Language Prejudice: Hudson, R.A. (1996) - Sociolinguistics (2nd Ed) - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

LANGUAGE PREJUDICE
The kind of inequality involves prejudices about particular ways of speaking. One
person can draw conclusions about another person's character and abilities simply on the basis
of how that person speaks, regardless of the content of what they say. We shall review
experimental evidence for this claim below, but for the time being it can probably stand as a
statement of the obvious. The reason why it is socially problematic is that the conclusions
drawn may be wrong, and may either underestimate or overestimate the extent to which the
speaker has various social desirable qualities. For example, if you hear me talking you may
think I am smarter than I really am if my accent is an upper-class one, and conversely if it is a
lower-class one. Why do we jump to conclusions in this way, when we know how easy it is to
be wrong?
This is really a question for psychologists rather than for sociolinguists, but we already
have the basis for a plausible answer. In a nutshell, we do it because we need the information,
and we have no better source. We need information
about another person's personality because it affects our own behaviour.
We ask questions about them like the following: Do we trust them? Do we like them?
How clever are they? How rich are they? Are their values like ours? Are they 'one of us'? Our
answers determine how we treat them: When they come
to our door do we let them in? When they apply to work for us do we offer them a job? Do we
invite them to have a drink? Do we lend them our books? Do we believe what they say to us?
All these decisions depend on what we know about them - or more precisely, on what we
think we know about them, because we only have solidly reliable information about a small
number of other people.
How then do we find out what other people are like? For a few people we have
reliable first-hand experience of their behaviour; for example, we know that they are always
late for appointments, that they always cope well with difficult
situations or that they have a good sense of humour. However, most of the people who we
have to deal with are relative strangers, so we have to rely either on what we hear about them
from others (gossip, to be treated with great
care!), or on intelligent guesswork. This is where language becomes relevant. We already
Hudson, R.A. (1996). Sociolinguistics (2nd Ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Page 1
know that the way in which we speak (or write) conveys a lot of socially important
information because speakers use their linguistic choices in
order to locate themselves socially in a multi-dimensional space, as an 'act of identity'. We
saw in the last chapter that some of the linguistic means for doing this are quantitative, and
extremely subtle. In other words, speakers are
transmitting information about 'the kind of people they are' all the time while speaking, so it
would be extremely surprising if hearers did not use this information.
Putting it the other way round, there would be no point in transmitting the information if it
were not used. Let's assume, then, that we do derive information about social classification
from the way other people speak.
This assumption takes us part of the way to an explanation for languagebased

prejudices, but we still have a gap to bridge, between the social classification and the
prejudices. How can we get from categories such as 'middle class'
or 'female' to value judgments like 'friendly', 'reliable' or 'intelligent'? At this point we should
really hand over to sociologists and social psychologists, but once again it is quite easy to
construct a plausible explanation. This time we
can hark back to the notion of 'prototype' which we have invoked so many times.
A PROTOTYPE is a concept which is typically associated with a collection of

characteristics but which has no 'definition', no set of characteristics that are so important that
they are indispensable. The concept is a way of recording that these characteristics tend to be
associated with each other, so one of them allows us to predict the remainder. The concept
'bird' normally involves flying, laying eggs, having wings and so on, so if you know that
something is flying it is a good bet that it also has feathers. The problem is that this is just a
guess, and not a certainty, because the flying thing could be a bat, a very large butterfly or a
model aeroplane.
Similarly for social types, i.e. 'kinds of people' - 'middle-class person', 'woman',
'middle-class woman', 'sociolinguist', 'Jock' (see p. 166), 'person who lives in Ballymacarrett'
(see p. 163), 'member of my family' and so on.
Each of these is a prototype which associates a number of characteristics, including
characteristics such as intelligence and attractiveness which we evaluate positively or
negatively. If a social prototype is shared by many people in society it is called a 'SOCIAL
STEREOTYPE' (Tajfel 1981). It is easy to see the benefits of social stereotypes; after all,
without them we should have to judge every stranger as a completely unknown quantity,
which would make life in modern societies virtually impossible. The trouble is that they are
often unreliable for the simple reason that some of the characteristics
which they combine are only loosely associated with each other, and many people have one
characteristic but not the others. Indeed, some social stereotypes include characteristics which
have no factual basis at all but which were developed as part of a mythology about the people
cconcerned (for example, English people tell jokes about an Englishman, an Irishman and a
Scotsman in which the Irishman is stupid and the Scotsman is mean).
A PREJUDICE is a characteristic of a social stereotype which is only weakly

predictable from the other characteristics (or even not predictable at all).
Figure 1 below illustrates the links from language, through an 'objective' social type,
to a 'subjective' and evaluative one. The hearer's chain of thought is as follows (with S as the
speaker): S has just said 'x x x x'; people who talk
like that are type-T people; type-T people are nice (have halos); therefore S is nice.
In short, a language prejudice is a characteristic which we expect people to have because of
the way they speak, and the link between the speech and this characteristic lies through the
type of person that (we think) speaks like that.
An ideal world would presumably be free of all prejudice, whatever its basis, but it is
important to remember that prejudices are a negative by-product of a much more positive
mental process, the ability to form concepts by associating
characteristics even where the associations have exceptions.
Further Readings:
https://www.thoughtco.com/dialect-prejudice-term-4052385
https://fr.slideshare.net/MiliSaha2/language-discrimination
https://fr.slideserve.com/takara/linguistic-prejudice-and-stereotyping
https://fr.slideshare.net/cupidlucid/linguistic-and-social-inequality-presentation-710338

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LANGUAGE PREJUDICE

This assumption takes us part of the way to an explanation for languagebased

A PROTOTYPE is a concept which is typically associated with a collection of

A PREJUDICE is a characteristic of a social stereotype which is only weakly

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