Pictured above: Rally for Trayvon Martin at the University of Minnesota – March 29, 2012 [ Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue ]
Does the way you grew up speaking at home differ from how you speak in public? Think about the different sounds, vocabulary, and jokes you might exchange with your family or friends. Have you ever felt uncomfortable speaking this way in public or with speakers who do not share your language background? Now, if you can remember, imagine a moment when the way you or someone else spoke was misheard or misunderstood by a listener. What led to the breakdown in communication, and how did it make you feel?
Everyone has an accent or speaks some dialect, a variety of a language, but certain ways of speaking are perceived more negatively than others by the public. Can you think of a language or way of speaking that is devalued? How have you or other speakers you’ve witnessed responded to such bias? Unfortunately, there are many ways in which talking differently or speaking a stigmatized dialect, a dialect that has been belittled or looked down upon because the language and its speakers might be viewed as inadequate or deficient, can have negative consequences. This happens every day across a range of contexts, including in school, the workplace, and even our criminal justice system.
It is crucial that witnesses be understood when providing a testimony, regardless of the dialect they speak.
If you’re wondering how this might be considered important in the context of the law, it is crucial that witnesses be understood when providing a testimony, regardless of the dialect they speak. Consider this instance in which a speaker spoke an unfamiliar language in a testimony and the effects its misunderstanding had on a transcript: A speaker from the United Kingdom spoke a language called Jamaican Creole, which is also known as Patois. When he recounted his reaction to hearing gunshots, he stated, “Wen mi ier da bop bop, mi drop a groun, an den mi staat run.” If you don’t speak this Creole, you might recognize a few words in this sentence, but you may not be able to fully parse it. This was true for the transcriber, who wrote, “When I heard the bop bop, I dropped the gun, then I started to run.” Unfortunately, that was an incorrect interpretation, as the speaker should have been translated as saying, “When I heard the bop bop, I dropped to the ground, and then I started to run.” Notice the difference between the last two sentences. For the word groun, the transcriber linked a gun to the speaker, whereas the corrected transcription replaces the word with ground. In the first, the speaker appears to be holding a gun, while in the second he is avoiding gunshots. This example demonstrates how speakers with dialects different from mine and possibly yours can be misheard and potentially criminalized, made to appear as someone engaged in criminal activity. This example also raises questions about the likelihood that such mistranscriptions are more likely to happen with speakers from oppressed groups whose speech and/or culture are devalued.
This example is just one of many that shows how stigmatized dialects are misperceived and the harmful impacts such misperceptions can have in legal contexts. In our paper “Language and Linguistics on Trial,” John Rickford and I find similar outcomes for a different stigmatized dialect, African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Zooming in on an individual speaker, Rachel Jeantel, who was only 18 at the time of testimony, we study (1) how this young Black woman was publicly shamed for her dialect in a high-profile case and (2) how the perception of her dialect affected the case results. In this case, George Zimmerman was charged with but acquitted of second-degree murder for the killing of Trayvon Martin, a young man walking home from the corner store. Who is Rachel Jeantel and why was she so important to this case? Rachel Jeantel played a central role in the trial as a close friend of Trayvon Martin and the last person to speak to him. As a witness who heard the exchange between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, she gave her testimony. However, she didn’t expect that the way she spoke would be criticized, that the way she spoke would outweigh the facts of the case, or that who she was would be on trial for the rest of world.
Speakers with dialects different from mine and possibly yours can be misheard and potentially criminalized, made to appear as someone engaged in criminal activity.
Rachel’s six-hour testimony was important because she was the last person to speak with Trayvon Martin and because she provided details about George Zimmerman’s pursuit of him. Her testimony also included Trayvon Martin’s perspective of being followed, as well as the moments leading up to his death. Despite the importance of Rachel Jeantel’s testimony, she was largely disregarded, and Rickford and I argue that the jury largely ignored her testimony because of the way she spoke. Online critics labeled her an idiot, ignorant, and uneducated, among other insults. What makes the way Rachel Jeantel spoke so distinctive? As mentioned before, she spoke AAVE, as shown by the kind of vocabulary, sentence structure, and sounds she used. AAVE is a dialect mostly spoken by African Americans, and it follows its own set of grammatical rules shared by speakers of the dialect. Do any examples of this dialect come to mind for you? There are plenty to choose from, but a few we will cover below include: “no cap,” zero copula (copula are forms of the be verb), e.g. “She 0 dancing,” as well as t/d deletion(e.g. fast 🡪 fas; ground 🡪 groun). You may or may not be familiar with these examples, but it is likely that someone you know or have watched on TV uses these unspoken rules in their everyday language. The term cap (“to lie”) sees its roots in AAVE spoken by older speakers, but it has been reintroduced in younger generations in the phrase “no cap,” which means “no lie.” As for the sentence structure rule zero copula, this refers to the absence of is or are in sentences like “He 0 coming over soon” or “She 0 bougie.” An additional and final rule we’ll discuss is t/d deletion, in which one of the consonants is dropped in a final pair, such that you can say “bes’ fren’” for “best friend.”
Revisiting Rachel Jeantel, we observed that she, too, drew on special vocabulary words and rules associated with the dialect. For example, she used the controversial n-word, minus the hard r, when quoting what Trayvon Martin said to her over the phone. She also had zero copula in 66% of her utterances and deleted final t’s and d’s in consonant pairs 88% of the time. The fact that she had these and other features in her speech, which mirror what has been observed for AAVE speakers across the country, suggests that she is an authentic speaker of the variety. This observation could have several consequences for the trial, including her testimony’s being misheard, misjudged, and dismissed.
Should people who speak differently be considered less trustworthy or unbelievable because we don’t understand their voices?
You might ask how we can guess the effects Rachel Jeantel’s testimony had on the acquittal of George Zimmerman, and so we turn to the direct quotes of jurors in the trial. In the first example, one of the six jurors said in an interview with Anderson Cooper after the trial that she found Jeantel both hard to understand and not credible. In another example, we turn to the transcript of the testimony when a juror is transcribed as interrupting Rachel Jeantel during her testimony to ask for clarification, saying, “I’m sorry, I just didn’t hear,” and the judge scolds this juror for continuing to speak out of turn, saying, “Okay. You can’t ask questions… If you can’t understand, just raise your hand.” Both examples suggest that the jurors had difficulty understanding Jeantel’s speech, and that also may have contributed to her testimony being disbelieved. Despite Jeantel’s extensive testimony taking place over 2 days and jury deliberations lasting more than 16 hours, Juror Maddy admitted that “no one mentioned Jeantel” and “her testimony played no role whatsoever in their decision.” Should people who speak differently be considered less trustworthy or unbelievable because we don’t understand their voices? We do not feel that the way a person talks should influence their credibility. Yet, research in sociolinguistics and social psychology has shown that people with accents, including AAVE speakers, tend to be misheard, judged as less understandable, and perceived as more guilty.
How can we ensure that witnesses are not discredited on the basis of their voices alone? As I’ve discussed in previous work with John Rickford, actions can be taken to diminish the harm against speakers of stigmatized dialects like AAVE. Some of those strategies include doing more research on the perception of AAVE; bringing more linguists into the courtroom to explain the dialect and its patterns; assisting these speakers in learning standardized English, if they desire to do so; advocating for interpreters; and including more Black jurors. Consider all the Rachel Jeantels of the world. Consider how you could be Rachel Jeantel. This is a call to action for those who aren’t heard in the criminal justice system. These are broader structural changes that can make a difference in the criminal justice system, but change can start with you too.
