Language on Trial - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Language on Trial

Sharese King & John R. Rickford

This essay draws on the case study we conducted of Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the
2013 trial of George Zimmerman v. The State of Florida.1 Although Jeantel, UN
close friend of Trayvon Martin, was an ear-witness (by cell phone) to all but the final
minutes of Zimmerman’s interaction with Trayvon, and testified for nearly six hours
about it, her testimony was disregarded in jury deliberations. Through a linguistic
analysis of Jeantel’s speech, comments from a juror, and a broader contextualization
of stigmatized speech forms and linguistic styles, we argue that the lack of acknowl-
edgment of dialectal variation has harmful social and legal consequences for speakers
of stigmatized dialects. Such consequences include limits on criminal justice, employ-
ment, and fair access to housing, as well as accessible and culturally sensitive educa-
zione. We propose new calls to action, which include the ongoing work the coauthors
are doing to address such harms, while also moving to inspire concerned citizens to act.

O n February 26, 2012, while returning from a casual walk to the corner store,

a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin was murdered by a neighborhood
watchman, George Zimmerman, in Sanford, Florida. While Zimmer-
man was the admitted suspect, he was not formally charged for the crime, second-
degree murder, until April 11, 2012. Like the fatal police shooting of eighteen-
year-old Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, after which
protestors and activists demanded that the offending officer, Darren Wilson, be
held accountable, this incident sparked a wave of resistance.2 Zimmerman, tried
In 2013, was ultimately found not guilty. The acquittal was a key moment in the
formation of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a response to the history of ex-
cessive force and extrajudicial killings by the state and vigilantes.3

There were many injustices leading up to the ultimate “not guilty” verdict for
Zimmerman, with the first and foremost being the pursuit and killing of Trayvon
Martin. It is difficult to point to any single factor that influenced the jury’s decision.
Perhaps the official charge should have been manslaughter rather than second-
degree murder. It might have been that the jury, composed of six women, repre-
sented Zimmerman’s peers but not Martin’s, and as a result, the jurors were un-
able to sympathize with Martin. Some have also emphasized that Martin, the vic-
tim, was on trial, rather than Zimmerman, and that his character assassination
contributed to the verdict.4 Acknowledging all of these and other possible con-

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tributions to Zimmerman’s acquittal, we, as linguists, examine the prosecution’s
training of their star witness, Rachel Jeantel, and the criticism of her linguistic
performance in the courtroom.5

Rachel Jeantel, then ninteen years old, was a friend of Martin. Her testimony
lasted almost six hours across two days of questioning. As the last person to speak
with Martin before he passed away, she heard much of the encounter between
him and Zimmerman up until their tussle on the ground. Despite her knowledge
of the encounter, her testimony was dismissed as difficult to understand and not
credible, and played no part in jury deliberations.6 Through a linguistic analysis
of Jeantel’s speech, comments from a juror, and a broader contextualization of
stigmatized speech forms and linguistic styles, we have argued elsewhere that
Jeantel’s dialect was found guilty before a verdict had even been reached in the
case.7 In this essay, we use our case study of Jeantel to launch a broader discussion
of linguistic prejudice, contending that the lack of acknowledgment of dialectal
variation has harmful social and legal consequences for speakers of stigmatized
dialects.8 We begin with an examination of the critiques leveled against Jeantel’s
speech and examine how the unintelligibility of such vernaculars extends to more
legal contexts. We expand this discussion to account for how such stigma also has
legal consequences in employment, housing, and schooling. Finalmente, we end with
an updated call to action, which includes the ongoing work the coauthors are do-
ing to address such harms, while also moving to inspire concerned citizens to act.

Jeantel, a trilingual speaker born and raised in Miami, received much backlash

for the way she spoke during the trial. Specifically, her use of African Ameri-
can Vernacular English (AAVE) contrasted with the socially unmarked variet-
ies of English demonstrated by the lawyers, the judges, and other witnesses, E
attracted the attention of many who subscribe to standard language ideologies.9
Such ideologies are what linguists describe as prescriptivist, emphasizing the “in-
correctness” or “ungrammaticality” of her speech, which departed from the rules
we learned as early as grade school.10 Contrary to popular belief, linguists have
shown that AAVE is a systematic, rule-governed dialect with regular phonological
(system of sounds), morphological (system of structure of words and relation-
ship among words), syntactic (system of sentence structure), semantic (system
of meaning), and lexical (structural organization of vocabulary items and other
information of English) patterns.11 Negative language attitudes about AAVE are
based on ideology, or ingrained beliefs about how one should speak and how lan-
guage should be used, rather than linguistic science, which has substantiated the
structure of the dialect across decades of research.12

We can observe Jeantel’s use of AAVE in an excerpt of her testimony, recount-

ing Martin’s realization that he was being followed by Zimmerman:

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152 (3) Summer 2023Sharese King & John R. Rickford

Excerpt from Courtroom Testimony of Rachel Jeantel (RJ), Day 1, Prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda
= zero
(BR) questioning, as recorded by the court reporter (CR) and annotated by the authors [
is/are copula, or zero plural, possessive, or third singular present tense -s]

RJ: He said he
of his daddy
fiancée

fiancée
∅

from–he–I asked him where he

at. An he told me he

∅

at the back

house, like in the area where his daddy fiancée–BY his daddy

∅

house. Like–I said, ‘Oh, you better keep running.’ He said, naw, he lost him.
∅
BR: Okay. Let me stop you a second. This–this lady [the Court Reporter] has got to
take everything down, so you make sure you’re–Okay. So after he said he lost him,
what happened then?

∅

by–um–the area that his daddy

RJ: And he say he–he
fian-
cée
house is, and I told him ‘Keep running.’ He–and he said, ‘Naw,’ he’ll just walk
faster. I’m like, ‘Oh oh.’And I–I ain’t complain, ’cause he was breathing hard, so I un-
derstand why. Soo

house is, his daddy

∅

BR: What–what happened after that?

RJ: And then, second

later–ah–Trayvon come and say, ‘Oh, shit!’

CR: [Unintelligible–requesting clarification] ‘Second later?’

∅
Dopo, Trayvon come and say, ‘Oh, shit!’

RJ: A couple second

BR: Okay. Let me interrupt you a second. When you say, the words, ‘Oh, shit,’ pardon
my language, who said that?

∅

RJ: Trayvon.

BR: He said it to YOU?

RJ: Yes.

BR: Okay. And after he used, pardon my language, he said, ‘Oh, shit,’ what happened
Poi?

RJ: The nigga

behind me.

CR: I’m sorry, what? (22:7–23:7)

∅

RJ: [Slowly, deliberately] The nigga’s behind–the nigga

behind me.

BR: Okay. He used the N word again and said the nigger is behind me?13

∅

This excerpt demonstrates several documented AAVE features including the
absence of -s in possessive and plural tense contexts, copula absence, and the use of
the controversial lexical item, the n-word.14 With respect to -s absence in posses-
sive contexts, we observe such a feature in a phrase like “daddy fiancée house”
where there is no -s after daddy or fiancée to mark possession. Absence of -s in plu-
ral contexts can be seen in phrases like “and then second later” or “couple second
later” where the noun second does not have an overt -s to mark plurality. Alongside
these examples, there is a “hallmark” feature of AAVE known as copula absence
where inflected “be” forms like is and are are absent. The AAVE copula follows im-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesLanguage on Trial

portant constraints such as rarely being deleted in the context of first person am or
in clauses where the copula occurs finally (Per esempio, “the area that his daddy
house is”). Jeantel deletes where expected in this dialect, as we can observe in sen-
∅
tences such as, “I asked him where he
at,” in which is is absent. We discuss these
examples to emphasize how these rule-governed AAVE patterns are employed in
∅
naturally occurring speech and to display their regularity in Jeantel’s speech.15

Without the awareness of AAVE’s systematicity or its legitimate status as a
rule-governed dialect, one might assume that the occurrence of such patterns in
someone’s speech marks both a lack of grammaticality and intelligence. Tuttavia,
as shown above, Jeantel displays a deep understanding of the dialect’s grammar
and its associated patterns. Unfair judgment of Jeantel’s language skills is demon-
strated in public comments on news articles published covering the trial:

She is a dullard, an idiot, an individual who can barely speak in coherent sentences.
–Jim Heron, Appalachian State16

This lady is a perfect example of uneducated urban ignorance. . . . When she spoke ev-
eryone hear, “mumble mumble duhhhh im a miami girl, duhhhhh.”–Sheena Scott17

Everyone, regardless of race, should learn to speak correct English, or at least under-
standable English. . . . I couldn’t understand 75% of what she was saying . . . that is just
ridicolous [sic]!’–Emma, comment on MEDIAite18

These comments expose the overwhelmingly negative response from the pub-
lic to Jeantel’s speech. The first exhibits the lack of understanding of such dialec-
tal variation, implying her speech was incoherent. The second demonstrates the
same, but also reveals the tropes that co-occur with discussions of racialized ver-
nacular speakers as being from the inner city, working class, and uneducated. Questo
coarticulation of discourses about the speaker and their assumed position in soci-
ety reinforces how stigma against vernacular speech is as much about how things
are said as it is about the speaker who says them.

Alongside the vitriol from the general public, evidence from jury members
suggested that not only was Jeantel’s speech misunderstood, but it was ultimately
disregarded in the more than sixteen hours of deliberation. With no access to the
court transcript, unless when requesting a specific playback, jurors did not have
the materials to reread speech that might have been unfamiliar to most if they
were not exposed to or did not speak the dialect. Specifically, juror B37 stated in an
interview with Anderson Cooper that “A lot of times [Jeantel] was using phras-
es I had never heard before,” indicating some degree of miscomprehension of
Jeantel’s speech. Further, when asked by Cooper if she found Jeantel credible, ju-
ror B37 hastily responded, “No.”19 Further support for miscomprehension across
jurors came from the court transcript itself. Specifically, the court transcriber
notes moments where jurors speak out of turn, ad esempio:

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152 (3) Summer 2023Sharese King & John R. Rickford

RJ: Yeah, now following him.

BR: Now following him. Okay. What I want you to do, Rachel Jeantel–

THE COURT [to a juror]: Just one second, please. Yes, ma’am?

A JUROR: He is now following me or–I’m sorry. I just didn’t hear.

THE COURT: Okay. Can we one more time, please, give that answer again.

RJ: He said, he told me now that a man is starting following him, is following him.

A JUROR: Again or is still?

THE COURT: Okay. You can’t ask questions.

A JUROR: Okay.

THE COURT: If you can’t understand, just raise your hand.

Here we observe further evidence that jurors needed moments of clarification
for Jeantel’s speech. Such confusion from the jurors, alongside the public com-
mentary on Jeantel’s use of AAVE, highlight the common lack of understanding in
public discourses of and about AAVE. They also raise questions about the poten-
tial consequences of producing stigmatized speech in legal settings and the role
that dialect plays in attributions of credibility or trustworthiness. Specifically, Questo
case opened up the following inquiries, which have taken a concerted effort from
linguists and members of contiguous fields to answer:

1) Are accented speakers like Rachel Jeantel more likely to be misheard and
viewed as less credible?

2) How intelligible is AAVE, or “accented” speech, in general?

3) What can we do to reduce these inequities among speakers of stigmatized
varieties?

While we do not provide complete answers to these questions, this essay sur-
veys the research that addresses them, examining the perception of accented
speech more broadly construed, while also expanding our consideration of the
sociopolitical consequences in legal contexts beyond criminal cases. In definitiva,
this specific case study showed us how the treatment of Jeantel as the defendant
on trial operates in a history of linguistic prejudice, discrimination, and misper-
ception of vernacular speech in legal contexts.

L istening to accented speech that is not your own can have processing costs

or the potential to be judged as less comprehensible.20 However, the extent
to which the lack of comprehensibility is the result of genuine misunder-
standings of accented speech, implicit biases about speakers with certain accents,

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesLanguage on Trial

or some combination of the two is unclear. Research in linguistics has established
that listeners have negative or positive ideologies about certain accents or dialects,
which can reinforce stereotypes about certain groups of speakers.21 The question of
how much these ideologies can influence perception has been explored in work by
linguist Donald Rubin in his investigation of race and the perception of accented-
ness.22 Specifically, his work suggests that the same voice can be evaluated different-
ly in terms of comprehension, whether presented with a picture of a white or Asian
face. Different perceptions of accentedness and comprehension for the same speech
signal, but different races, calls into question the objectivity of listening and its role in
interpreting racialized speakers’ voices as nonnormative, and therefore deficient.23
How might such biases interact with perceptions of credibility or presump-
tions of guilt? In low-stake situations, such as reading random trivia facts, Rif-
search has indicated that listeners were less likely to believe statements when pro-
duced by a nonnative speaker.24 However, when the stakes are higher and in the
context of legal settings, biases against specific dialects can affect presumptions
of guilt for suspects and witnesses. In particular, linguists John A. Dixon, Berenice
Mahoney, and Roger Cocks found that those who spoke in the less-prestigious and
more stigmatized regional accent tended to be negatively evaluated and rated as
guilty.25 Linguists Courtney Kurinec and Charles Weaver make similar observa-
tions in their 2019 article showing that jurors found AAVE-speaking defense wit-
nesses and defendants less credible and less educated than their General Amer-
ican English-speaking peers, ultimately yielding more guilty verdicts.26 Finally,
evidence from linguists Lara Frumkin and Anna Stone shows that even eyewit-
ness testimonies are evaluated differently with respect to credibility, accuracy,
and trustworthiness based on factors like the prestige of an accent, race, and age.27

T he unintelligibility or lack of understanding between dialects can also lead to

mistranscriptions, which not only result in the misrepresentation of speech
in legal documents, but also the misinterpretation of the facts in a case. A
demonstrate such injustices, we introduce three examples from English contexts.
The first example comes from vernacular Aboriginal English (AE) and displays how
unawareness of a particular word in this dialect affected the meaning of the sen-
tence. In a Central Australian case, the phrase “Charcoal Jack, properly his father,” ut-
tered by an AE-speaking witness, was transcribed by a court reporter unaware of the
dialectal differences as “Charcoal Jack, probably his father.”28 On the surface, such a
mistake looks benign, but an understanding of the phrase reveals that the speaker’s
intended usage reflects the specific meaning in AE where properly means real. Così,
the mistranscription introduces doubt via the use of the word probably where the ac-
tual usage of the term properly is meant to distinguish the biological father.

Building on this example, we turn to a mistranscription of a Jamaican Creole

speaker testifying in a police interview in the United Kingdom:

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152 (3) Summer 2023Sharese King & John R. Rickford

wen mi ier di bap bap,

mi drap a groun an den mi staat ron.

UN. When I heard the shots (bap, bap), I drop the gun, and then I run.

B. when I heard the bap bap [the shots], I fell to the ground and then I started to run.29

In this example, the verb drop is initially transcribed such that it has the direct ob-
ject gun. The introduction of the word gun for ground potentially attributes respon-
sibility to the speaker of having a weapon. Fortunately, the transcript was checked
against the recording by a Jamaican Creole interpreter who corrected the poten-
tially dangerous error.

A final example of such transcription errors comes from a 2015 police tran-
script of a recorded jail call from a speaker in East Palo Alto. The speaker, recorded
as saying “I’m fitna be admitted” was mistranscribed as “I’m fit to be admitted.”
The word fitna is a variation of finna, “fixing to,” and marks the immediate future
in AAVE. While this statement originally referred to the timing of admittance, IL
transcription now changes meaning to consent to being admitted. Such examples
illustrate that across these three dialects (Aboriginal English, Jamaican Creole, E
African American Vernacular English), lack of awareness of the structure of the
variety, be it in vocabulary or sentence structure, affects one’s ability to accurate-
ly transcribe the speech. Taylor Jones and colleagues recently showed that court
transcribers from Philadelphia, who were certified at accuracy rates of 95 per cento
and above, often mistranscribed and misparaphrased AAVE.30 Although they self-
reported at least some degree of comprehension with the dialect, their transcrip-
tion and paraphrase accuracy was 59.5 percent and 33 per cento, rispettivamente, at the
level of the full utterance, far below the threshold for acceptable accuracy. Such
work suggests that even for these experts, understanding and representing the va-
riety can be difficult; così, we must recognize the potential legal repercussions
when we do not account for vernacular intelligibility.

P rejudice against and stigma for such speech extends beyond the legal conse-

quences of speaking and hearing speech in criminal cases. Speakers of these
stigmatized dialects also suffer consequences that can infringe on their civil

liberties and access to services and resources.

Accent discrimination in the workplace can affect current and future employ-
ment opportunities.31 James Kahakua, a “university-trained meteorologist with
20 years of experience” and a speaker of Hawaiian Creole and English, was denied
a promotion to read weather reports on air in Hawaiʻi because his employer be-
lieved that his colleague, a thirty-year-old Caucasian man, had the better broad-
casting voice.32 And in Mandhare v. W.S. LaFargue Elementary School, Sulochana
Mandhare, an Indian immigrant who had been studying English for almost twen-
ty years, sued the school board for not renewing her contract as a school librarian

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesLanguage on Trial

because of her “heavy accent.”33 These are just two examples of many that show
what is on the line for speakers when they encounter the stigma of having accent-
ed speech.

Title VII of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission disallows em-
ployers from taking action on the basis of one’s accent, but protects their abili-
ty to do so if the employee’s accent affects job performance.34 The perception of
which accents interfere with job performance is often influenced by bias. Questo è,
what one might interpret as a linguistic impediment to the job might interact with
their beliefs, not facts, about what is considered unprofessional language and who
is considered “professional.” Thus, in deciding what is or is not an interference,
“even the most open-minded of courts may be subject to the unwritten laws of the
standard language ideology.”35 Further, the ambiguity around “accent” and “lan-
guage” does not make clear where the law stands in relation to dialects of one lan-
guage (such as English), rather than the differences between multiple languages.

In addition to employment discrimination, discrimination with respect to
housing rental has often involved linguistic prejudice. Through “linguistic pro-
filing,” the auditory equivalent to racial profiling, whereby listeners use auditory
cues to identify the race of a speaker, speakers have been denied opportunities to
see homes on the basis of their voices.36 In extensive work on housing discrimi-
nation, linguists Thomas Purnell, William Idsardi, and John Baugh have demon-
strated that not only do listeners try to identify a speaker’s dialect based on the
word “Hello,” but landlords also discriminated against prospective tenants on
the basis of their voice.37 That is, landlords were less likely to make appointments
with Black and Latinx callers in neighborhoods with higher populations of white
residents.38 The Fair Housing Act “prohibits housing discrimination on the basis
of race, colore, national origin, religion, sex (including gender, gender identity, sex-
ual orientation, and sexual harassment), familial status, and disability.”39 Howev-
er, people are not always aware that cues in a voice can be used to map a person to
such demographic categories.

Finalmente, having shown how linguistic injustices can generate both employment
and housing discrimination, we turn to examine a pivotal case in the history of
Black language in education. In King v. Ann Arbor, the plaintiffs were Black pre-
school and elementary students asserting that they spoke a Black vernacular or
dialect and were denied equal participation in their instructional programs as the
school had not taken appropriate measures to account for such a language barri-
er.40 This case was the first to argue successfully on behalf of speakers of Black
English, and resulted in the judge ordering the district to identify Black English
speakers in the schools, teach them how to read Standard English, and improve
teachers’ negative attitudes toward their speech.41 Intuitively, we can imagine
that the lack of recognition of Black English in schooling impedes the learning
experience, but without explicit instruction on these vernaculars and the reach

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of their stigma, the broader society remains unaware of the vulnerability speak-
ing such a dialect can pose in a range of areas including education, housing, E
employment.

W e have considered how often speakers of stigmatized dialects are mis-

heard and perceived as less credible, that accented speech can affect
processing, and that such effects can be tied to negative language ide-
ologies or negative attitudes about certain groups of speakers. Let us now address
the question of what can be done to reduce these inequities among speakers of
stigmatized varieties. In our previous work, we have suggested how linguists and
citizens could play a more active role in combating linguistic prejudice in legal
systems.42 While our work has focused on the dialect AAVE, our suggestions can
be extended to other vernaculars. We revisit this list through a new lens of the
practical challenges to reducing these inequities, as well as examples of how we
have tried to implement such solutions since the publication of our study:

io. Oppose efforts to preemptively keep African Americans and members of
other marginalized groups that are overrepresented in the carceral system
from serving on juries, especially when their knowledge of linguistic differ-
ences could be beneficial to the task. After all, a jury should be reflective of
one’s peers. But as we have made clear, discrimination through jury selec-
tion is not uncommon: “In Foster v. Chatman (2016), the U.S. Supreme Court
held that prosecutors purposefully discriminated against a Georgia man
facing the death penalty when they dismissed two Black jurors during jury
selection.” On the other hand, “The Court’s narrow decision was largely
based on the egregious nature of the Batson violations and, Perciò, may do
little to deter the discriminatory use of race in jury selection.”43 We can also
consider the criminal case of Box v. Superior Court where a potential Black ju-
ror was dismissed on the basis of pronouncing police as PO-lice, piuttosto che
po-LICE, with stress on the first syllable rather than the last.44 This pronun-
ciation is a feature of AAVE. Tuttavia, due to bias against AAVE, the prose-
cutor claimed the pronunciation was evidence the juror had an “unfriendly
feeling” toward law enforcement.

ii. Advocate for and produce more research on the perception and processing
of stigmatized voices in institutions like schools, courtrooms, and hospi-
tals. Research in this vein is burgeoning, with researchers assessing court
reporters’ understanding and transcription of vernacular speech, as well as
researchers evaluating bidialectal Black speakers’ use of MAE (Mainstream
American English) or AAVE when providing a narrative as one would in an
alibi.45 Expanding research on the study of stigmatized dialects allows us to
investigate which aspects of the dialect are difficult for nonfluent listeners to

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interpret, while also uncovering more about the relationship between per-
ception and linguistic biases.

iii. Agree to help with cases or projects in the legal system that involve speak-
ers of stigmatized varieties. Native speakers of AAVE and linguists familiar
with AAVE should offer to serve as an expert witness or participate in build-
ing cases for speakers whose speech in question is AAVE. For instance, Sha-
rese King has accepted invitations to speak with law firms or specific courts,
such as the Fourth District in the Minnesota Judicial Branch and the Habe-
as Corpus Resource Center in California, about linguistic prejudice in legal
contesti. This direct engagement has allowed us to educate lawyers, judg-
es, and court reporters on the legitimacy of the variety, while also inform-
ing them of the social and legal consequences of producing such speech in
legal contexts and beyond.

iv. Allo stesso modo, advocate for speakers of stigmatized varieties like AAVE to be
heard in the courts and beyond, while acknowledging how raciolinguistic
ideologies affect one’s ability to listen and accept information from accent-
ed speakers.46

v. Offer help to acquire “standardized” varieties of English for speakers inter-
ested in commanding both their vernacular and MAE. Such multilingualism
can help them be more upwardly mobile. We acknowledge the controversy
of such an offer, since one should be wary of solutions that put the burden
on the victims to conform to the linguistic norms of those in power. We also
recognize that speaking the standardized dialect will not fix all the injustices
such speakers face, nor shield them from the injustice of racial prejudice.
But it may alleviate such injustices to some extent, and we should prioritize
individual speakers’ agency to decide what is the best option for themselves.
vi. Advocate for more vernacular speakers to have the option to use interpret-
ing services in court settings to reduce the risk of misunderstandings. Noi
emphasize the word option as we understand that some speakers may reject
the notion given that they may not be aware of how their language varieties
are subject to misunderstandings in comparison to other English speakers in
the courtroom. Further, we acknowledge that the position of the translator
would need to be filled by someone who is informed about the structure of
the language, including regional variation. As above, we prioritize speaker
autonomy to choose which solution they feel most comfortable with.
vii. We have advocated for jurors receiving transcripts, while also having lin-
guists check these transcripts for accuracy. King’s ongoing work teaching
Minnesota court reporters about AAVE and the social political consequenc-
es for speaking such a variety has raised a new awareness of this need and
the challenges to implementation. Specifically, court transcribers noted the

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difficulty of converting their work into legible transcripts for jury members
in a short period of time. Such work could prolong the time between law-
yers’ closing statements and jury deliberation. Inoltre, court transcribers
not only expressed their lack of knowledge about the grammar, but a lack of
understanding of how to represent the variety. These conversations made us
aware that court transcribers may need linguists’ help in developing a uni-
versal coding system for transcribing AAVE in these contexts.

viii. “Stay woke” or informed about the racial disparities experienced by the
most marginalized in society, be it from linguistic prejudice to health ineq-
uities to unfair policing of such communities. Consider when and how such
injustices interact. In addition to increasing awareness, we must be vigilant
in spreading such knowledge and not keeping these conversations in the
halls of the ivory towers. Such work includes engaging in different forms of
communication with family and friends, or with the public via social media
platforms, linguistic podcasts such as The Vocal Fries and Spectacular Vernac-
ular, or newspaper editorials.47

ix. Lastly, we must evaluate our own linguistic prejudice and how it materializ-
es in both personal and professional settings. Further, we must assess how
specific norms in the workplace might devalue some voices versus others
and work to address them.

While the broader public is just becoming aware of the notion, linguistic prej-
udice and its impacts are being felt widely by communities of speakers whose lin-
guistic practices have been stigmatized. Recognizing the consequences of preju-
dice in criminal justice, employment, housing, and education can help us to ad-
dress the unnecessary harms speakers of AAVE and other vernacular speakers face
in society. We believe that the multifaceted solution to reducing such inequities
will require acceptance and compassion for an increasingly multilingual society,
but also the courage to enact such empathy through research, policy, and sus-
tained education on the issue.

about the authors

Sharese King is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Lin-
guistics at the University of Chicago. Her research explores how African Americans
use language to construct multidimensional identities and how these constructions
are perceived and evaluated across different listener populations. She has published
in journals such as Annual Review of Linguistics and Journal of Sociolinguistics.

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John R. Rickford, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2017, is the J. E. Wal-
lace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities, Bass University Fellow
in Undergraduate Education, E, by courtesy, Professor in Education Emeritus at
Stanford University. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and
the British Academy. He is the author of Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (con
Russell John Rickford, 2000), African American, Creole and Other Vernacular Englishes: UN
Bibliographic Resource (with Julie Sweetland, Angela E. Rickford, and Thomas Grano,
2012), Variation, Versatility, and Change in Sociolinguistics and Creole Studies (2019), E
Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language (2022).

endnotes

1 John R. Rickford and Sharese King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel
Jeantel (and Other Vernacular Speakers) in the Courtroom and Beyond,” Language 92
(4) (2016): 948–988, https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0078.

2 Protestors and activists, as well as formal groups such as the National Bar Association,
called for the Ferguson Police Department and the Missouri Department of Pub-
lic Safety to hold Darren Wilson accountable for Michael Brown’s death. See Paul
Hampel, “African-American Lawyers Association Seeks Revocation of Darren Wil-
son’s Police Officer License,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dicembre 8, 2014, https://www
.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/national-lawyers-association-seeks-revocation
-of-darren-wilson-s-peace/article_524dde5b-d5cb-5794-8a77-269f03f60382.html. For an
overview of the protests and the Justice Department’s response, see Jaime Chandler and
Skylar Young, “Justice Delayed,” U.S. News: A World Report, ottobre 15, 2014, https://
www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/jamie-chandler/2014/10/15/st-louis-ferguson
-missouri-police-must-be-held-accountable-for-killings.

3 What began as a hashtag in response to the acquittal of Zimmerman grew into a move-
ment and nonprofit organization. More information can be found on https://black
livesmatter.com.

4 Karen Grisby Bates, “A Look Back at Trayvon Martin’s Death, and the Movement It
Ispirato,” Code Switch, NPR, Luglio 31, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch
/2018/07/31/631897758/a-look-back-at-trayvon-martins-death-and-the-movement-it
-inspired.

5 Mark S. Brodin, “The Murder of Black Males in a World of Non-Accountability: The Sur-
real Trial of George Zimmerman for the Killing of Trayvon Martin,” Howard Law Journal
59 (3) (2016): 765–785, https://lira.bc.edu/work/ns/f2c96856-9e22-48ce-b292-52065e11d3d8.
6 Lisa Bloom, Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Con-

tinue to Repeat It (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2014).

7 Rickford and King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial.” We draw on Walt Wolfram
and Natalie Schilling’s definition of dialect as “a neutral label to refer to any variety
of a language that is shared by a group of speakers. Languages are invariably mani-
fested through their dialects, and to speak a language is to speak some dialect of that
language.” Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling, American English: Dialects and Variation
(Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2016), 2.

8 In sociolinguistics, variation, language variety, or simply variety refers to differences in speech
patterns, such as dialect, register, and general style. Standardized English is one of many

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variations or varieties of English. For more on varieties in sociolinguistics, see Braj
B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson, eds., The Handbook of World Englishes
(Malden, Massa.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).

9 We recognize that there are other variations on the term African American Vernacular
English, including African American Language (AAL) (Lanehart) and African Amer-
ican English (AAE) (Verde). Tuttavia, in referencing AAVE, vernacular refers to the
variety that is most different from standard or standardized English (Lippi-Green).
See Sonja Lanehart, The Oxford Handbook of African American Language (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 2015); Lisa J. Verde, African American English: A Linguistic Introduc-
zione (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Rosina Lippi-Green, English
with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States, 2nd ed. (Abingdon-
on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2012).

10 Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk, and Rachel Elizabeth Weissler, “Lan-
guage Standardization & Linguistic Subordination,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Estate 2023):
18–35, https://www.amacad.org/publication/language-standardization-linguistic-sub
ordination; and Wolfram and Schilling, American English.

11 Verde, African American English.
12 Walt Wolfram, A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech (Washington, D.C.: Cen-
ter for Applied Linguistics, 1969); Ralph W. Fasold, Tense Marking in Black English: A Lin-
guistic and Social Analysis (Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1972); William
Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); and John Baugh, Black Street Speech: Its History, Struc-
ture, and Survival (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973).
13 Rickford and King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial.”
14 While we follow a long tradition within linguistics of referring to these features as “ab-
sence” by contrast with their required presence in written Standard English and oth-
er varieties, we propose instead that we refer to them as “intrinsic” features of AAVE,
which does not frame the standardized options as the norm. See William Labov, Paul
Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis, A Study of the Nonstandard English of Negro and
Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City: Final Report, Cooperative Research Project No. 3288
(Washington, D.C.: United States Office of Education, 1968); and Anne H. Charity
Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, Talking College: Making Space for Black
Language Practices in Higher Education (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2022).
15 While this brief analysis focuses on Jeantel’s speech, some have criticized the discourse
strategies used by Bernie De LaRionda, referring to his repetition as a kind of “ven-
triloquy” that further othered her speech as peculiar or deviant. See Alyvia Walters,
“Race, Language, and Performance in American Legal Space: Rachel Jeantel, Testimo-
nial Truth, and the George Zimmerman Trial” (master’s thesis, Georgetown Universi-
ty, 2018), https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1050773.

16 Evan S. Benn and Audra D. S. Burch, “Trayvon Martin’s Childhood Friend Back on the
Witness Stand in Zimmerman Trial,” Miami Herald, Giugno 26, 2013, https://archive.ph
/20130815164012/http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/26/3471243_alternate-juror
-dismissed-in-trayvon.html.

17 Marc Caputo, “Zimmerman Trial Witness to CNN: ‘Nigga,’ ‘Cracka’ Not Racist Terms,"
Miami Herald, Luglio 16, 2013, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/trayvon
-martin/article1953292.html.

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18 Evan McMurry, “Democrat Rips ‘Black English’: Black Leaders ‘Have To Stop Making
Excuses’ for Rachel Jeantel’s Speech,” MEDIAite, Luglio 2, 2013, http://www.mediaite.com
/tv/democrat-rips-black-english-on-fox-black-leaders-have-to-stop-making-excuses
-for-rachel-jeantels-speech.

19 “Juror B37 Speaks Exclusively with Anderson Cooper: ‘I Felt Sorry for Rachel Jeantel,’”
AC360, CNN, Luglio 15, 2013, https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/15/juror-speaks
-exclusively-to-andersoncooper-i-felt-sorry-for-rachel-jeantel.

20 Ann R. Bradlow and Tessa Bent, “Perceptual Adaptation to Non-Native Speech,” Cog-
nition 106 (2) (2008): 707–729, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.04.005; E
Charlotte R. Vaughn, “Expectations about the Source of a Speaker’s Accent Affect Ac-
cent Adaptation,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 145 (5) (2019): 3218–3232,
https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5108831.

21 Dennis Richard Preston, ed., Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Vol. 1 (Amsterdam: John

Benjamins Publishing, 1999).

22 Donald L. Rubin, “Nonlanguage Factors Affecting Undergraduates’ Judgments of
Non-Native English-Speaking Teaching Assistants,” Research in Higher Education 33 (1992):
511–531, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00973770.

23 Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa,“Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies
and Language Diversity in Education,” Harvard Educational Review 85 (2) (2015): 149–171,
https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149.

24 Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar, “Why Don’t We Believe Non-Native Speakers? The In-
fluence of Accent on Credibility,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (6) (2010):
1093–1096.

25 John A. Dixon, Berenice Mahoney, and Roger Cocks, “Accents of Guilt? Effects of Re-
gional Accent, Race, and Crime Type on Attributions of Guilt,” Journal of Language and
Social Psychology 21 (2) (2002): 162–168, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1177/02627
X02021002004.

26 Courtney A. Kurinec and Charles A. Weaver III, “Dialect on Trial: Use of African Amer-
ican Vernacular English Influences Juror Appraisals,” Psychology, Crime & Legge 25 (8)
(2019): 803–828, https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2019.1597086.

27 Lara Frumkin, “Influences of Accent and Ethnic Background on Perceptions of Eye-
witness Testimony,” Psychology, Crime & Legge 13 (3) (2007): 317–331, https://doi.org
/10.1080/10683160600822246; and Lara A. Frumkin and Anna Stone, “Not All Eyewit-
nesses Are Equal: Accent Status, Race and Age Interact to Influence Evaluations of Tes-
timony,” Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice 18 (2) (2020): 123–145, https://doi.org/10
.1080/15377938.2020.1727806.

28 Herold Koch, “Nonstandard English in an Aboriginal Land Claim,” in Cross-Cultural En-
counters: Communication and Miscommunication,” ed. John Pride (Melbourne: River Seine,
1985), 176–95; and Diana Eades, Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process (Bristol, England:
Multilingual Matters, 2010).

29 Celia Brown-Blake and Paul Chambers, “The Jamaican Creole Speaker in the UK Criminal
Justice System,” International Journal of Speech, Language & the Law 14 (2) (2007): 269–294.
30 Taylor Jones, Jessica Rose Kalbfeld, Ryan Hancock, and Robin Clark, “Testifying While
Black: An Experimental Study of Court Reporter Accuracy in Transcription of Afri-

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can American English,” Language 95 (2) (2019): e216–e252, https://doi.org/10.1353/lan
.2019.0042.

31 Lippi-Green, English with an Accent.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Rosina Lippi-Green, “Accent, Standard Language Ideology, and Discriminatory Pre-
text in the Courts,” Language in Society 23 (2) (1994): 178, https://doi.org/10.1017/S004
7404500017826.

36 John Baugh, “Linguistic Profiling,” Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa
and the Americas, ed. Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha F. Ball, and Arthur
K. Spears (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2003), 155–168. Also see John
Baugh, “Linguistic Profiling across International Geopolitical Landscapes,” Dædalus 152
(3) (Estate 2023): 167–177, https://www.amacad.org/publication/linguistic-profiling
-across-international-geopolitical-landscapes.

37 Thomas Purnell, William Idsardi, and John Baugh, “Perceptual and Phonetic Experi-
ments on American English Dialect Identification,” Journal of Language and Social Psychol-
ogy 18 (1) (1999): 10–30, https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X99018001002.

38 Ibid.
39 NOI. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Fair Housing Rights and Obliga-
zioni,” https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/fair_housing_
rights_and_obligations (accessed July 6, 2023); and Civil Rights Act of 1968, Pub. l. No.
90-284, 82 Stat. 73 (1968).

40 John Chambers Jr., ed., Black English: Educational Equity and the Law (Ann Arbor, Mich.:
Karoma Publishers, Inc., 1983); Geneva Smitherman, ed., Black English and the Education
of Black Children and Youth: Proceedings of the National Invitational Symposium on the King Deci-
sion (Detroit: Center for Black Studies, Wayne State University, 1981); and Marcia Farr
Whiteman, ed., Reactions to Ann Arbor: Vernacular Black English and Education (Washington,
D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1980).

41 Walt Wolfram notes that the judge ordered the teachers to be trained in the dialect of the
children. Infatti, Wolfram and Donna Christian prepared materials for that training
so that they could identify the speakers. See Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Dia-
logue on Dialects, Dialect and Educational Equity Series (Washington, D.C.: Center for
Applied Linguistics, 1979); and Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Exploring Dialects,
Dialect and Educational Equity Series (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguis-
tic, 1979).

42 Rickford and King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial.”
43 “Foster v. Chapman [sic]: Excluding Jurors Based on Race,” Constitutional Law Reporter,
https://constitutionallawreporter.com/2016/06/02/foster-v-chatman-excluding-jurors
-based-race (accessed July 6, 2023).

44 Christopher Box v. The Superior Court of San Diego County (2022).
45 Jones, Kalbfeld, Hancock, and Clark, “Testifying While Black”; Sharese King, Charlotte
Vaughn, and Adam Dunbar, “Dialect on Trial: Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Perceptions

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesLanguage on Trial

of AAVE and MAE Codeswitching” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2022),
https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/45378; and Kurinec and Weaver,
“Dialect on Trial.”

46 Flores and Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness”; and H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, E
Arnetha F. Ball, eds., Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016).

47 For instance, see John Rickford’s appearance on The Vocal Fries in 2022, which includes a
discussion of Rachel Jeantel and Trayvon Martin. The Vocal Fries Pod: The Podcast about
Linguistic Discrimination, “The Rickford Files,” July 22, 2022, https://radiopublic.com
/the-vocal-fries-GOoXdO/s1!986ee; Spectacular Vernacular at Slate, https://slate.com
/podcasts/spectacular-vernacular (accessed July 6, 2023); Sharese King and Katherine
D. Kinzler, “Bias against African American English as a Pillar of American Racism,” The
Los Angeles Times, Luglio 14, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-14
/african-american-english-racism-discrimination-speech; and Anne H. Charity Hud-
ley and Jamaal Muwwakkil’s letter to the editor, cited in Sewell Chan, “Opinion: About
That Page of Pro-Trump Letters,” The Los Angeles Times, novembre 21, 2020, https://
www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-11-21/letters-page-trump-voters-aftermath.

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193

152 (3) Summer 2023Sharese King & John R. Rickford
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