In the summer of 2021, I received an email from an editor at Carson Dellosa, an educational children’s book publisher, in need of a consultant for a book series about language variation. I eventually agreed to write the books myself. “Words in my World” is a 4-book collection that aims to increase awareness of language variation and develop critical language ideologies among students in and teachers of early elementary grades (K-2). I combined my experiences in early elementary classrooms with my expertise in linguistic variation to introduce emerging readers to introductory linguistic concepts such as regional dialectology and modes of communication and sociolinguistic problems such as linguistic discrimination. Writing this series was made difficult by each book’s limiting 150 word and grade 2.9 reading level maximums, the ideologies and practices of the editors and illustrators experienced in creating educational content for young students, and the need for the books to be marketable to wide audiences. In this talk, I outline “Words in my World” and discuss my experiences working with non-linguists to get this project off the ground.

Despite decades of research and intervention efforts, gender-based occupational segregation remains a significant problem. An emerging body of research suggests that one way women overcome gender discrimination when applying for and working in male-dominated jobs is by deliberately managing gender impressions. For example, they may use language that makes them seem less feminine, or "lean in" and act more assertively. However, these individual efforts are often met with backlash and can have unintended negative consequences for women's professional success and personal well-being. In this talk, I argue that systemic problems require systemic solutions, and that organizational efforts to dismantle sexism cannot focus on individuals alone. These individual-level solutions place an undue burden on those who are experiencing stigma and discrimination to solve the problem for themselves by altering the way they act and communicate. Instead, I argue in favor of systemic changes that remove bias from the organizational structures, processes, and procedures that create and perpetuate bias in the first place. Specifically, I will present findings from research examining two interventions that attempt to apply behavioral insights about language to cultivate diversity and inclusion. One intervention explores how we can modify language to attract women to more traditionally male-dominated roles, and the second examines how the language we use to talk about competition can help to reduce the gender gap in promotions.

In this presentation, I describe my experiences as a Deaf researcher who was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, working with signing communities around the Caribbean. I describe some of the ways in which linguistic discrimination affects Deaf communities and individuals in the Caribbean, and suggest some of the changes that need to happen.

Ongoing limitations in access to information and services in our own signed languages, and the failures of Deaf education systems continue to be a major problems for Deaf people in the Caribbean. In my own personal experience as a researcher, my opportunities, particularly access to higher education, have been severely limited by English language requirements.

Many of our sign languages around the region are endangered as a result of the spread of international languages, especially ASL, and there is an urgent need for language documentation.

Although there are strong Deaf-led organisations in Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, in many other parts of the region, organisations are controlled by hearing people, and may not always work in the best interests of Deaf communities. Interpreters, who Deaf people often rely on for access to information, may have limited understanding of Deaf people’s cultures, experiences and languages.

Linguists can and should play a crucial role in addressing language-related biases. However, we linguists carry these biases as well, especially in our teaching, so we risk perpetuating them through our students, many of whom will become the next generation of linguistics. To break the cycle, we need to work on addressing these issues in our pedagogy. In this talk, I present a resource to help with that: the Linguistics Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Repository (LEDIR). LEDIR contains a variety of materials, including lecture notes, assignments, a handbook of inclusive and affirming practices, and the Diverse Names Database. I explore some of the materials on LEDIR and how to use them, to help linguistics instructors make their teaching more equitable, diverse, and inclusive in different ways at the level of course content, representation of languages, and classroom practices.

Ranging from private services offered by English language teachers and speech language pathologists to workplace technologies and self-help videos on YouTube, accent modification is marketed as a means to enhance oral communication between English users of varying linguistic, ethnoracial, and national backgrounds. While it purportedly helps those with “incomprehensible” speech accents to be better understood, accent modification does more harm than good. Specifically, accent modification can be considered a project of accentism, an accent-based oppression that sustains interpersonal and material inequities. First, in terms of its goals and practices, accent modification often requires minoritized speakers to conform to the accents of their majoritized counterparts, thereby freeing the latter of any responsibility in working toward intelligible communication. Moreover, by treating accent as a professional skill to master, accent modification justifies discriminatory hiring practices on the basis of accent. Overall, the accentism of accent modification upholds various racial, colonial, and class hierarchies in a globalizing world. After exemplifying all of the above points, this talk considers anti-oppressive ways to foster mutual understanding in oral communication.

Perhaps because of its salience in the current medical model of transgender identity (Johnson 2015), the role that gender dysphoria plays in determining transgender experience is highly contested within trans communities. Belief in dysphoria as a defining feature of transness is the linchpin of transmedicalism, an ideology stipulating that both gender dysphoria and strong desire for medical transition are required in order to be genuinely transgender. Often referred to, by themselves and others, as transmed(icalist)s or truscum, those who subscribe to this ideology ratify medical authority in regulating transgender experience, insisting that deviating from the established medical model undermines public acceptance of trans communities and trivializes authentic trans experiences. Here, I present an analysis of negotiations of transgender identity on the English-language subreddit r/Truscum, an online community that identifies itself as “a place for those who have been cast out of mainstream trans subreddits.” Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of posts and comments from December 2020–January 2021, I show how the jockeying for semantic authority (McConnell-Ginet 2018) of terms like trans(gender), dysphoria, transtrender, and truscum trouble multiple binaries: authentic and inauthentic, transgender and cisgender, (trans)normative and subversive, and of course, the gender binary itself. Drawing on the tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall 2005), I trace the relationship between discursive practices in these virtual settings and the gender and sexual logics of the transmedicalist healthcare model offline, highlighting the ways in which intra-community discourses are often inseparable from large-scale cultural processes and gendered formations.

Western women who convert to Islam undergo a shift in social positioning that can render their new identity uninterpretable to two audiences: non-Muslims and heritage Muslims. By non-Muslims, the choice to convert is framed as contradictory to liberal ideals like rationality that position theism generally as non-scientific and Islamic theism specifically as oppressive to women, violently reactionary, and counter to social progress (Flower & Birkett 2014; van Nieuwkerk 2006). Simultaneously, faith practices adopted by Western converts to Islam are often framed as devoid of authenticity by heritage Muslims, whether due to converts’ isolation from sociocultural Muslim communities or to converts’ adherence to a Western form of faith practice that lacks religious authority in the context of global Islam (Grewal 2014; McGinty 2006).

Forced to navigate multiple oppositional sets of expectations, convert women construct themselves as Muslim subjects who are both rational and pious (Mahmood 2012; van Nieuwkerk 2014) by leveraging linguistic norms in acts of self-authentication. I examine two types of these authentication strategies – appeals to norms on the level of discourse and appeals to lexical and phonological norms – in demonstrating how converts use language as a resource for the construction of legitimizable identities in their online conversion narratives.

In 2021, I analyzed 1,568 tweets from 1,474 uses that contained ‘pronoun labels’, depronominalized pronoun collocations (e.g., I’m a she/they.) used in nominalized or other lexicalized manners. While much of the speaker demographic information was absent, 60% of users (n=885) indicated their personal pronouns in profiles. USER PRONOUNS, both social and linguistic in nature, is a particularly interesting factor: it is intrinsic connected to the topic of my study, which finds that some speakers consider personal pronouns as a ground for identification that is not equivalent to gender identity. In my coding of this factor, I attempt to account for non-normative linguistic identification practices, such as multiple personal pronouns and neopronouns, while the act of converting it into a quantifiable factor unavoidably erases some nuance. By connecting it to previous literatures in gender and other markers on legal documents (Ashley, 2021; Lyon, 2013), I also interrogate the normative presumptions in my approach. My brief engagement with this ‘new’ factor, is a trial (which I do not claim to be successful) in reimagining how to examine the factors relevant to gender and sexual identity in a non-static way while studying the ever-changing language.

Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has put immense strain on North American food service workers, whose work necessarily involves close proximity to unmasked diners, and who have been tasked with enforcing safety regulations on the very customers they rely on for tips. /r/TalesFromYourServer (TFYS) is a Reddit community where (primarily American) food service workers post narratives about experiences they have at work, often involving interactions or conflicts with customers. In this talk, I apply computationally-assisted critical discourse analysis to TFYS narratives during COVID-19. Within individual narratives, servers depict themselves as deploying linguistic and nonlinguistic styles strategically in order to accomplish their goals at work, such as presenting themselves as a normatively-ideal server to increase tip income, defusing server-customer conflict, and maintaining their own sense of dignity at work. Through metanarrative practices like the sharing of 'second stories' (Sacks, 1992), servers posting on TFYS validate each others' experiences, share advice on how to handle challenging situations, and construct a collective narrative of the restaurant industry from the perspective of the workers whose labour has been keeping it running.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission, despite acknowledging language as inextricable from ethnicity and place of origin (1996), excludes language from its grounds for discrimination. Nevertheless, there is reported accent discrimination in Canadian hiring (e.g., Kalin & Rayko, 1978; Munro, 2003; Creese, 2010). Does Toronto, one of Canada’s most multicultural cities (Anora, 2019) and its top destination for immigrants (Statistics Canada, 2017), foster greater tolerance? While correspondence studies in the GTA (Oreopoulos, 2011) have indicated otherwise, work on possible accent bias is needed, as language discrimination affects immigrants’ quality of life. As Canada increases immigration targets (El-Assal & Thevenot, 2020), this preliminary study investigates whether accents are possible barriers to employment in the GTA.

Female German and Jamaican first and second-generation voices recorded scripted but naturalistic interview snippets. 40 undergraduates evaluated answers for content, expression and whether they deserved a full interview. For all three parameters the most significant variable was which scripted answer was used. Additionally, for two parameters, the evaluator’s English proficiency and the voice’s immigrant status were significant. Participants’ comments and advice, although largely similar, often penalized first-generation voices (especially the Jamaican) and rewarded second-generation voices. These results and their implications are discussed while considering the study’s limitations.

Multiculturalism and hockey are two features that often define Canadian identity (Szto, 2016). However, rarely do the two intersect. While Canada is a multicultural society, its racial and ethnic diversity is not reflected in hockey. For example, in the NHL 97% of the players are White (Associated Press USA Today, 2018). Following Harnarayan Singh’s 2021 debut as the first Sikh person to call play-by-play on a national broadcast, this talk explores the discourse on Twitter surrounding his broadcast. Grounded in a raciolinguistic perspective, tweets (and comments and retweets) were qualitatively examined, and we reveal evaluations of Singh, his play-by-play calling, and his voice. Though many of the comments were positive, praising Singh for challenging the hegemony of hockey and sportscasting and addressing the need for more diversity in the sport, we find racialized and ideological assumptions guiding positive, negative, neutral, ambivalent, and ambiguous evaluations. Viewers and listeners of sports broadcasts are viewed as gatekeepers who inform broadcasting corporations about who they want to see/hear in the broadcasting booth. As such, this public discourse plays an important role in broadcasting hiring decisions and employment for racialized peoples. We further discuss how Singh describes his discursive navigation of being a sportscaster, a Sikh man, and a Canadian.