Words&Dirt

Summary:

Katherine D. Kinzler’s How You Say It is a book about how our ways of speaking influence our internal, social, and political experiences. Kinzler argues that all people have “language identities” that typically go unacknowledged, and seeks to highlight the importance of such identities in determining various life outcomes. Some sections of the book focus on academic research about language development, including a few linguistic paradoxes we tend to encounter as verbal animals. Other parts explicate language’s role in constructing in-group/out-group categories and explore the pitfalls of “linguistic bias/accent attitudes.” Toward the end, Kinzler urges readers overcome language-based prejudice and embrace “linguistic diversity.” Overall, How You Say It is a serviceable primer on an under-appreciated subject.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• My main takeaway from this book was that we should give people the benefit of the doubt by practicing mindfulness about our language identities and cultivating sensitivity to our linguistic biases and the possible linguistic insecurities of others.
• Kinzler makes some excellent points about the superficiality of racial bias when compared to linguistic bias, effectively arguing that prejudice based on language and/or accent has a much stronger evolutionary basis. She also invites readers to question why linguistic bias continues to be so acceptable, even in progressive/liberal circles.
• I found Kinzler’s point of view to be personally edifying because I hadn’t thought very critically about my own tendency toward linguistic bias, which I think is significant and requires some careful and conscientious revision.
• It was fun to learn about the “monolingual myth”: “the understandable but mistaken assumption that we are better off––and more neurally capable of––learning just one language instead of two or more” (153). I wasn’t raised with this idea so was interested and a bit puzzled to find that it’s a belief many people seem to hold. Glad to have the evidence on hand to refute the monolingual myth should I ever encounter it in my personal or professional life.
• I wholeheartedly agree with Kinzler that promoting bilingualism and multilingualism in our cultural practices and educational policies is critical for the development of more tolerant and open societies. I also think it would help people around the world build a sense of global identification and compassion for all our fellow humans.
• This book is too long and repetitive, despite being very short. It’s a classic example of an academic work that would have been more effective as a longform article but was expanded into a full book for financial/marketing reasons.
• I was very disappointed that Kinzler basically ignored the issues of tone of voice and body language. I feel like these are hugely important aspects of the way people speak that can cause a lot of miscommunication and social strife. I wish Kinzler had included a chapter (or at least a dedicated section of a chapter) addressing the social consequences of saying one thing but communicating something else via tone and/or nonverbal cues.

Favorite Quotes:

Something is missing from the study of social grouping––and from public discourse about tribalism in particular, and human nature in general. Researchers and many other people largely overlook a key factor that determines whether people find common ground: language. More precisely, I’m referring to the way you talk, which often means the accent you speak with. (Yes, you have an accent. Everyone does. It pops up every time you speak.) As the saying goes, it’s not what you say, but how you say it. (ix-x)

The psychology of race is categorical in a way that the genetics are not. Patterns of genetic diversity simply do not match up clearly with what we see, psychologically, as modern racial groups. People’s psychological perception of human difference doesn’t align with the biological reality. This is because the psychology of race isn’t about what is actually in the genome. The psychology of race is about what people think is real.

Some evolutionary psychologists seeking to explain why we evolved to care about race have come up with a bold answer: in short, we didn’t. The psychology of race is not a human necessity. We care about race, psychologically, because of the dramatic consequences it has today for people’s lives, and the way it unites and divides people in our current social world. Yet at a deep level the psychology of race is a modern by-product of an ancient adaptation for caring about human groups more generally. This means that if kids were raised in a world in which race were not a big deal, the psychology of race would likely decline, no longer a necessary way of categorizing and dividing other people. We are built to care about groups; race does not necessarily have to be one of them. The fact that it is says something important about our societies and their recent history, but not necessarily about our evolutionary lineage. (92-3)

Children’s minds are set up to care about language as marking social difference. Children intuit that people who are like each other speak in the same ways, and they orient themselves to familiar-accented people for learning. They think that speaking in different languages or even just different accents is a signal of some other kind of meaningful, broad difference across groups of people. This is a normal function of what it means to be human and predisposed to see the world in categories. In and of itself, this does not need to be bad. Yet when adults taint these early-developing categories with bigotry, children learn to associate languages and the people who speak them with negative, harmful stereotypes. Children are on a journey to figure out who is who and what is what in their social lives––and from day one, language is a tool that they carry on this quest. (113)

People are not typically aware of the consequences of accent discrimination. People––and institutions, such as our legal system––are not aware of how much it can impact people’s lives. When people discriminate against others based on their speech, they may not realize they are doing it. And when they witness other people being discriminatory in this way, they may not understand how problematic it is. Indeed, linguistic bias still seems permissible in a way that other forms of bias no longer are among enlightened, progressive people who seek to treat others equally, without regard to their looks or creed. (126-7)

Bilingualism breaks down social boundaries and may open a path to social openness and tolerance. This is vital for developing children, because in many ways, understanding others––taking their perspective, empathizing with their feelings, and imagining their mental life––cuts to the heart of what it means to have a human interaction. By enhancing our ability to understand others, multilingualism it may offer a small step toward human togetherness––one that counts. (170)

Speech is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the way we talk signals group differences, laying the groundwork for terrible prejudice. On the other hand, speech can give us a strong sense of belonging, helping us find ourselves and our cultural identity, while preparing us to thrive. Learning to speak in more than one language appears to make us more socially perceptive and more cognitively flexible, potentially keeping our minds sharp later in life.

Speech, in short, can be the problem and also the solution. By changing our relationship to language––becoming aware of how much it matters to our social lives, opening up to linguistic diversity in its many forms, and implementing changes to improve our educational, legal, and civic institutions––we can harness the power of speech for the good. The time for this revolution is now. (176)

Rating: 6/10