John Baugh | |
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Born | December 10, 1949 |
Occupations |
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Known for | Developing theory of linguistic profiling |
Academic background | |
Education | |
Doctoral advisor | William Labov |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Linguistics |
Sub-discipline | |
Institutions | |
Website | sites |
John Gordon Baugh V (born December 10,1949) [1] is an American academic and linguist. His main areas of study are sociolinguistics,forensic linguistics,education,and African American language studies. He is currently the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, [2] Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, [3] and a former President of the Linguistic Society of America. [4] In 2020 Baugh was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the section on Linguistics and Language Sciences, [5] and in 2021 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [6]
Baugh was previously a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and of the Rockefeller Foundation. He served as president of the American Dialect Society from 1992 to 1994 and as the Edward Sapir Professor during the 2019 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute.
Baugh is best known for developing the theory of linguistic profiling,which occurs when someone’s speech triggers discriminatory bias against them,such as when they are seeking employment or housing. [7] As a result of this work,Baugh has served as an expert witness and consultant in various legal cases,frequently working with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,the National Fair Housing Alliance,and the United States Department of Justice,among other organizations.
Baugh is the author or co-editor of twelve books,including Black Street Speech:Its History,Structure,and Survival;Out of the Mouths of Slaves:African American Language and Educational Malpractice;Beyond Ebonics:Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice;and Linguistics in Pursuit of Justice. He has advised and appeared in several linguistic documentaries such as Do You Speak American? [8] and Talking Black in America, [9] and he has been featured in publications including Business Insider , [10] The Washington Post , [11] [12] The Economist , [13] and The Atlantic . [14]
Baugh began his undergraduate studies at Taft College before transferring to Temple University,where he completed his B.A. in Speech,Rhetoric,and Communication. He then earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania,under the doctoral supervision of sociologist William Labov. [1] In addition to Labov,Baugh studied extensively under anthropological linguist Dell Hymes and sociologist Erving Goffman.
Baugh's first academic appointment was as lecturer in Black Studies and Linguistics at Swarthmore College in 1975. In 1978,he was appointed Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology,Black Studies,and Linguistics at Swarthmore. The following year,he began teaching at the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Foreign Language Education. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1984. [1]
In 1990,Baugh became a Professor of Education and Linguistics at Stanford University,where he remained until 2005. During this time,Baugh served as director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. He became Professor Emeritus at Stanford upon his departure in 2005. [15]
Baugh joined the teaching faculty of Washington University in St. Louis in 2005 as the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts and Sciences. He served a term as director of African and African American Studies from 2005 to 2010,and he now holds appointments in the departments of Anthropology,Education,English,Linguistics,Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology,Psychological and Brain Sciences,and Urban Studies. [15]
Baugh’s early research focused on the language and culture of African Americans,employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic methods. Baugh conducted the first longitudinal linguistic study of African American adults,described in his first book,Black Street Speech:Its History,Structure,and Survival. [16] Its title was chosen in consultation with those whom Baugh interviewed for the project;they often described their vernacular,or most informal manner of speech,as "street speech".
In 1999,while at Stanford University,Baugh wrote Out of the Mouths of Slaves:African American Language and Educational Malpractice. [17] The book contains a combination of linguistic and educational research,including specific ideas about ways to increase literacy among African Americans,who often fall victim to various forms of educational malpractice.
In response to an educational and legal controversy that resulted from a 1996 resolution by the Oakland Unified School District in California that declared Ebonics to be the indigenous language of its 27,000 African American students,Baugh wrote Beyond Ebonics:Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice. [18] Baugh debunked many of the misconceptions about the concept of Ebonics (a portmanteau of "ebony" and "phonics",for "black sounds",a term coined by social psychologist Robert Williams) as well as some of the educational policies that emerged in the wake of the controversy.
In 2022,Baugh was named to the advisory board of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. [19] [20]
Baugh and Joel Sherzer edited Language in Use:Readings in Sociolinguistics,a volume of sociolinguistic studies that includes a combination of qualitative and quantitative studies of language usage in diverse speech communities. [21]
His next editorial collaboration in sociolinguistics was a festschrift in honor of his mentor William Labov that was produced under the editorial leadership of Gregory Guy of New York University. This work,Towards a Social Science of Language,was published in two volumes:Variation and Change in Language and Society and Social Interaction and Discourse Structures. [22] [23] The studies in both volumes pay tribute to Labov’s influence on the field of sociolinguistics.
Baugh's research on linguistic profiling began with his own experience seeking housing in the San Francisco Bay Area as an African American. [24] Baugh noticed that landlords who had given him an appointment after he utilized Standard American English over the phone later denied him the opportunity to rent after meeting in person. Baugh conducted a series of experiments,initially described by Thomas Purnell,William Idsardi,and Baugh in the 1999 article "Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification",showing that discrimination can occur based on dialect and that listeners can identify ethnicity through short samples of speech alone. [25]
Baugh’s findings have been replicated by others, [26] [27] [28] affirming that people who speak with a dialect or accent that is devalued where they live may fall prey to linguistic profiling —having goods or services denied to them,typically sight unseen,during telephone calls after inquiring about those otherwise available goods or services. With long-standing support,primarily from the Ford Foundation,Baugh has continued to study various forms of linguistic discrimination in housing,education,medicine,and the law. His work,initially concentrated in the United States,has expanded to other countries and regions,including Brazil,the Caribbean,France,South Africa,and the United Kingdom.
Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistic knowledge,methods,and insights to legal contexts,especially those concerned with linguistic evidence and language use in the judicial process. The field can be traced to the Cullen Davis murder trial,in which Roger Shuy,a professor emeritus of linguistics at Georgetown University,served as an expert witness,using discourse analysis methods to evaluate the speech of suspects and the defendant. [29] [30] Since then,other linguists have engaged in forensic linguistic analyses. For instance,in the Unabomber case,Shuy and FBI Agent James Fitzgerald used the language in Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto to discern his location and age. [31] [32]
Baugh’s contributions to forensic linguistics have built upon his formulation of linguistic profiling,and his work has been used in legal cases involving hostile work environments, [33] unequal access to housing, [25] [34] and murder. [35] Baugh has served as a consultant and as an expert witness in both civil and criminal trials. [15] [36]
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.
Ebonics is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from African descent, particularly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. The term Ebonics was created in 1973 by a group of black scholars who disapproved of the negative terms being used to describe this type of language. Since the 1996 controversy over its use by the Oakland School Board, the term Ebonics has primarily been used to refer to the sociolect African-American English, a dialect distinctively different from Standard American English.
African-American English is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like all widely spoken language varieties, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.
William Labov is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary and accent features, AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However, in formal speaking contexts, speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the non-standard accent. AAVE is widespread throughout the United States, but is not the native dialect of all African Americans, nor are all of its speakers African American.
In sociolinguistics, a sociolect is a form of language or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, age group, or other social group.
A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. The concept is mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.
In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally considered by a society to be the most "correct" or otherwise superior. In many cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions, particularly in situations of covert prestige. In addition to dialects and languages, prestige is also applied to smaller linguistic features, such as the pronunciation or usage of words or grammatical constructs, which may not be distinctive enough to constitute a separate dialect. The concept of prestige provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in form among speakers of a language or languages.
Gregory Riordan Guy is a linguist who specializes in the study of language variation and language diversity, including sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, phonetics, and phonology. He has a particular interest in the Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish languages.
John Russell Rickford is a Guyanese–American academic and author. Rickford is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University's Department of Linguistics and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he has taught since 1980. His book Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, which he wrote together with his son, Russell J. Rickford, won the American Book Award in 2000.
Linguistic insecurity comprises feelings of anxiety, self-consciousness, or lack of confidence in the mind of a speaker surrounding their use of language. Often, this anxiety comes from speakers' belief that their speech does not conform to the perceived standard and/or the style of language expected by the speakers' interlocutor(s). Linguistic insecurity is situationally induced and is often based on a feeling of inadequacy regarding personal performance in certain contexts, rather than a fixed attribute of an individual. This insecurity can lead to stylistic, and phonetic shifts away from an affected speaker's default speech variety; these shifts may be performed consciously on the part of the speaker, or may be reflective of an unconscious effort to conform to a more prestigious or context-appropriate variety or style of speech. Linguistic insecurity is linked to the perception of speech varieties in any community, and so may vary based on socioeconomic class and gender. It is also especially pertinent in multilingual societies.
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation, lexicon, grammar, and other features. Different communities or individuals speaking the same language may differ from each other in their choices of which of the available linguistic features to use, and how often, and the same speaker may make different choices on different occasions.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a nonstandard dialect of English deeply embedded in the culture of the United States, including popular culture. It has been the center of controversy about the education of African-American youths, the role AAVE should play in public schools and education, and its place in broader society. The linguistic and cultural history of African Americans has been fostered and maintained in part through the Black church, including some lexicon and the call and response style of linguistic engagement. Artistic and cultural movements originating with African Americans, such as jazz and hip-hop, have also significantly showcased, influenced, or sometimes mainstreamed elements of AAVE in the broader American culture and even on the global stage. The dialect is also seen and heard in advertising.
Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded and directs the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.
Walt Wolfram is an American sociolinguist specializing in social and ethnic dialects of American English. He was one of the early pioneers in the study of urban African American English through his work in Detroit in 1969. He is the William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University.
Linguistic profiling is the practice of identifying the social characteristics of an individual based on auditory cues, in particular dialect and accent. The theory was first developed by Professor John Baugh to explain discriminatory practices in the housing market based on the auditory redlining of prospective clientele by housing administrators. Linguistic profiling extends to issues of legal proceedings, employment opportunities, and education. The theory is frequently described as the auditory equivalent of racial profiling. The bulk of the research and evidence in support of the theory pertain to racial and ethnic distinctions, though its applicability holds within racial or ethnic groups, perceived gender and sexual orientation, and in distinguishing location of geographic origin.
Real-time sociolinguistics is a sociolinguistic research method concerned with observing linguistic variation and change in progress via longitudinal studies. Real-time studies track linguistic variables over time by collecting data from a speech community at multiple points in a given period. As a result, it provides empirical evidence for either stability or linguistic change.
Tracey Weldon is an American linguist who studies variationist sociolinguistics, Gullah, Quantitative Sociolinguistics, and African American English.
Sonja L. Lanehart is an American linguist and professor of linguistics in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona who has advanced the study of language use in the African American community. Her work as a researcher, author, and editor includes African American English, education, literacy, identity, language variation, women's languages, intersectionality, and inclusivity within the African American community. Lanehart's sociolinguistic orientation prioritizes language as a phenomenon influenced by sociocultural and historical factors. She also utilizes the perspectives of Critical Race Theory and Black feminism in her work. Lanehart was the Brackenridge Endowed Chair in Literature and Humanities at the University of Texas at San Antonio from 2006 to 2019, and was selected by the Linguistic Society of America as a 2021 Fellow.
In the terminology of linguistic anthropology, linguistic racism, both spoken and written, is a mechanism that perpetuates discrimination, marginalization, and prejudice customarily based on an individual or community's linguistic background. The most evident manifestation of this kind of racism is racial slurs; however, there are covert forms of it. Linguistic racism also relates to the concept of "racializing discourses," which is defined as the ways race is discussed without being explicit but still manages to represent and reproduce race. This form of racism acts to classify people, places, and cultures into social categories while simultaneously maintaining this social inequality under a veneer of indirectness and deniability.