Reverse Linguistic Stereotyping and Social Judgment of Accented Speech: A Case Study About Raciolinguistic Phenomena

There has been an ongoing act of social discrimination in which individuals’ language use is misjudged and misunderstood by virtue of listeners’ stereotypes of speakers’ social identities. Because language judgments have a tangible impact on individuals’ opportunities for education, for career advancement, and even for civil rights, reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS) (i.e., attributions of a speaker’s group membership or racial identity cueing distorted perceptions of the speaker’s speech), is of more than just scholarly interest. The current chapter provides an overview of listeners’ expectations and RLS in social judgments and introduces a case study which illustrates these raciolinguistic phenomena in a real-world context. The study is particularly about prospects of employment for immigrants in the U.S. restaurant business. The chapter ends with implications for language education and various workforce-related communication in global contexts.