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Origin of linguistic discrimination

Linguistic discrimination appeared before the term was established. During 1990s, scholars started to explore the connection between racism and languages. Linguistic discrimination is a part of racism when it was first studied. The first case found that helped establish the term was in New Zealand, where white colonizers judge the native population, Māori, by judging their language. Linguistic discrimination may originate from fixed institution and stereotypes of the elite class. Elites reveals strong racism through writing, speaking, and other communication methods, providing a basis of discrimination. Their way of speaking the language is considered the higher class, emphasizing the idea that how one speaks a language is related to the social, economic, and political status.In that concept, people bind certain bias with the way how people speak. Certain way of speaking may represent how the socioeconomic and political condition of this person is.

Later, linguistic ideology is introduced to sociolinguistics to address linguistic discrination directly rather under the category of racism. Linguistic ideology is defined as the conception or feeling that how a person speaks a certain language can imply social status. This concept further demonstrates that linguistic discrimination derives from the stereotype and cognition of how certain population speak the language.

Impact of linguistic discrimination

Linguistic discrimination is a form of racism. Impact of linguistic discrimination ranges from physical violence to mental trauma, and then to extinction of a language. Victims of linguistic discrimination may experience physical bullying in school and a decrease in earnings in job. In countries where a variety of languages exist, it is hard for people to obtain basic social service such as education and health care since they do not understand the language. Mentally, they may be ashamed or feel guilty to speak their home language. People who speak another language that is not the mainstream language does not feel social acceptance. Researches show that countries with assimilation policies result in higher stress. They are forced to accept this mainstream language and foreign culture.According to stats, every two weeks an endangered language will be extinct. This is because on the country level, linguistically marginalized population must learn the common language in order to obtain resource. Their opportunities are very limited when they cannot communicate in a way everyone else understands.

Linguistic Discrimination in English.

English, being the language that most countries speak in the world, experiences a lot of linguistic discrimination when people from different linguistic backgrounds meet. Regional difference and native language may have an impact on how people speak the language. For example, many non-native speakers in other countries fail to pronounce the “th” sound. Instead, they use "s" sound, which is more common in other languages, to replace. “Thank” becomes “sank,” and “mother” becomes “mozer.” In Russian-English pronunciation, “Hi, where were you” may be pronounced like “Hi, veir ver you” since it is closer to Russian. It may be considered inappropriate ways to speak the language and be ridiculed by native speakers. Research had shown that these linguistic discrimination may lead to bullying and violence in the worst case. However, linguistic discrimination may not always be bad bias or causing superiority. A mixed pronunciation of different languages may also lead to mixed reactions. Some people who are native to the language may find these mixes to be special and good, while some others are unfriendly with these speakers. Nonetheless, all these are stereotypes of certain languages and may lead to cognition bias. Former president Donald Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, was harshly mocked and insulted on the internet due to her Slovenian accent of speaking English.

In Canada[edit]

Francophones in Canada[edit]

This section needs expansion with: explanations, examples and additional citations. You can help by adding to it. (February 2021)

Canada was first occupied by French people in the history. Later, British colonizers took the control of Canada, while the influence of French culture and languages were still enormous. Historically, the Canadian federation and provinces have discriminated against Canada's French-speaking population, during some periods in the history of Canada, they have treated its members as second-class citizens, and they have favored the members of the more powerful English-speaking population. This form of discrimination has resulted in or contributed to many developments in Canadian history, including the rise of the Quebec sovereignty movement, Quebecois nationalism, the Lower Canada Rebellion, the Red River Rebellion, a proposed Acadia province, extreme poverty and low socio-economic status of the French Canadian population, low francophone graduation rates as a result of the outlawing of francophone schools across Canada, differences in average earnings between francophones and anglophones in the same positions, fewer chances of being hired or promoted for francophones, and many other things.

Mock Spanish

Mock Spanish is a loaded term used to describe a variety of Spanish-inspired phrases used by speakers of English. It include the English accent of speaking Spanish and the modification of Spanish phrasese. Puerto Rican are concerned whether they have an accent in speaking Spanish. However, Americans may concern less or does not concern their accent when they are speaking Spanish. Americans would speak Spanish in exaggerated American accent. Although short training will allow Americans to speak in a more original accent, people refuse to do so, and instead intentionally maintain this attitude toward Spanish. Furthermore, people would mix English with Spanish and modify standard Spanish to create jokes. For example, "hasta mañana" is modified to "hasta banana." Another example is "No problemo." while "problemo" is not a word in Spanish. This is considered an inappropriate joke that shows linguistic racism to Spanish. Many Spanish speaker reflect that mock Spanish is offensive. Jane Hill believes that this intentional jocular and disrecpectful accent and modification represents "elevation of whiteness" and direct racism. Since white people consider Spanish-speaking people to be lower in social status, they refuse to respect the language.

Asians

Linguistic discrimination against Asians is still a topic under studied. A scholar in paper includes a short story that an Asian reporter was asked whether she can speak English every time she meets a stranger. Everyone was assuming that she may not understand English because she has an Asian appearance. Most Americans assume Asian cannot speak English. Among Asian immigrants, 60% are able to speak English fluently. The proportion is much lower for new immigrants. However, this low English literacy level and lack of translation discourages many Asian immigrants to obtain access social services, such as health care. Asian immigrants, especially younger students, experience a language barrier. They are forced to learn a new language.

Chinglish is a common point of attack. It is the mixture of Chinese and English. It is considered a confusion of Chinese and English grammar, accompanied by Chinese accent. An example would be "Open the light," since "open" and "turn on" are the same word ("开") in Chinese. Another example would be "Yes, I have." This is the literal translation from Chinese to English, and it is hard for Chinese people to learn this quickly. Speaking Chinglish may result in racial discrimination, while this is only the nuance between Chinese and English grammar.

Black Americans[edit]

Due to historical reasons such as slavery and racial discrimination, some African Americans derive their own way of speaking English. Because they speak a particular non-standard variety of English which is often seen as substandard, they are often targets of linguicism. AAVE is often perceived by members of mainstream American society as indicative of low intelligence or limited education, and as with many other non-standard dialects and especially creoles, it is usually called "lazy" or "bad" English. Also because grammar of AAVE may not be the same with standard English, people may consider them as a poor imitation of standard English rather than a specific new language.

AAVE usually contains words and phrases that have a different meaning from their original meaning in standard English. Pronunciation also differs from standard English. Some phrases require sufficient cultural background to understand. From the grammatic aspect, AAVE shows more complex structures that allow speaker to express a wider range with more specificity. However, since the majority of AAVE speakers is African Americans, they easily become target of discrimination due to the long exisiting racism and white supremacy.

The linguist John McWhorter has described this particular form of linguicism as particularly problematic in the United States, where non-standard linguistic structures are often deemed "incorrect" by teachers and potential employers in contrast to other countries such as Morocco, Finland and Italy where diglossia (the ability to switch between two or more dialects or languages) is an accepted norm, and non-standard usage in conversation is seen as a mark of regional origin, not of intellectual capacity or achievement.

In the 1977 Ann Arbor court case, known as the Ann Arbor Decision, AAVE was compared against standard English to determine how much of an education barrier existed for children that had been primarily raised with AAVE. The assigned linguists determined that the differences, stemming from a history of racial segregation, were significant enough for the children to receive supplementary teaching to better understand standard English.

For example, a black American who uses a typical AAVE sentence such as "He be comin' in every day and sayin' he ain't done nothing" may be judged as having a deficient command of grammar, whereas, in fact, such a sentence is constructed based on a complex grammar which is different from that of standard English, not a degenerate form of it. A listener may misjudge the user of such a sentence to be unintellectual or uneducated. The speaker may be intellectually capable, educated, and proficient in standard English, but chose to say the sentence in AAVE for social and sociolinguistic reasons such as the intended audience of the sentence, a phenomenon known as code switching. Currently, AAVE is unique and organized enough to be a new language that derive from English but becomes its own new language. It shares many similar characteristics with standard English, but it has its own complexity with African American culture and history. Nonetheless, AAVE is only used in non-formal situations. It is not uncommon for AAVE speakers to speak in formal and standard English under formal situations.

Reports have shown that black workers who sound more "black" earn on average 12% less than their peers (data in 2009). In education, students who speak in AAVE are educated by their teachers that AAVE is not proper or is not correct. According to a survey, when a person speaks in AAVE, listeners tend to believe that the speaker is an African American from North America and is more related to adjectives such as poor, uneducated, and unintelligent. By merely sounding like black, a person may be assumed to be in certain image.

• China: In the 2000s the Chinese government began promoting the use of Mandarin Chinese in areas where Cantonese is spoken. Cantonese is a regional dialect in Guangdong, Hong Kong and nearby regions, and Mandarin is the major language spoken in majority of China. Chinese government intended to advocate inter-regional communication by educating Mandarin rather than in Cantonese throughout the country. In 2010 this gave rise to the Guangzhou Television Cantonese controversy. Guangzhou Television once proposed that all television program were to be in Mandarin rather than in Cantonese. This has also been a point of contention with Hong Kong, which is located in the general area where Cantonese is spoken. Cantonese has become a means of asserting Hong Kong's political identity as separate from mainland China. Later, this movement of abolishing this regional dialect was proven to be fake.

• During the time when Korea was annexed by Japan from 1910 to 1945, Japanese government forced Korean people to learn and speak Japanese. They are forced to take Japnese names and the order of names in Japanese. In 1911, Joseon Education Decree is enacted. Joseon Education Decree is interpreted to have the purpose of obliterating all Korean cultural and spiritual independence to keep Koreans colonized forever. Japanese was required to teach in schools.
• In south Asia, more than 800 languages are spoken, while only about 40% of them have language education. Linguistic minorities do not have same education opportunities.
• Pakistan has more than 60 languages existing in its territory. There are a total of six major languages which are Urdu, Punjabi, Pushto, Sindhi, Balochi, and Hindko. All of them have a ethnolinguistic group. Currently, these large ethnolinguistic groups are demaning for a separate province based on languages.

Linguistic discrimination in governance[edit]

As colonial languages are used as the languages of governance and commerce in many colonial and postcolonial states, locals who only speak indigenous languages can be disenfranchised. By forcing the locals to speak the colonizers' language, colonizers assimilate the indigenous people and hold colonies longer. For example, when representative institutions were introduced to the Algoma region in what is now modern-day Canada, the local returning officer only accepted the votes of individuals who were enfranchised, which required indigenous peoples to "read and write fluently... [their] own and another language, either English or French". This caused political parties to increasingly identify with settler perspectives rather than indigenous ones.

It is a common approach for colonizers to set language limitations. Japanese government in 1910 enacted decrees in colony Korea to completely eliminate existing Korean culture and language. All schools must teach Japanese and Hanja. By doing so, Japanese government was able to make Korea more dependent on Japan and colonize Korea longer.

Even today, many postcolonial states continue to use colonial languages in their public institutions, even though these languages are not spoken by the majority of their residents. For example, the South African justice system still relies primarily on English and Afrikaans as its primary languages, even though most South Africans, particularly Black South Africans, speak indigenous languages. In these situations, the use of colonial languages can present barriers to participation in public institution.