The Unspoken Truth About Language: Thoughts on Speech and Socio-Linguistics

In linguistics, there is often as much an emphasis on what we say in addition to how we say it. This weeks readings by Sumner, Podesva, and King/Sumner took a deep dive into what language has to say about speech and the social weight of spoken words. Even though speech is highly variable, it contains high predictable patterns in the form of linguistic and social structures and cue listeners and ultimately serves a social function. The recognition and encoding of these patterns are different among different groups and individuals, as evidenced by the Podesva article as well as the King/Sumner readings. I want to take some time to reflect on my thoughts on these articles, go over ideas that resonated with me as well as ideas that didn't make sense. Finally, I will discuss the societal implications for the ideas gained from reading these research studies.

So number one, I'll go over some ideas that resonated with me in all three articles. As an asian male in the male dominated industry of engineering at Stanford, it is hard to imagine what it is like being a marginalized person and going to a career fair, especially given that career has both the social-linguistic and cultural stereotypes of being typically male driven. I'd imagine being part of the "in" group would make it easier to adopt certain ideas from a career fair, empathize more personally and take away more.

In the Podesva article, I really liked how the study took to time to analyze Rice's speech patterns and use statical modeling to make inferences about her speech patterns whilst taking into account linguistic patterns like diphthongs, monophthongs etc. I also liked how the paper tied ideas like /-r/vocalization and /-d/glottalization into the statistical research and bring the study closer to the reader by explaining the statistics in terms of linguistic terms. I thought it was fascinating how the paper by Podesva concluded that Rice avoided using the linguistic and speech patterns from her upbringing, arguably because of her high education status. I will dive more into this soon.

The king/sumner paper took a look into how different speakers had different impacts on people listening. The "surprising" result was that the first speaker "M", a young white woman, was found to be more agreeable than J, who was an older african american man. I definitely agree with the paper's point that since there were many factors that contributed to the differences between M and J, it is hard to conclude what specifically on a linguistic-speech level, caused the perceived and actualized differences found through the study. For example, did the fact that J had a more "non-standard" form of english give people more or a stereotypically unagreeableness? Or was it something else unmentioned?

So moving onto the ideas that didn't make sense/ideas that I want to expand upon. I find it hard to believe that Rice would only speak like herself currently because of her education. Of course being educated helps but going back to the idea in the TICS paper by Sumner, when you are generally considered by society to be an outsider, spoken language is one of the barriers to overcome in terms of adopting the same mindset and groupthink. Like the chicken and the egg idea earlier, perhaps you speak differently because you believe you are a different group, or you are a in a different group because you speak differently, which is a direct reflection of your social status. I think another reason Rice speaks the way she does, which is unmentioned in depth in the Podesva article, is that as an outsider (there are not many women in politics, let alone African American women), Rice needs a way to persuade herself and persuade others that she is an "in" member. Adopting professional and highly-educated sounding english is a first step to feeling part of that group and helping others (white and male) to treat her seriously as a "in" member of politics now. That wasn't the most eloquently phrased paragraph but I think Rice had a specific reason for speaking the way she does - it's not just a consequences of her education.

Overall, I really enjoyed the readings this week. They dove into how language and spoken words serve an important social function. There are many factors then in linguistics that impact how we communicate, if not by words then by how we say things.

Here is a video I thought would be interesting to people who know a lot about cross language perception. It is interesting to consider how we collectively view other languages, not based on the content of the language, but solely based on the spoken patterns present in the presentation. Enjoy!