Do You Speak American . What Speech Do We Like Best? . Prejudice

Language Prejudice

We often make snap decisions about character and intelligence based on our language biases.
Decisions that can at times have devasting consequences.

They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in NYC
Southern pride falters in the face of linguistic stereotyping.

Women Talk Too Much!
No, they don't. Rather they don't in every situation.

Talking with Mi Gente
Misunderstandings about dialect can cause problems for students.

Dennis Preston discusses language attitudes on a train journey.

Hymes, Dell, ed. 1964. Language in Culture and Society, (New York. A still-useful anthology.
Chambers, J.K., Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (Eds.). 2004. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.
Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. American English: Dialects and Variation. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.
Alim, H. Samy. (in press). "Hip Hop Nation Language." In Ed Finegan & John Rickford (eds.), Language in the USA. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt 1991. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cutler, Cecilia. 2002. "Crossing Over: White Teenagers, Hip Hop and African American English." Doctoral Dissertation, New York University.
Hill,-Jane-H. 1995. Junk Spanish, Covert Racism, and the (Leaky) Boundary between Public and Private Spheres. Pragmatics 5, 197-212.
Labov, William. 1980. "Is There a Creole Speech Community?" Theoretical Orientations in Creole Studies, Albert Valdman and Arnold Highfield, eds. Pp. 369-388. New York: Academic Press.
Rampton, Ben. 1996. "Language Crossing and Ethnicity in Sociolinguistics." Paper presented at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV XXV), Las Vegas.


National Endowment for the Humanities	William and Flora Hewlett Foundation	Ford Foundation	Rosalind P. Walter	Arthur Vining Davis Foundations	Carnegie Corporation of New York