This blog displays pieces written by students in the course Development of Language Attitudes: The Origins of Linguistic Discrimination, taught by Dr. Charlotte Vaughn in Spring 2019 at the University of Oregon’s Clark Honors College. See the right side menu under “Posts” to navigate to students’ pieces.

As part of the course, students were tasked with writing a public-facing blog post that explains an issue related to linguistic discrimination, which their final paper (not shown here) would go on to address. These pieces were meant to raise awareness about an issue to the general public, or describe a known issue in a new light, grounding it empirical research. In their final papers, students proposed a study or intervention that addressed the issue they discuss in the pieces displayed here. To get a sense of what we grappled with during the course overall, see the course description here: 

Most adults have beliefs about the languages and accents they think are smart and sophisticated, and which sound uneducated. But, how did they come to have those beliefs? This course will examine how aspects of language come to be associated as markers of social groups, and how we come to hold attitudes about languages and dialects (attitudes that can have real consequences for speakers of marginalized language varieties). We will engage with an interdisciplinary literature from linguistics and psychology to ask fundamental questions about how language attitudes are formed in human development. For example, we will examine: How do we study language attitudes? How and when do features of language come to take on social meaning? When in development do language attitudes emerge? How do language attitudes change over the lifespan? What cognitive and social phenomena are involved in these processes? Some of these questions have started to be answered, but some have barely begun to be asked. Students, then, have the exciting opportunity to use that previous work to ask their own new questions in a final project, a proposal for original research that would explore some of these questions, and potentially point toward effective strategies to reduce the entrenchment of linguistic prejudices.

Please note that this blog only contains posts by students in the course who wished to display their writing publicly.