LINGUISTIC AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY

Linguistic inequality

One of the most solid achievements of linguistics in 20TH century has

been to eliminate the idea that some languages or dialects are
inherently ‘better’ than others.

Linguistic inequality => different people in different social situations

transmit the same message by using different linguistic items;

Linguistic inequality may be a cause and consequence of social

inequality

The basis for the social inequality is in the social and educational
status of a speaker (different people - different level of linguistic
competence and linguistic performance)
1. Concerns what people think about each other’s speech
2. Relates to the linguistic items that a person knows – reflects the different
experiences people had
3. Knowledge of how to use linguistic items to communicate successfully
(differences at the level of conceptualization and culture)
 Subjective inequality: Language-based prejudice

- Prejudices about particular ways of speaking – drawing conclusions

about another person’s character and abilities based on speech
- Why? => We need information and we have no better source
- The way we speak or write conveys socially important information –
speakers use their linguistic choices to locate themselves in a
multidimensional social space (a speaker uses the speech as a sign of
social distinction)
 Linguistic prejudice is the major cause
of linguistic and social inequality;
 Any individual may be a victim of linguistic prejudice
regardless of their social & ethnical status;
 marginalized groups are often the victims, due to the speech varieties
they are using.
Subjective inequality:
Language-based prejudice
 Bridge a gap between social classification
(e.g. middle-class, female) and prejudice (e.g. friendly, intelligent)
 Notion of Prototype: collection of characteristics (e.g. kind of person
based on features)
 Social stereotype: a social prototype shared by many people in society
(opinion of a certain social group e.g. of Hispanics, Italian, British etc.)
- African–Americans usually speak a particular non-standard variety,
often seen as sub-standard. The members are also perceived as people
with low intelligence and limited education.
- Hispanic Americans - people that have strong Mexican accent, and use
simple vocabulary. They are often considered as poorly educated or
illegal immigrants.
Types of linguistic prejudice
1) Cognitive uncertainty
• The basic need for information about other person (reaction, value, moral,
behavior) is known as cognitive uncertainty
e.g. When someone delivers a speech, depending on intonation, and choice of
vocabulary - can be seen both positively and negatively.

2) Linguistic insecurity
• The anxiety or lack of confidence experienced by speakers and writers
who believe that their use of language does not conform to the principles
and practices of the standard language
e.g. A great deal of evidence shows that lower-middle-class speakers have the
greatest tendency towards linguistic insecurity, and therefore tend to
adopt the prestige forms.

3) Prestige
• The respect and admiration that someone gets for being successful -
prestigious language is the language of successful and important people
E.g. A child that adopts a language of the upper class, can lose respect for his
friends. So, in order not to give up all the forms of his local group, he
would use mixture of both. However, he would prefer the upper class
forms (overt prestige), and keep only selected local forms.
 Stereotypes and how to study them
• Speech of others is a clue to non-linguistic information about them - their
social background and even personality traits (intelligence).
• Subjective Reaction Test developed by social psychologists and Labov:
• people talking and respondents asked to answer a questionnaire about
them: Where do you think the speaker comes from?; locate the speaker on
a scale of toughness, intelligence, friendliness; what job do you think the
person holds? etc.
=> Different voices and accents evoke different stereotypes in the mind of the
same person and the same voice suggested different stereotypes to
different people.
• Labov: controlling the speech used to identify the particular linguistic
features to which hearers were reacting (reaction to pronunciation)
• Another research – used RP to one group of students and Birmingham
accent to another – gave a short talk about psychology: Students were
asked whether he would be suitable to give speeches in the future…
prejudiced against the accent
• Prejudice based on racial types: the speech of black and Mexican-American
children rated less standard than that of white children
Linguistic incompetence: strictly linguistic inequality

• What is linguistic competence? What would be incompetence?

• In Britain children from different social-class backgrounds have very
different success-rates in learning to read – DEFICIT THEORY
• Is it the same in Macedonia?

• No two speakers have the same range of vocabulary and syntactic

constructions - some such differences are relevant to success at
school
• Bernstein: restricted vs. elaborated code
• Parental speech style affects the child’s linguistic development

• Inequality can also be due to experience: to nurture rather than

nature
 Communicative incompetence:
inequality in communication

• What is communicative competence? What would be communicative

incompetence?
• Knowledge of speech acts
• Silence (when should people stay silent)
• Native vs. non-native speakers