Our Language Prejudicess DonT Make No Sense By Raffaella Zanuttini Summary

The film “American Tongues” documents a variety of English accents that are present across the United States and highlights a lot of the opinions people have about accents and people who speak these accents. A large majority of the people who express opinions about other peoples’ accents tend to express negative views, as they see their own accent as the superior one. The film focuses on showing the array of accents found in the U.S., but also how a lot of people who speak these “inferior” accents work to learn “Standard American English” to increase their chances of getting jobs and communicating in more official domains. Although the film was made in 1988, it expresses views still present in today’s society towards different accents, as people tend to continue judging others based not only on what they say, but also how they say it.

In the examining and writing my analysis of the article Mother Tongue by Amy Tan, I hope to appeal to an audience that wishes to expand their knowledge of the cultural use of various languages and their social impacts. In this case, the language would be English and the culture would be that of Asian-Americans. I would think that this work, and the analysis of, would primarily be of interest to those in academic or research fields of sociology and language. I would hope the reader of my analysis would be interested in gaining insight into how using a “broken” English system heavily influences one’s communication and feeling towards those outside of your culture. The analysis would benefit the reader by

Linguistic stereotypes are an existent form of discrimination. Since, languages are criticized and mocked due to the connection between language and cultural character. Thus, language is significantly related to the identity of the speakers. In addition, languages are vulnerable to criticism due to differences in cultural behavior.

Allport, Gordon. “The Language of Prejudice.” Language Awareness. Ed. Paul Eschholz. Alfred Rosa. Virginia Clark. Boston: Bedford St. Martin, 2013. 324-333. Print.

The English language has many tongues. From the 1500’s where people started migrating to the thirteen colonies to today where America is surrounded by immigration. From the beginning of history, society has been shaping English and its quality. It’s shown in Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” the varying ways one speaks them, regardless of being the same language. The author’s mother is being discriminated against due to speaking a different English from the proper form of English. Amy uses her personal experiences to contribute to the English- speaking community about inequality of different tongues through rhetorical appeals such as pathos, ethos, and logos. Amy Tan in her essay “Mother Tongue” claims that foreigners and immigrants who can’t speak proper English are treated differently.

Bissenger employs an omniscient point of view and detail to convey the idea that prejudice and stereotyping are never good things.

Language discrimination is an inevitable issue experienced in contemporary society as there are numerous variations and accents of the English language. This is evident in the texts, "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan and "The case of Robyn Kina" by Diana Eades. These texts explore the many forms of this discrimination, these being both personal and communal, and contrast or vary in terms of severity.

Fundamentally, he shows the effects of social factors to the language and describes how Americans` way to speak their language varies by regions. When it comes to education, unlike MacNeil who neutrally observes the change, McGray focuses on Americans` perspective on language that has changed by social and political issues. He claims that American education did not react to the growing internationalism and let Americans be indifferent to other countries, especially languages (McGray 354). For example, 25 luminaries proposed plausible educational reforms, but government officials did not adopt them (McGray 355). Ultimately, the author suggests that to be competitive in national fields, Americans need to realize the seriousness of their indifference to foreign countries and cultures, understand their indifference to other foreign languages, and change the American education system and policies for foreign languages. Similar to McGray and contrast to MacNeil, Simon worries about the usage of modified English. He recognizes that English has inevitably changed by social circumstances, such

Human equality has always been an issue in every part of the world. Prejudice, discrimination and stereotypes have been passed on from one generation to the next. The Society has accepted these behaviors to be normal and acceptable. According to the article, “Causes of Prejudice” by Vincent N. Parrillo, there are two types of prejudice; psychological and sociological. Psychological prejudice focuses on individual behavior, where as sociological is focused more on a group. Psychological Prejudice is based on an individual’s behavior and occurs when an individual thinks and acts certain ways that can positively or negatively affect someone else. I believe that both Causes of prejudice are important, however in my opinion sociological prejudice can harm not just an individual but certain race or group of people. Therefore, sociological prejudice can be very damaging because these are beliefs that have been passed down from generation to generation in a form of a discrimination, and stereotypical behavior.

Citizen (2014), by Claudia Rankine, is a book that explores racism and prejudice that is happening in the United States. Rankine incorporates personal encounters, reactions, reflections, writing and art pieces, historical events, and the media to prove the point that racism is still very prominent to this day. For a majority of the book, Rankine writes short pieces about her personal encounters that deals with some form of racism, whether it happened to her or if she witnessed racism happening to other people. Within those short pieces, Rankine refers to herself as “you,” because she wants her readers to see what racism looks like in her shoes, even if the readers have not personally been affected by racism. Throughout the book, Rankine includes several symbols that are important to her that shows the audience that those symbols may be small, but they have a huge impact on how people perceive them. Some of the symbols that Claudia Rankine uses throughout Citizen is the color line, complexion of skin tone, and angry. What are the significance of each?

Language attitudes, which include people’s perception about the language variety in their own community and language varieties in other communities, has been one of the crucial topics in sociolinguistics since 1960s.

Unmistakably prejudice can consume the lives of many, whether it is because of sexual orientation, strengths and weaknesses, or appearance. With such a controversial topic, there will never be a right or wrong choice. However, with a growing and outspoken society, there may be a down fall in prejudice ideas and beliefs.

Non-standard dialects are regarded with contempt, mistreated as improper forms of a language. Linguists and researchers reported that speakers of minor varieties seem to form negative attitudes towards their culture, rating their own varieties badly and lacking respect for them (Lambert et al., 1960; Genesee & Holobow, 1989, as cited in Campbell-Kibler, 2011). With the fear of being prejudged, speakers of other dialects begin to feel inferior about their vernacular dialect and start to use the variety with higher status when they are surrounded by outsiders and they would employ their dialect again only if they are with their tribes (Petyt,

Other forms of the English language are developed from speech communities with an intention, for efficiency and to show inclusion, and to exclude others. It also helps to convey a specific identity of the speaker, with the use of syntactic and phonological differences from Standard English. These modifications form non-standard dialects, transferring the speaker’s cultural background and language to provide a better perception and reflection of identity. The falling intonation accompanied with interrogatives in the Asian ethnolect, such as ‘Gravy?’, is the opposite of the rising intonation used for the same purpose by Australians, and can quickly cause conflict between the two communities due to the missing benchmark in language. Pronoun deletion in ‘No like’ (‘I don’t like it’) is a feature of many ethnolects (Greek, Aboriginal English), and is differing from the Standard, yet still helps to get the message across. Ethnolects develop from Standard English, and helps to express a user’s identity through their language use and in-group solidarity within the speech community.

There are many people in society, especially those with a prescriptivist attitude, who strongly believe that the Standard is ‘intrinsically superior to other varieties’, as stated by K Burridge. It is clear however that this is not true, when one considers the ability of ethnolects and Aboriginal English to express identity and finer nuance. Ethnolects occur when features of someone’s first language or ‘mother tongue’ are adopted into their second language, in this case English. Features can include the phonological addition of vowel sounds to the ends of nouns e.g. bread /_/ (common to Greek and Italian); the