People say that a long, long time ago,
everybody on Earth spoke the same language
and belonged to the same tribe.
And I guess people had a little too much time on their hands,
because they decided they were going to work together
to become as great as God.
So they started to build a tower up into the heavens.
God saw this and was angry,
and to punish the people for their arrogance,
God destroyed the tower
and scattered the people to the ends of the earth
and made them all speak different languages.
This is the story of the Tower of Babel,
and it's probably not a literal historical truth,
but it does tell us something about the way that we understand
languages and speakers.
So for one thing, we often think about speaking different languages
as meaning that we don't get along or maybe we're in conflict,
and speaking the same language as meaning that we belong to the same group
and that we can work together.
Modern linguists know that the relationship
between language and social categories is intricate and complex,
and we bring a lot of baggage to the way that we understand language,
to the point that even a seemingly simple question,
like, "What makes a person a speaker of a language?"
can turn out to be really, really complicated.
I'm a Spanish professor at Ohio State.
I teach mostly upper level courses where the students have taken
four to five years of university-level Spanish courses.
So students who are in my class speak Spanish with me all semester long.
They listen to me speak in Spanish. They turn in written work in Spanish.
And yet, when I asked my students at the beginning of the semester,
"Who considers themselves a Spanish speaker?"
not very many of them raised their hands.
So you can be a really, really good speaker of a language
and still not consider yourself a language speaker.
Maybe it's not just about how well you speak a language.
Maybe it's also about what age you start learning that language?
But when we look at kids who speak Spanish at home
but mostly English at work or in school,
they often feel like they don't speak either language really well.
They sometimes feel like they exist in a state of languagelessness,
because they don't feel fully comfortable in Spanish at school,
and they don't feel fully comfortable in English at home.
We have this really strong idea that in order to be a good bilingual,
we have to be two monolinguals in one body.
But linguists know that's not really how bilingualism works.
It's actually much more common
for people to specialize,
to use one language in one place and another language in another place.
Now, it's not always only about how we see ourselves.
It can also be about how other people see us.
I do my research in Bolivia,
which is a country in South America,
and in Bolivia, as in the United States,
there are different social groups and different ethnic categories.
One of those ethnic categories is a group known as Quechua,
who are Indigenous people.
And people who are Quechua speak Spanish a little bit differently
than your run-of-the-mill Spanish speaker.
In particular, there are some sounds that sound a little bit more alike
when many Quechua speakers use them.
So a colleague and I designed a study
where we took a series of very similar-sounding word pairs,
and they were similar-sounding in exactly the same sorts of ways
that Quechua-speakers often sound similar when they speak Spanish.
We played those similar-sounding word pairs to a group of listeners,
and we told half of the listeners that they were going to listen
to just your normal run-of-the-mill Spanish speaker,
and the other half of the listeners that they were going to hear a Quechua speaker.
Everybody heard the same recording,
but what we found was that people who thought they were listening
to a run-of-the-mill Spanish speaker
made clear differences between the word pairs,
and people who thought they were listening to a Quechua speaker
really didn't seem to make clear differences.
So if a visual would help,
here are the results of our study.
What you see here in the top line
is a little bit of an arch.
That's what you would expect from people who are making
clear differences between the word pairs,
and that's what you see for people who though they were listening
to a Spanish speaker.
What you see on the bottom is a little bit more of a flat line,
and that's what we expect to see
when people are not making clear differences,
and that came from the group that thought they were listening to a Quechua speaker.
Now, since nothing about the recording changed,
that means that it was the social categories that we gave the listeners
that changed the way that they perceived language.
This isn't just some funny thing that only happens in Bolivia.
Research has been carried out in the United States,
in Canada, in New Zealand,
showing exactly the same thing.
We incorporate social categories into our understanding of language.
There have even been studies carried out with American college students
who listen to a university lecture.
Half of the students were shown a picture of a Caucasian face
as the instructor.
Half of the students were shown a picture of an Asian face
as the instructor.
And students who saw the Asian face
reported that the lecture was less clear and harder to understand,
even though everybody listened to the same recording.
So social categories really influence the way that we understand language.
And this is an issue that became especially personal to me
when my children started school.
My children are Latino,
and we speak Spanish at home, but they speak mostly English
with their friends out in the world,
with their grandparents.
When they started school, I was told that the district requires
that any household that has a member who speaks a language other than English,
the children have to be tested to see if they need
English-as-a-second-language services.
And I was like, "Yes, my kids are going to ace this test."
But that's not what happened.
So you can see behind me the results from my daughter's ESL placement exam.
She got a perfect five out of five for comprehension,
for reading and listening.
But she only got three out of five for speaking and writing.
And I was like, "This is really weird, because this kid talks my ear off
all the time."
But I figured it's just one test on one day and it's not a big deal.
Until, several years later, my son started school,
and my son also scored as a non-native speaker of English
on the exam.
And I was like, this is really weird,
and it doesn't seem like a coincidence.
So I sent a note in to the teacher,
and she was very kind.
She sent me a long message explaining why he had been placed in this way.
Some of the things that she said really caught my attention.
For one thing, she said that even a native speaker of English
might not score at advanced level
on this test,
depending on what kinds of resource and enrichment they were getting at home.
Now, this tells me that the test
wasn't doing a great job of measuring English proficiency,
but it may have been measuring
something like how much resources kids are exposed to at home.
In which case, those kids need different types of support at school.
They really don't need English language assistance.
Another thing that she mentioned caught my attention as a linguist.
She said that she had asked my son to repeat the sentence,
"Who has Jane's pencil?"
And he repeated, "Who has Jane pencil?"
She said this is a typical error made by a non-native English speaking student
whose native language does not contain a similar structure for possessives.
The reason this caught my attention is because I know that there is
a systematic, rule-governed variety of English
in which this possessive construction is completely grammatical.
That variety is known to linguists as "African-American English,"
and African-American English is actually group of dialects
that's spoken across the United States,
mostly in African-American communities.
But it just so happens that my son's school
is about 60 percent African-American.
And we know that at this age,
children are picking things up from their friends,
they're experimenting with language,
they're using it in different contexts.
I think when the teacher saw my son,
she didn't see a child
who she expected to speak African-American English.
And so instead of evaluating him as a child who was natively acquiring
multiple dialects of English,
she evaluated him as a child
whose standard English was deficient.
Language and social categories are intricately connected,
and we bring so much baggage to the way that we understand language.
When you ask me a question like,
"Who counts as a speaker of a language?"
I don't really have a simple answer to that question,
but what I can tell you
is that people are pattern-seekers,
and we're always looking for ways to connect the dots
between different types of information.
This can be a problem
when our underlying biases are projected onto language.
When I look at children like my own
and I see them in the gentlest and most well-meaning of ways
being racially profiled as non-native speakers of English,
it makes me wonder,
what's going to happen
as they move from elementary school
onto high school and college and onto their first jobs?
When they walk into an interview,
will the person sitting across the table from them
look at their color or their last name
and hear them as speaking with a Spanish accent,
or as speaking bad English?
These are the kinds of judgments that can have long-reaching effects
on people's lives.
So I hope that that person, just like you,
will have reflected on the naturalized links
between language and social categories,
and will have questioned their assumptions about what it really means
to be a speaker of a language.
Thank you.
(Applause)