Ask or aks? How linguistic prejudice perpetuates inequality

[2naSalit]

2. When I was young...

I was punished for not speaking and writing in a specific version of English and was told that anyone who could not pronounce words properly had inferior education. It also went with a host of other alleged tells indicating people to be avoided.

As I got older and traveled quite a bit I realized that there was a whole country of English speakers who had numerous varieties that were more regional than anything else. In college I really got into dialects, because I knew so many and my advisor was excited to meet a code switcher, I was able to go pretty far with it for an undergrad. Language and food, staples of cultural identification and camaraderie.