4 ms·

Have you ever tried to learn another language as an adult? If you do, you're going to speak it in an accent that is going to be extremely hard/impossible to get

Have you ever tried to learn another language as an adult? If you do, you're going to speak it in an accent that is going to be extremely hard/impossible to get rid of. That is the type of thing the article is talking about. Once your speech patterns are set (by age 10 or so), barring a concerted effort, that's the way you're going to talk for the rest of your life. Note: I'm not talking about the (legitimate) lexical and grammatical differences between Standard American and AAVE, I mean the way speech sounds. The accent. The way that you can tell someone born and raised in Texas from someone from New Jersey just by listening to them. The point of the article is that if you happen to have grown up in an environment that leads you to sound identifiably Black, then all else equal, you will have lower wages. You can say that you don't care; that's fine. You're allowed to be callous. But you can't imply that the person who sounds Black has only to change their (ingrained) accent to solve their problem. That takes the blame from society and places it on the victim, thus perpetuating the evil. You're not allowed to be evil.

tsotha 14y ago
>I'm not talking about the (legitimate) lexical and grammatical differences between Standard American and AAVE, I mean the way speech sounds. But the article doesn't distinguish between accent and things like grammar and word choice. I agree an accent is just an indicator of your origins, but poor grammar and slang are a legitimate indicator of a substandard education. That's what I meant about speaking standard English. Employers aren't charities - they have a legitimate interest in hiring people who sound professional. The study would have been a whole lot more useful if it made some attempt to separate accent from grammar and slang. If you read the article (you did read the article, right?) you'll see they mention (in passing, of course, because it's the NYT and coastal liberals don't care) people who "sound southern" have the same pay disparities. Which makes me wonder how well controlled the underlying study is, frankly. This may all just be a statistical artifact of the fact that bankers and stockbrokers in NYC make a lot of money compared to everyone else.

tsotha 14y ago

>I'm not talking about the (legitimate) lexical and grammatical differences between Standard American and AAVE, I mean the way speech sounds. But the article doesn't distinguish between accent and things like grammar and word choice. I agree an accent is just an indicator of your origins, but poor grammar and slang are a legitimate indicator of a substandard education. That's what I meant about speaking standard English. Employers aren't charities - they have a legitimate interest in hiring people who sound professional. The study would have been a whole lot more useful if it made some attempt to separate accent from grammar and slang. If you read the article (you did read the article, right?) you'll see they mention (in passing, of course, because it's the NYT and coastal liberals don't care) people who "sound southern" have the same pay disparities. Which makes me wonder how well controlled the underlying study is, frankly. This may all just be a statistical artifact of the fact that bankers and stockbrokers in NYC make a lot of money compared to everyone else.