Language and discrimination: Generating meaning, perceiving identities, and discriminating outcomes
Abstract
Humans are remarkably efficient at parsing basic linguistic cues and show an equally impressive ability to produce and parse socially indexed cues from the language(s) they encounter. In this review, we focus on the ways in which questions of justice and equality are linked to these two abilities. We discuss how social and linguistic cues are theorized to become correlated with each other, describe listeners' perceptual abilities regarding linguistic and social cognition, and address how, in the context of these abilities, language mediates individuals’ negotiations with institutions and their agents—negotiations that often lead to discrimination or linguistic injustice. We review research that reports inequitable outcomes as a function of language use across education, employment, media, justice systems, housing markets, and health care institutions. Finally, we present paths forward for linguists to help fight against these discriminatory realities.
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The determination of which forms of language are considered standard or correct reinforces social hierarchies that can justify the inferiority of some groups.
“In fact, the determination of which forms of language are considered standard or correct also reinforces social hierarchies that can justify the inferiority of some groups (Blodgett et al. 2020; Craft et al. 2020).”
From Bias and Fairness in Large Language Models: A Survey (2024) · cites this paper as Craft et al. 2020
Cites
Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005) · Discourse Studies · doi:10.1177/1461445605054407 · Cited by 3,797 · see citing works
The Everyday Language of White Racism
Hill, J. H. (2008) · doi:10.1002/9781444304732 · Cited by 909 · see citing works
Uncovering the role of gender stereotypes in speech perception
Strand, E. A. (1999) · Journal of Language and Social Psychology · doi:10.1177/0261927x99018001006 · Cited by 388 · see citing works
Rickford, J. R., & King, S. (2016) · Language · doi:10.1353/lan.2016.0078 · Cited by 374 · see citing works
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Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of “Bias” in NLP
Blodgett, S. L., Barocas, S., Daumé III, H., & Wallach, H. (2020) · Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.485 · Cited by 1,050 · see citing works
“, Campbell-Kibler, 2009; Preston, 2009; Loudermilk, 2015; Lanehart and Malik, 2018)? Which are rendered invisible (Roche, 2019)?(3) Language ideologies play a vital role in reinforcing and justifying social hierarchies because beliefs about language varieties or practices often translate into beliefs about their speak…”
BackgroundBias and Fairness in Large Language Models: A Survey
Gallegos, I. O., Rossi, R. A., Barrow, J., Tanjim, M. M., Kim, S., Dernoncourt, F., Yu, T., Zhang, R., & Ahmed, N. K. (2024) · Computational Linguistics · doi:10.1162/coli_a_00524 · Cited by 665 · see citing works
- Authors
- Craft, J. T., Wright, K. E., Weissler, R. E., & Queen, R. M.
- Affiliations
- University of Michigan (US)
- Venue
- Annual Review of Linguistics
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 2020-01-14
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 389-407
- ISSN
- 2333-9683 (ISSN-L)
- 2333-9691
- OpenAlex
- W2981537661
- Cited by
- 147
- References
- 4
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 52 · 2024: 22 · 2023: 32 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 9.76
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Annual Review of Linguistics (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Linguistic Variation and Morphology
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Multilingual Education and Policy
- Keywords
- language discrimination, linguistic injustice, social identity, linguistic cues, social cognition, justice and equality, institutional discrimination, language and institutions, employment, media, justice system, housing market, health care
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