Who counts as a speaker of a language?

Backed by research and personal anecdotes, Spanish professor Anna Babel reveals the intricate relationship between language and culture, showing how social categories and underlying biases influence the way we hear, regard and, ultimately, judge each other. A talk that will leave you questioning your assumptions about what it really means to speak a language.

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 raise 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
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."

(Laughter)

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)