Talking While Bilingual

Talking While Bilingual Zentilla     

Linguistic profiling, “the auditory equivalent of visual racial profiling” (Baugh, 2003, 155), affects a person’s chances of getting a place to live, a job, a degree, a promotion, a teaching credential and health care because “people use false assumptions about language to justify judgments that have more to do with race, national origin, regional affiliation, ethnicity and religion than with human language and communication” (Lippi-Green, 2004, 292). —> What to make of this? Seems to be drawing a contrast between linguistic profiling (by stereotype) and ‘real differences’ associated with racial or ethnic identity. 

EEOC guidelines outlaw linguistic discrimination based on the protection against national origin discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Two specific guidelines safeguard the linguistic rights of workers, in recognition of the fact that speaking English at all times is burdensome for people who also speak another language: (i) employers may impose English-only rules only if there is a business necessity; and (ii) when employers impose English-only rules, the workers must be informed of the policy and they must be informed of the consequences of disobedience (The Legal Aid Society, 2002).3 But the EEOC guidelines are often violated by complainants who argue that they want to hear English-only in order to avoid being subjected to “babble,” that it is discomforting to hear a language other than English and/or that they have a right to hear English only. Others claim that English-only rules are necessary to avoid what they perceive as rude behavior, for example, workers speaking about a fellow worker in another language, or to promote racial harmony, or because of the market repercussions of multilingual workplaces. For example, 7-Eleven charged that customers would shop elsewhere if they felt uncomfortable when the clerks in their 800 7-Eleven stores in Virginia and Maryland spoke a foreign language to each other (primarily Korean).

—> This seems like an unstable legal foundation, given the nonisomorphism between language and national origin.