Abstract
Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the problem of widespread negative, misinformed language ideologies in the United States, which results in linguistic prejudice and linguistic discrimination. Examples are analyzed to illustrate how people are socialized into problematic language ideologies, such as differences in linguistic portrayals of heroes and villains in children’s movies and the use of stigmatized varieties in television shows to index undesirable qualities. Also examined are several examples of how these ideologies negatively affect linguistically marginalized people, such as the denial of housing through the use of linguistic profiling, the mistreatment of linguistically marginalized students in primary and secondary schools, and the unequal judicial treatment of witnesses due to their linguistic backgrounds. The chapter concludes by introducing a proposal for one possible part of the solution to this problem: the adoption of the Structural Inquiry of Stigmatized Englishes (SISE) approach to the introductory linguistics course.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this text, I use the pronouns they, them, and their in reference to singular antecedents (as opposed to using a gendered singular third person pronoun) in order to avoid mis-gendering the scholars to whose work I refer and/or to avoid stylistically awkward and gender binary constructions such as he/she. The use of singular (gender nonspecific) they/them/their is becoming more common in academic writing, and I view my use of this feature herein as support for its increased use in general, particularly as a way to advocate for those whose preferred pronouns are gender nonspecific, which is the case for some of the students I discuss later in this text. For more information, see Merriam-Webster’s (2019) article about their selection of they as the 2019 Word of the Year and the American Dialect Society’s (2020) article about their members’ vote to declare singular they the Word of the Decade for 2010–2019.
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Hercula, S.E. (2020). Linguistic Inequality in the United States. In: Fostering Linguistic Equality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41690-4_1
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