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"Researchers showed children images and voices of a child and two adults, and asked, "Which adult will the child grow up to be?" Children were presented with a challenge: One adult matched the child's race, and one matched the child's language, but neither matched both. ... As would be expected, 9- and 10-year-old children chose the adult who matched the featured child's race. ... Five- and six-year-old English-speaking white children's responses were a bit more surprising: Most of those children chose the language match, even though this meant that the featured child would have needed to change race."

Interesting article on how one's race and accent are related.

A small circle of history researchers is racing to capture the last remnants of a little-known French dialect that endures in some old Missouri mining towns before the few remaining native speakers succumb to old age. So-called Missouri French is spoken by fewer than 30 people in Old Mines. The dialect is one of three French dialects to have developed in the U.S., and emerged 300 years ago. It's an amalgamation of old Norman French, Native American languages, and frontier English.

This study from the University of Pennsylvania explores whether or not Asian-Americans have a certain "sound" to their speaking that distinguishes them from their White counterparts. White and Asian-American audio samples were curated for a test group to listen to in order to guess their races. On average, White and Asian-American participants in the study were around 65% accurate in their guesses, suggesting more success than random guessing. Some individual participants had accuracy as high as 85% or 90%. Some audio samples yielded guesses that were accurate upwards of 90% of the time. Asian-American participants were often more accurate in their guesses, but less able to express how they knew. White participants described the "upspeak" often used as a "lack of assertiveness." They also identified "increased pauses between words" and "jerkier speech". They also noted that Asian Americans used more "filler material" in their sentences like "um," "uh," or "like." I thought that was interesting because in Japanese, similar filler words like あのう and ええと are used. In Indonesian, we often hum as a filler, which I found to be different than typical English speakers' hums, and that I as a bilingual person have started to do when speaking English as well.

This article highlights the phrases that Clinton used during the presidential debate to attract black voters. Phrases like "systematic racism", "implicit bias", "black bias", and "racist" were used to identify with the black voters. Many viewers were excited that she was facing such issues and was tackling them head on because according to this article, "A big chunk of Americans - not just people of color - want our leadership to talk about race, and to talk about policing the criminal justice system and the role that race plays in those institutions." As a presidential candidate, Clinton has been forced to become more skilled with the word choice. Here, she attempts to appeal herself to different groups of people to attract votes.

The World Health Organisation counts 430m people as deaf or hard of hearing. Many use sign languages to communicate. If they cannot also use those languages to talk to computers, they risk being excluded from the digitisation that is taking over everyday life. Sign language poses particular issues in re: its translation to either text or speech. Some challenges include improving the machine-learning algorithms that recognise signs and their meaning and developing the best methods to interpret sign languages' distinctive grammars. The applications of such technology could improve the lives of the deaf, for example, allowing them to use their cell phones to search for directions or look up the meanings of unknown signs, without resorting to the written form of a spoken language.

The article talks about the history drag and LGBTQ+ slang and the double-edged sword of the language becoming mainstream. It's interesting how many subcultures such as African American and Latinx cultures contributed to what drag is today.

Article examines the changing public attitudes towards words: is Redskins a pejorative racial slur? Is acceptability dependent on the user?

Language Specialists are attempting to save the Native American Language before it becomes extinct.

I'm about to become a father. And among the many questions racing through my mind is an odd one I can't yet answer. It's not the existential question of whether I'll be a good dad or the basic question of whether I'll drop the baby while walking.

A new study by Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield, authors of the New York Times bestseller Crucial Conversations, shows nearly everyone has either seen or suffered from a catastrophic comment. Specifically, 83 percent have witnessed their colleagues say something that has had catastrophic results on their careers, reputations and businesses. Here are the top 5 blunders: 1) SUICIDE BY FEEDBACK: You thought others could handle the truth-but they didn't. 2) GOSSIP KARMA: You talked about someone or something in confidence with a colleague only to have your damning comments made public. 3) TABOO TOPICS: What it looks like: You said something about race, sex, politics or religion that you thought was safe, but others distorted it, misunderstood it, took it wrong, used it against you, etc. 4) WORD RAGE: You lost your temper and used profanity or obscenities to make your point. 5) "REPLY ALL" BLUNDERS. You accidentally shared something harmful via technology (email, text, virtual meeting tools, etc).

Code-switching involves moving freely between two different languages or dialects of a single language. Many people of color, especially mixed-race and multi-cultural people naturally code-switch. This article shows us Sheena Cobb as an example because she uses both the American Sign Language (ASL) and Black ASL depending on who she is with. Elements of black culture appear in Black ASL such as religious practice, cooking, humor, music, hairstyles, words and phrases typically used in the black communities. People who use Black ASL tend to sign with two hands, in different positions, in a larger signing space and with more repetition than with regular ASL signs.

This article talks about how Latvia has passed a law that will limit the use of Russian language in schools. They passed this law because they wanted to strengthen Latvian identity, as Latvia spent half of its time as an independent country being a member of the Soviet Union. Banning Russian will help to strengthen national identity and integrate Russian speakers into the society. However, because much of the population speaks Russian, there is some backlash against the law. Many people are more comfortable speaking Russian than Latvian, and they are afraid the new law will increase tensions between races.

To speak or write Black English with any level of fluency requires diligence and, more often than not, a familiarity that is both embodied and acculturated. The language ebbs and flows temporally, but also along lines of class, region, and even national origin (after all, Americans are not the only people-black or otherwise-to speak English). Black English is, like standard American English, a language worthy of both speech and study. It is distinct and recognizable, a code of speech that can function as much as a signal of authenticity or belonging as it does a way to relay words.

Facebook shut down an Artificial Intelligence experiment shortly after developers discovered that the machines were talking in a language the machines made up that humans couldn't understand. The developers first programmed the chatbots so they could talk in English to each other when trading items back and forth. When the chatbots got into a long negotiation, they started talking to each other in their own language. Even though these chatbots were not highly intelligent, it is concerning that they went off on their own so quickly. In 2014, scientist Stephen Hawking warned that Artificial Intelligence could be the end of the human race. Hopefully the Matrix is science fiction, not science prediction.

This blog has various articles re: the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting. Recent posts include the role of Asians in hip-hop, popular media and code-switching.

Choosing a voice has implications for design, branding or interacting with machines. A voice can change or harden how we see each other. Research suggests that users prefer a younger, female voice for their digital personal assistant. We don't just need that computerized voice to meet our expectations, said Justine Cassell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. We need computers to relate to us and put us at ease when performing a task. "We have to know that the other is enough like us that it will run our program correctly," she said. That need seems to start young. Ms. Cassell has designed an avatar of indeterminate race and gender for 5-year-olds. "The girls think it's a girl, and the boys think it's a boy," she said. "Children of color think it's of color, Caucasians think it's Caucasian." Another system Cassell built spoke in what she termed "vernacular" to African-American children, achieving better results in teaching scientific concepts than when the computer spoke in standard English. When tutoring the children in a class presentation, however, "we wanted it to practice with them in 'proper English.' Standard American English is still the code of power, so we needed to develop an agent that would train them in code switching," she said. And, of course, there are regional issues to consider when creating a robotic voice. Many companies, such as Apple, have tweaked robotic voices for localized accents and jokes.

This article talks about the relocation of the cockney accent from east London to Essex. The cockney dialect is thought of as a white, working class accent originating in London, but the culture has spread to Essex because of migration due to poverty, overcrowding, deindustrialisation in London and development in Essex. Similar to second-generation immigrants or mixed race people, this has resulted in a confused sense of identity for Essex-born and Cockney-speaking individuals.