3rd Edition
English with an Accent Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States
Since its original publication in 1997, English with an Accent has inspired generations of scholars to investigate linguistic discrimination, social categorization, social structures, and power. This new edition is an attempt to retain the spirit of the original while enriching and expanding it to reflect the greater understanding of linguistic discrimination that it has helped create.
This third edition has been substantially reworked to include:
- An updated concept of social categories, how they are constructed in interaction, and how they can be invoked and perceived through linguistic cues or language ideologies
- Refreshed accounts of the countless social and structural factors that go into linguistic discrimination
- Expanded attention to specific linguistic structures, language groups, and social domains that go beyond those provided in earlier editions
- New dedicated chapter on American Sign Language and its history of discrimination
- QR codes linking to external media, stories, and other forms of engagement beyond the text
- A revamped website with additional material
English with an Accent remains a book that forces us to acknowledge and understand the ways language is used as an excuse for discrimination. The book will help readers to better understand issues of cross-cultural communication, to develop strategies for successful interactions across social difference, to recognize patterns of language that reflect implicit bias, and to gain awareness of how mistaken beliefs about language create and nurture prejudice and discrimination.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
The International Phonetic Alphabet
Preface to the Third Edition
Chapter One: The pronunciation of difference
Reproducing inequality
Discourse structural racism
Language ideologies
Red summer
Where we are headed
Discussion questions
Chapter Two: Language, categorization, and social identities
Fifty shades of grue
Only skin deep
Sorting humanity
Categories and cognition
Is that a sandwich?
Some basic semiotics
Language and racialization
Discussion questions
Chapter Three: Things linguists know about language
Facts about language
Linguistic potential
Variety is the spice of life!
Are you a robot?
So-called Standard English
Communicative effectiveness depends on variation
Discussion questions
Chapter Four: Language subordination
Reading a textbook: roles and responsibilities
Rejecting the gift: the individual’s role in the communicative process
Hesitance and uncertainty?
Standard language ideology
Confronting ideologies
Discussion questions
Chapter Five: Place-based variation in the American context
The social meaning of place
Regional varieties of American English
Spread the word
Vowels on the move
Regional variation in morphology and syntax
OMG! There's, like, so much more variation!
Structured variation: the hidden life of language
Discussion questions
Chapter Six: Language, racialization, and racism
No MSG
Race, ethnicity, and linguistic variation
Ethnicity-indexing variation: words and sounds
Ethnicity-indexing variation: sentences and meanings
No MSG, no lazy grammar
Language, interaction, and ethnic inequality
Language, race, appropriation, and whiteness
Language is love
Discussion questions
Chapter Seven: Language diversity in the United States
Estados Unidos no tiene un idioma oficial
Language abundance
Stolen childhoods
Language ideologies and English public space
Embracing bilingualism
Discussion questions
Chapter Eight: American Sign Language and deaf culture
How people communicate
What it means to be hearing
Deaf culture
Sign languages and American Sign Language
Martha's Vineyard Sign Language
Oralism vs. manualism
Language ideology and deaf culture
Ideologies within the deaf community
Discussion questions
Chapter Nine: Putting language on the map
How we see the language around us
Perceptual dialectology
Linguistic landscapes
The linguistic perception of the American South
Kountry Livin’
What it means to sound Southern
Perceptions meet strategies of condescension
Discussion questions
Chapter Ten: A history of ‘r’ in the United States
Meaningful, important, and arbitrary
The remarkable letter ‘r’
Rhotics: variety, terminology, and symbols
American [ɹ] is wei(r)d
Where did American [ɹ] come from?
From non-rhotic to rhotic: American sound change in the first half of the 20th century
Non-rhotic in Manhattan
Discussion questions
Chapter Eleven: The communicative burden in education
The medium of instruction
Invisible ideologies go to school
The setting of goals
Whose language?
Appropriacy arguments
Languagelessness
Education as cultural assimilation
How teachers talk
How graduate students talk
What the science tells us
Discussion questions
Chapter Twelve: Language use, media stereotypes, and fake news
Storytellers, Inc.
Teaching children how to discriminate
Building on stereotypes
Disney’s worldview
Information literacy: beyond cartoons
Echo chambers and filter bubbles
Bad is stronger than good
Discussion questions
Chapter Thirteen: Language in the workplace
Unwelcoming environments
Sorry not sorry
"This is America, speak English!"
"Nobody can understand those people"
"You sound so insecure when you talk the way I do"
"You’re so much prettier when you’re not angry"
White men talking
Discussion questions
Chapter Fourteen: Examining the American judicial system and housing
Language(s) and the law
Lost in translation
Linguists as experts
American housing problems
Heard but not seen
I had you at "hello"
A human failing
Discussion questions
Epilogue: Teach your children well
Honesty & equality & respect & linguistic diversity
You must be carefully taught
Our hope for you, dear reader
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Rusty Barrett is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. His research is in Mayan linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. He is author of From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures, co-author of Other People’s English: Code Meshing, Code Switching and African American Literacy, and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality.
Jennifer Cramer is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. Her research is in perceptual dialectology, with a specific focus on dialect variation in Kentucky. She is the author of Contested Southernness: The Linguistic Production and Perception of Identities in the Borderlands, co-author of Linguistic Planets of Belief: Mapping Language Attitudes in the American South, and co-editor of Cityscapes and Perceptual Dialectology: Global Perspectives on Non-Linguists’ Knowledge of the Dialect Landscape.
Kevin B. McGowan is 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.
The third edition of English with an Accent presents an extraordinary new resource created from a time-honored classic, taking the pieces of the original and elegantly intersecting them with 21st-century language practice. The original material is still there; however, it has been rewoven to include a broader semiotic realm, a deeper representation of language variation across multiple modalities, a richer set of theoretical and methodological approaches, and a new coherence rooted in the fact that language variation is simultaneously arbitrary and powerfully meaningful. As such, this edition sets a new standard for the presentation and discussion of linguistic discrimination.
Robin Queen, University of Michigan
With crisp prose and cogent arguments, the authors recreate the eye-opening impact of English with an Accent in light of recent movements for social justice, crafting activities, exercises, and discussion questions that directly help readers engage in questions of how language socialization works and how it affects our personal lives as well as our society’s future.
Kirk Hazen, West Virginia University
Be prepared to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. This edition of English with an Accent hits home and will keep you engaged and engrossed in issues that society too often doesn’t understand in any meaningful and life-altering way. Well, the road to enlightenment is clearly provided here.
Sonja Lanehart, University of Arizona
Since its first publication, English with An Accent has inspired conversations that grapple with and challenge the ways people use language to recognize, categorize, and rank social differences. This latest version builds on this important foundation while providing significant updates to the coverage of topics and theory. Written in an engaging, provocative style, this new edition by Barrett, Cramer and McGowan is comprehensive and accessible. It will leave readers with greater insight into and critical awareness of the subtle role language variation plays in the maintenance of power today and the marginalization and on-going subordination of particular social groups, in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Barbra A. Meek, University of Michigan
