Discrimination’s ‘Back Door’: Tackling Language Bias on Campus

W hen Ashley Lawson first came to North Carolina State University, she was careful not to say “bowl” for “boil” or “holler” for, “you know, a dip in the ground.” In 2014, the freshman from Prestonville, in rural Stokes County in the state’s western Piedmont, was surprised to even be at N.C. State — and on the prestigious Park Scholarship, a full ride for four years. She was careful to tone down her highland cadence, and to avoid certain words and expressions common to her region, like hit (for it) and dicker (for negotiate), for fear people would think she was stupid.

That changed after Ms. Lawson, who wants to teach math in a rural community one day, signed up for a service project that takes students to the mountains of western North Carolina to lead workshops about dialects for middle- and high-schoolers. The project included a required course on language diversity in North Carolina. “I fell head over heels in love with it,” she says.

What Ms. Lawson loved, and what Stephany Dunstan, who taught the course and led the service trip, hoped to impart, is the realization that everyone has a dialect, and that your own isn’t linguistically inferior to any other. If some dialects have more prestige than others, it’s only because certain arbiters — classroom teachers, newscasters, TV sitcom directors — have assigned them that status. And while mocking people for their race, ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic position is widely seen as taboo, mocking a dialect or an accent is still tolerated, if unwittingly, at colleges and in society.

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Ms. Dunstan co-founded and is a co-director of Educating the Educated: a University-Wide Language Diversity Initiative at N.C. State. In her course, she uses the textbook English With an Accent, by Rosina Lippi-Green. It calls language bias the “back door to discrimination.”

“We talk a lot about racial discrimination,” explains Ms. Lawson, who is now a junior. “We talk about judging people based on their socioeconomic status” and on other, more visibly identifiable factors. But people rarely talk about language, even though it is socially stratified in the United States, as in most countries.

“When I came to college,” Ms. Lawson says, “people kept telling me how strong my accent was.” She thought, “Wow, y’all need to come home with me and hear how other people sound.” She was doing what linguists call code-switching — toning down her accent in favor of a standardized English considered to be more acceptable.

But since language varies across the country, the “standard” in a Detroit classroom is not the same as the standard in the Carolinas. When students begin to realize that, they understand that the so-called standard is simply an invention of a given society.

“To make judgments about people for not speaking what we think is the standard is a little bit ridiculous,” says Ms. Dunstan.

I n workshops and talks about language diversity, Ms. Dunstan and the other directors of Educating the Educated frame the discussion around dialects of North Carolina. “We talk about some myths and some truths about language,” says Ms. Dunstan. Two of those truths are that all dialects have grammar and patterns, and that no dialect, even the one used in the classroom, is scientifically superior.

“We can tell people that,” explains Ms. Dunstan, “and they will say, ‘I know that’s not true. I know what bad grammar is; I’ve heard it.’ " But even what many people consider “bad” speech, like the drawn-out “lazy i” in a Southern drawl, or the inflected be in African-American Vernacular English (Veronica be playing basketball after school), has rules for when it can and cannot be used.

“A lot of us growing up in the South get told, it’s lazy to say ah instead of i,” Ms. Dunstan continues. “People stop to think about it, and they say, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t say rahhhs instead of rice, but I would say rahhhz instead of rise, and why is that?’ "

As students examine their own speech, they begin to recognize its patterns and rules. In fact, most students in North Carolina will say i before a “voiceless” consonant, where the vocal cords don’t vibrate when the consonant is pronounced (like the s sound in rice), but they’ll say ahhh before a “voiced” consonant, where they do (as in the z sound in rise).

North Carolina State University has a long tradition of sociolinguistic research. Walt Wolfram, a sociolinguist and another of Educating the Educated’s directors, established the North Carolina Language and Life Project in 1993 to study the state’s varied languages, dialects, and accents. Its research includes studies of Outer Banks English, African-American English in southern Appalachia, a Cherokee-language immersion school, and the Lumbee Indian dialect. For the public, the project, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, produces documentaries, museum exhibits, podcasts, and books.

Educating the Educated began in 2012, when Ms. Dunstan was a Ph.D. candidate in N.C. State’s College of Education, finishing her dissertation on the college experience of students who speak the mountain dialect of Appalachia. “The North Carolina Language and Life Project for 30 years now has done so much outreach throughout the state,” she says, “but we kind of stopped and said, ‘Oops, we haven’t done anything on our campus.’ " Talking to students made her realize that something happening in the university’s own backyard had long been ignored. “Some of it was heartbreaking,” she says.

One rural student said a professor had made him an example of all white country males: Any time there was a discussion of racist ideology or what country people did, the whole class looked to him, assuming that, because of his dialect, he held those beliefs. An aerospace-engineering major was told that she might need speech therapy to mitigate her accent in order to be taken seriously. Another student felt she had to code-switch out of her mountain dialect if she didn’t want to become “the entertainment” among her peers.

“Especially if you are the first in your family to go to college,” Ms. Dunstan says, “you are already wondering, do I belong here? Do I fit in?”

Using the Lippi-Green text and other readings, Ms. Dunstan guides students through the semester-long course, aiming to open the eyes (and ears) of those who have what some call “the mountains on my tongue,” as well as those who speak less stigmatized, more “privileged” dialects.

“I will be the first to admit that I have at times heard the way someone talks and made a judgment,” says Megan Hester, who’s now a junior, from Charlotte, N.C. Ms. Hester, an environmental-science major who wants to develop urban green spaces, signed up for the language-diversity service trip because it sounded interesting.

After completing exercises in class, like how to spot the grammar rules in unfamiliar dialects, she, Ms. Lawson, and six other students then taught those exercises to middle- and high-schoolers in the mountain town of Robbinsville. From her students she learned new words, like sigogglin, meaning off-kilter or askew, and buddyrow, meaning a best friend.

Now, rather than judge people by how they talk, says Ms. Hester, she is much more apt to appreciate what they have to say.

In 2013, Educating the Educated applied for, and later received, a $3,000 grant from the university’s diversity office to “incorporate this program into the infrastructure,” as Mr. Wolfram puts it. Although the program relies largely on the volunteer efforts of people like him, who are passionate about adding language to the diversity canon, the grant helped put Educating the Educated on the diversity office’s radar. Now the program participates in Diversity Week each October.

The campus housing office also schedules language-diversity workshops for new resident advisers. Educating the Educated has a booth at the university’s Packapalooza festival (so named because North Carolina State’s athletic teams are the Wolfpack), which welcomes students to the campus. Ms. Dunstan has given workshops for new faculty members, and professors invite her to talk about language diversity in their courses. One of the program’s videos, “Language Diversity at NC State,” is shown at new-student convocation.

Bob Patterson, a biologist in the department of crop and soil sciences, still speaks with the mountain cadence of his native Catawba County. He has invited Ms. Dunstan to be a guest lecturer in his course “World Population and Food Prospects” for the past three years. Her presentation about valuing language diversity has helped students better understand the need for all types of diversity, he says. Students tell him her talk “helps them in ways beyond this course.”

Randy Woodson, North Carolina State’s chancellor, considers diversity a selling point for the university. “We’re proud that we have students from all 100 counties in the state,” he says at the end of the language-diversity video for new students, adding that Wolfpack students also come from 119 countries. “So literally, you can walk across this campus and experience a myriad of dialects.”

In January, Educating the Educated attained national recognition, winning the “grand gold” Award for Excellence from Naspa, the national association for student-affairs workers.

No other diversity offices in higher education have a linguistic-diversity component, says Mr. Wolfram. But today as many as a dozen other colleges, including West Virginia and North Dakota State Universities and the University of Hawaii-Manoa, have or are starting similar programs. They are inexpensive to set up, and many are helped by free PowerPoints made by N.C. State graduate students.

Enthusiastic students provide a lot of the energy in N.C. State’s program. Ten or 12 mostly graduate students in sociolinguistics become language-diversity ambassadors each semester, co-teaching workshops for Diversity Week, giving out information at Packapalooza, or helping explain language biases to new tutors and resident assistants. The events are announced on posters with the motto “Howl With an Accent.”

Last year the program applied for money to become an undergraduate student club. Amanda Eads, a graduate student who’s leading that transition, plans monthly club meetings and talks by researchers, including one who has studied the dialogue of princesses in Disney movies.

One of her first recruits was Ashley Lawson, the student who used to worry about toning down her rural drawl.

“I love that I have my accent now,” she says.

Heidi Landecker is deputy managing editor for copy at The Chronicle and editor of Lingua Franca, a blog about language in academe. Follow her on Twitter @heidilande, or email her at heidi.landecker@chronicle.com