Gorsh! We All Have Accents

Carrie and Megan talk with Drs Rusty Barrett, Professor of Linguistics, Jennifer Cramer, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky, and Kevin B. McGowan, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of the University of Kentucky Phonetics Lab (all at at the University of Kentucky), about their book English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. 

• New language in Australia
• Chaos/order muppets

Chapters

• 9:04 Interview with Rusty, Jennifer and Kevin

Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi. Welcome to The Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Megan Figueroa: I'm Megan Figueroa.

Carrie: And I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: Carrie, I almost said I'm Carrie Gillon. I was like so in my head. I don't know why I was so in my head right now. Okay, that is very weird.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: That is very weird. 

Carrie: You know what? There's just some, I don't know. It's been a weird...

Megan: It's been a bad week for everyone in Arizona. 

Carrie: Oh, yeah, that is true. 

Megan: My head is all over the place.

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, I remember. Was it a year? No, I guess it was closer to 2 years ago, right? When we heard that Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned.

Megan: Right and then we were on with Sarah Marshall.
. 
Carrie: Yeah. So here is one of the results of that.

Megan: Yeah, the Arizona almost complete total ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. It's horrifying.

Carrie: Or like, I don't know if you're going to be... It's going to kill you.

Megan: Oh yeah, right. Well, it says if it's going to kill the mother, then that's an exception, but I just wonder about that part too.

Carrie: Yeah, it rarely works out in your favor.

Megan: Yeah, exactly.

Carrie: But you have to wait so long before you're allowed to do it.

Megan: Yeah, exactly. 

Carrie: So fun times.

Megan: Yeah. Abortion is still very legal up here. So that's good.

Carrie: And you can pay for it out of pocket, you know if people need to travel to Canada.

Megan: It's going to have to happen, I think a lot of people...

Carrie: Or Mexico

Megan: Yeah. Mexico too.

Carrie: Or sometimes you can just go to a different state. I'm just saying, health care is relatively inexpensive here, even without insurance. So just putting it out there. I think it's probably cheaper in Mexico. If you're closer to Mexico, go there but...

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. I know.

Carrie: If you have the means, obviously. 

Megan: Right.

Carrie: I don't know. 

Megan: I know there are abortion funds out there that can help with travel.

Carrie: Yes, there are. So I hope no one listening has to deal with this, but if you do, we support you.

Megan: Yeah, we support you. 

Carrie: So I saw this on Threads. 

Megan: Oh, okay.

Carrie: This article is from January, but I had not heard anything about this. So I feel like probably very few people will have not heard.

Megan: Yeah 

Carrie:  A new language spoken by just 350 people has evolved in Australia's outback.

Megan: Okay. I've not heard this.

Carrie: No. 

Megan: Yeah. Okay, a new language. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Megan: A newly documented or like they've created it?

Carrie: People have created it, but like, in the natural way that...

Megan: In the natural way. Okay, not like a conlang?

Carrie: No, it's what we would call a mixed language.

Megan: Okay. 

Carrie: So in Canada and parts of the US, there's a language called Michif, which is a mixed language. It's probably the most famous, at least in North America. This is another example of that...

Megan: Okay.

Carrie: ...but in Australia. It's spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia in a very remote village. Most people who live there are Warlpiri. So it's called Light Warlpiri.

Megan: Light Warlpiri. Okay. Very cool.

Carrie: Or Warlpiri Rampaku. It has elements of standard Australian English and Warlpiri and also Creole.

Megan: Okay.

Carrie: Which is an English-based Creole. It's kind of interesting. I guess it was first reported by a bilingualist, Carmel O'Shannessy, in 2005. Again, never heard of it.

Megan: 2005. Okay. That's almost 20 years ago at this point.

Carrie: She thinks that it surfaced in the 70s and 80s when some of the Warlpiri adults started using occasional English or Creole words.

Megan: Okay, very cool.

Carrie: So like code-switching.

Megan: Very cool.

Carrie: It is really cool. 

Megan: That is really cool. Light Warlpiri. You said it's about 350 speakers?

Carrie: So first of all, this village is very remote. The closest other community is 110 kilometers or 68 miles away. The nearest town that has any significant size at all is 560 kilometers or 350 miles away, and that takes 6 hours to drive. So...

Megan: Wow. What?

Carrie: We're talking remote. 

Megan: Okay. 

Carrie: It takes that long to drive because it's mostly like dirt roads. 

Megan: Okay. Like four-wheel drive kind of dirt roads, am I imagining or...

Carrie: Yeah, I think so. They say it's like quote unquote unsealed. I don't know what that means. I just thought that meant like not didn't have tar on it, but I'm like, well, that's covered by being dirt. Maybe like there's some kind of sealing you can do on dirt roads to make them more stable. I really honestly don't know. This is way outside of my area of expertise. This is the thing I found really interesting. So going back to Michif. Michif is like really broad strokes. Then the nouns are mostly French and the verbs are mostly Cree or Ojibwe. So kind of a similar thing is going on here. Most of the verbs and the verbal morphology come from English or Creole. Then the noun morphology comes from Warlpiri. So you get this mixed system. That's why it's called a mixed language.

Megan: That is very cool.

Carrie: Yeah, really cool.

Megan: Michif is something you've worked on, right? 

Carrie: Yes. I have 

Megan: That's very cool. So you're seeing the similarities here.

Carrie: Seeing similarities, like kind of the opposite, right? The nouns are coming from the indigenous language, whereas with Michif, the nouns are coming from the European language. Right? But anyway, really cool. I love it. There's a clip where you can hear a young girl telling a story in this language. I will post the article and so you can take a listen if you're interested.

Megan: That is very neat. That's a good story to hear about a new language instead of one that's becoming more and more endangered. Although there's only 350 speakers, but still...

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, the pure number itself is not what tells you if it's endangered or not. It's more, are you losing speakers or are you gaining speakers or are you stable? And this seems to be stable, at least.

Megan: Stable. Yeah. Which is good news. 

Carrie: Yeah. Again, it's because they're so isolated. The impact of English is obviously there because it helped create this new language in the first place, but it's not forcing them to switch completely to English.

Megan: Right, which is very good. 

Carrie: That's cool. 

Megan: Awesome. That is very cool. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for sharing some good news.

Carrie: Yeah. It's just something fun and interesting, not about discrimination exactly, but that's okay. Sometimes we just need to celebrate the language in general.

Megan: Yeah and language diversity. 

Carrie: We have 2 people to thank, and the one person I completely forgot, like this is from January. So we would like to thank Irvin Tang.

Megan: Thank you.

Carrie:  And Reggie McNamara. 

Megan: Yeah. Thank you so much. We really appreciate anyone that can support us on Patreon.

Carrie: Yes,  because it helps us keep the lights on. It helps us pay for the transcription and the editing, basically. Those are the two main things. So thank you so much for anyone who is willing to slip us a few bob. You can support us at www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod. We have bonus episodes and we have stickers, and there's a mug. I always forget about the mug.

Megan: There's a mug. Yeah, it's a cool one. 

Carrie: It is.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: And today we have a really good episode. 

Megan: Yeah, I think you'll find it really interesting. Plus[?] we cover a lot of ground.

[intro music]

Megan: All right. So we're so excited today to have three guests with us. We have first Rusty Barrett, who's a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky. His research is in Mayan linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. We have Jennifer Cramer, who's a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky. Her research is in perceptual dialectology with a specific focus on dialect variation in Kentucky. Then finally we have Kevin B. McGowan, who is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky and director of the University of Kentucky Phonetics Lab. He is a phonetician and his research primarily focuses on speech perception and the ways in which the creation and perception of social identities influence our ability to understand each other. They're here to talk about their book, 'English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States', which is now in its third edition. Thank you so much for being here.

Carrie: Yeah. Thank you. 

Jennifer Cramer: Thanks. We're happy to be here.

Megan: You know, I feel like your book is like the reason why Carrie and I can have a podcast, kind of like you were the original, OGs.

Carrie: Oh Yeah. 

Megan: Talking about linguistic discrimination way back in 1997 when the book was first published. So why did you want to write this book back then? And why did you want to update it? And has the need for it changed in the intervening years?

Rusty Barrett: Yeah. We didn't write the original version.

Kevin B. McGowan: Yeah.

Rusty: The 1997 and 2012 editions, the first and second editions, are by Rosina Lippi-Green.

Kevin: My contribution in 1996 was being in Rosina's class when she was teaching.
 
Carrie: Oh, that's awesome. 

Megan: Okay. So now I was wondering why you were talking about Rosina Lippi-Green in the preface. I guess I just did not understand, but yes, that book is whenever anyone asked me like, what would you recommend people reading? It's always that one. I think the 2012 edition is what I have.

Jennifer: If you read in that preface, what it actually talks a little bit about is how all three of us were greatly impacted by those earlier editions and the work that we do. So to be able to take on the third edition was one of these really exciting moments for the three of us because that book was so influential in the work that all of us do. As Kevin mentioned, he was in the class. Rusty worked with Rosina at times when she was working on the book, I believe. Part of my dissertation came out of the idea of southern discrimination, linguistic discrimination in the South.

Megan: Are you from the south? 

Jennifer: I am. I'm from Kentucky originally.

Megan: Oh, you are. So you guys actually get to be where you're from.

Jennifer: Yeah. We won the lottery. 

Megan: That's nice.

Jennifer: We don't play the lottery anymore because you don't get to go back home as an academic. So..

Megan: Yeah, that's usually true. So what are language ideologies in general and standard language ideology in particular?

Rusty: Language ideologies are sets of beliefs about language. So any sort of attitude about a particular way of speaking. If you say people who say 'ain't' are uneducated or something like that, that's a language ideology, and we have lots of them. The most prevalent one in the US is standard language ideology, which argues that there's a structural basis for one dialect to be better than all others, which linguistic evidence would say exactly the opposite. There's nothing about the structure of a variety that makes it better. All languages are equal in terms of their ability to do what language does. So standard language ideology says that anyone who doesn't speak in this certain way is somehow deficient, but there is no real standard that everyone agrees on in the first place. So it's all just sort of created through language.

Megan: Absolutely. How do language ideologies contribute to social inequity?

Jennifer: Well, part of what we talk about in the book in various ways are the ways in which... Essentially if I think something about you because of the way you talk, I am likely to do all sorts of things that go down the discrimination path, right? I've heard your voice and now I'm not going to rent you this apartment or I've heard your voice and now I'm not going to give you this job, and the standard language ideology, which sort of states that you're deficient because you didn't speak in the way I was expecting you, is the justification. That's not really a good way of approaching... Interacting with other people.

Megan: Yeah, and when people don't speak the way that we expect them to, that reminds me immediately of using the word articulate...

Kevin: Yeah. 

Megan: ...when we're talking about black folks if you use articulate, there's kind of this implication that you didn't expect them to sound that way.

Kevin: Yeah. The beliefs we have about each other, set the boundaries upper and lower on what we allow other people to be, right? So if I think someone's going to be hard to understand, then they're going to be harder to understand. Or if I think somebody's going to be inarticulate, as you point out, that was the big thing with President Obama, right? Everybody was trotting out the word articulate and not intentionally, sort of accidentally revealing these, frankly, racist language attitudes that they were walking around with.

Jennifer: We see it show up in other places too. So I mentioned work on Southern discrimination. I always tell my students that if someone says, "Oh, you're the smartest Southerner I've ever met," that's not a compliment. They're not expecting you to say anything worthwhile.

Carrie: Absolutely. 

Megan: Wow. 

Megan: You brought in this new edition, an example that I love. I thought of it with President Obama, is with Julian Castro. When he was in the debate and he was speaking Spanish and how when Beto O'Rourke and I think Cory Booker spoke Spanish, they were praised for it, but when Julian, used the wrong "for," he used "por" instead of "para," I think, or the other way around. He was admonished for it, and I really liked that you bring that example into the book.

Rusty: Yeah. So that's part of standard language ideology is this idea that people who grow up speaking English and some other language are somehow just deficient because they don't speak just English. Then people who grow up monolingual and learn a second language are praised as doing something amazing when they're both really doing the same thing, right?

Jennifer:  There's like a meme that says what's classy if you're rich and trashy if you're poor. One of them is speak two languages.

Megan: Yes. Exactly. 

Carrie: Yeah. Absolutely.

Megan: I haven't seen that but that's perfect. 

Jennifer: Oh, really? 

Carrie: No.  

Megan: No. I haven't. Yeah. 

Jennifer: Oh interesting 

Carrie: Have language ideologies changed at all since 1997? Or are we all stuck in the same milieu?

Kevin: I mean, normally I would say Rusty should go first, but let me, maybe he and Jennifer can back clean up. So what I would say is language ideologies have changed importantly in two ways since Rosina's first edition and second edition of the book. First I'll talk about on the linguistic side. So she was breaking, she was sort of creating this area that the rest of us get to play in and she was doing this foundational work on language ideology and how there's a big thread in that first book about how kind of language ideologies are some of the last publicly acceptable barriers or publicly acceptable ways to discriminate against people. In a negative way, I feel like that has sort of slid. I think there are more ways that it's socially acceptable. On the linguistic side, a fascinating thing has happened, I think, where that book reifies social identities, right? And says there are Hicks and Hillbillies. What do those people talk like? There are black people. What do those people talk like? There are men and women. What do those people talk like? 

What we had to do in this edition of the book was sort of carefully try to preserve the part we love about the book, the part that made our research possible, and then say, but let's back off from that, and let's say there are all of this, all of this identity is created through linguistic behavior and the perception of the creation of identity through linguistic behavior. So now what do we say instead? And it's, well, there are ways of talking that can project an identity, right? And the identity you are personally able to project is both performed through linguistic behavior, but also then limited by the ideologies of the person listening to you. It was a much larger project, I think, than any of the three of us thought we were taking on, but I'm really happy with, at least with what Jennifer and Rusty did.

Megan: Well, I was going to say, you added so much that it felt like a different book. I hope that that's a compliment. I mean for it to be a compliment. I have the 2012 edition and you've added so much and these new examples are so... It's so nice to have, like they said, with the Julián Castro one, it's just like so nice to read these new ones. I love how you use Latinx, like just these little things that you've added in there really add to the 1997, 2012 editions very much. So...

Jennifer: Oh, and we wanted to keep the stuff that makes the book beloved. For example, the Disney chapter is always... Everyone wants to tell me about the Disney chapter. I love that chapter. One of the things we had to do was update it for more recent movies and ways of thinking about Disney. Even Disney has ventured into the sort of live-action thing. So we could do this wonderful comparison of those ideologies on Beauty and the Beast, for example, and the animated versus the live-action version. Keeping that chapter there, but building it out and pulling in these other aspects of the media and their impact on people's ideologies, I thought was a really important thing for us to do.

Megan: You added a chapter on sign language and the deaf community. Why did you want to do that?

Kevin: Yeah. So I think adding the chapter was Rusty's idea, or Rusty and Jennifer's idea, but the implementation of it fell to me. There's this whole linguistic world that is sort of ignored or missing, right? And that more people need to pay attention to. We hosted the 2017 Institute here in Kentucky, and I got to know a student from Gallaudet who was taking my eye-tracking class when that happened. He was in a video that Gallaudet made about what do we... The deaf community, want hearing people to know about sign language. That chapter is very much the result of sort of sitting down with that video and talking to him and thinking, all right, well, this book, a lot of people might read this book, a lot of hearing people might read this book. So how could I maybe extend the reach of this video a little bit, put it in print, and tell people, tell linguists, look, here's this interesting area that's under-researched, and tell students who are sitting in the classes reading this book for the first time, not only do language ideologies touch hearing people, but these language ideologies sort of create limitations on deaf people that are unnatural limitations.

Megan: Well, not only is it understudied, but it's erased by many linguists. We just don't even talk about it.

Kevin: Yeah, I mean, parts of speech, there's no reason to call them parts of speech.

Carrie: That's a good point. 

Megan: Because they have, quote-unquote, parts of speech in...

Kevin: Yeah. So it's much better to call them something like lexical categories or to at least theorize about the label for that kind of thing.

Jennifer: I mean, I took one of my graduate phonology classes from a person who studies sign language phonology. The phone in phonology, right? [inaudible]

Carrie: Yeah. Do you have other examples of how things are misunderstood about language, how language works, and how that contributes to linguistic discrimination?

Kevin: Here's one of the ones that as a phonetician, I work on every time I teach a new student about phonetics, right? So we Americans at least walk around with this ideology that saying "runnin'" is lazier than saying "running," right? So when we reach that part where we're talking about segments in intro phonetics class, I always try to make the point that there isn't any measurable sort of muscular action or measurable amount of work difference between saying "running" and "runnin'". Crucially, we can tell people, speech isn't letters, it's speech sounds, and so it's not dropping the G, it's pronouncing a velar nasal, not an alveolar nasal, but then we can add to that from an articulatory perspective. It's not actually less work, right? You're not burning fewer calories saying "runnin'". So the idea that it's lazy exists entirely in the mind of the listener, right? Well, also in the mind of the talker. The idea that it's lazy is entirely a socially constructed thing. So even in the middle of sort of an articulatory phonetics class, there's this opportunity to say sociolinguistics always matters. Here's one way that we can think about not only the segmental identity of tongue gesture but also the sort of social identity implications of a tongue gesture.

Jennifer: All three of us have taught a class that's basically language and discrimination. We always used this book for the class. One of the struggles I have, and a lot of our students tend to be white, middle class, often Kentucky or the region around us, and I often worried that some of the examples in the book... They need to hear them, they need to see them, but they wouldn't be familiar to them. So I was particularly wanting to emphasize what happens to Southerners in their situations of linguistic discrimination and to show them that these are real, they're real-world outcomes. So at least one of the stories from my students ended up in the book, I think that I had a student who told me that she came to Kentucky, and that means she took out student loans, but she previously been a softball player. I think this one ended up in the book. She went to one of these athletics tryouts things, and one of the coaches took her aside and said, "You're a really good player. I'd have you on my team if you didn't sound like such a rube," and...

Megan: What does that have to do with softball? 

Jennifer: Right. So what it had to do for the student was, she didn't get a scholarship to go to whatever school this was. I don't know the school, but presumably, she would have had maybe lower loans, if not no loans, depending on what kind of scholarship that would have been. All because one person decided they didn't like how they sounded, and they're right. What does that have to do with softball? It doesn't have anything to do with softball. Plenty of people play plenty of sports and sound plenty of different ways, but that was a real financial impact on that person. I tried to bring those real-world impacts to light when we talk about it because it's one thing to say, "I hear you speaking this way, and I think you're from such and such a place," but it's another whole thing then to say, "And therefore, I don't think you're worthy of whatever, this scholarship." So that fine line between knowing someone's from a place and then discriminating against them because of it, or knowing someone has a certain ethnic, racial, sexual, whatever background.

Carrie: What about you Rusty?

Rusty: For me, the thing that is sort of the biggest misunderstanding and the thing that sort of upsets me that people don't understand about language is the way that anything that isn't standard English gets treated as somehow less complicated and unable to express things and not having any nuance and so on. I'm from Arkansas and my dialect has lots of things like there's a distinction between 'y'alls' and 'y'allses.' So 'y'alls' is a collective plural, so it's something owned by all of you together, but 'y'allses' would be distributed across individuals. That's something that standard English doesn't do. So when people hear 'she working' or 'she be working,' they don't realize that those are making a difference in meaning. They're just both wrong to most people. It's not that they're wrong, there's a complicated system going on there.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. We don't have a way of easily talking about 'y'alls' and 'y'allses.' I'd have to explain that in my dialect in a different way, a way that would take it much longer to explain than saying 'y'alls' or 'y'allses.'

Rusty: Yeah. 

Megan: So you say in the book something that I want to ask about. What do you mean... I think it's really good to just remind our listeners of this: What do you mean when you say that linguistic stereotypes are founded in social prejudices rather than linguistic structure?

Jennifer: So part of that is that there's nothing inherent to the structure that means something is less than. An example we often give, I don't remember if this one ended up in the book, is that, for example, in English, standard English says don't put two negatives in a sentence. So I don't have any sugar as opposed to I don't have no sugar. So the two negative parts is bad, right? In that grammar, not supposed to do that. We know that tons of the non-standard varieties that exist do this. If you flip it and you look at something like French or several other romance languages, there's this requirement in the negatives to have two parts. So 'Je ne sais pas' is French for 'I don't know.' You have to have the 'ne' and the 'pas' in formal standard French to have a negative. 

So you were supposed to have a double negative. Sure enough, regular colloquial French, they say 'Je ne sais pas.' So they lose the 'ne', which is the actual negative. Colloquially, they drop one. So single negative is quote-unquote wrong there, and there's no reason. Structurally, they just exist. Grammar just is, nothing is bad, nothing is good. It just is. So when someone says, oh, because they use that structure, I think they are lazy, bad, ugly, whatever the bad things are. It's got to be about the people because the language itself just is.

Megan: The language itself just is. I love it. No, it's perfect. I think it's just really good to remind our listeners about that because I don't know... That's kind of at the heart of tackling linguistic discrimination, I think, is to make sure that people know that there's nothing inherent to the language that is good or bad or it's about our perceptions of social categories and social relationships and all of that.

Carrie:  Yeah, that's what we bring to it.

Rusty: My favorite example of that is the word initial 'H', which is obligatory in proper British English, right, and is grammatically incorrect in French, right? So the proper French and proper English in Britain have the same pattern, and we have a mix, right? We used to have a British colleague who said, Oh, I hate it when I hear Americans say herb." It's like they're trying to be uppity and all continental in French. I had to remind him that we lived down the road from a town called Versailles. That sounding French was not something that people cared about very much around.

Carrie: That's definitely not. That one is one of my favorites because I think I say it either way depending and because I'm Canadian, I don't know, I'm kind of strapped between the two worlds. I don't know which one I used to say first.

Jennifer: So it's the problem of paying attention to languages. You can no longer know what you actually do because you know all the names.

Carrie: It's so true. That is part of the problem, yes. Plus, I lived in the United States for a long time, so that kind of changed a bunch of things too.

Rusty:  Is it pasta or pasta?

Megan: Oh my Gosh.

Carrie: It's pasta. I'm a pasta, but taco and macho, but in the UK, it's macho.

Megan: And nacho, right? They would say nacho for nacho?

Carrie: It probably depends. 

Megan: Like, we always remind our listeners that we're human here. I was about to say that that's horrifying. We still have our reactions to things. We just have to be sure that we keep them to ourselves and not act on them.

Jennifer: I tell students that when they take classes with me I've given them their imaginary linguist hat and they're supposed to wear it in class, but that when they take their linguist hat off, I recognize this stuff is out there and it happens even to linguists. We take our hats off and we have pet peeves too.

Megan: Yeah, they're very deeply embedded, so it's really hard to root them fully out. It's just important that we recognize them, right?

Kevin: They're part of the enterprise sometimes, right? So we'll do this thing where we say, prescriptivism is bad. You've got to be descriptive and all language is good. Then you get to the syntax part of the chapter and you go, now let's talk about English. Here's what English does. Let's talk about Spanish. Here's what Spanish does, and it's like, well, which Spanish do you mean exactly? Which English do you mean exactly? There's a deep prescriptivism baked into that. I would love everybody to at least acknowledge it.

Rusty: When I was in graduate school, you had to write the stars on the sentences and then figure out which ones were grammatical and not grammatical and explain it according to the theory from class. My stars were exactly opposite of what was expected because of my dialect. I ended up having to go with the students from Korea and Japan to get grammaticality judgments from another speaker of English so that I could pass syntax.

Carrie: Oh, that's not okay. 

Megan: That is not okay at all.

Carrie: If you used your own data, I feel like you should be allowed to. That's ridiculous.

Megan: Well, it's not their own... Were you given sentences to...

Carrie: Yeah, but it's still your judgment.

Rusty:  But you have to judge them.

Kevin: Yeah. I got a bad grade on a syntax assignment. I'm not going to name any names on a syntax assignment in graduate school because my parents are both from Dublin, Ireland. I just couldn't get the binding conditions on reflexive pronouns. I'm just like, give himself a towel. That's completely fine to me.

Carrie: Yeah. I had problems with that too because, I don't have those, but I had something that was different from what was expected. I can't remember now. My professor at the time said, "Okay, well, just use the judgments I'm giving you. I recognize that you have a different system," but just to simplify things, at least she was upfront in that way. That I can understand, but just like, it's still problematic. We know, intellectually, there are other varieties, but we don't seem to know how to deal with it.

Kevin: It's really hard. I would say, I'm not trying to... I don't want anybody to punch me at the next LSA meeting, but a thing that really grinds my gears as a phonetician, can I use that expression? Is these assignments that early in the semester, usually in an intro class, but it happens in other classes too, but early in the semester, you'll get translate these words into the IPA. That's not a possible request, right? I mean, translate these words into the IPA. What can I possibly mark wrong if I say translate these words into the IPA and I don't know that the person doing the translation is from rural Western North Carolina? Okay. Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox.

Carrie: No, it's okay. Soapbox away.

Megan:  I always had a hard time with the IPA because I didn't know, like I would want to compare with my classmates or whatever, but I realized that we do have different ways of saying it. I didn't trust myself enough to trust my own way of saying things. English is complicated. There's a lot of different Englishes. Speaking of Englishes, we've already talked a bit about this, but since you're all at the University of Kentucky, I wanted to talk more about the American South, because we've talked about this before on the show and we've had a couple episodes, but I think it's really worth discussing again. What does it mean to sound Southern? And why is this viewed as pejorative by so many Americans, even by those that are Southern themselves? 

Jennifer: So can I take this one? I think I have to.

Megan: Yes.

Jennifer: A lot of my work is on Kentucky Southern actually. So I can ask you that first. You too. Is it Southern?

Carrie: I would have said yes before the way that you're looking at me. I mean, I interpret, I mean. I was surprised that Megan asked you if you were Southern because, to me, you sound Southern. So yes, to me, it's Southern.

Jennifer: Okay, So, and if I asked my Michigan colleague here, he would agree with you that it's absolutely the South. I don't actually know where Rusty lands on this now, but I would guess some folks in Arkansas and definitely people in other parts of the South are like, no, Kentucky doesn't count. So it's at this really interesting crossroads, socio-historically, politically, geographically, everything. Kentucky has this kind of split situation going on. I think of myself as Southern, so I don't have a problem with sounding Southern, but I know that a lot of people do. You mentioned that you do perceptual ontology and some of the stuff that ends up in the book, there's a whole chapter that's focused on perceptions and my kind of perceptions, which are a little different than the kinds of perceptions Kevin studies. 

They essentially... A lot of times what we do is we will give people a map and we'll say, tell me where people have a certain way of talking and they'll draw on that map. That's a lot of what perceptual ontology ends up being. Sure enough, when you ask anybody to draw one of these maps, in the American anyway, they almost to a person will draw a South. So that's the first point it's a known entity. It's a thing that everyone knows exists. Then the next thing to note is that by and large when people do draw the South, if you also ask them to label it or rate it in any way, as we often do, it gets a lot of pretty disparaging comments. So these labels like Hick, Hillbilly, and Redneck, tend to be pretty pejorative, and worse, I've seen a lot worse. Then describing it, I would call them ornery. I think that word is supposed to be pronounced ornery.

Carrie: Supposed to.

Megan: Supposed to.

Jennifer: They write some pretty bad things and they also rate them pretty low on lots of different categories. Non-Southerners will say, Southerners are not, they're not pleasant, they're not correct, they're not educated, they're not pretty, they're not anything. Then the parts you mentioned about Southerners themselves, they got kind of what we would often call linguistic insecurity, where they might rate it pretty nicely. Those are pretty pleasant, right? But they themselves won't rate their own varieties as correct. It's the sort of standard stereotype of really sweet guy, but not the brightest crayon in the box, right? And so they basically own that, a lot of them do. So where does that come from? Well, I think that idea that it's a known entity is really important for this. Whether you've been to the South or not, the South has been the butt of the joke for ages in the media, and when in various places, right? 

So it's only relatively recently when we start seeing a little more pride and ownership in Southerners as being something good again, but there's still not that same level of pride in the way that they talk. They've fully sort of taken on the idea that they don't sound very good, which is why you end up with a lot of people saying, I need to work on my accent or work on the way that I talk. So I'll always ask students, and I don't know if they're always honest, I'm like, have you ever tried to change anything? A lot of them have.  I remind them that if they get super emotional or drunk, it's likely to come back, but that idea that they need to change is pretty pervasive. I have to tell them that as much as I want to celebrate what they do, I'm not the one at the Fortune 500 company they want to get a job at. 

I recognize that they're walking on what we call in the book, this linguistic tightrope, this idea that you want to belong where you belong. Students at Kentucky will say they get to the UK and they get picked on for how they talk. So they fix it and then they go back home and then they get picked on by their parents because they sound like they got above their raisin'. That's the tightrope they're walking. So I think that Southerners have that. Obviously, they're not the only ones that have that particular phenomenon going on. I think that's a big thing in the American context is the South being pitted against everyone else, but also Southerners sort of taking it.

Megan: The media is, you're right, is so to blame for this.

Carrie: I have not solely, but they're a big part of it.

Megan: I know. I'm thinking about myself where I have an aunt from Arkansas and sounds like she's from Arkansas, whatever that means. She doesn't sound like me. I remember talking to her on the phone and just thinking that there was something wrong with her accent and not wrong with my accent. Even though knowing having a relative wasn't as strong as seeing the Beverly Hillbillies or whatever on Nick at Night or whatever, that was just so much more pervasive for me somehow.

Kevin: Yeah, I mean, to think about a thing that shocks my students now that I'm here in Kentucky is pointing out to them that Goofy is meant to be a Southern caricature. The Disney character Goofy.

Carrie: I did not know that.

Megan:  I didn't know that either.

Kevin: It's so embedded that actually the indexicality starts to disappear, right? And the Southern-ness kind of disappears into the goofiness. Also, it's not [inaudible], it's not very accurate.

Carrie: No, not even close. It's not even like, I don't know, Yosemite Sam or somebody who [crosstalk]...

Kevin: Foghorn Leghorn. 

Carrie: Yeah, there we go. That's a better one. At least I can pinpoint that. Goofy, no.

Rusty: No, but you said something that Goofy says that you told your students, and they all got it.

Kevin: You're trying to get me to say, "gawrsh"?

Megan: Oh gosh. Oh yeah.

Carrie: That is the only thing.

Rusty: But what Jennifer was saying is a good example of what you brought up earlier in the discussion, was that prejudices against language are about social stereotypes, right? So a Southerner sort of is seen as ignorant and backward, but sort of harmless, right? And a lot of forms in African American English and Southern English overlap, right? And so the same sentence will be interpreted as, "Oh, that person is like dangerous or frightening or what have you," but, or they're not, they're harmless. Although I guess there are people who are afraid of Southerners, but they've seen Deliverance. It's clear that what's happening in terms of how to interpret the language is about previous stereotypes.

Jennifer: And that's why the media is part of the equation because it's a shortcut in storytelling. So the example, maybe Goofy doesn't do it for you, but surely Mater from Cars does. That he's......

Carrie: I've never seen cars so... 

Jennifer: Oh, you got to see Cars. It's...

Megan: Yeah. So just so you can see what they're talking about with Mater, but...

Jennifer: So he is a lovable, not quite so smart sidekick character, and Disney is good at this. They do it over and over and over again. The reason they do it is because I only have 2 hours or an hour and a half to get you to feel something about this character. So I need to lean on what you already have in your brain. So it's a shortcut. That's why you regularly see, not just in Disney, but in other movies, the good guy has a standard-sounding accent. Doesn't sound like he's from anywhere. The sidekicks and the lackeys and the butts of the jokes again, they'll have something else. Often Southern, if you want the sweet, but stupid, you'll get African-American English or Chicano English. In the example, in The Lion King with the hyenas, you get the two of them alongside a blathering idiot that doesn't say anything, right? He just blathers, and that they're all the same. So basically speaking incoherently is the same. That's how you know these are the bad guys, the lackeys. So it's a good shortcut to use good in the sense that it allows even small children who are already baking in this sort of milieu of stereotypes to go, "Oh, I get it. He's Lightning McQueen's best friend and he's not very smart. Let's go."

Kevin: One of the many ways that Rosina blew my mind when I was an undergrad at Michigan was this exact conversation about how you use voice to create identity as a kind of shortcut in Disney movies and other media. The little ones who are first being exposed to this, learn the meaning in the other direction, right? So they learn like, this is the bad guy. This is the villain. This is the dumb one. Then they come to associate it. So as she says in the first two editions of the book, it's the media is responsible for contributing to at least the creation of these stereotypes, not just the implication, not just the implementation of the stereotypes.

Carrie: And the smart bad guys usually have a British accent.

Jennifer: Oh, yeah. British is evil genius. That's a stereotype, right? And they can do some of this, right? The cartoons are a particularly interesting one because how do you give personality to inanimate objects, right? And you can do some of it through design. So again, back to Mater, you want to make him seem a little off. You make him kind of a clunky tow truck. Okay, and he's rusty, not Rusty Barrett, but he's rusty, right? And so you can do some of it with imagery, but also they're going to have to say something. That's where you can do a lot with the stereotypes that already exist in the community.

Megan: Well, and we kind of do this too, right? And we have shortcuts ourselves when this is what's playing out when we're linguistically discriminating against people.

Jennifer: Absolutely. As humans, we like to categorize, and that's what we're doing with stereotypes ultimately. 

Rusty: It's worth noting that the actor that voices Mater is from Nebraska and is not Southern. So you're totally getting a stereotype of Southernness and not an actual Southerner. 

Carrie: Yeah. That's usually the case, right, with these instances, I find, is that they're not actually Southern.

Kevin: Yeah. Or not actually Indian, right, in the case of Apu from the Simpsons.

Carrie: Oh, yes. 100%.

Kevin: I teach a class on speech perception, sort of a third-wave sociolinguistics introduction to speech perception through the medium of the Muppets and...

Carrie: What?

Kevin: ...everybody builds a puppet and you have to create an identity for the puppet and then create a voice and then write it. It's a way of separating people from teaching about how identity works without all of the sort of personal threat of having it be about them [inaudible] themselves. One of the things I've noticed teaching this class that would never have jumped out to me before is how not lazy the Muppet workshop people are in creating characters with specifically this use of linguistic stereotypes in character creation. Sometimes they lean on it, but, they'll use a New Jersey accent for a rat, for example, which is probably not ideal.

Carrie: That's true.

Kevin: A lot of the main Muppet voices, they don't use it. It's really admirable, I think. Sorry.

Carrie: And that's why you got the Cookie Monster shirt on right now?

Megan: You're also a cookie. Yeah.

Kevin:  I'm not sure which way the causality goes there. 

Jennifer: You should have him back on here just to talk about the Muppets

Carrie: I am sold.

Megan: Yeah. Let's do it 100%.

Carrie: Are you a chaos Muppet or an order Muppet? 

Kevin: Oh, a chaos Muppet. 

Megan: Me, too.

Carrie: Are there any last examples you want to leave our listeners with? Anything that we didn't touch on?

Megan: Yeah, because we go through so many. You do such a good job of, again, adding to the original.

Kevin: Oh, thank you.

Jennifer: Thanks. 

Megan: Yeah, it's fantastic. 

Jennifer: Kevin talk about 'R'.

Megan: Definitely recommend.

Carrie: 'R' yes. 

Megan: Yes 'R'

Kevin: That chapter? I think...

Megan: That was an addition, right? Or was it not?

Kevin: That's a new addition. There's this amazing thing that happened with 'R' in US English in the last century, where the social meaning of non-rhoticity flipped, right? So in the earliest part of the 20th century, the prestigious dialect of American English was non-rhotic. So the chapter talks about kind of how you get into that situation. Then mid-century, it flips, and rhotic, sort of a Midwestern-ish rhotic target, becomes the prestige dialect, as you immediately hear right now. So the chapter is about that. When I said that chapter before, what I mean is that was an especially big endeavor, especially a painful chapter, right? I hope it doesn't come through in the text, but...

Megan: No, yeah. 

Kevin: Oh good. I mean I was reading middle English. I was reading ancient sort of philological books and modern linguistic anthropology. For some reason, I put a big thing in there about articulation of different rhotics. I don't know. I haven't read it again since we... The last time we typed before it was published.

Jennifer: Well, since he won't be positive about himself, I'll say one of the things that that chapter does is it takes something that's easily recognizable to readers, right? Other than Southern, 'ah', 'R-less-ness' is a thing people will tell you about. If they're familiar with New York accents or Boston accents or whatever, they're going to be like, "Oh, yeah, r-less." They don't say their 'R's'. That's how they'll say it. They're so lazy, they don't say their 'R's'. To take this thing that is a little... Look, you can see this thing. You hear it as no 'R'. Well, guess what? It's got this fascinating history of pronunciation. It does exactly what we were saying earlier about it can't be the structure. It can't be the structure, have an 'R', or don't have an 'R', if it can flip like that in its meaning. It's this arbitrariness in language that they just aren't seeing because so much of what they hear out there is exactly the thing you mentioned. Oh, they're lazy because they won't articulate this 'R'. No, it's way more than that. It's almost more a can of fashion than anything else.

Kevin: It's pretty clear that the flip... I mean, there's a lot of factors that go into what causes the flip, but it's clear that racism in the Northern migration and antisemitism played major roles. These are documented influences that people were trying to get away from.

Carrie: I know the racism. Maybe you should explain both because I've never heard the antisemitic part. So I'm interested to hear about that.

Kevin: Yeah. So as I say, it's been a while since I've read the chapter, but one of the kind of... Rusty probably has the dates to mind here. So please fill them in, but one of the sort of shocking things is then in the late 20s, there's an address given by the president of Harvard saying "We're letting in too many New York Jews and we need to improve Harvard by letting in more good Midwestern folk." So there's an active decision, not just at Harvard, but among the Ivies to try to recruit wealthy white Midwesterners into the student body. That brings with it a revalorization of what it means to be rhotic or non-rhotic occurring at the time. Part of that revalorization is this no longer sounds metropolitan and educated. It now has these revalorizations that are less desirable in mid-20th-century America.

What I love most about this chapter and the reason that the thing that kept me going is the way that it recontextualizes Leboeuf's famous department store study, right? And actually, there's this part in that chapter where I just insert lovingly, just insert all of the texts from the second edition that's handling the Leboeuf's department store study, but it means differently now that 'R' has in the 1960s, right? In the mid-1960s, 'R' has just 20 years-ish before undergone this major change in what it means to be a non-rhotic speaker and what it means to be a rhotic speaker. That's hard for us to see from the position of... For me, the first time I encountered it mid-90s US, but even now at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, it's hard for us to see that this revalorization had just happened. So social meaning is arbitrary, right?

Carrie: Yes, of course. It should never surprise me that anti-Semitism is there somewhere because every conspiracy theory, somehow it's there. Of course it's there, but I just had no idea about the 'R-less'. I knew about the racism side. Oh my goodness.

Rusty: If you think of New York, sort of a bagel with a schmear, right? The 'R-lessness' is the stereotype. I mean, when they decided to sort of shift trying to get people from Illinois and Ohio and Michigan to go to Harvard, part of that was when they also instated the SAT to sort of culturally weed out Jewish students. So it was all part of this sort of shift in terms of how we sort of judge people and reward them, I guess. 

Carrie: Yeah. Of course.

Megan: Of course. 

Carrie: Oh my goodness.

Kevin: Yeah, but I mean, there's a burden there, right? Like if you're going to make a claim, that sounds like an outrageous claim to someone who isn't open to it, right? And so there's a burden there that I hope we meet in the chapter of showing the students, this is what evidence looks like. This is how you bring evidence in support of a position and avoid circularity and these sorts of things. So that's all in there too.

Carrie: Well, thank you. This has been a really great conversation [crosstalk]...

J: Yeah, it's been so lovely.

Carrie: ...and I'm very excited and yes, we will definitely have Muppets at some point. 

Megan: Yes...

J: Sorry Kevin.

Megan: ...that has to happen, but yeah, thank you so much for being here. 

Carrie: Yeah. Thank you.

Kevin: Thanks for having us. 

Megan: Again, I completely recommend this edition of the book. It is fantastic. You will find so many things in there that we talk about on the podcast.

J: Can I make a little shout-out to your listeners? 

Carrie: Yes. Absolutely. 

J: There's a thing that happens sometimes we get kind of connected to our book, and especially if we're instructors and we're like, I've been teaching from this book, I've got a good rhythm. As you said, it's almost like a new book. So it would be a very hard shift for someone who's been teaching from the second edition for a long time to shift to teaching from the third edition. I encourage you to check out the book and take a look and see. We have tried to keep that which made this book special, to begin with, and add new things that will be very relevant to students, very easy to make the case for why discrimination is happening and maybe shouldn't. What we're hoping is that if we get a chance, and we don't know yet, but if we get a chance to do the next edition, if that happens, that we'll be able to build on this foundation we've already got, keep bringing in the new stories, new histories, new ways of thinking about how language discrimination works. We just hope people will consider utilizing this book. Maybe in addition to other editions, I don't know, but I know that it can be hard to make the shift. I just hope people will take a look at it.

Carrie: Perfect.

Megan: Definitely worth it, and we leave our listeners with one final message. 

Carrie: Don't be an asshole.

Megan: Don't be an asshole. 

Rusty: Yes. Thanks. 

Megan: Thank you. 

Kevin: Thanks.

[END]