stereotypes – Educational Sociolinguistics

No Tomahawk Chop Needed!

Kahsennenhawe Mandy Jacobs

It’s human nature to want to fit in. When in another country and I am a visitor and I come with respect for their land, their customs and their language (when in Rome!) Greeted by the locals I was readily accepted as one of them. Because I look like a local. But getting the scowl when I say I don’t speak their language. With the language barrier I had to represent who I was by doing the hand over mouth saying “woo – woo – woo” Only when I use a racist action and just short of doing the tomahawk chop made popular by a certain sports team, do they understand who I am.

The local women says,“It’s too bad, because you look like us”. These words were never spoken to me on this side of the border. I was finally not fish out of water. My heart beams because I finally fit in, unfortunately it’s a thousand miles away from my home. The home of seven generations before me. Where the government tried to assimilate us and take away my language and force me to speak theirs.

Oh, you are Japanese, BUT you speak English well!

Yuri

I went to Australia two years ago. It was a fantastic trip, and I met many people including 10ish local Australian people. When I introduced myself, all of the Australians said “oh, you are Japanese! But you speak English well!”

“Wait, what do you mean by but?”, I wondered. Is it weird that a Japanese person speaks English well? I never asked the question because I knew they didn’t mean anything negative. I just smiled and politely said ‘thank you’. BUT, there are many Japanese people who speak English well, and there are very many Japanese people living in Australia. Have you not met any Japanese person who speaks English? Really?

Mirror, mirror, do my lexical choices reflect gender stereotypes?

John Narvaez

I recently watched a TED talk by Lera Boroditsky on how languages shape the way we think. One of her examples pointed out the relationship between grammatical gender and the perceptions that this notion creates in the minds of speakers of languages that use it. She mentioned how, for example, a Spanish speaker would associate stereotypically male words to describe nouns such as “bridge” (“puente”, a masculine noun) while German speakers would assign stereotypically feminine words to describe the same bridge because bridge in German is a feminine word.

I set out to test this idea and surveyed a few friends (5 male, 5 female) asking them to give me the first adjective or word that came to mind when I mentioned a mix of feminine and masculine nouns in Spanish. I chose 6 lexically-linked words: Puente (bridge), casa (house), iglesia (church), edificio (building), estadio (stadium) and piscina (pool). I have translated the results of my survey to share them with you and hopefully bring up some discussion on the implications of this issue in language teaching: