Tag: raciolinguistics

January 2, 2019

Field Notes from 2018’s Adventures in Applied Linguistics

Happy Birthday to us! We’ve been doing the bish thing for a year, so I guess we have to do that tired old practice of recapping because like Kylie, we had a big year.

TL;DR – following is a list of our plans for 2019 and a recap of what we learned in 2018.

This is a still from Kylie Jenner's 2016 New Year Resolutions video. It shows her head and shoulders with the quote "like, realizing things..." — This is a still from Kylie Jenner’s 2016 New Year Resolutions video. It shows her head and shoulders with the quote “like, realizing things…”

#goals

1. We’re looking for guest writers. So if you know any other linguabishes, send them our way.
2. We’re diversifying our content to include not just peer-reviewed articles in academic papers, but also conference papers, master’s theses, and whatever else strikes our fancies.
3. We’re planning to provide more of our own ideas like in the Immigrant v. Migrant v. Expat series (posts 1, 2, and 3) and to synthesize multiple papers into little truth nuggets.
4. Hopefully it won’t come up, but we’re not beyond dragging any other racist garbage parading as linguistics again.

Plans aside, here’s all the stuff we learned. We covered a lot of topics in 2018, so it’s broken down by theme.

Raciolinguistics and Language Ideology

We wrote 5 posts on language ideology and raciolinguistics and we gave you a new word: The Native-speakarchy. Like the Patriarchy, the Native-speakarchy must be dismantled. Hence Dismantling the Native-Speakarchy Posts 1, 2, and 3. Since we had a bish move to Ethiopia, we learned a little about linguistic landscape and language contact in two of its regional capitals. Finally, two posts about language ideology in the US touch on linguistic discrimination. One was about the way people feel about Spanish in Arizona and the other was about Spanish-English bilingualism in the American job market.

This is a gif of J-Lo from the Dinero music video. She’s wearing black lingerie and flipping meat on a barbecue in front of a mansion. She is singing “I just want the green, want the money, want the cash flow. Yo quiero, yo quiero dinero, ay.”

Pop Culture and Emoji

But we also had some fun. Four of our posts were about pop culture. We learned more about cultural appropriation and performance from a paper about Iggy Azalea, and one about grime music. We also learned that J.K. Rowling’s portrayal of Hermione wasn’t as feminist as fans had long hoped. Finally, a paper about reading among drag queens taught that there’s more to drag queen sass than just sick burns.

Emojis aren’t a language, but they are predictable. The number one thing this bish learned about emojis though is that the methodology used to analyze their use is super confusing.

This is a gif of of the confused or thinking face emoji fading in and out of frame.

Lexicography and Corpus

We love a dictionary and we’ve got receipts. Not only did we write a whole 3-post series comparing the usages of Expat v. Immigrant v. Migrant in three different posts (1, 2, and 3), but we also learned what’s up with short-term lexicography, and made a little dictionary words for gay men in 1800’s.

Sundries

These comprise a grab bag of posts that couldn’t be jammed into one of our main categories. These are lone wolf posts that you only bring home to your parents to show them you don’t care what they think. These black sheep of the bish family wear their leather jackets in the summer and their sunglasses at night.

This is a black and white gif of Rihanna looking badass in shades and some kind of black fur stole.

Dank Memes

Finally, we learned that we make the dankest linguistics memes. I leave you with these.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more in 2019!

By Caitlin O'Connell 1 Comment

December 11, 2018

Expat v. Immigrant v. Migrant Post 3: Collocating Adjectives in Corpus

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The public discourse around people who move to the U.S. is ugly at the moment (the moment being Build a Wall, Travel Ban, and Zero Tolerance). This series uses dictionaries and corpus linguistics to reflect on how we speak about people that move from one country to another.

We looked at dictionary definitions. We looked at dictionary example sentences. Now we go straight to the horse’s mouth: corpus. We are going to check out which words collocate with immigrant, migrant, and expat in that sexy stallion, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

COCA is “the largest freely-available corpus of English, and the only large and balanced corpus of American English.” They had me at free. It’s a big ol’ database with spoken, academic, fiction, newspaper, and magazine texts from American English sources and you can query to your heart’s content.

Confession Time: It’s been a hot minute since my graduate class on language analysis and I honestly forgot near everything I once learned about using corpora, so forgive me and make suggestions if something doesn’t seem right in the search methodology described below.

So what are we looking at here in this table? For each of the People that Move lexical items you can see the top five adjective collocations that go before them. Meaning when I searched for migrant- as a lemma so it encompassed singular and plural forms- COCA pranced through her database of texts and identified that Mexican was the word that most frequently preceded it, black was second most frequent, etc.

Expats are most likely to be qualified with their nationalities, and the top nationalities are Western countries with white majorities. Immigrants are frequently described by their legal status, but also as Mexican. Migrants have a mix of nationality, race, and status. Why don’t we have Mexican expats when Mexican people comprise the largest portion of foreign born living in the U.S.? Why must we speak of immigrants primarily in terms of legal status?

By Kaylin Wainwright No Comments

December 11, 2018

Paper Drags: Do Linguistic Structures Affect Human Capital?

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In case you’ve been off linguistics Twitter for the last week, you should know that it coniptioned last Wednesday. This is what happened.

A study was dropped (ya, academics drop papers) that claimed that in countries where the dominant language allowed pronouns to be omitted, education suffered.

There were a lot of hot takes with linguists sashaying into Twitter for an opportunity to drag this quote unquote study.

TL;DR: the study ignores current work in the field, doesn’t collaborate, uses sloppy methods, and arrives at biased results.

Here are the problems with it as mined from Twitter:

Research:

This study by Horst Feldmann (2018) is not based on current research in linguistics. The “recent” research in that is referenced in the introduction is a baloney economics study from 2013 by M. Keith Chen. It was dragged in its own time for its interpretation of the now infamous Theory of Linguistic Relativity.

Theory of Linguistic Relativity: This a nearly century old study that claimed that an individual’s thoughts are restrained by the languages they speak. It is also known as Whorfianism.

A heck-ton of studies over the last 100 years have attempted to prove or disprove this theory. These days, linguists generally accept that language does or might have some effect on thought, but that we’re not quite sure how large that affect is or might be. I’m not going to get into it here, but if you want to learn more, get reading!

Feldmann, like Chen before him, ran with what we call the strong version of the hypothesis. He boldly claims that “…language shapes speakers’ mental representation of reality…” which it doesn’t. If Feldmann had studied linguistics, he would have known that.

This leads us to the second major issue:

Author expertise:

@gretchenmcculloch compared this type of study to a linguist writing an economics paper. @sesquiotic pointed out that the study was not even co-authored by a linguist. He tweeted that the study has a “crib-toy use of linguistics” and that its chain of reasoning and supposition is patently problematic.

This is all a part of the invisibility of the linguistics field. @adamCSchembri pointed out that somehow, linguists aren’t considered experts by academicians in other fields.

But since Feldmann went ahead and decided to act the linguist anyway, let’s look at his premise:

The premise:

The premise of the paper is that there are languages that license the dropping of the pronoun before a verb. That’s true. A common example is Spanish whose speakers could say “yo hablo” (I speak), but can use just the “hablo” part if they want. Ok, so that’s an incredibly overly simplified explanation, but that’s for another time.

What Feldmann got wrong was claiming that English does not license the dropping of the pronoun. Actually speakers of English do it all the time. For example “do you speak English?” “Sure do!” or “Guess so.”

Yep, that’s pronoun drop. So the premise is wrong. This brings us to the bad linguistics of it all:

Bad linguistics:

@sesquiotic: the study doesn’t include actual linguistics and makes some pretty big claims about linguistics.

This paper is full of bad linguistics so here’s a list of a few that came up on Twitter:

Misspelling hablo as ablo
Studying 103 languages, but not mentioning which ones
Mentioning spoken language, but not including any in their data
Not defining or citing language variables used in regression tables
Grouping together languages without acknowledging language families
Using English example sentences that no one has ever uttered (I speak)
Claiming that V-S-O languages are the most common, but not backing it up with evidence
Referencing “ancient cultural values” and the “distant past” without defining what those things are or researching language history

@eviljoemcveigh: the linguistics is garbage so regression methods, covariates, and other statistical decisions are uninformed.

What do you get when you take an outdated hypothesis, add a false premise, and stir in some bad linguistics?

The conclusion:

Feldmann concludes that dropping a pronoun has a “negative effect of human capital” and that speakers of those languages have less education. Many people on Twitter were reminded of a similar conclusion by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in an open letter to the Kansas School Board.

The thing is, if you’re not putting in solid research and defined linguistic variables, the conclusion is moot. Feldmann’s conclusion is punching down at countries with less access to education and claiming that no one’s to blame because language. But there are guilty parties in the disparities in education around the world. A linguistics website isn’t the best place to learn about them, but this paper isn’t just bad linguistics, it’s bad anthropology, bad economics, and bad statistics, bad research design, and bad critical thinking.

This bish’s conclusion? Sashay away, Feldmann!

Special thanks to Joe McVeigh (@Eviljoemcveigh), Lee Murray (@MurrayLeeA), Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC), James Harbeck (@sesquiotic), and Nic Subtirelu (@linguisticpulse).

Recommended for no bishes!

————————————————————
Feldmann, Horst. “Do Linguistic Structures Affect Human Capital? The Case of Pronoun Drop.” Kyklos: International Review for Social Sciences, 8 Nov. 2018, doi:10.1111/kykl.12190.

Chen, M. Keith (2013). The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets, American Economic Review. 103(2): 690‐731.

By Caitlin O'Connell No Comments

December 4, 2018

Expat v. Immigrant v. Migrant Post 2: Dictionary Examples

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The public discourse around people who move to the U.S. is ugly at the moment (the moment being Build a Wall, Travel Ban, and Zero Tolerance). This series (Post 1) uses dictionaries and corpus linguistics to reflect on how we speak about people that move from one country to another.

If like my co-bish, Caitlin, you read dictionaries for fun, you might have noticed that there are frequently example phrases and sentences to provide further context of how the word is used. You might even own a book that composed short stories using only dictionary example sentences and you might read it aloud to your indifferent friend, Kaylin.

Lexicographers select example phrases and sentences from corpora that demonstrate how that word is used in a “typical grammatical and semantic context.” That is to say, the examples are intended to be emblematic of the word’s usage as determined by big data (corpus linguistics). Some online dictionaries even populate example sentences from recent media in addition to the official example. What are typical grammatical and semantic contexts for expat, immigrant, and migrant?

An example of a bad example.

We will stick with the same dictionaries from the first post in this series. American Heritage Dictionary online had no examples (can someone old school look them up for me in your real life dictionary pleeaassee). However, our other two dictionaries give us some food for thought.

Compare New Oxford American Dictionary’s examples for expat and immigrant:

‘American expatriates in London’
‘they found it difficult to expel illegal immigrants.’

The difference is jarring. I am jarred. Expats are from a wealthy country neutrally existing in a cosmopolitan city. Immigrants are without status and an ominous ‘they’ attempts to remove them.

(New Oxford American did not have an official example for migrant, but it had multiple example sentences from what I gather to be news sources though they are not credited. From words spelled commonwealthily and references to Australia, I have surmised that most these sources are not American, and must be coming from the sister dictionary Oxford Dictionary of English.)

Merriam-Webster doesn’t chap my lips as much.

‘English and American expatriates in the bars of Paris’
‘Millions of immigrants came to America from Europe in the 19th century.’
‘migrants in search of work on farms’.

The M-W example for immigrant is not negative like NOA’s, so that’s something. As in NOA, expats are from wealthy, Western countries with white majorities hanging out in a foreign city. This particular example was from a sentence about Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein credited to Robert Penn Warren. The example for migrant squares with M-W’s definition: a person who moves regularly for agricultural work. Agricultural labor, a so-called low-skilled job, is not for expats. Expats move abroad to work as writers and NGO staff and businessbishes. Expats have privilege. Migrants move abroad to toil in fields. Migrants are disenfranchised.

Not blaming Mrs. Dictionary for any of this. She is merely the vessel. Tune in for the next post on the source material: corpus.

By Kaylin Wainwright No Comments

November 27, 2018

Expat v. Immigrant v. Migrant Post 1: Dictionary Definitions

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As an American living in Ethiopia, I am frequently referred to as an expat. However, my Ethiopian colleagues in the United States are identified as immigrants. Why is that?

What are the definitions of immigrant, migrant, and expat? For those uninitiated in the dark arts of lexicography, words in dictionaries are not defined by some divinity on high making pronouncements (aka prescriptions). Rather words are defined by lexicography witchstaff who are analyzing how they are used by the speakers of the given language (aka descriptions).

Thhhhhhusly, the definitions below have been determined by and broadly represent how Americans use and understand these labels. Take a peep:

As you can see with your own beautiful eyes, the distinctions are subtle. (Also, how extra is American Heritage Dictionary?) All three dictionaries include reference to permanence for immigrant. There is no analogous qualification for expat, indicating expats may not be perceived as permanently living in a foreign country. The definitions for migrant all include a reference to work and frequent movement.

I have moved in and out of the U.S. to four different countries for work opportunities over the course of my career, but nobody has ever called me a migrant. Qwhite interesting, huh? In subsequent posts I will consider how these terms are used in racialized and class-based ways rather than applied to describe permanent, temporary, or work-related movement.

By Kaylin Wainwright No Comments

October 8, 2018

Raciolinguistic ideology and Spanish-English bilingualism on the US labor market: An analysis of online job advertisements

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Learn a language, they said. You’ll be more desirable on the job market, they said. Everyone needs to be multilingual to be competitive in this globalized world, they said. Get that dinero, they said.

In education and work environments language is often characterized as a skill that can be leveraged in this little system we call capitalism. Dr. Nic Subtirelu is skeptical of this. In his 2017 paper, “Raciolinguistic ideology and Spanish-English bilingualism on the US labor market: An analysis of online job advertisements,” he unpacks how the rhetoric of language skills as human capital doesn’t capture the IRL economic experience of language minorities.

Are Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States earning the promised cold hard cash? While there is evidence that Spanish-English bilinguals outearn Spanish monolinguals, it seems that Spanish-English bilinguals don’t get a pay bump over English monolinguals. Hand-wringing reports of how Americans don’t learn foreign languages and will be ill-equipped in the global economy seem to ignore the millions of bilingual Latinxs in the U.S. Raise your hand if you think racism has something to do with that.

Raciolinguistics

Subtirelu applies a raciolinguistic ideology lens to the issue. Raciolinguistics is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the study of the relationships between race and language- both how language is used to construct race and how race theory applies to linguistics. For example, people who hold antiblack and racist attitudes are likely to have a negative view of African American English (AAVE). For the record, AAVE is a legit dialect with its own sophisticated grammar and a unique phonology.

According to raciolinguistic concepts U.S. Latinxs are racialized and therefore their English and Spanish are deemed non-standard and ‘deficient’ compared to the English of white Americans or the Spanish of Spaniards.

Subtirelu argues that U.S. employers conceive of Spanish in two ways. First, It’s a world language, which has economic value because it could be leveraged in international trade to ganar dinero. (Mexico is one of the United States’ biggest trading partners.) Second, Spanish is also conceived of as a local language, which has economic value because it can be used to hablar con U.S. Spanish speakers in customer service scenarios.

When employers orient toward Spanish as a world language for fancypants corporate jobs, they disregard U.S. Latinx bilingualism, but when employers need Spanish as a local language they are likely to hire bilingual U.S. Latinx workers. But do those language skills come with a wage premium? Existing research points to no.

The Study

He pulled 74,000 job advertisements from an online job board to identify how many jobs prefer or require Spanish-English bilingualism. And what those jobs are. And the difference in pay between those jobs and similar jobs without bilingual requirements. And which job descriptions conceive of Spanish as a world or local language. And any difference in pay among those.

On average advertisements that did *not* mention Spanish had a higher salary listed than those that required or preferred Spanish-English bilingualism. Spanish was also more likely to be mentioned in ads that had low education and experience requirements. A matched sample contrasting jobs in the same states with comparable education and experience level showed that jobs that had *no* Spanish-English bilingual requirement paid an average of $3,500 more.

Digging into the jobs that require Spanish reveals even more not coolness. The handful of high paying jobs oriented to Spanish as a world language, with language about performing audits in South America, international accounting, international distribution, etc. The slightly larger number of middle paying jobs were primarily nonprofit and education jobs that oriented to Spanish as a local language. By far the largest group were low paying ($15,000-27,000) frontline customer service jobs that conceived of Spanish as a local language.

Additional uncoolness alert: the higher paying job ads were more likely to use language like speak fluent Spanish and the low wage jobs were much more likely to use the word bilingual. Subtirelu hypothesizes that the label bilingual was serving as a code for a more ‘nativelike’ authenticity than the label fluent and may carry some racial undertones. As an academic he has to hedge his impressions with qualifications and soft language, but we here at LinguaBishes are mere lowly linguistics groupies and I have no problem claiming with undue confidence that bilingual is probably code for Latinx in these ads and fluent was code for a suit who double-majored in accounting and Spanish.

Conclusion

While the job ads showed a demand for Spanish-English bilingualism, the most demand was in lower paying jobs that oriented toward Spanish as a local language and were probably recruiting Latinxs.

The electoral success of Donald Drumpf on a nativist platform, the botched federal government response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and ICE ‘mistakenly’ detaining U.S. citizens that are Latinx are just a few signs that many whites don’t view Latinxs as sufficiently American. This research shows that this denigration extends to their bilingual skills, which are not financially valued in the job market despite capitalist rhetoric extolling the benefits of a multilingual workforce.

Though this has all been rather disheartening, it’s important for linguistic research to continue shedding light on whose languages and dialects have built-in privileges and who is given a pat on the head and a low wage job for their language skills.

This paper is recommended for bilingual bishes, sociolinguistics stans and anti-racists.

Subtirelu, N.C. (2017). Raciolinguistic ideology and Spanish-English bilingualism on the U.S. labor market: An analysis of online job advertisements. Language in Society, 46(4), 477-505. DOI:10.1017/S0047404517000379

By Kaylin Wainwright 1 Comment