How we judge others when they speak (and we should stop) | Carrie Gillon | TEDxChandlerPublicLibrary 

Well if it is tendentially true, why must it stop, and how would you make it stop? If the Hispanic person with a degree from Harvard wants to embark on a top notch career, they can just adopt a standard accent, or code switch between them.

+Franck badman Totally agree with her conclusion btw

I take issue with your points, as follows: 1. Everyone has bias. Everyone is prejudiced. It’s something everyone must work on every day. Letting go of prejudice and bias comes naturally to no one. I think it very possible that despite this potential prejudice in her, you yourself have quite a ways to go in the journey of overcoming prejudice as well. Regardless, this point of yours does nothing to counter her arguments. She’s still right on all her points. 2. No, she's not, because there already isn't a standard. There's really no such thing. You don't speak "Standard English" and neither do I. Standards are imaginary. What's real is just the English of the powerful (e.g. white males whose ancestors won wars) and the English of everyone else. Who gets to decide whose English is best? Why is your English any better than my English? Why is our English any better than AAVE? In truth, it's not. We define a “standard” all the time, but it’s not real and there’s no reason that this “standard” should be better than any other variety. In reality, what is “standard” in one circumstance for one person will not be standard at all in another circumstance for another person. The rules taught in English class are a *style guide* and nothing more. By all means, keep defining a "standard" English. Just be aware that it's largely imaginary, make students aware that it's a style guide (and not the unwavering rules of the universe) when teaching it in schools, and don't use it to put yourself above others. Technically modern English is just really poor, broken Middle English anyway (which itself was a really poor, broken version of old English, which was a poor, broken version of Proto-Indo-European, etc.) 3. I think the point is that AAVE speakers are allowed to make judgements about *their own English* (as in each INDIVIDUAL can judge only their own English) and you are allowed to make judgements about *your own English* but no one has the right to judge the English of another person. Even if I spoke AAVE and you spoke AAVE, you would have no right to judge my AAVE and nor would I have any right to judge yours. 4. I honestly have no idea what this point is about. I think you’re making a judgement about how she chose to phrase things? Which means you really aren’t getting her message at all tbh. Maybe rewatch the video? :P 5. If the necessary text books and materials are in fact not available in Welsh, I think that just goes to show even more that Welsh is stigmatized (and unjustly so). Soooo her point still stands ;P And besides, why mention it in an article if it's just a shortage of textbooks in the person's native language? Why be that nitpicky? 6. Stigmatization is a negative cultural judgement about either another aspect of the culture or a different culture entirely. It’s very possible to point out things that are stigmatized in a culture. I suppose you’re finding issue with this because you yourself are biased against commonly stigmatized groups and she offended you by making you aware of this bias?

@@capercaillieskye Some responses to your comments: 1. If she, like everyone else, is biased and prejudiced, why should we grant that she is nonetheless correct in all points that she makes? 2. Of course standards are arbitrary, variable, labile, not always adhered to. Does this mean they are imaginary? Not all watermelons are alike, but does that mean there is no such thing as a watermelon; that they are imaginary? 3. Why is it that people have no right to judge each other and their performance in various realms of endeavor? 4. The point I was making is that grammar, even though it is often arbitrary, is nevertheless rooted in logic and therefore is a useful tool in conveying logical relationships, such as comparisons. For a comparison to be enlightening it helps to know what things are being compared. 5. The point about textbooks relates to the economies of scale of production. A medical text written in English has a potential market of many thousands and yet they are still quite expensive. Imagine how much they would cost, given economies of scale, if they were written in or translated into languages that are spoken by only a small number of people. 6. In my opinion you gave a pretty good definition of stigmatization, though it doesn't address the issue of whether stigmatization is good or bad in individual cases. However, I don't see how you make the leap to assume that I must be biased against commonly stigmatized groups. Are you projecting your own thought processes onto me?

@@MartinMMeiss-mj6li I think you're still missing the point. Language isn't something you can standardize, it's something that arose naturally among humans and is just as varied and diverse as humans ourselves. There are as many idiolects as there are people on the planet (roughly 7.6 billion) and as many English idiolects as there are speakers of English (roughly 1.35 billion), and to choose ONE SINGLE idiolect out of all of those and say "this is standard English" is absurd. It's easy enough to say "this is definitely a watermelon" but far harder than you might realize to say "this is definitely English" or "this definitely is not English." Ever heard someone speaking Singaporean English? Or Scottish English? Or Indian English? Are they English enough to be English? What about pidgins and creoles which are only half English at most? Are they English? They definitely can sound like English. Does that make them English, or something else entirely? Where does English end and a separate language begin? This can be highly difficult to pinpoint, much more than you might think. It's equally absurd to claim that one English is better than another. Why would your English be better than my English? In reality, it's not. Usually the "better English" just happens to belong to a group in power, be it social, cultural, economic, political, or military power. Often whichever English becomes the "standard" is just the English that belonged to groups that won wars or subjugated the other groups. Why is Southern American English not the "standard" American English? Because they lost the civil war! lol (Which is quite ridiculous if you think about it ;P Southern American English is a perfectly valid and highly fascinating dialect.) Honestly I think your point about watermelons disproves itself. Which variety of watermelon is the standard watermelon? Who gets to decide which counts as a true, pure watermelon and which counts as a broken, incorrect version? No one's saying there is no such thing as a watermelon here (i.e. no one's saying English doesn't exist), just that your variety of watermelon isn't better than mine or anyone else's just because it's yours (i.e. no dialect or idiolect of any language is invalid, all language in its infinite variety is acceptable language). And if a new variety of watermelon suddenly appeared, no one would say "that's clearly not a watermelon at all." Likewise, language change is not only perfectly natural, it's healthy (languages that couldn't change would just die out, we'd all switch to a new language instead). All that being said, I think I'm done with this conversation. It's pretty clear I'm not taking to a linguist here. Respond if you must but I likely won't read it or reply again.

@@capercaillieskye It's not that I MUST respond; it's that I enjoy intellectual discourse. The fact that I am not a linguist doesn't mean that the points I make are invalid. Nowhere did I suggest that one variety of English is better than another. That judgement can only be made when one has a particular purpose in mind. For instance, if I were to write a medical textbook, I would want use language that had the required technical vocabulary and was widely understood.

+ablestmage "Proposing that there could be an unintentional meaning to the words apart from that which you intend strays very slippery-slopily toward prescriptive linguistics, and appears to thoroughly undermine the whole point toward abstinence from judgment." I would be very careful with this statement. I have not studied linguistics, but Mathematics, and my native language is not English. Nonetheless, the following point stands and seems to remain largely unnoticed by the majority of people (as there's no obvious reason to even consider it). All of language is inherently ambiguous and different people will very well pick up different contents out of the same message. You can not define a word without making reference to something and every person checked different reference points throughout their lives. It is inevitable that people will, instinctively, pick up whatever message suits their experiences and references the best and _not_ what the speaker seeks to convey. As such, unless both parties make a conscious effort to mutually understand each other, they will inevitably chain words into sentences into talks with little to no actual communication happening. In either case, there is any number of unintentional meanings to any set of words. We communicate mostly through contextual information, such as facial expressions, the situations we find ourselves in, the relationship to the person we talk to, and so on. In summary, words carry _no meaning_ on their own.

+Nal We agree that all language is inherently ambiguous and different people will interpret the contents of any given utterance through a filter of their own experience -- but that filtered version, is a false version. The person who speaks the word is the definer of the word in that specific context. The pursuit of the genuine listener should be to immediately assume that the heard version is the false version, and seek to increasingly align the interpretation with what is actually trying to be communicated.

ablestmage"The pursuit of the genuine listener should be to immediately assume that the heard version is the false version, and seek to increasingly align the interpretation with what is actually trying to be communicated." I entirely agree with that. Unfortunately the majority of people appears to even be unaware of that very fact and quickly becomes agitated purely based on impulse. It puzzles me why concept such as this are not taught in _all_ schools across the globe, when they are clearly more important than being able to compute a derivative with no applicable context or similar circus tricks (coming from a Mathematician).

"In descriptive linguistics, which she appears to be touting by-and-large (as opposed to the prescriptive variety), what the speaker actually means is what the speaker really means." I am not sure if I understand this idea correctly, but, in language, there is more meaning that what is literally expressed. For example, we infer social information about the speaker when we listen to him/her. We could be wrong in our judgement (prejudices, stereotypes), but we still generate inferences about the speaker. The descriptive view is not against this idea. Actually, language for linguists is an intentional-inferential system, in which the speaker has an intention to communicate something and the task of the listener is to infer what is the message that the speaker wants to convey. I don't understand your first point either. There is a vein of research that examines linguistic attitudes, beliefs about language and varieties of language, and how stereotypes are formed. You should check it out! Attitudes towards vocal fry (or creaky voice) have been studied, among other topics.

@Jonas P.R I think the "fock u" you put before you modified, really proved my point there :)

Where did you study linguistics? What degree do you have in linguistics? To me, what you are saying is totally incompatible with being a linguist. Linguists are descriptivists.

@@meninaviolet omg, not in my capacity AS a linguist, but generally speaking. The two are not related. I was judging people for the way they talk long before I studied languages. You know, in the same way a doctor can treat a patient very competently and compassionately, but still judge them, somehow, for their choices, because they still SEE them, and they are still interacting with them, and they are still fully conditioned human beings, but anyway, it doesn't really matter. When listening to my doctor friends talking about their job I can absolutely detect some judgement there, at any rate, which doesn't at all mean they they don't do their work competently/ compassionately/ suffiently detachedly. Whereas the general public simply judges outright, without the additional filter of technicalities.

@@Wandering.Homebody yikes! Did you study languages or linguistics? They are not the same thing. Making judgements about certain varieties (e. g., this accent is for wharehouse workers and this other variety is for executives) actually reveals a lack of understanding of how languages evolve, change, develop. That is what linguists study! How do languages change in the first place if it wasn't for those instances of variation? It is like being an astrophysicist and then, in your spare time, claiming the earth is flat. It is just incompatible.

+ExRepro Guitaro ~ As an ESOL teacher I have to educate students in register; we should all KNOW not to say "ain't" in a formal environment, however we speak informally. If we cannot curb our speech then we disqualify ourselves from environments where restraint is essential; it's a life skill which merits higher pay. This speaker saying "don't judge" is soft in the head .

differous01 I couldn't agree more. In private situations my dialog is loose and you can tell I'm from Chicago... in my professional life it's completely different. You have to be able to speak correctly. One of my personal pet peeves is the common republican pronunciation of "nuclear". We have elected officials representing us who say "new-cue-lar".

ExRepro Guitaro lol, "new-cue-lar" deserves to be stigmatised (along with Bush's "war on tourism")

Standard American: “r" is always pronounced. Collective nouns (eg “team”) are always singular "The baby is TAKING a nap" “I often go ON the weekend" Received Pronunciation (ie Standard British): “r" is only pronounced when followed by a vowel within the sam syllable. Collective nouns can be plural depending on the context "The baby is HAVING a nap" “I often go AT the weekend" Two dominate standards with conflicting sets of rules, meaning no matter what you do, you are always speaking “bad English”.

@@AWriterWandering not if you adapt it to your current environment, surely.

Relax! What Dr. Gillon is saying is that "seen" and "saw" are used indistinguishably in that context: they are two instances of the same word. So in that context, they have the same meaning and the same function. That happens A LOT in language! For example, an irregular verb such as "to be" (am, are, was, were...) is now a single verbal paradigm, but in the past, those irregularities were caused by the integration (or suppletion) of four different verbs. The same thing happens with "to go". Grammar is not clear-cut rules, but rather we have patterns of use that we come to interpret as "rules".

@@meninaviolet well they are phenetically different, and are also different registers, because one is grammatically correct, while the other is grammatically incorrect and therefore slang. If I were hiring employees I'd aim to hire people who had the mental capacity to speak appropriately, for the occasion, and choose the correct register, unless I was looking for like, some warehouse workers, or a cleaner etc., in which case it wouldn't matter, but I don't think that that's what the speaker was talking about.

@@Wandering.Homebody , Did you mean "phonetically"?

@@Wandering.Homebody I think that this comment is actually proving the point of the talk. It is very concerning that you don't see anything wrong with it. Do you know how languages evolve? Do you actually know the mechanisms of change?

@@Wandering.Homebody , I would say to you the following. What are the studies that show that people who say "seen" instead of "saw" have a reduced "mental capacity"? I mean, what do you even mean when you say "mental capacity"? 😅 Those opinions about language don't have a scientific or objective basis. They are just that: opinions. Like opinions in general, they could reveal prejudices, biases, etc. That's the point of the talk!