by Tanisha Pandey
Picture this: after a long afternoon on the slopes, a group of friends who know each other from their MA walk into a small restaurant somewhere in the Swiss Alps. They speak animatedly and frequently switch between languages, as multilingual groups tend to do. As they sit down and wait to be approached by the wait staff, something noticeable occurs: only two members from this group are addressed in English and offered an English menu. Everyone else receives a German version of the menu. The question that some members of the group are left to ask themselves – what about these two group members necessitated differential treatment, and why was English chosen as the vehicle for that.
This moment is a familiar entry point into what sociolinguistics understands as linguistic microaggressions. They are small, sometimes unintentional acts of othering, everyday slips in which presumptions about peoples’ bodies, identities, or “typical” membership to a social category inform everyday language practices. In her 2020 book Why Words Matter, McConnell-Ginet reminds us that labeling is part of how humans understand the world, deciding who belongs and who counts as “normal”. In her work, she identifies one such instance of labelling as marking some identity categories but leaving the default category unmarked. In some uses of English, Americans of Asian, African, Indigenous, or mixed ancestry are often described with affixes before the word American (such as “African-American”, “Asian-American”, etc). While linguistically these are naming conventions, and in some cases the terms might actually be preferred by speakers to describe themselves, when used uncritically, the habit of speaking about “hyphenated Americans” reproduces the idea that only those with European ancestry are unmodified, unmarked, and simply “Americans.”
This logic extends beyond nationality labels. In the fictional but all too likely example above, the English menus did not appear out of nowhere; they were grounded in what Bucholtz and Hall (2016) identify as the “categorizing power of bodily discourse.” Bodies are not neutral. They carry social meaning within specific contexts. Skin tone, facial features, or perceived non-Swiss appearance can lead listeners to assume linguistic incompetence in the official language of a region. Often, these decisions have more to do with social hierarchies (for e.g., what kinds of speakers are perceived as being proficient in what languages) than with a speaker’s actual linguistic repertoire. It is likely that English menus in the example above could have been offered with the intention to be helpful and accommodative, not exclusionary. Nevertheless, intention notwithstanding, McConnell-Ginet advises caution against acts of erasure, whereby one must not fail to imagine that certain kinds of bodies (over other more stereotypically European ones) might also be conversational in German, French, or Romansh. Such acts of linguistic ignorance can negatively impact the mental health of language learners while cultivating in them feelings of disbelonging. This can also be counter-productive towards efforts at assimilation and integration. Additionally, it might spare the listener (or the occasional bystander) awkward silences or uncomfortable interactional moments.
Studies suggest that these micro-level encounters shape institutional decisions, legal judgments, and hiring processes. At the Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS), a current project supervised by Prof. Erez Levon examines another kind of microaggression, namely accent bias in legal contexts. Research shows that foreign accents influence how credible a speaker is perceived to be, but we still know little about the cognitive mechanisms behind this bias or the contextual factors that contribute to or mitigate it. Using virtual reality to recreate courtroom settings, the project investigates how stereotypes interact with listener backgrounds to shape evaluations of accented speech.
This work builds on Levon’s previous research on accent bias in job recruitment in the UK. Within this context, accents function as social markers of class and/or ethnicity and in turn reinforce inaccurate and often harmful public narratives about minority speakers. The current project, which is part of the Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral network, demonstrates how sociolinguistic research can illuminate everyday inequalities and guide us toward fairer communicative practices.
References
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2016). Embodied sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates (pp. 173–198). Cambridge University Press; Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107449787.009
Levon, E., D. Sharma, D. Watt, A. Cardoso & Y. Ye (2021). Accent bias and perceptions of professional competence in England. Journal of English Linguistics 49(4): 355-388.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2020). Words Matter: Meaning and Power. Cambridge University Press; Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108641302
