#BlackLanguageMatters: Can linguistics change the course of justice?

The 2013 trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin is well-known as the court case that sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the USA. 17-year-old Martin was shot dead by Zimmerman, who claimed he was acting in self-defence and was eventually acquitted of all charges. The outcome of the trial caused outrage among the Black community over racial profiling, police brutality and inequality in the criminal justice system, and prompted the founders of #BlackLivesMatter to use the hashtag for the very first time.

It’s less well-known that the case also served as a ‘call to action’ among linguists. John Rickford and Sharese King of Stanford University studied the court proceedings closely, focusing on the testimony of one particular witness, Rachel Jeantel. A close friend of Martin, Jeantel was on the phone to him just moments before his death. As such, she represented an important ‘ear-witness’ and testified for over 6 hours in court, but her testimony was completely disregarded by the jury, who found her to be unintelligible and ‘not credible’.

What does this have to do with linguistics? Jeantel is a speaker of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), also known as African American Language (AAL): a variety of English spoken by many Black Americans. AAVE has been studied extensively by linguists, who have shown that it is a systematic and rule-governed dialect of English like any other. Nevertheless, like most ‘non-standard’ vernaculars, AAVE is often stereotyped by non-linguists as uneducated and broken. Jeantel’s speech is no exception: Rickford and King note that she was ridiculed on social media throughout the trial, labelled as ‘inarticulate’ and ‘the perfect example of urban ignorance’.

As well as being lampooned online, Jeantel’s testimony was overlooked by the jury in their decision-making. Commenting after the case, one juror said that Jeantel was ‘hard to understand’, and another reported that ‘no one mentioned Jeantel in [16+ hour] jury deliberations. Her testimony played no role whatsoever in their decision’ (Juror Maddy, as reported in Bloom 2014) despite the fact that she was on the phone to the defendant moments before the shooting took place.

In their paper, Rickford and King set out to investigate linguistic reasons for why this happened. They start by closely analysing over 15 hours of Jeantel’s recorded speech, to see how it compares to that of other AAVE speakers. They found her speech to be ‘a systematic exemplification of the grammar of AAVE’. In other words, it displays patterning in lexicon, grammar and phonology that is typical of AAVE, and also reflects the possible influence of Jeantel’s Haitian mother and Anglophone Caribbean Creole-speakers living in Miami. Given these findings, the possibility that Jeantel was not understood because her speech was incoherent – or, as one commentator described it, ‘the blather of an idiot’ – is clearly ruled out. Why, then, did the jury neither understand Jeantel nor consider her testimony to be important in their deliberations? Rickford and King look at two possibilities in their paper: the influence of social bias and the issue of dialect unfamiliarity.

It is likely that social bias had an effect on jurors’ ability to understand Jeantel as well as their assessment of her credibility. Rickford and King cite several studies that show that ‘speech perception is influenced by listeners’ stereotypes of speaker characteristics’ – in other words, if White listeners believe that a speaker is Black, their comprehension actually decreases. Importantly, the Zimmerman trial jury was primarily White, middle-aged and suburban, with no African American members.

Considering dialect unfamiliarity as a factor, Rickford and King list a number of other court cases in which vernacular language has been misheard or mistranscribed. Part of the problem, they explain, is that courtrooms do not provide interpreters for dialects, but only for ‘foreign languages’. In other words, an interpreter would be provided for a Spanish or Vietnamese-speaking defendant, for example, but not offered to a speaker of Bajan Creole or AAVE. Depending on the dialect in question, this can lead to dangerous misunderstandings: Rickford and King give the example of a police interview in which a Jamaican Creole speaker’s words, given verbatim in (a), were first transcribed as in (b).

(a) wen mi ier di bap bap, mi drap a groun an den
when I heard the bap bap [the shots], I fell to the ground and then
mi staat ron.
I started to run.
(b) When I heard the shot (bap, bap), I drop the gun, and then I run.

As this example shows, the distinction between ‘languages’ and ‘dialects of a language’ is not always clear-cut, and listeners are likely to have difficulties with comprehension if they are not familiar with the variety being spoken. In the Zimmerman case, Rickford and King show that Jeantel used several preverbal tense-aspect markers in her speech, such as stressed BIN, completive done, and habitual be. The authors point out that these features of AAVE have been mis-transcribed by non-AAVE speakers in other cases, meaning that it is very likely they were misunderstood in this case too.

Rickford and King conclude that AAVE was, in a way, ‘found guilty’ in the Zimmerman trial, since responses to Jeantel’s dialect unfairly prevented her testimony from being heard or properly understood, and undoubtedly affected the outcome of the case. In light of this, they argue that courtrooms are in serious need of expert linguistic input and dialect interpretation, and strongly urge linguists to help make courtrooms fairer places. More broadly, Rickford and King point out that language prejudice affects outcomes not only in the criminal justice system, but also in education, employment and healthcare, and call on linguists to dispel myths about speech and language in all domains of life.

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Bloom, L. (2014). Suspicion nation: The inside story of the Trayvon Martin injustice and why we continue to repeat it. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.

Rickford, J. R., and King, S. (2016). Language and linguistics on trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and other vernacular speakers) in the courtroom and beyond. Language 92/4, 948-988.

This summary was written by Rosemary Hall

‘Oh gurl, you Sassy’

‘Slay’, ‘yaas kween’, ‘squad’ – if you’re a keen social media, you might be familiar with some of these words. Originally from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) – a variety of English spoken by some Black Americans – these terms have quickly become part of the internet grammar. But, how and why have these terms entered our lexicon and what does the use of AAVE in internet communication mean? This and other questions are examined by Christian Ilbury in his recent paper.

Recent sociolinguistic work has often used social media data to examine patterns of written variation – such as whether you spell the word working as <working> or <workin> - in relation to the distribution of the spoken language feature. An example of this is Grieve’s recent paper which we discuss in detail in a previous post. In that paper he uses social media data to explore lexical (i.e., words) variation across different areas of the UK. This work demonstrates the enormous potential of using social media data to explore general patterns of accent variation. However, whilst these approaches appear promising, Ilbury suggests that these analyses often miss a fundamental quality of online interaction: That users often use elements of language that are not part of their own speech for certain purposes, such as to adopt a different identity or signal that the message is humorous.

To investigate this issue, Ilbury turns to tweets from gay men in the UK to examine the ways in which this community use elements of African American Vernacular English. He argues that the gay community in the UK are well suited to examining this phenomenon because aspects of AAVE feature prominently in mainstream gay culture and form much of contemporary gay slang. For instance, drag queens in the UK frequently use aspects of AAVE such as copula absence as in ‘she going’ for ‘she is going’ or the use of completive done as in ‘she done used all the good ones’ in their performance. Turning to Twitter, he extracted 15,804 tweets from the timelines of 10 self-identifying gay men who reside in the UK and trawled through their tweets to identify features that are typically associated with AAVE.

His analysis shows that several features characteristic of AAVE are widespread in the gay men’s tweets. This includes lexical features, including words such as ‘slay’, ‘yaas’, and ‘y’all’; the representation of sound features such as ‘dat’ for ‘that’, ‘ma’ for ‘my, as well as several grammatical features such as copula absence in ‘you nasty’ for ‘you are nasty’ and demonstrative them as in ‘working them boots’.

He argues that the appearance of these features can’t be accounted for by the men trying to represent their own dialect since they are likely to speak a variety of British English that is very different to AAVE. This is in contrast to Grieve’s analysis where the users appear to be representing aspects of their own dialect. This suggests that the men in Ilbury’s study are not attempting to represent their own voices but are rather using elements of AAVE to adopt or perform an altogether different identity.

To investigate what this identity may be, Ilbury looks to popular memes to see how African Americans and AAVE are represented in digital contexts. This includes exploring two memes that reference aspects of AAVE. The first refers to Kimberly ‘Sweet Brown’ Wilkins and the second is entitled the ‘strong independent Black woman who don't need no man’.

'I am a strong independent Black woman who don't need no man' meme (L) &
Kimberly 'Sweet Brown' Wilkins 'Ain't nobody got time for that meme' (R)

He argues that these memes feed into ideological and stereotypical representations of African American women as ‘sassy’. However, this imagery is not new. African American women have frequently been depicted as ‘fierce’ or ‘sassy’, even in very old media representations of this community. These representations are obviously very problematic since they are based on racialised and essentialised ideas about the personal qualities of African American women.

Returning to the Twitter data, Ilbury argues that these representations are helpful in explaining why the men are using features of AAVE. He suggests that it is exactly that this ‘sassy’ meaning that the men are ‘activating’ by using components of AAVE. In other words, the men appropriate aspects of AAVE to perform an identity that is non-local and to evoke the essentialised associations of that style to present themselves as ‘sassy’ – a quality that has become appreciated in mainstream UK gay culture. He argues that they are not attempting to present themselves as ‘Black women’ but are rather using features of AAVE to appropriate the associations of that variety and perform a gay identity that he refers to as the ‘Sassy Queen’ – where ‘Queen’ is a gay slang term that refers to an effeminate gay man.

Such types of language play, Ilbury argues, are particularly useful in contexts where there is some threat that the user may be read as rude or direct, such as disagreements. In these contexts, the use of this style allows the user to avoid the negative outcomes of the disagreement because the receiver is aware that the user is performing a style that is inauthentic. 

So, whilst social media can tell us a lot about dialectal variation (e.g., Grieve – previous post), it is important to acknowledge that some users will appropriate aspects of other linguistic varieties to perform other identities and utilise the meanings associated with that variety. What users do with that style depends on how it is used in interactions and may differ from community to community.

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Ilbury, Christian (Online First/2019) “Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE. Journal of Sociolinguistics.

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12366

The Queen’s Speech

Picture this: it’s Christmas day, you’re overloaded with turkey, surrounded by the remnants of wrapping paper and you’ve just settled down to watch the Queen’s annual speech. It’s a tradition for many at Christmas. But, what if I told you that the Queen’s speech isn’t the same as it was in more recent decades than, say, in the 1950’s. Of course, here I’m not talking about the content of her speech (of course that changes year by year!), but rather her pronunciation of what is sometimes referred to as ‘the Queen’s English’. 

Jonathan Harrington along with colleagues set out to find out how changes in society have influenced the ‘Queen’s English’ by examining the Queen’s speech in her Annual Christmas broadcast over three time periods. This synopsis focusses on just one of these papers, Harrington, Palethorpe & Watson (2000).

The ‘Queen’s English’ or Received Pronunciation (RP) as linguists refer to it, is a variety of English spoken by some upper-class individuals and is often associated with power, money and privilege. It also happens to be the variety of English spoken by Queen Elizabeth II (hence the name!). Typically, RP is characterised by pronunciations such as ‘gep’ for ‘gap’ and ‘bottle’ where both of the t’s are still pronounced as t’s, as opposed to ‘bo’le’.

But, as sociolinguists know, language changes over time. This is particularly the case for RP, which has been influenced by the changing social class boundaries between upper-, middle- and working-class communities. These changes are likely to influence language use. As Harrington and colleagues observe, these changes have already influenced RP, such that the tendency to pronounce an ‘l’ in a word like milk as something like a ‘w’ – a feature that was once typical of working-class varieties, such as Cockney – is now regularly heard in the speech of many RP speakers. So, then, how do these changes relate to the ‘Queen’s English’?

By examining the Queen’s Christmas address across three different time periods (1950’s, late 1960/ early 70’s, 1980’s), Harrington and his colleagues examined how the changing social landscape related to the Queen’s English. They did this by looking at what linguists refer to as ‘acoustic properties’ of the Queen’s vowels. Vowels, like other sound forms (e.g., music) can be measured in Hz. These measurements are then plotted onto a graph and linguists are able to track changes in the way a particular vowel was pronounced over time or by speaker.

In Harrington and colleagues’ analysis, they measured the acoustic properties of 11 vowels, including those in the words: heed, hid, and hoard. They also compared the Queen’s pronunciation of these vowels with data from Standard Southern British English speaking females to see how the Queen’s speech related to more general patterns of speech.

What they find is that, over time, the Queen’s English appears to have moved towards the pronunciation typical of the Standard British English speaking females. Although she doesn’t mirror their speech, the English spoken by the Queen in the 1980’s appears to be dramatically different than the variety she spoke in the 50’s, sounding more like younger speakers who are lower on the social class hierarchy - in other words, the Queen has become less posh!

For instance, in the next two videos, compare how the Queen says ‘Happy Christmas’ in 1950 (0.31, in the first video), where happy is pronounced more like ‘heppy’ and in 1980, where it pronounced more like ‘happy’ (8.55, in the video below).

So, it seems that, whilst the Queen may have become less ‘posh’, it’s quite clear that she’s not part of the Royle family just yet.

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Harrington, J., Palethorpe, S., and Watson, C. (2000). Monophthongal vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: an acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas Broadcasts. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 63-78.

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100300006666

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See also: 

Harrington, J., Palethorpe, S., and Watson, C. (2000). Does the Queen speak the Queen's English? Nature, 408, 927-928

Harrington, J. (2006). An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts, Journal of Phonetics, 34 439–457. 


This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Agreement in the House of Lords? Not likely!

A vintage engraving from 1861 showing tumult in the House of Lords 

Anyone who has watched Question Time in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords of the British Parliament will know that there is a certain kind of institutional rudeness which is acceptable as part of the ritualized confrontational encounters that take place there. It is the job of MPs and Members of the House of Lords to question government ministers on matters for which they are responsible. Disagreement is therefore part and parcel of this particular context and interaction.

However, the participants are also bound by the rules of the respective Houses and perhaps this is especially so in the House of Lords, where some of the highly formal traditions have been in place since the 14^th century and which account for the sometimes archaic language and behaviour. So, in this situation, how do the Lords ‘do’ disagreement? Researcher Jessica Robles collected around 300 video recordings and transcripts of the meetings (from the official document called Hansard) of interactions in the House of Lords, available from the United Kingdom Parliament website. 

In this paper she provides an in-depth analysis of two examples of disagreement from the oral question sessions of the House of Lords (you can read the whole article here) to support her main argument, which is that disagreement is achieved through what she calls ‘talking around the issue’. Robles argues that there are three dimensions to the practice of talking around the issue. These are: 1) institutional positioning, in which the talk itself positions the participants within their current role and within the institutional context of the government structure as well as in opposition to others. 2) display of emotionality, a way of talking around the issue by appearing to disagree but not actually specifying what the disagreement is about. The talk contains markers of ‘feelings’ that cue people to a particular attitude being presented – in one example, Robles includes such things as lack of fluent speech, use of emphatics such as ‘absolutely’ and ‘precisely’ and nonverbal expressions such as frowning, rolling the eyes and shaking the head. 3) orientation to the issue , in which talking about the focal point of an argument may be avoided explicitly but is referred to implicitly. By using these three practices, disagreement is thus carried out through indirect orientations to an implied issue.

Overall, these practices sound very familiar, not only in the House of Lords but also perhaps in political debates more generally, where speakers talk around an issue by addressing the issue through indirect strategies. These strategies appear to be shaped by the context in which they take place but Robles argues that they are not bound to this context. While talking around the issue may be considered as ‘beating around the bush’ in everyday interactions, she suggests that the strategies could be investigated as a way of dealing with disagreement in other relevant contexts. 

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Robles, Jessica. (2011). Doing disagreement in the House of Lords: ‘Talking around the issue’ as a context-appropriate argumentative strategy. Discourse and Communication 5(2) 147-168.

doi: 10.1177/1750481310395452

This summary was written by Sue Fox

How do political leaders justify their actions?

We’ve probably all been in a situation where we felt the need to justify or ‘legitimise’ our behaviour or actions in some way. This legitimisation usually takes the form of providing arguments which can explain our actions or even our opinions about something. There can be many reasons why we do this; to gain social acceptance; perhaps an attempt to get or maintain power; to improve relationships or maybe to achieve popularity or fame. Whatever the reason, in most cases when we do this, we’re looking to get the support or approval of the person or people that we’re talking to.

A good example of where we see this process of legitimisation in action is in political discourse. Politicians (or ‘political actors’) need the support of the electorate and they must therefore justify their actions, non-actions or their ideological standing on a particular issue in order to gain that support. Researcher Antonio Reyes suggests that speakers use five key strategies of legitimisation in order to achieve their political goals. They are: 1) emotions (particularly fear), 2) a hypothetical future, 3) rationality, 4) voices of expertise and 5) altruism. To illustrate how these strategies are employed, Reyes uses examples from speeches given by two leaders in two different armed conflicts, George W. Bush on Iraq (2007) and Barack Obama on Afghanistan (2009), with both speakers seeking to justify military presence in what has become known as the ‘War on Terror’.  

Reyes says that the first strategy uses an appeal to emotions which allows the speaker to ‘skew the opinion’ of the audience about a specific issue. He states that since 2001, political leaders have often drawn on the events of 9/11 to activate people’s emotions in order to legitimise future actions. The date is so engraved in people’s memories that any mention of it sets off the emotions related to the event. So when Bush said (11 Jan 2007) ‘These are the same folks that came and killed about 3,000 of our citizens’ (all bold font appears in original article) and Obama said (1 Dec 2009) ‘On September 11 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people’  Reyes suggests that the sentences trigger emotions which are ideal to later ‘legitimise political actions based on the effect of those emotions’.   

Another strategy that Reyes identifies is one of posing a hypothetical threat in the future to justify actions in the present. In this case the political actor usually refers to a cause in the past (here 9/11) which may happen again in the future and which therefore requires action in the present in order to stop that future threat. Reyes provides an example from Bush (11 Jan 2007) when he said ‘If we were to fail in Iraq, the enemy would follow us here to America’.

The third strategy is legitimisation through rationality. Here, the political actor is said to present the legitimisation process as a process where all the options have been considered and a decision has been reached after a ‘heeded, evaluated and thoughtful’ procedure. Linguistically, the strategy is often framed by clauses such as ‘after consultation with our allies’ or verbs relating to mental and verbal processes such as ‘explore’ and ‘consult’.

The fourth strategy is to draw on voices of expertise to strengthen the politician’s position. An example given comes from Bush (11 Jan 2007) when he said ‘and so our commanders looked at the plan and said, Mr President, it’s not going to work until – unless we support – provide more troops.......’ where a direct quote is used from authoritative figures who have been consulted for their expert opinions.

Reyes final strategy is one of altruism, meaning that political actors will often propose their actions as being beneficial to others. Examples are taken from the speech of Bush (11 Jan 2007) who said ‘It’s time to act not only for our sake, it’s time to act for the sake of the people in Iraq’ and Obama (1 Dec 2009) who said ‘Thanks to their courage, grit and perseverance, we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people’. Reyes states that actions are more likely to be accepted if they are framed as being beneficial to others, particularly towards the poor, innocent or vulnerable members of a society.

In his conclusion, Reyes claims that even though these two political figures have differing ideologies and that they use very different styles to present their arguments, they nevertheless employ similar strategies to legitimise their political agendas. Of course, political discourse may be said to be planned or pre-planned and Reyes calls for further studies to test the strategies in other speech events, suggesting that such strategies may also be used in casual conversation.  

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Reyes, A. Strategies of legitimization in political discourse: from words to actions. Discourse and Society 22(6) 781-807.

DOI: 10.1177/0957926511419927

This summary was written by Sue Fox