Linguistic Profiling

I found that the information presented in the University of Washington @ St. Louis really disgusted me. It is horrible that Dr. Braugh (I know I didn't spell that right) was discriminated against both for his accent and his race. It reminded me of the test that Kenneth Clark did to make the case for Brown v. Board of Ed.: he asked small Black children which doll (either Black or White) they preferred. It turned out that the "preferred race" was white. This unfortunate trend resonates in accent discrimination as well. With regards to the other article, it is totally unfair to discriminate on the basis of accent if the person has the same qualifications as another applicant who speaks the "Standard" accent. I tend to think that if a person has an accent, it usually means that the person has learned English as a second language, and most of the time, they know the grammatical rules better than most native speakers.

The accent identification quiz was somewhat difficult for me. I was able to identify some of the Black speakers, but the Hispanic speakers to me really did not have a very strong accent. A lot of the time I thought the White speakers were Hispanic and vice versa, even though those are the two ethnic groups with which I spend the most time. The easiest to identify were the Middle Eastern and Indian speakers, they had the "stereotypical" accent that was very easy for me to pick up on. I also noticed that those who had maybe heard the nursery rhyme from early on were able to say it very fluidly.