Linguistics in Pursuit of Justice

by John Baugh

As a black child growing up in inner-city neighborhoods in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, John Baugh witnessed racial discrimination at a young age and began to notice correlations between language and race. While attending college he worked at a Laundromat serving African Americans who were often subjected to mistreatment by the police. His observations piqued his curiosity about the ways that linguistic diversity might be related to the burgeoning Civil Rights movement for racial equality in America. Baugh pursued these ideas whilst traveling internationally only to discover alternative forms of linguistic discrimination in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, the Caribbean and South America. He coined the phrase 'linguistic profiling' based on experimental studies of housing discrimination, and expanded upon those findings to promote equity in education, employment, medicine and the law. This book is the product of the culmination of these studies, devoted to the advancement of equality and justice globally.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

Published February 28, 2018

Reviews

[Selim Ben Said · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a leading sociolinguist, John Baugh pioneered work on ‘linguistic profiling’. A mentee (i.e., doctoral supervisee) of prominent sociolinguist William Labov, Baugh expands upon his research on language and race in this book -- which in his words is about ‘fairness’ and how linguistics can promote justice. One of the injustices addressed by the author is racism though language. To do this Baugh first takes us back on a historical journey which retraces the historical figures of black activism such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. Through this evocation, Baugh provides a rich diachronic overview of the sociolinguistics of Philadelphia. Baugh also retraces the earlier and coincidental beginnings of the field of forensic linguistics with the pioneering work of Roger Shuy. In this chapter, I thought that the graphs were not very explicit and sometimes difficult to read (i.e., the printing was not color-coded, and the shades of grey were sometimes indistinguishable). Chapter 7 is a transition from the previous one and covers an area which John Baugh is mostly celebrated for: linguistic profiling and particularly discrimination based on accented speech during phone conversations. The chapter (especially near the end) leans considerably towards highly specialized quantitative paradigms which does not really engage a non-specialized readership. In the penultimate chapter (i.e., Chapter 10), Baugh reviews some of the influential tools and methods in (socio)linguistics which when combined and properly applied, can serve the causes of fairness and justice.

[Gabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for class but I still enjoyed it and feel like I will come back to some of these topics. 3.5 stars actually bc it could be repetitive