Language Communities in the US

Catalog description

This course explores and analyzes how language usage (dialect, "accent," bilingualism) relates to social perceptions and attitudes. Ideas on language contribute to the emergence of communities, but they can also lead to language-based prejudice and discrimination in our country. Emphasis is on how language-based attitudes may lead to bias, discrimination, and profiling based on race and ethnicity, social class, gender, and nationality/citizenship (for instance, when people mistakenly connect accents with assumptions about individual personality or categories of people). Students will also study how individuals and communities use language variation to resist these kinds of bias and profiling. Examples will be drawn from current events and mainstream media, including film, television, the internet and social media. Overall, this course fosters an informed and reasoned openness to, and understanding of, difference.