Assignment 2: American Tongues & Language Prejudice
BEFORE WATCHING
Before we watch the video, American Tongues, here are some questions about which I want you to think
and free-write.

When you hear someone speak, what judgments do you make? What assumptions do you make
about people from the way they sound? What assumptions do you think people make about
you based on the way you sound? Do you judge a person’s interests from how they sound?
Their intelligence? Their ability? Their personality? Something else? What judgments do you
feel confident making about people based on how they sound? What sort of connections
between a person’s speech and their other attributes are most valid? Which are least valid?
WHILE WATCHING
As you watch the video, take notes on what you find significant, interesting, and important. Make sure
you push past just recording informational notes alone (where you log facts, definitions, and ideas
without any record of why you wanted to note this information). It is important that you have some
sense of YOUR THINKING on the information you are taking note of so that you can go on to write about
the questions below.
AFTER WATCHING
It is likely that the pre-viewing questions and the video will take up most, if not all, of our class time.
Therefore, for homework, you should use the above notes, what you recall, your reading of Harvey
Daniels’ “Nine Ideas About Language,” and any relevant terms and concepts from Chapter 1 of our
textbook to write a 1-2 page paper discussing the following:

What can be learned from the type of research/investigation we see taking place in the video—
where researchers investigate language attitudes by asking people to identify who “talks funny”
or who speaks “bad English?” And, why is such research and study important?
As you write about what can be learned and its importance, it should help you to reflect on the
following questions and to pull specific examples from the video, your other readings, and your own
experience:



What attitudes do people have towards specific regional dialects and accents?
What factors seem to cause listeners to perceive one type of language as higher in status than
another?
What are some of the consequences of generalizing about people based on dialect?
American Tongues. Dir. Louis Alvarez and Andy Kolker. PBS, 1988. Documentary. http://distanceed.fullerton.edu/bbpresentations/barbara_erickson/american_tongues/player.html.