evaluations based on many external cues,
one of them being the other person’s language and accent. Those sociolinguistic
cues are directly linked to homeland, the race and ethnicity and other factors –
the entirety of the social self – of the other person. Based on our own personal
histories, our own backgrounds and social selves (which together comprise a set of
filters through which we hear the people we talk to), we will take a communicative
stance. Most of the time, we will agree to carry our share of the burden. Sometimes,
if we are especially positive about the configuration of social characteristics we
see in the person, or if the purposes of communication are especially important
to us, we will accept a higher-than-usual share of that burden.
Each of us would group the accents we come across in different configurations.
For the majority of Americans, French and Swedish accents are positive ones,

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Language ideology and language prejudice 299

but not for all of us. Many have strong negative reactions to Korean accents,
or to African American Vernacular English, but certainly not everyone does. In
Hawai‘i, where there is a long history of animus between people of Japanese and
Filipino national origin, one person with a foreign accent may reject a different
foreign accent or reject the creole that is spoken by so many in the islands. In
black communities in the Bronx (in New York City) and elsewhere, there is a great
deal of tension between African Americans and recent immigrants from Africa
and the Caribbean. In other communities, some people may cringe or glower
when they hear Spanish spoken on the street or spoken between sales clerk and
customer, while others may smile broadly to hear Italian or Polish spoken in
the same situations. The languages and language varieties we hear must pass
through our language ideology filters. In extreme cases, we feel completely justi-
fied in rejecting the communicative burden – and, in so doing, the person in front
of us.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (specifically Title VII of that law) provides
recourse for workers who are discriminated against on the basis of race, color,
religion, sex, or national origin. The scope of the law was broadened in 1980 to
address trait-based discrimination (for example, language that is linked to national
origin). The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (abbreviated EEOC) is
responsible for the overview and administration of Title VII. In its Guidelines on
Discrimination because of National Origin, the EEOC currently defines national
origin discrimination

. . . broadly as including, but not limited to, the denial of equal employment
opportunity because of an individual’s, or his or her ancestor’s place of origin;
or because an individual has the physical, cultural or linguistic characteristics
of a national origin group. [Federal Register 1988: ¶1606.1; italics added]

The spirit of the law is clear: an employer may not reject a job candidate or fire or
refuse to promote an employee because the employee externalizes in some way
an allegiance to another culture. In the case of racial discrimination, the courts
have determined that no personal preference (neither the employer’s nor that
of his customers) can excuse discrimination. Similarly, a qualified person may
not be rejected on the basis of linguistic traits the employer or the employer’s
customers find aesthetically objectionable, as long as those linguistic traits are
linked to a category protected by the Civil Rights Act, and that includes national
origin. In contrast to racial discrimination, however, an employer has some latitude
in matters of language: “An adverse employment decision may be predicated
upon an individual’s accent when – but only when – it interferes materially with
job performance” (Civil Rights Act of 1964, §701 et seq., 42 U.S.C.A. §2000e et
seq.).
Let’s return now to the story we began with at the head of the chapter. Florence
Kyomugisha lost her job at the University of Wisconsin in part because of alleged
communication difficulties with her supervisor, Ms. Clowney. It is important to
note that after its independence from Great Britain, Uganda adopted English as its

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official language. English is the language of government and commerce and the
primary medium of education; official publications and most major newspapers
appear in English, and English is often employed in radio and television broad-
casts. Ms. Kyomugisha, a fluent speaker of Runyankole and Luganda, is also a
native and fluent speaker of Ugandan English. As the chancellor of the univer-
sity acknowledged in 1996, while Ms. Kyomugisha does not speak “Wisconsin
English, she nevertheless speaks perfectly fine English” (Kyomugisha v. Clowney,
complaint filed October 16, 1997).
In her complaint under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Ms. Kyomugisha
claimed national origin discrimination linked to language traits. This is a subject
her attorney explored during the deposition of her supervisor, Ms. Clowney, who
is also an attorney. (A deposition is testimony taken under oath as part of the
preparation for a trial.) The attorney uses the term animus to refer to prejudice or
malevolent ill will.

at t o r n e y: . . . You know about discriminatory animus from your pro-


fessional preparation in the field of affirmative action and
discrimination law; isn’t that correct? . . . you were respon-
sible for doing the investigations of discrimination at the
university, and you need to know what the law is about that,
correct?
c l ow n e y: . . . Yes, sir.
at t o r n e y: And you know about the sociology of discrimination,
right?
c l ow n e y: Yes.
...
at t o r n e y: And you would agree that the process of communication
between two individuals involves a degree of burden shar-
ing between the two individuals for purposes of making
each other understood, correct?
c l ow n e y: Sometimes. It depends on the nature of the two individuals.
I would agree that the burden is more on an investigator to
be understood in an university community than employ-
ees. The burden is more so on the professional than the
nonprofessional.
at t o r n e y: Now, I’m speaking of two people who speak with each
other, who have divergent accents. You agree that you have
an accent, correct?
c l ow n e y: At times I might. I don’t know if I do or not; you tell me.
at t o r n e y: Well, isn’t it true that all people have an accent of one kind
or another?
c l ow n e y: Not all people, some people. My mother is a schoolteacher
and she doesn’t necessarily have an accent.

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Language ideology and language prejudice 301

at t o r n e y: Well, do you think somebody from another part of the coun-


try who speaks with a different intonation would say that
that person in fact has an accent?
c l ow n e y: Possibly, yes.
...
at t o r n e y: And communication between two such people involves the
acceptance of a certain responsibility for burden sharing
between each other in order to effectuate communication;
isn’t that correct?
c l ow n e y: It can. It depends on the relationship between the two indi-
viduals.
at t o r n e y: One of the factors in that relationship that could make the
communication difficult is when one individual refuses to
accept burden, a burden in connection with effectuating
comprehensibility; isn’t that correct?
c l ow n e y: How about the burden on the other person to go and take
courses and study and to be understood as well. What about
– why should the burden – I also understand diversity, but
why should the burden be on the recipient rather than, I
mean, if you look at modern-day diversity studies, we’d be
here all day. There’s a double burden; there’s a dual burden.
I’ll – I’ll say there’s a dual burden.
at t o r n e y: Isn’t it true that in some conversations where one person
has a racial animus of one type or a national origin ani-
mus of one type that person refuses to accept a burden,
any burden for effectuating the communication . . . and
thereby make – makes the allegation that the person is
incomprehensible?
c l ow n e y: I’m not going to answer that. I’m not an expert on com-
munications skills. I’ve written papers on communication
skills and racial animus. I can’t say that. You’re – you’re
asking me to draw inferences here and I can’t say that.
There are people I know that are trained who don’t have
any kind of animus; and if they can’t understand someone,
they get frustrated, and then have nothing to do with race,
sex, religion, whatever. But the bottom line is that, you
know, it’s – you have to listen a little bit carefully, but, you
know.
...
at t o r n e y: Do you feel like you accepted your portion of the burden
in trying to understand Florence’s oral communications?
...
c l ow n e y: Yes.

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at t o r n e y: . . . whether you feel that you accepted your portion of the


burden to comprehend what Florence was saying to you
when she was orally communicating with you?
c l ow n e y: Yes, I do.
at t o r n e y: Do you feel that you made a reasonable good faith effort
to understand Florence?
c l ow n e y: Yes, I do.
at t o r n e y: Is it your testimony that notwithstanding that effort that was
not enough and you still had oral communication problems
with Florence?
c l ow n e y: Yes, I do.

Subsequent to this deposition, the university decided to settle this case before
it came to trial, and Ms. Kyomugisha received compensatory damages, back
pay, and the attorney’s costs she had incurred. The university’s lawyers did not
disclose the reasons the university decided to offer a settlement, but from her
deposition there would seem to be some question about the true origin of Ms.
Clowney’s communication difficulties with Ms. Kyomugisha. She asked, “How
about the burden on the other person to go and take courses and study and to
be understood as well . . . why should the burden be on the recipient . . . ?”
After Ms. Kyomugisha had worked successfully for four years with three other
supervisors, it would be difficult to justify a claim that her accent was a bur-
den or barrier in any general sense. As Ms. Clowney herself seems to acknowl-
edge, racial or national origin animus can raise a barrier of its own to successful
communication.
Ms. Kyomugisha was knowledgeable about the law, and she had the strength
of will necessary to pursue her legal rights. She was successful, but many others
are not. Everyday in the USA, individuals are taught that the language they speak
marks them as less-than-good-enough. Some turn away from them, pretending
not to understand their language. The repercussions of such linguistic rejection
are vast, because

. . . our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the


misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real
damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back
to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.
[Taylor 1994: 25]

Linguists are interested in the process of language subordination – how it works,


why it works, and why we let it work. Standard language ideology is introduced
by the schools, vigorously promoted by the media, and further institutionalized by
the corporate sector. It is underscored and underwritten in subtle and not so subtle
ways by the judicial system. Thus, it is not surprising that many individuals do not
recognize the fact that, for spoken language, variation is systematic, structured,
and inherent, and that the national standard is an abstraction. What is surprising

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Language ideology and language prejudice 303

and deeply disturbing is the way that many individuals who consider themselves
democratic, even-handed, rational, and free of prejudice hold on tenaciously to a
standard language ideology.

Suggestions for further reading and exploration

Lippi-Green (1987) exposes and indicts social institutions that instill language
prejudice and discrimination, including how the spoken accents of animated Hol-
lywood characters perpetuate stereotypes. Cameron (1995) is strong on politi-
cal correctness, sexist language, and linguistic prescriptivism, but with examples
drawn largely from Britain. Less accessible and more theoretical, Eagleton (1991)
addresses ideologies from a Marxist point of view. Gee (1996) begins his excellent
analysis of discourse and literacy from a moral perspective. McKay and Wong
(1988) gathers in one place descriptions of contemporary language minorities in
the USA, particularly Hispanic and Asian groups; some chapters offer a histori-
cal perspective and others address educational implications of language diversity.
Herman and Chomsky (1988), relying on case studies, propose a propaganda
model of the press and argue that the press is manipulated by government and
corporations into playing a role in shaping events, rather than fairly reporting
them. Fairclough (1992) gives good representation to analyses of critical lan-
guage awareness and critical discourse analysis. Crawford (1992) documents the
historical roots of US language policy (with pieces by Benjamin Franklin and
Theodore Roosevelt, among many others), the official English movement and
the issues surrounding it, and the symbolic implications of language conflict.
Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) reviews and analyzes the literature on the subject
of language ideology. Foucault (1984), in a classic treatment, addresses questions
of who has the right to speak and be heard and the implications of the answers
to those questions. Bourdieu (1991) is a classic treatment of the role of symbolic
power in social life.

References
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1, p. 12.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Ed. and intro. by J. B. Thompson.
Trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London and New York: Routledge.
Card, Orson Scott. 2003. http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/restaurant/utah/gardenwall.
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Crawford, James, ed. 1992. Language Loyalties: a Source Book on the Official English Con-
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Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology: an Introduction. London: Verso.
Fairclough, Norman, ed. 1992. Critical Language Awareness. London: Longman.

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Foucault, Michel. 1984. “The Order of Discourse.” In Language and Politics, ed. Michael
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Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton:
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Woolard, Kathryn A. and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 1994. “Language Ideology,” Annual Reviews
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Zentella, Ana Celia. 1996. “The ‘Chiquitafication’ of US Latinos and their Languages, OR
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