This LING 2070  course examines the way that language plays a role in social and political issues, particularly with respect to questions of gender, race, ethnicity, and social identity. We’ll investigate ideologies about language and language variation, issues surrounding regionally and ethnically linked dialects, hate speech and political correctness, and language-based discrimination locally and globally.

Some of the questions that we’ll attempt to answer this semester:

• How are people discriminated against based on their language variety?
• Can a person’s language affect access to employment, education, housing, medical care?
• What is the media’s role in shaping our views of language?
• How are we socialized into language discrimination?
• What does it mean to speak a standard variety of a language?
• Who/what determines the standard form of a language?
• What are the consequences of hate speech?
• Can you sound gay, white, rich, poor, uneducated?
• What is linguistic profiling?
• What is the relationship between gender and language?

Course meets Mondays - Thursdays in the 5w1 session from12:00pm -1:20pm
This course is in the core curriculum and there are no prerequisites. 

Questions can be directed to Sarah.Crowder@unt.edu.