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Nonfiction

The Biases We Hold Against the Way People Speak

Credit...Tyler Comrie

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HOW YOU SAY IT
Why You Talk the Way You Do — and What It Says About You
By Katherine D. Kinzler

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg grew up with a solid old-school Brooklyn accent. She displays no trace of it in recordings of her work as a young litigator, but today, one can hear shades of it in her speech on and off the court. Why?

Black English is often reviled as an indication of lower intelligence, and yet ever more, advertisers seek out voice-over artists with an identifiably “Black” sound. Why?

Things like this do not surprise linguists who specialize in the intersection of language and sociology. For example, they have found that people of the lower middle class, in settings where their speech is being evaluated, tend to speak more “correctly” than even upper-middle-class or wealthy people do. Justice Ginsburg’s suppression of Brooklyn vowels was a perfect example, as is the fact that having moved into a different class since, she subconsciously feels she has less to “prove.”

Meanwhile, the Black English issue can best be explained through an experiment carried out in Montreal in the 1960s at a time when English was considered much more prestigious than French. Anglophone and Francophone Canadians were played a passage in English and a passage in French, unaware that the passage was being read by the same person. Both Anglo and French Canadians tended to think the English speaker was smarter, but that the French speaker seemed warmer and more friendly. This is why Black English can be associated with both dimness and approachability, and thus ideal to represent banks, insurance and medicines.

Katherine D. Kinzler’s “How You Say It” addresses how people sound when they talk and its effect on how they are perceived. This area overlaps considerably with the subfield called sociolinguistics, whose worldview is well represented by Kinzler. Sociolinguistics has sometimes been subject to the charge of simply describing rather obvious things with elegant vocabulary. The charge is indiscriminate but has some truth in it, and Kinzler admirably steers clear of stressing tenets such as “People speak differently with intimates than in formal settings,” which hardly seem like hot news to most of us.

What makes sociolinguistics a subject worth engaging with are the surprises, and Kinzler’s book is full of them. She reveals the extent to which language imprints our brains and how we are neurologically programmed to be sensitive to it. Even if we lose a language after early childhood and no longer speak it in adulthood, learning it will be easier because of deep-seated neural settings permanently etched by that first language. People are more viscerally aroused by the curses in their first languages than ones learned later. In one of Kinzler’s studies, kindergartners were shown a clip of a white girl speaking English and then clips of two adults, one a Francophone white woman and the other an Anglophone Black one. The children actually supposed that the white girl would grow up to be the Black woman, so deep-seated was their sense of language as marking identity. Fourth graders, on the other hand, had internalized race as the deciding factor.

Kinzler’s main interest, however, is in linguistic discrimination. Amid our discussions of racism, sexism and even classism, we don’t spend much time thinking about the ways we can be biased when it comes to how people speak. It is, however, one of the last prejudices permissible in polite society. As Kinzler notes, “Linguistic bias is part of our basic cultural fabric. It is so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it. It’s sanctioned by the law, it’s allowed by culture, and it’s practiced so frequently that people do not even realize when it is happening. Linguistic discrimination is seen as normal and typical, and because of this, it flies beneath the radar.”

The latter point is key: As with so much discrimination, linguistic bias is often subconscious and intertwined with other kinds of prejudice. In “Lethal Weapon 2,” the Danny Glover character describes a South African as having an accent he puts down with an elaborate pejorative, where the humor is in the sheer arbitrariness of the judgment. That kind of judgment, however, can result in things much less amusing.

Black earnings decrease to the extent that one has a perceptible “blaccent.” College students were played a recording of native, idiomatic English being spoken — by an Ohioan, in fact. When the accompanying photo was of an Asian man, the students heard the speaker of the recording as having an accent, but not when the photo was of a white man. The Honolulu D.M.V. denied a job to a Filipino man who had spoken English his whole life, claiming that his accent made him difficult to understand, when an examination revealed that he was not only effortlessly comprehensible but well spoken in general. Kinzler advises that we legislate against linguistic discrimination specifically rather than by national origin, as cases like the one with the Filipino man can be justified if an organization has hired other Filipinos who happen not to have accents.

This is vital counsel. Those wondering why everybody in America can’t speak like, roughly, Jason Bateman miss how spontaneous and beyond control most of speech is. The tidiness of writing creates the illusion that speaking is a deliberate placement of words in sequence, like setting a table. It is actually a lightning-speed and subconscious transformation of words into word-sandwiches like “Joo…” for “Did you?,” and stealth idioms like “What are you doing in a tutu?” when you are only asking why the person is wearing the tutu rather than what action that person is performing in it. All of this is of course also marinated in the sounds we are surrounded by from birth.

Ultimately the way we talk is largely out of our control, subject to as many outside forces as the ones that determine how we laugh or walk. We can make adjustments, but if we by chance accomplish so magnificent a self-control that our natural way never emerges, we have erased our very selves. One should only be expected to do such a thing for reasons of civic urgency, such as genuine incomprehensibility.

“How You Say It” makes a crisp but comprehensive case, while dropping us in on what sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research teaches, that although our distaste for ways of speaking that differ from ours is baked into us, true civilization requires that we work against it as much as possible.

John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University and the author of “Talking Back, Talking Black.”

HOW YOU SAY IT
Why You Talk the Way You Do — and What It Says About You
By Katherine D. Kinzler
230 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Fuggedaboutit!. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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