more trouble for you. Baugh does command what people think of as *SAE;
but he is still discriminated against on the basis of race.
Of course, the identification of social allegiances on the basis of
language traits is a normal and natural practice for all human beings;
variation is built into spoken language specifically to help us situate each
other in social and geographic space. The problem starts when we draw
conclusions and then use them to discriminate and exclude individuals
from normal life activities on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin or
any other protected category.
In a long-term study funded by the Ford Foundation, Baugh and his
associates looked at these issues closely. The initial question was a simple
one, on the surface at least: Is it possible to tell a person’s race and/or
ethnicity based on an individual’s speaking voice – without any visual
clues at all?^5 That is, are there specific phonological or phonetic features
that are associated with a particular race or ethnicity, and if so, do specific
traits trigger specific kinds of reactions?
I had you at Hello
Baugh and his colleagues designed a series of four experiments to better
understand some of the most basic aspects of linguistic profiling. In the
first stage of this study, Baugh collected the data himself by systematically
calling landlords to inquire about advertised apartments, targeting five
specific areas in the San Francisco Bay area. In every case he used the
same greeting: “Hello, I’m calling about the apartment you have
advertised in the paper.” In order to avoid suspicion on the basis of
idiosyncratic features, different return telephone numbers and pseudonyms
were used for each of the three calls to each landlord.^6 The hypothesis was
that in communities where the population was predominantly Anglo, there
would be fewer positive responses to inquiries made in AAVE or ChE.
The second study was similar to the first in that the same sentence was
used, but this time twenty individuals who were native speakers of one of
the targeted varieties of English recorded the sentence in question.