Linguistics by Geoffrey K. Pullum

Author:Geoffrey K. Pullum [Pullum, Geoffrey K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509530786
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

4

Language and Social Life

One evening in February 2012 an unarmed 17-year-old student walking home in Sanford, Florida, was shot dead 65 metres from his back door. The victim had been talking to a friend on the phone in real time, and reported being stalked.

Police, who were already on the way, arrived immediately and arrested the killer, who didn’t deny what he’d done. The testimony of the victim’s friend, a young woman named Rachel Jeantel, should have made the prosecution’s case for a murder conviction virtually unassailable. But that’s not how it went. Jeantel testified in her native dialect of English, and alienated not just the jury but thousands of TV viewers across the country.

We’ll never know exactly what happened the night Trayvon Martin was shot. Jeantel testified that he was running away from his killer when he was shot. But the killer, George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighbourhood watch coordinator, claimed he was defending himself from a physical attack. And indeed, arrest photographs show him bleeding from the mouth and the back of the head. Still, you might expect at least a manslaughter conviction for a grown man who shoots an unarmed teenager dead over a fist fight. But instead the prosecution’s star witness was reviled right across the country, and the jury returned a verdict of ‘Not guilty’ after deliberations in which Jeantel’s evidence was never mentioned even once.

Rachel Jeantel speaks an interesting dialect that American linguists call African American Vernacular English (AAVE). There is powerful prejudice against it. Two Stanford University linguists, John Rickford and Sharese King, wrote an extended linguistic analysis of Jeantel’s testimony and its reception. They argued that the crucial information she provided was disbelieved and ignored because of prejudice against the way she spoke. Jurors claimed she was ‘hard to understand’ and ‘not credible’. She was on the stand for six hours, but her speech as heard on TV and radio led to her being not just dismissed but vilified as an idiot by social media users across the United States.

Typical white middle-class speakers of standard English, and even educated African Americans, regard AAVE as simply sloppy, careless, bad English. A fairly mild contributor to the storm of hostile commentary aimed at Jeantel after her testimony wrote on Twitter:

Everyone, regardless of race, should learn to speak correct English, or at least UNDERSTANDABLE English … I couldn’t understand 75% of what she was saying … that is just ridicolous! [sic]

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.