English with an Accent

Since its original publication in 1997, English with an Accent has inspired generations of scholars to investigate linguistic discrimination, social categorization, social structures, and power. This new edition is an attempt to retain the spirit of the original while enriching and expanding it to reflect the greater understanding of linguistic discrimination that it has helped create.

This third edition has been substantially reworked to include:

• An updated concept of social categories, how they are constructed in interaction, and how they can be invoked and perceived through linguistic cues or language ideologies
• Refreshed accounts of the countless social and structural factors that go into linguistic discrimination
• Expanded attention to specific linguistic structures, language groups, and social domains that go beyond those provided in earlier editions
• New dedicated chapter on American Sign Language and its history of discrimination
• QR codes linking to external media, stories, and other forms of engagement beyond the text
• A revamped website with additional material

English with an Accent remains a book that forces us to acknowledge and understand the ways language is used as an excuse for discrimination. The book will help readers to better understand issues of cross-cultural communication, to develop strategies for successful interactions across social difference, to recognize patterns of language that reflect implicit bias, and to gain awareness of how mistaken beliefs about language create and nurture prejudice and discrimination.

Rusty Barrett is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. His research is in Mayan linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. He is author of From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures, co-author of Other People’s English: Code Meshing, Code Switching and African American Literacy, and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality.

Jennifer Cramer is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. Her research is in perceptual dialectology, with a specific focus on dialect variation in Kentucky. She is the author of Contested Southernness: The Linguistic Production and Perception of Identities in the Borderlands, co-author of Linguistic Planets of Belief: Mapping Language Attitudes in the American South, and co-editor of Cityscapes and Perceptual Dialectology: Global Perspectives on Non-Linguists’ Knowledge of the Dialect Landscape.

Kevin B. McGowan is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky and Director of the University of Kentucky Phonetics Lab. He is a phonetician, and his research primarily focuses on speech perception and the ways in which the creation and perception of social identities influence our ability to understand each other.