Reflections

I found John Rickford’s article on African American Vernacular English particularly fascinating as someone who had only been exposed to it in the media until coming the US a year ago. His points about biases against AAVE seemed incredibly poignant, as I thought about how I had engaged with AAVE before: often in films that portrayed those who spoke with AAVE as slaves, or house help (The Help, Twelve Years a Slave etc.) On the other hand, I now engage with speakers of AAVE at Stanford who are some of the most brilliant people I know. This disparity between what is parsed from reality to be broadcasted to the masses compared to what reality actually is is shown in the Lupyan article’s overarching theme that “not all triangles come equal”. 

I can relate to the point Rickford he makes about an “unequal partnership” whereby sociolinguistics will study the linguistics of a community but not necessarily be able to give back anything to help them. This principle can be applied to many other socially minded studies where data collected has no bearing on the development of the communities themselves. Rather the scholars who collect the data get recognized for their work.

The Lupyan article help me to consider another type of bias inherent with regards to speech in that we can say words that mean the same thing, but our choice of words will affect the meaning people infer from them. For example, in the study where participants were asked to draw a “three sided polygon” and a “triangle”, more often participants would draw an equilateral triangle for “triangle”. This is a challenge we face every day in trying to convey meaning as succinctly as possible, meaning we praise those who do this the best as being “eloquent”.