The Language I Speak | Research Documentary | Full Movie | Dialects

[record scratch] And I say, "Of course I am." Because, in fact, to be white in America - Malfunction. Need input. - Input, all right, right, you got it, OK. This is a house. We live within it, inside it. We have a floor, see, and we have the opposite of a floor, which is a ceiling. - How do we learn a language? - What is it that allows human beings to talk and other animals not to have this capacity? These are deep theoretical questions. And why is it that although English and Chinese appear to

be completely different, at some level they're still both human languages and they share lots of stuff? Obviously, we use human language because we are human beings, but this doesn't identify us as Americans or as Kentuckians or as basketball players. - We use language for so many functions that are necessary for us to express our needs, to find and build community, to express solidarity, as well as just to communicate for other kinds of basic purposes. And the way that we speak says a lot to pe

ople about who we are and maybe where we come from. - We learn language because we participate in the everyday activities of our community. So we learn language by being immersed in language because we're part of a social environment. Language is also related to cognition, so it is a complex process, but for me, we learn language because we are social beings and we participate in our communities since the moment that we're born. [music] - Babies begin to learn language before they're ever born.

Babies are listening in utero. By the time babies are born, they already prefer to hear their own mother talk, and during the first year of life, they have some very, very acute skills. They're able to tell different sounds apart. So they're working, they're making kind of a template of the language, listening to it, and then what happens is they learn interactively around parents who talk to them or older people who talk to them. I mean, kids learn those early words that are meaningful, so slow

ly they begin to get a vocabulary that's mostly of the things around them. My name is Jane Berko Gleason, and I am Professor Emerita at Boston University in the Psychology Department. - Jane got recognized for many great achievements through her career. The most famous, though, was the WUK test created by her in 1958. It was a test to recognize development in speech in kids ages 2 to 4 years old. The test demonstrated that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology.

- Look at this, Sophie. Meow, meow. - If I were to tell you actually that Sophie is Edward... Ah! ..does that change anything? I maybe thought, oh, this is a little girl, so I have to give her little girl things. - Is that a robot? What about this? Oliver. Oliver. - You've gone for, you could say, boy toys for this boy. - Possibly. - If I tell you that he is actually a girl... - Really? - Yes. - Parents have very stereotypic notions about what their kids are like. Some research has shown that ne

wborns are regarded quite differently if they're boys or girls. There was a very interesting study done where they took a bunch of babies that were matched for Apgar score and size and weight, and the only thing that was different, one half of this group of babies was boys and one half was girls, and they asked the parents on the first or second day after the baby was born about what these kids were like. And it turns out that the parents of little boys thought they were tough, bouncy, strong li

ttle guys, and the parents of girls thought they were sweet, pretty, weak little things. The research has also shown that mothers are more likely to see their babies as babies, whether they're boys or girls. So you see the biggest difference in the way people talk to little kids is fathers talking to daughters or fathers talking to sons. We've seen fathers calling their sons funny names, you know, "Come on, wise guy," "All right, Magoo," things like, "Come on, Nutcake." Well, parents don't talk

to their little girls that way. Here's one big, big difference. [dramatic music] Parents talk more about inner states to little girls than to little boys, so that if you sit them down with a wordless picture book... You know, it's about the cat running away kind of thing... Parents talking to little girls say, "Look, the kitty has run away, and the little girl is sad." "Look, she's crying." Talking to little boys, they say, "Oh, there goes the cat." "Whoops, there he is, up the tree." And they d

on't talk about their inner feelings as much. Little girls begin to talk about feelings by the time they're 2 or 3 years old, and little boys don't. So our feeling may have something to do with the fact that we treat them very differently. Kids have to function in the world. I mean, what is language for? It's just not there to express our ideas. It's to get things done as well. What you have to do is be able to use the language appropriately in different social settings, and the ability to use l

anguage appropriately in different ways and doing it in a way that doesn't make people hate you, that is called communicative competence. - Communicative competence is needed to understand communication ethics, to develop cultural awareness, to use computed, mediated communication, and to think critically. Competence involves knowledge, motivation, and skill. - In order to be communicatively competent, you want to use language in the situations that are of interest to you. So if, for instance, y

ou come from Brooklyn, and you have a Brooklyn accent, you want to play Shakespeare on the stage, you're going to have to learn to talk in a way that doesn't sound like Hamlet from Brooklyn. That is, you want to talk in a way that is coin of the realm, so to speak. So it is perfectly appropriate for you to learn to speak in the right dialect for the stage or for your life. Then you can go and learn to speak in a more standard, if you're in this country, American way. - For Americans, in order to

teach them a dialect, you have to make them understand that they have one already, and most people don't think they have an accent at all. - John has served as a dialect coach for many productions, including The Who's Tommy, Cabaret, Ragtime, Born Bad, The Secret Guardian, and more. His coaching credits include Top Girls, Matt Forrest, Cloud Nine, and many others. - So my work initially was to try to neutralize an accent, so then you could then do one. [bagpipe marching music] - I pride myself

on education and speaking correctly and getting my point across as cleanly as possible. - I believe I speak properly. I'm in the business world, so if I did have a Brooklyn accent, you know how they say "tree" instead of "three" and they skip some letters? Now I pronounce every letter. - My definition of proper English would be whatever is clear enough to be easily understood by everyone and whatever doesn't let people know exactly where you're from. - I don't speak proper English because I use

a lot of slang and things like that. - I don't think there is a standard English. I think that there's too many regions in this country and everybody has a little different of an accent. - Most people have an attitude about what sounds best to them. Often it's what they speak, so people might say, "I like the way I sound, so that's the best English." Other people are aware that their way of speaking is stigmatized, so they may not think that their way of speaking is the best way. But apart from

that, there's sort of this mythical, standard way of speaking English. - Plenty of people in the field debunk this as a myth that standard English exists, right? And that it's more so a social construction. - Dr. Cherise King is a sociolinguist interested in the relationship between race, place, and language of creation. She explores how African Americans use language to construct multidimensional identities and how these constructions are perceived and evaluated across different listener popula

tions. - All the time in spoken language, we are always producing things that don't necessarily correspond to orthographic form of correct English, right? And so that's just a part of the way that everyone speaks. Variation is inherent to language. [colonial music] - Great Britain has a particular dialect of English that is THE dialect that you have to speak if you're going to be the right sort of person. - "Shoestring, taggart, spender, bergerac, morse." What does that say to you? - We don't ha

ve that here, but what we do have is a sort of general speech that's called "General American." And the General American is what's spoken... It used to be in the Northern Midwest, but it's what you hear people... Television reporters talking. - Welcome back. Time right now, 5.55. - Hillary Clinton hammered Donald Trump's business practices. - All right, welcome back, everybody. Juan Fernandez, Sarah Dantzscher here. - I was growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and it used to be within the telev

ision world and to some extent in radio as well that the most desirable accent was one from the Midwest, and people in Michigan particularly were thought to be the most desirable to have on the news. You actually saw evidence of that, even in Southern television stations and East Coast television stations and West Coast television stations. You'd always have this person with a Midwestern accent who'd be doing the news, and you wondered how that can possibly be. There's nobody in the area who spe

aks that way. - Peter Jennings. A Canadian. We knew he was a Canadian as soon as he opened his mouth. Dan Rather. We knew he was a Texan as soon as he opened his mouth. Tom Brokaw. We knew that he was a Northern Midwesterner as soon as he opened his mouth. So the idea that they all go to some secret school somewhere in Iowa and they all learn to speak this unaccented English, it's a wonderful myth. - Somehow it's kind of ingrained into us in all sorts of various media, whether it's through TV, w

hether it's through movies, whether it's through schooling. So we tend to think that there is a better way of speaking than another way, but in actuality, for a linguist, there is no such concept. - Dr. Sukur-Avila's research focuses on the study of linguistic variation and change, specifically grammatical change over time in African American English. Her study of rural Texas community have provided much of the data for presentations and articles concerning approach to sociolinguistic fieldwork,

as well as documenting innovations in African American English. - There are people who benefit from not speaking a certain way, and so they want to keep and retain the benefits by assuming that bias against it doesn't exist. The belief in sort of a meritocracy would sort of suggest that if I speak a certain way and I've gotten to particular positions in the society, I was able to be upwardly mobile, it's because I worked hard. I sort of followed the script of what I was supposed to do, whereas

the people who speak this other kind of way that is unlike me have not followed the script, right? And so I think partly it completely ignores why people speak this way to begin with and how people are concentrated in their communities in such a way that they may have access to particular resources or may not. And I think that we're able to bypass discrimination in language because again, we have this belief that standard American English exists. The point of the matter is, when those difference

s get marked and when they become meaningful and when they become sort of grounds for people to advance prejudice or discriminate against certain groups is the more important question, I think. - You're a loser. - Go home. - Loser, go home, stupid bitch. You're little. - Stay away from me. - What happened? - Don't be looking at me behind my back. - Okay. - Yes? Huh? Dude, just go back. - Stay away from me. - I will be following up, and my guess is they're not done yet. So my next call is to ICE

to have each one of them get out of my country. If they have the will to come here and live off of my money, I pay for their welfare, I pay for their ability to be here. So at least they can do it. At least they can do it. - This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish. - I don't think you live here because I saw you have slanted eyes and I talk to a Mexican. - Slanted eyes? Wow. - It says it's Mexican. We're not in Mexico. We're in America. - Who are you going to call? - Huh? - Who are

you going to call? - Immigration. - For what? - For you. - Why? - Because you're not legal. - He didn't attack the dog. I have it on camera. - You know what? - What? - You guys are acting like normal people. You should act like normal people. - But we're acting like what? - You're acting like people that aren't normal. - If you put an Asian face and a white American face and the same dialect, the exact same sample, people will say the Asian face is accented and more difficult to comprehend, eve

n though it's exactly the same passage. - But the common person, the lay person, is just sort of coming around to the fact of seeing, like, hey, yeah, people have different ways of speaking, and none of these ways of speaking are inherently bad. They're just different and correspond to the kinds of communities that you come from to express yourselves. [pop music] - Now, real people don't care about language very much. Except all real people love dialects. - You're jelling. You're jelling off of

me. - Manhattan. - Father. - Coffee. - More laid-back and more friendly, more outgoing. - Instead of car or harbor. Instead of harbor. - Oh, that's hip. That's cool. Let's get lit. - It's drip. Now you're dripping. Not dripping with water, but you're dripping with swag. [laughter] - I mean, between Cali, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Philly, New York, you'll get a different greeting, and that's just the start. I can go down to Atlanta and say, you know, what it do? Detroit, what up, though? New Y

ork, what's up, son? Cali, what up, blood? You better be careful where you at if you say blood, though, but they know if you say what's up, blood, it's family. - I'm from a place where we don't use the dialect that I use here, but I'm able to maneuver with it. So you might hear, what up, shorty? What up, though? You know, and I'll just give 'em something that I have from Detroit. If you're like, what up, shorty? I'll be like, what up, though? Or if you go to New Orleans, they'll be like, hey, wo

adie? The language gives you access, and it'll give you a barrier. So the best thing to do is use it for your access. - I always thought it was really interesting. America is such an enormous country that there's so much diversity in ways that people speak. For example, my mother went to Oberlin College in Ohio, so she met a lot of people out there who talk very flat, like, get in the car, and stuff like that. So it was weird for her because she was born and raised in New Jersey, so her accent w

as conflicted with theirs, and people thought it was very weird the way she spoke. - I'm originally from Georgia. When I first came to New York, people used to stare at me because I had such a heavy accent, and they would have me to repeat words over and over because I had, like, a singing on each word, and they thought it was funny. Some people thought it was, like, strange. - And so, yeah, language is a tool that can allow us to express category membership and align with people who share certa

in kinds of cultural values. But it can also be a means through which to create boundaries in which we are able to distinguish ourselves from one another and keep certain people from being presumed as belonging to said category. - In terms of the New York accent, we mainly talk about pronunciation, a few different vowels and consonants that make the New York accent fairly distinct from other regional accents. - Kara is a sociolinguist, a variationist, and dialectologist whose scholarship concern

s regional and social varieties of American English. Kara talks often to the media about linguistic diversity in the U.S., most commonly about the New York City dialect. - So the biggest one would be the pronunciation of "r." So at the end of a word or in certain other environments, we can, what people call, "drop the r," so I can say a word like "father." In New York, I can pronounce that word as something like "fathuh." - I'm your father when I say it. - And just kind of drop the r at the end

of that word. - I grew up in Pittsburgh. I would say things like "bron" instead of "brown," or I'd say "tom" instead of "town," or "don"... going "don-ton" instead of going "down-town." - Something in African-American vernacular English like "habitual be." He be walking home after school, meaning he always walks home after school, or he walks home after school regularly, right? And so people may say, "Oh, that be, that sounds different from the traditional usage of be in a sort of mainstream Ame

rican or mainstream United States English." - Even use of a word like "ain't." - ♪ Ain't no sunshine when she's gone ♪ - Which everybody agrees is sort of non-standard grammar, but in some parts of America, it's a little more acceptable in casual speech than it is in other parts of America. Generally in the American South, especially the East Coast. Americans are comfortable with "ain't" for casual speech, speech among friends, even at upper middle-class levels. But you go to the Midwest and to

the Northeast, then "ain't" is just a shibboleth. You would only use it to make fun of a lower-status speaker. - These days in the United States, a lot of people don't speak English properly. I don't know if it's because, you know, there's so many different ethnic backgrounds or if it's just more tolerated. [Native American singing] - Native Americans have been told for a couple hundred years that they speak weird. The biggest issue that we have is they've also been introduced to this, what we r

efer to as the principle of linguistic subordination, that if your group is socially subordinate, then your language will be considered to be no good. - Walt Wolfram is an American sociolinguist at North Carolina State University, specializing in social and ethnic dialects of American English. He was one of the early pioneers in the study of urban African-American English. Since the '60s, he has authored and co-authored 20 books and more than 300 articles on the variation in American English. -

Me telling you what you just said is said incorrectly is like telling you that your mama is not smart. What I just said, my mom said to me. That's where I got it from, or my dad, or my people, or whatever. If I said, "That's not how smart people talk," 'cause that's what teachers say, right? "That's not the correct way to say that," then what you're not saying is that everybody in my life doesn't speak correctly, right? What you're not saying is that everybody other than you, is wrong. - On the

notion of correctness, I will say from a linguist's perspective, we don't actually analyze language according to who's right or wrong, but rather what is it that people produce and do people in the communities they're speaking to understand it? And so these kinds of prescriptivist notions, which corresponds to rightness and wrongness, are actually what we shy away from, and we look to document what it is that people actually produce out of their mouths. - And so our biggest challenge is to get c

ommunities to understand that their language is really fine. It's the social dominance and subordination that is the issue, and so it's a part of their heritage, and if they embrace other aspects of their heritage, that they should include language in that. - What really comes out of that is that it's just, if you sound regional, then you're sort of highlighted as being different. - What do cowboys say to one another? - Howdy, partner. - Howdy, partner. - Every kid learns that "Howdy, partner" i

s what cowboys say. You ask Americans, "What do French people say?" - Ooh la la. - And of course, my friends ask what Germans say, and they'll say "this is forbidden." So I don't know if any two cowboys ever met one another and said "Howdy, partner." And I don't know if French people ever say "Ooh la la," but we have these very stereotypical notions about what people are, what they talk like, and what they're like. - What is considered undesirable, unfortunately, I would say there are a lot of s

tereotypes about the way that a person comes across, especially on the telephone, and a lot of assumptions and judgments are made if you don't speak Mid-Atlantic English and you have an accent that is associated with a certain culture or a certain part of the U.S. even. - If someone from Brooklyn travels to another part of the country, so they speak with a New York accent, and all of a sudden it taps into this whole set of judgments about this person, right? You're fast-talking and you're rude a

nd you're a gangster, whatever it is, the set of ideologies that we hold about this particular accent, a speaker of that accent may be interested in moving away from that, may be interested in not being associated with some of that negative stigma. - The entire South is prejudiced against everyone in the North, for example, or at least everyone I've studied, says that Southern English is the worst English in America. Well, if you tell people how bad they are for a very, very long time, then you

may succeed in convincing some of them. People in New York do not tell jokes about people from Iowa's language. People in Iowa make fun of New Yorkers. They make fun of people from Alabama. They make fun of people from Texas and Kentucky because of their accents. They make fun of black people. They make fun of Hispanic people because of their accents. But they couldn't make fun of these people for their accents if they had one themselves. So what we see is that people from some places, Michigan,

Ohio, maybe Wisconsin, maybe Kansas, maybe Iowa, who have no stereotype against their variety. So many people, not just with regional accents, but with ethnically-based accents, African-American English, now Hispanic-influenced English, many people are simply made to feel bad by a majority which says, "Oh, you don't speak English well." "Oh, your variety of English is terrible." "Why don't you pay attention and speak right like me?" - If you're middle class and you come from Ohio and speak a di

alect that's middle class, or if you're Californian, you may speak differently, but as long as it's middle class, it's okay. And it's almost quaint and cute, but when you belong to a socially subordinate group, then it's problematic. So it’s all of these sort of social and cultural connotations that are the problem. [soft music] - Can you show me the doll that you like best or that you'd like to play with? - This one. I like that one. - And can you show me the doll that is the nice doll? And why

is that the nice doll? - She's white. - And can you show me the doll that looks bad? And can you give... and why does that look bad? - Because it's black. - And why do you think that's the nice doll? - Because she's white. - And can you give me the doll that looks like you? - When we talk about how something is racialized, we're talking about how it is assigned a racial meaning or how we categorize someone as belonging to a racial category. And so when we do this in language, what we're doing i

s saying, based on the way you speak, "I think you're black," or "I think you're white," or "I think you're Asian," and whatever other kind of racial or ethnic category that we might assign to a person. And so what happens is that there are certain kinds of forms that are produced among particular communities, and those forms then get associated with that racial group. - Why does black English exist? Isolation. For a population to develop its own variety of language, there has to be some kind of

apartness. Whenever people are apart, they diverge culturally and linguistically. - In the period of the Great Migration, which started around World War I and continued till after World War II, you had a mass exodus of people leaving the South. Then you had African Americans living in concentrated areas in these urban areas of the North, but they didn't have the same kind of contact that they had had previously with the white population. - We had 300,000 people crammed into a narrow band of lan

d at its height. So you had people in kitchenettes and piled on top of one another, commerce everywhere, restaurants, clubs, businesses, et cetera. And so you had a very vibrant, though repressed community, it was a very vibrant community. - The classroom was set up so that there was a divide in the middle of the classroom. Some desks were on one side, some other desks were on another side and facing each other with an aisle down the middle. And I remember coming in, and the students were very d

ivided, and mostly Latino students on one side and Anglo students on the other side. And sort of even within that division, there were smaller friend groups that would sit together. And so it was very segregated in that sense into these small friend groups. But when we began our class, we asked the master teacher if we could push everyone to one side of the room. So everyone was thrown together into a new seating arrangement and sort of had to get used to that. You know, you weren't sitting next

to your best friend anymore. You're sitting maybe next to someone you had never even spoken with before. And so that was really powerful in the sense that even spatially and physically in the classroom, from day one, we put everyone on the same side. And I think that that really opened up a space and a possibility for friendships and trust to grow within the class. Because, you know, students are sharing personal experiences about language in their lives and opening up. And, you know, when some

one's doing that across the room, and you aren't, you know, relating to them, but when they're right next to you and you're also sharing your experience, I think that really fostered relationships in that classroom that hadn't been there before. - Who am I? I've graduated from a top ten university. I graduated from Northwestern University. And I know how to speak standard English. And there's a part of me that is this kind of professional, this is how I'm going to speak. And then there's another

part of me that's like, you know, no, I'm a homegirl and I can speak like this. - Depending on where you come from, you have to get accustomed to the way people do things there. People in the South, for instance, are more laid back and more friendly, more outgoing. Whereas in New York, people are somewhat more reserved. And they are rushing all the time, you know, because of the pace of life. - I know, for instance, that when I'm talking in front of my class to American students, I have to expo

se something in a different, in a particular way. If I'm talking to my Spanish-speaking friends, I am going to allow myself to tell my stories in ways that are long-winded, maybe, that go into different tangents, that share multiple stories. When I'm talking to friends, I've learned to edit my stories to be, you know, one story, one topic. Otherwise, my friends are not going to understand me and their eyes are going to veer to the left. - So if you're talking about code-switching among, like, ma

rginalized communities, then yeah, maybe they code-switch because they don't want to be judged about their intelligence and about their capabilities on the basis of speaking a stigmatized variety. So maybe people code-switch for those reasons. Other times, people code-switch because they want to show alignment with the people they're speaking with. And so they might speak in the language that sort of reminds them of home or brings them closer to a particular person. Sometimes people may code-swi

tch to represent sort of where they stand, their stances on certain issues. Right? I think there are a lot of reasons why people do it, and it's contextually sensitive. - Language is obviously a reflection of society and vice versa, and sometimes it's a circular process and it's very difficult to figure it out. So some people are born into the world, and so the society that they want to achieve is also the language that they must achieve. Young people are born and come into the world and they be

gin to hang out with their peers and they want to sound like them because they want to belong to that little community. But then we choose a profession and we want to belong to that little community. That next community has a socially represented way of talking. It carries with it a social identity. So one reason that society and language are reflections of one another is that when we achieve our identity, our identity is very much dependent on what this variety of language use we have. [city st

reet noise] - The kinds of issues that I focus on aren't just about speaking differently from one another, but also about the sort of social-political consequences that result from speaking differently, because there are. People are denied jobs, people are denied housing, people are believed to be less credible, right? All based on the kind of accent that they're using in these situations. [soft music] -This was a study that one of my graduate students did back in 2000, it was quite a few years

ago. People who were interviewing people for jobs had sort of these underlying subconscious attitudes about the candidates based on the way they sounded. And she noticed that a lot of the employers would comment on the strength of the candidates' qualifications, but that the way they sounded might be a hindrance to them working in their company. And she thought, "Hmm, that's interesting. Can you say that? Is that legal?" - Unless you have your own company or you're a rapper or you're an athlete

with vernacular, you are going to be pushed out of opportunities and marginalized. For survival, economic survival, I'm going to have to do that song and dance. - If somebody says, "You're not going to get that job because you're the wrong sex or you're the wrong ethnicity," they'll be in court for discrimination in a minute. By the same token, somebody can say, "You're not going to get the job because you don't talk right," when your competence on the job may have nothing to do with your talkin

g. I can tell you... I can name six IT persons who, if you heard them talk, they don't speak standard English. But, boy, can they do technology and program. Their speech has nothing to do with their competence as programmers. And so the point is, you know, somebody can say, "You're not getting the job because you don't talk right," and they feel bad about themselves. - When I speak horribly, I feel very... I feel stupid, and I don't have confidence in myself, and it's holding me back. It's holdi

ng me back in a lot of things that I want to do. I want a good career and things like that, and if you don't speak well, you can't. - You know, they kind of stereotype you, "What, are you from Brooklyn?" Yeah, I am from Brooklyn, but I don't like to, you know, remember it every day. It was a good place when I grew up, but automatically, when they hear the "Brooklyn" accent, they think, like, you grew up in a slum, hanging out on a corner. You know, they get the wrong impression, which I guess I

like to make a good impression. - It's worth noting that the New York City accent is one of the most stigmatized in the U.S. So if you ask speakers from outside of New York or from anywhere in the country to rate different accents in terms of different qualities or just in terms of best to worst, New York always kind of ends up at the bottom. Americans in other places in the U.S. seem to just really not like the New York accent. At the same time, within New York, there's something that we call l

inguistic insecurity, so the idea that New Yorkers themselves don't always like their accent, and that's evidenced by the way they talk about it, some of their behaviors, linguistic behaviors, so they'll sort of attempt to correct or even hypercorrect their speech. If you cause them to pay attention to it. So they seem to be aware of the stigma that's attached to the New York accent, and you'll see, you know, New Yorkers going to dialect coaches, for instance, to quote-unquote "lose" their accen

t. - My feeling is I would be happy if somebody could control their accent rather than lose it. Because to me, if you lose your accent, it's a bit like losing your identity. - As if somehow learning another variety would put them in a better financial condition or something, and we know in many cases that the social stereotypes of language are unfortunately attached to issues like race and ethnicity, so that the so-called improvement of oneself by changing their accent is something that will not

guarantee them a better job at all or an advanced social position. But we're still caught, I'm afraid, in some of the latter-day effects of race and ethnicity, and so our prejudice... Because there's no reason to be prejudiced against language. I mean, a language can't be dumb. A language can't be racist. A language can't be sexist. People are this way. Languages are not this way. [dark music] - Do you solemnly swear and affirm that your testimony int these proceedings will be the truth, the wh

ole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you god? - So help me god. - Thank you. - I think what's interesting about Rachel Jantel is that she was the last person on the phone to speak with Trayvon Martin right up until the point that he died. It's one of the closest things you can have to a testimony that is a witness, right? A person being there and seeing it happen. But what I found really interesting was that there were different jurors who came forward and spoke about the case, and one

of them said the testimony was discounted. “We didn't believe her”. Now, to put this in perspective, she gave about a 6-hour testimony across 2 days. And so the question is, how is it that her testimony was just ruled not important or that people just didn't pay attention to it? - Are you claiming in any way that you don't understand English? - I understand you. I understand you. I do understand English. - And partly we think it had something to do with the fact that she was speaking a very stig

matized variety of American English that the people on the jury were probably mostly not familiar with. And she was penalized, not necessarily even just by the jury, I want to say. But if you would look on the Internet, on any social media account, people were castigating her, even people within the Black community, for the way that she spoke and for not delivering the testimony in this kind of way that is sort of associated with respectability and with middle-class English. And the fact of the

matter is, we don't get to choose our witnesses, ever. When you go into a courtroom and you have a witness come forward and say, "I witnessed this," you don't get to say, "Hold on, let's swap you out" "for a person who speaks more standard American English," because that's not how events unfold. And because we are not able to do that, we have to make do with the people who were there at the time, and we have to make sure that they're heard, regardless of how they choose to deliver the testimony.

We have to make sure that we're evaluating things based on the facts of the testimony and not what we think about the speaker in terms of our biases against people who use a certain variety. - More stereotypes and discrimination is tolerated related to language than just about any other social dimension. [IN HISPANIC ACCENT] - Hello. Can I ask a few questions about the apartment on Park Street? - What was your name? - My name? My name is Juan Hernandez. - It's been rented. - Oh, it's gone? [IN

HINDI ACCENT] Hello, my name is Sanjay Kumar. I am calling about the apartment on Park Street. - It's not available. - Not available? [AFRICAN AMERICAN ACCENT] Hello, my name is Tyrone Washington. I'm calling about the apartment on Park Street. - It's just been rented. [CHINESE ACCENT] Hello, I am Chen Ling. My name is Khalid Bin Ali. I'm Tuan Vo. Hello, my name is Moshe Goldberg. I use a wheelchair. It's gone. Not available. All right. Thank you. Yes, hello, my name is Graham Wellington. I'm ca

lling about the apartment for rent on Park Street. Is that still available? - Yes, it is. - It is? - Yes. - Really? - Well, there's no accent or dialect that's undesirable to us, but unfortunately, in the housing market, there are many housing providers who try to avoid serving and even meeting with certain populations, and one way they do that is to try and discern dialects or accents over the phone. And so that's a type of discrimination that we still see in the housing market. - Mr. Freyberg

is one of the nation's leading experts in the use of testing as an investigative tool to enforce civil rights laws. His professional activities for fair housing span more than 40 years and received numerous awards for his accomplishments in the fair housing field. - One of the things that happened once the fair housing laws were passed, doors were not being slammed as often in people's faces. They weren't being told overtly that they would not be rented to. Instead, housing providers had to adop

t some different tactics, and unfortunately, one of those tactics is what is often called linguistic profiling. - Linguistic profiling is a practice of identifying the social characteristic of an individual based on auditory cues, in particular, dialects and accents. - There actually have been lawsuits on this. - To be considered a good applicant, I needed to have a white person or someone who's white adjacent vouch for me. - People call for a, you know, I want to rent an apartment. The person d

etermines their ethnicity. They don't want a person who they think is lower-class African-American because of their speech. So they tell them the apartment is taken. And then their white friend calls up, and suddenly the apartment is vacant. - This time, she asked her girlfriend, Hanako Franz, who is half white and half Japanese, to apply with her. Franz was working part-time at a grocery store. One of her most recent biweekly paychecks was $162. And at the time, your financial situation was uns

table. - Oh, yeah. It was terrible. - Oh, my God, it was so bad. - It was terrible. I was borrowing money from my sister. Rochelle paid my health insurance at one point 'cause I didn't have enough money to pay it. - But for Santander Bank, the final lender for rule tried, none of that seemed to matter. Franz had a good credit score, and once she came on board, it all went smoothly, even though Franz couldn't provide proof of a stable work history. - They were like, "We need two years." And I was

just like, "I can't give that to you." And they were like, "All right, we'll move forward." - We reached out to the two places that For Rule approached for loans. Santander says that while they sympathize with For Rule, her loan application was managed fairly. Philadelphia mortgage advisors declined to comment specifically on For Rule's loan application. Both companies say they are committed to fair lending and adhering to existing laws. - It's complicated, but it has a lot to do with our histo

ry as a nation and the fact that we had slavery in this country, that we had Jim Crow laws, and we had in the last century intentional policies and practices that the real estate industry and government pursued in the New York City and the surrounding counties. - Lizette Caron has conducted complex systemic investigations that have resulted in fighting numerous fair housing cases. She also developed and implemented effective testing protocols for investigating lenders' practices. - Part of the t

esting was having our testers call to make appointments to meet with a lender at a specific time and place. And what I noticed was that of these 77 tests that we did, my African-American testers and South Asian testers who may have had an accent, I started to notice that their phone calls were a lot longer than their white counterparts. - A recent investigation I worked on with Newsday, Newsday did a large number of real estate sales tests on Long Island and found that 49% of the time, African-A

merican testers who were posing as homebuyers were treated less favorably than their white counterparts. They had racial steering occur. They were provided fewer listings. They were sometimes not even served without getting a pre-approval from a bank, whereas white testers were immediately taken out to see homes. So the fact that we're still at half of the African-American testers in a major metropolitan area still being discriminated against because of their race suggests that we haven't made e

nough progress yet and we still have a long way to go. - The problem that exists now in Newark, New Jersey, is all the landlords turned their properties over to real estate companies. - Yes! - Now check it. When they switch their property over to the realtor agent, the realtor agent, you got to get a... You got to pay for a background check. You got to pay for an application fee. You will spend... The way they got... getting apartments now in Newark, New Jersey, I don't know about the other stat

es, you spend almost $300 before... You'll spend $300 and don't nobody call you, say you're accepted for an apartment or you're qualified or none of that. They just don't call you back. So I look at it like it's a scam. - And then now, of course, we have call screening. So you can leave a message and never hear back. Social media, it's easy. Somebody sends you a contact and they didn't... A message, they didn't hear back from the broker, so they decide to send a DM or a tweet and then as a broke

r I can just block you. So there are lots of ways. - We're always amazed at the lengths to which some housing providers will go to to avoid having contact with African-American renters, Hispanic renters, and so forth. - But our sort of views about speech that is racialized as Black also reflects our views about Black people, right? So those two things can't be separated, I think is really important when we're talking about research on race and language and just the way that people interpret diff

erent kinds of speech. [soft music] - I think we've found ways to document linguistic profiling and we've found ways to investigate people who are using it in a discriminatory fashion. And that's a good thing, that we can find ways to hold people accountable who are engaged in this kind of pernicious activity. I think that from our standpoint, we see diversity and inclusiveness as the greatest strength this country has and that it's important that we understand how accents and dialects and peopl

e's backgrounds actually enrich our society and enrich our democracy. And I think that from our vantage point, the hope really comes from the fact that this diversity exists and we have to make sure that everybody respects the differences that exist in our society and appreciates the fact that they help all of us. - There are moments where I have hope and then there are times where, you know, you just feel like this is a losing battle. But I'm encouraged that we're having a national conversation

and that we're having this conversation, even. Because it's going to take everyone to participate in creating inclusive communities that benefit all of us. - Oftentimes, we blame the speakers, right, for producing a specific variety that people can't seem to understand. But we also have to do work to understand the listeners. And what is it that keeps people from being able to understand? Is it something about just the linguistic content that they're hearing, or is it other kinds of biases that

are interfering with their perception of the actual material? - I myself was raised in a very working-class area of Philadelphia, and so I didn't have educated parents who were liberal who might have educated me differently. And in reality, you know, we've tried to be different with our own kids, but in reality, there are just too many things out there that socialize people. My feeling is it's better to sort of recognize that and to actively confront it than it is to sort of claim, "No, I'm not

racist, I'm different." - I didn't learn coal mining language because I sat down with a coal language dictionary and learned to do it. I learned it because I was in that environment. So it was a tool to fit into my environment, which was almost necessary because I lived there and I had to do it. I think the difficulty in language as a tool arises when people tell you that you have an inadequate tool. And yet you yourself, and I think especially of young people from certain ethnic groups, from c

ertain working-class environments who are most frequently the ones... Or even from certain regions... Who are told they’re the ones who have inadequate tools. But they don't have any experience that they have inadequate tools. They talk fine, they have no trouble interacting, they can express themselves. How can you convince them that they need something very different? And the worst thing, I think, in the American situation is that we don't want to just convince them that, "Hey, here's another

tool that might be good for you," but the idea also, "Oh, and that tool you have? Broken, blunt, throw it away." - There’s a belief from many people that because of globalization and because of the Internet, we are somehow going to lose our local accents, right? That somehow things are going to flatten out. And what we're seeing in linguistic research is exactly the opposite. What we're seeing is the maintenance of these local ways of talking. - When I meet a person and they tell me they're from

my area, King Street, South Carolina, sort of South Carolina, or they tell me they're from Harlem, especially Spanish Harlem, yes, I find that you get a more sincere connection because they understand where you come from. - The North Carolina mountains on one side of North Carolina, on the western side of North Carolina, and all the way on the east you have the Outer Banks and some of the Down Easters, and that way they're different and those lexical items are differentiation, but I think it al

so adds... There's a solidarity thing about North Carolina. - Sometimes the best language in Harlem is no language. We can look at someone and not say something and totally understand what we mean because we are... we live the experience. So I could look at someone on the street and say, "Yo." Or I could say, "Yo, man." And they'll totally get what I'm saying without saying anything else. - Heimat, it's a German term that means "belonging." Oh, you're from where I come from. We have a sort of in

stant rapport and a solidarity. - When I'm in Brooklyn, reflect that I belong here and that I sound like a native or that I'm home. Do people relate to it? Do they talk to me back in the ways that reflect the patterns associated with this space? It's a co-construction between the person and the community. - New York City, probably more than anywhere else in the country, you can hear more dialects and more accents on the street than any other place in the world. I always feel good when I hear tha

t, and I realize that it's a very unique kind of place that we live in, in New York City. And I mean that in the most positive sense of the word. - It seems to me there is a kind of now local revival in accents and varieties where it's a little harder to browbeat people, a little harder to make them feel so insecure. - We need to extend that celebration beyond just these entertainment purposes. Because like I said, African American English has been taken up already in these other kinds of forms.

Now we just need people to accept it more widely. - I think there is sort of a new regional pride that's being exercised, but I think the issue is not the difference.