A very warm welcome to Chapter 12, episode number
two, "Linguistic profiling - names and accents
in urban apartment searches".
My learning goals for you today are to talk about language and stereotypes,
so you understand the relationship between them.
You will learn about the linguistic discrimination
in urban contexts.
You will also learn on how to do research on language and social justice.
I would talk a little bit about ethnolinguistic vitality,
and you will hear about the relationship between neighborhoods in a city and accents
that are spoken in those neighborhoods.
As you probably all know in urban environments,
people with a migration background often have limited access
to the infrastructure of host societies and mainstream everyday life
in different ways.
As a result of competition for limited resources
such as housing in specific urban areas, social and ethnic separation
is also forced by the host society based on different treatment
towards immigrants.
In many societies, urban diversity is not realized by integration,
but rather realized in spatial segregation as a result
also of the discriminatory practices of gatekeepers to housing,
employment and good schools, for example.
And several studies have shown that, they demonstrated
that speaking with a non-standard accent or dialect in telephone conversations
to inquire about the possibility to see an apartment,
to have an apartment viewing without getting
in personal contact, it already alters the likelihood
of being invited by a landlord or real estate agent
to view the apartment.
So the relationship between ethnic group and a linguistic accent
is very old. Already, the linguist Sapir in 1923
stated that languages and varieties are often associated with ethnicity.
And the first systematic study was conducted in Canada
by Gardner and Lambert and they discovered that bilingual speakers
who are bilingual French and English speaking
were consistently evaluated as more positively
when they spoke English, meaning that English
had a higher prestige in terms of character traits such as employability
or attractiveness, for example.
So that means that foreign accents and dialects are
associated with the social representation of their speakers.
And in that sense, we have a social stratification
of dialects, even though the dialects themselves are equally elaborated
linguistic systems,
that means no dialect is inferior to the other.
The societies associate certain ethnic groups
and social classes to these dialects,
and in that sense, we have the social ladder
as social stratification of dialects.
On the other hand, some of the dialects that are not viewed very highly
in mainstream societies such as in Germany,
we have the so-called "Kiezdeutsch" which is a youth language
that has a lot of traits from foreigner talk as well,
or in America, for example, we have African-American English,
which has a very high prestige among that group,
that means if you are among your group, you need to speak that specific dialect
because it fosters the group identity,
and it's really important to speak it.
On the other hand, in the mainstream society,
it's not valued.
So there's quite an ambivalence in that. Yeah, and so how does that work?
We have phonology, you see that we have our brains,
we have articulatory phonetics,
and if you immigrate to a new country, it's pretty hard
not to speak without an accent.
I mean, there is this theory that we say around the age of 13,
you are pretty able to still acquire a native accent,
but after that, it's already pretty hard because your tongue and your brain
are geared towards that one direction.
And then the sound waves are pretty different
from a native speaker's,
they get perceived in auditory phonetics by the listener,
and so it gets into the brain, it's auditory phonetics
and right away, the accent is associated with a certain ethnic group
and judgments are made.
And this is how this happens.
Yeah, so and I was really interested in different kinds
of dialects and accents, and there is a research gap
because no one ever had taken a prestige dialect,
which is American English speakers, and Turkish dialect,
which is our largest immigrant group in Germany. But still, unfortunately,
some Germans have some prejudices towards Turkish names and accents,
so I wanted to see what are the different reaction
towards an American speaker, a Turkish speaker and a German speaker.
So there have been studies that were conducted in sociology
and psychology that have shown that standard German speakers
with standard German names were discriminated,
that they discriminated against speakers with Turkish names and accents,
for example, when they were applying for jobs
or apartments. And most used paired testing methods,
testing German and Turkish names.
So but what none of these studies have done is that
there were no high and low prestige accents.
And I say "high" and "low" prestige accents because that associate,
that bias that is implemented here. Then I have the name,
the Turkish name with and without an accent.
I also checked the length of each conversation,
so we stopped the minutes and seconds of each conversation.
We rated the friendliness of the landlords and real estate agents.
And what also hasn't been done before is a discourse analysis.
We got the permission to tape record, audio record
some of the conversations which I analyzed later,
according to conversation analytic methods.
Yeah, to talk a little bit more about social stratification of accent,
is that that we do have,
the fact that educational success is actually related
to the neighborhoods within the city, and if you think about that,
then if ethnic names and dialects are related to neighborhoods
and educational success is also related, that could be kind of a downward spiral
that way.
Actually, when I told one of my students, one of my BA students about my study,
she said she grew up in the neighborhood of Gröpelingen,
and she said that
all but two students in Gröpelingen in her school
got a recommendation for the high school in Germany,
which is the highest school preparing for college,
so only two students got a recommendation for that school.
She had a boyfriend at the time who grew up in Schwachhausen
which is the very expensive, higher middle class,
upper middle class area here in Bremen.
And he told her,
all but two people got a recommendation for the gymnasium,
for the high school that prepares for college.
So really, you see that there's a relationship between all this,
the demographics, the ethnic groups, the neighborhoods
and the educational success.
So that means that non-standard German and ethnic or youth
migrant language develops oftentimes in neighborhoods
where we have a high migrant population and Heike Wiese
has studied a lot about this.
This is called "Kietzdeutsch" and the mainstream standard
German speakers might think this is kind of a lower class,
social class German, but really, as I mentioned before,
doesn't have to do anything with intelligence or lack of education,
but it's really a dialect that confirms an ethnic group identity.
Yeah, and so my study basically replicates both results.
In California, John Baugh was a student of the famous sociolinguistics
William Labov, and he did a fascinating study.
Being African-American himself,
he noticed that he called for an apartment with the name John Baugh,
speaking a standard American accent,
and when he got to the house viewing, oftentimes the people said,
well, no, sorry, the house is not available anymore.
And so he had that idea, being a social linguist,
to try different areas in the San Francisco Bay Area.
So he tried East Palo Alto, Oakland, San Francisco, Palo Alto and Woodside.
And all of these cities have different populations
with higher or lower percentages of African-Americans
or Chicanos. Chicanos are Latin American speakers
who speak Hispanic sounding dialect also.
Yeah, and he found that there was a strong correlation,
and as you see here in the numbers between the areas you see,
let's say, East Palo Alto and Oakland have a large population
of African-Americans, and there the acceptance
of African American vernacular and viewings,
the numbers were much higher than, for example, in Palo Alto and Woodside,
which are predominantly European-American,
and so there the acceptance for viewings for African-American
and Chicano accents were way lower.
What's interesting is to see that we have quite a system about,
you know, associating categories towards people,
so we have a label let's say, I'm German, I'm a mother,
and if I say I'm a mother, there are some associations,
I belong to a certain membership category, as we say in sociolinguistics
and conversation analysis.
That means through names and accents,
I can categorize someone and have a whole lot of "knowledge"
about that person.
And this knowledge is very inference rich. If I say someone is African-American
or a Mexican-American, I have some societal
structural information about that person.
And these are invoked just by purely mentioning a name and an accent.
And often they're associated with diffuse negative stereotypes.
So these stereotypes existing in the society, pre-existing,
and it's sometimes really difficult to get them out of your heads.
They are nothing more than categories that people try to make the world simpler.
But the downside of this is that they're sometimes false
and that they are sometimes negative, if you don't know a certain group.
Yes, so and if we talk about this issue of neighborhoods and accents,
we see that even in one city, so for example,
if you're here in the city of Bremen, in Germany, you go
to one neighborhood, there might be a different
dialect spoken, a slightly different German,
for example, the Kiezdeutsch and in other neighborhoods,
another style of German would be spoken.
And so this is also something that a lot of researchers in,
for example, Hamburg and in Canada and in America
found in their studies that there are different accents and dialects
within one city within a different neighborhood.
And so there would be preferred and dispreferred phonological features,
and we could describe a dialect by phonological features,
meaning that there's certain sounds that are slightly different.
And in that sense, we do have a multiethnolect,
for example, in the city of Bremen as well, a so-called Kiezdeutsch,
which was mainly associated to the Berlin area.
Yeah, and of course, you might find different neighborhoods
where we have a large number of a specific ethnic or national group.
And of course, it's a common sociological pattern
to seek out one's own community,
and the social force of racism, though, also serves to keep certain communities
within geographical boundaries.
So, for example, in the context of the United States,
the so-called "White flight" in certain neighborhoods
or the gentrification can lead to de facto segregation,
which now continues to be maintained.
And you observe that in a lot of different cities in Germany,
also in the US, that this gentrification is going on,
the apartments get unaffordable.
If there were certain groups living in those areas,
they're not affordable anymore.
And so the downside could be even being homeless in the end.
Yeah, and so in the United States, for example,
we had that biracial ideology for a long time.
And in that sense, we can still explain why African American vernacular
is still distinct to standard American English,
and that is the divergence hypothesis and the social stratification
which Labov studied intensively,
and also researchers such as Shana Poplack and Heike Wiese.
I just want to give you an example of the census data from 2010.
Unfortunately, the census data, the latest
didn't have a geographical map like this, now because there were
different categories,
many people said that they were multiracial and more than one race. In this map,
you still see an association of one ethnicity towards one color.
So you see the blue dots would represent African-Americans,
the pink dots European-Americans, the orange Chicano Hispanic speakers,
the green would be Asians.
And I think it's very easy to see, also here in Los Angeles
that there are certain neighborhoods where you see really one ethnicity
is predominant in that neighborhood.
And we can explain a little bit why we would have
that so-called ethnolinguistic vitality, meaning that if Chicanos
speaking bilingual, Spanish English speakers live in one neighborhood,
they develop a certain dialect and it is being kept alive,
it's part of the ethnic identity and strengthens the in-group identity
towards the White European Americans.
The same with African-American.
So you see that ethnolinguistic vitality will pertain to different dialects
spoken within one city.
Yeah, and here I show you a video that illustrates the way
that we conducted the study with my students.
And my research questions were: Are callers with Turkish, Standard American accents
and Standard German treated differently by landlords
and real estate agents in Bremen?
What is the difference between Turkish name callers
speaking Standard German and Turkish name callers with Turkish accent?
And are there any differences in the reactions of the landlords
and real estate agents in prestigious and less prestigious parts of town?
Meaning these areas had quite different prices in the,
for the apartments, for example, they had different unemployment rates
and they had different numbers of people with migration
background or people being native Germans,
so to say.
Native Germans in terms of ethnic Germans.
And so these are the four areas that I investigated in the city of Bremen,
they were Gröpelingen, Walle Schwachhausen and Tenever.
As you see, Tenever has a very high percentage of people
with migration background numbering 61 percent,
so it's more than the ethnic Germans in this area, versus Schwachhausen
only has 8.9 percent
people with migration background versus the rest is ethnic German here.
Yeah, so the design of my pilot study was we conducted
289 phone calls in four parts of town in Bremen
with different, with these different social structures.
And we first called with a Turkish name and accent, then
with the US American name and accent, then the German name and accent,
and all of the callers were nurses,
so nurses or kindergarten teacher, so we had the same employment category,
so to say.
And then I conducted a statistical analysis, I did ANOVA
and Chi square, I took field notes,
I did discourse analysis of the recorded telephone conversations.
You see here the so-called transcription in GAT 2 transcription system,
that means it's a transcription system that also notes,
for example, pauses, overlapping talk,
and interruptions, for example.
And I just want to read out the conversation
how it happened and how I recorded it.
So the real estate agent is RA and the caller is Aysun Gülbeyaz,
our Turkish caller.
And so the real estate agent picks up the phone
and says the name of the agency and she says, "name of the agency,
my name is".
And Aysun says,
"Hello, I'm Aysun Gülbeyaz, I call because",
and she doesn't even finish the word because and already she gets interrupted
by the real estate agent.
She says, "Good day", in German she says, "Guten Tag".
And so she picks up again, Aysun picks up again
and she says, "Yes, I wanted to ask if I can have an appointment viewing",
and then she taps on the table twice
and then the real estate agent interrupts her again
and says, "OK for the apartment,
which one, the two or the four room one?" - "Two room,
I'm by myself, I'm single, I'm alone".
"Good okay.
Let's have a look.
What do we have here?
Hmm. (Pause) No, I'm sorry.
So for that flat, there's already too many offers."
Aysun says, "OK. Hmm.
Would you have different offers for me nearby?"
The real estate agent says, "Oh yeah, we can do it like this.
I can register you as interested."
Yeah, so from a conversation analytic perspective,
this is really interesting because you see that Aysun interrupts,
Aysun is interrupted by the real estate agent,
and we can conclude that Aysun's non-native accent
and name could possibly have influenced the course of the conversation.
So we can say that just the accent and also her name had an influence
on how this conversation went, and also not only that,
but also on the decision of the real estate agent.
Because this is what my statistical results
will show you later on.
And also Chase Raymond has written about this,
how accents and dialects can can really influence
the course of conversation because of affiliative membership categories
that callers have.
And what you see also is that Aysun's turns
have been treated as repairables as we say in conversation analysis,
these are not overtly lexical item or non-native speaker membership issues,
maybe also because of the institutional categories,
but so, you know, the real estate agent
fills in the syntactic gap and says "Für die Wohnung, for the apartment",
so kind of treating her as if she had not said it correctly.
So this is already a highly structured institutional talk procedure
to apply for an apartment, to to say the correct sentences,
to give the correct information with distributed institutional roles
and power relations
which the German real estate agent exhibits, you know, in her taken-for-granted
other-initiated repairs.
So this is a typical analysis of, of let's say, I would say
a kind of micro-discrimination because she doesn't really say,
you know, I'm not going to give you the viewing
because because of your name and your accent,
it could be that that was the case,
we don't know,
but the statistical results unfortunately really showed
that this did happen.
And in this sense, I'm very honored to have Dr. Adeiza Isiaka
here today with me, and he will give an expert,
an insider interview as he is a linguist himself,
studying immigration and language in Germany right now.
And I will interview him on racial and linguistic profiling
on the housing market here in Germany and Canada.
Welcome. I feel very honored to introduce Dr. Adeiza Isiaka
from the University of Toronto today.
Dr. Isiaka is a researcher and scholar of linguistics and migration
and so he is quite an expert on all issues that are having to do
with immigration and language.
And yeah, welcome.
So it's a pleasure to be here.
Yeah, I have a question for you.
So did you experience maybe in your studies
or you yourself linguistic discrimination in the housing market in Germany?
Yes, as a student in Germany, and so from 2013 to 2017,
I had a couple of experiences which I believe
were also consistent with the experiences
some of the people who are from Africa like me
also had because we talked about these things.
So what usually happens is that you, you'll find a listing
or you find listings online, so you are interested in the apartment,
and usually there are phone numbers that you can call
and then you put a call through.
And so it could happen in different ways.
So sometimes the phone is answered,
of course it would be answered,
And just at the point of introducing yourself
and expressing your interest, it's obvious that you are not German,
because even if you had been in Germany for a long time
and you have learned to speak German, from your accent, they can easily
tell that, OK, this person isn't German.
So sometimes they just are going to tell you right away,
it's no longer available, the apartment has already been taken.
And sometimes, they want to give you the benefit of the doubt,
so they invite you, they actually invite you for viewing.
And it's when you show up, and and I would think
that has to do with color, really,
but so when you show up and they see that, OK, indeed,
you have certain kind of color,
so that's when, of course, you're still going to see the building.
But then that will be the last you would ever hear from the,
from the from the estate agent.
So sometimes you don't even get the opportunity to view
and sometimes you actually get there and you're never invited
for further discussions about the vacancy, yes.
And, yeah, I imagine that is kind of very hurtful
to experience that, and I wonder, did you have a terrible
and a good experience, maybe, in doing this?
Yes, I would say that if you are looking for an apartment
as an immigrant, which of course, I was then
and which I would still be if I were living in Germany,
I'm now, you definitely going to have such experiences.
But it's not,
it's not everyone who will turn you down.
And so in my case, I had to, you know, spread my net very wide.
I wasn't just looking for apartments in a particular part of the city,
so I was looking for apartments all over the place,
so I had several options.
You would be lucky, of course, if you have, if you spread your net wider,
if you are looking for apartments in different parts of the city.
But there are indeed occasions,
of course, there were occasions in which I was flatly turned down,
when I was not even given the chance to introduce myself.
And because there are different kinds of immigrants, right?
Some are not just going to turn you down because you are an immigrant,
they are also interested in knowing if you won't cause trouble
for other tenants in the house.
So if those get to know that you're a scholar,
maybe you could be considered.
And but if you were never given the chance to even say who you are
or to say something about yourself, of course you wouldn't get that chance.
But there are also some people who gave the benefit
of the doubt, they gave,
they gave me the chance to introduce myself as a post,
as a doctoral student at the university, and that gave me some kind
of an advantage over all the people who were not scholars.
Yeah. And do you think, so,
you think there is a relationship between the name already
and maybe the social representation of the speaker?
Oh yes. There is usually a relationship between the name
because, for instance, it's not, I don't know any German
who goes by the name Adeiza,
and Adeiza is typically African, right?
So sometimes just introducing yourself as Adeiza
would already disqualify you.
But I also observed that there was a particular instance
in which I introduced myself as Peter and I was invited
to come view the apartment, because Peter is also my name,
even though it's not on my certificate,
so it's a name that some people call me.
And usually I tell people, if you can't, if you can't pronounce Adeiza,
you should be fine with Peter.
And when you say, "Hello, this is Peter, I am calling from
Technische Universität", you know, then I was at the University
of Chemnitz, definitely you're going to get a consideration.
But if it's Adeiza, yes, they would know.
And it's even, it becomes even more complicated
when you, when you say Adeiza and you're speaking English
and not German.
So, yeah, you were experimenting a little bit with your several names, cool,
and do you have any advice maybe on one hand,
for the German landlords and the German real estate agents,
why they should maybe change that kind of linguistic profiling,
that they select just based on names and accents?
Yes, I think it should be the case that they get to know the tenant,
first of all, before making decisions on whether they're going to allow the person
into their homes or not.
I don't think it's fair when you make decisions
about whether you're going to, you know, accept people
into your property or not, just based on their names,
or based on your accent. For instance, even if I have lived in Germany
for like many years, there is no way I'm going to speak German
like enunciate in German as a native German would.
So just making decisions based on my accent of German
or based on your knowledge of the fact that I am African is not fair.
I think there is also that need for you to get to know me
and then, you know, to deal with me based on who I am
and not based on your prejudicial perception
about who I could be, but then who I am.
That's wonderful.
Thank you so much for this interview.
Yeah, it's my pleasure to be here,
like I said, and it's a joy to talk about the experiences I had in Germany.
Yes, I want to thank Dr. Isiaka for these insightful comments.
And my goal was really to find out statistically,
is that just a personal experience,
maybe people experiencing these encounters in immigration contexts,
in urban areas, applying for apartments sometimes
do not know if there's really something like a statistical proof of this.
And this is the study that I will provide here now.
So interestingly, the statistics were
very convincing for certain neighborhoods, but not for others.
So in the neighborhood that had the cheapest apartments,
that had the highest rate of people with migration background, namely
61 percent in Bremen Tenever,
we see that there's hardly any differences between the Turkish callers,
the American callers and the German callers.
That means that the real estate agents gave Turkish applicants
the same chances almost as German applicants.
The differences were very slight.
On the other hand, in the upper middle class neighborhood
in Bremen Schwachhausen, the differences were really striking.
That means even though the Turkish caller called first,
they got a lot of refusals for viewings.
They only had about 22 percent chances at getting an apartment viewing,
Americans about 72 percent, and the German callers
had 89 percent chances for an apartment viewing.
These are the appointments for all groups in all parts of town.
And you see that overall, the German callers,
the German accent callers and German name callers
had in all areas basically the most chances,
the Americans were in the middle position and the Turkish callers
had the lowest chances at getting a viewing.
And that is, of course, in this context, not very fair
because it was just based on names and accent and everything else was the same.
If we look at just the influence of the accent, namely, I took,
we also had a paired testing with a Turkish name with a Standard German
and with the Turkish accent,
we see that consistently
the Turkish name with a German, Standard German accent
got more viewing offers than the caller with a Turkish accent.
To conclude, I would like to mention that in all four parts of town in Bremen,
there is a significant correlation between the accent of the speaker
and the number of appointments,
that means the possibility to acquire an apartment.
In the more expensive area Schwachhausen speakers with Turkish accent
have very low chances to get an appointment,
in general. They were asked more about their employment situation,
they were asked more questions about if they really move in by themselves
and not with a large family and stuff like that.
And interestingly, the length of the conversations
were the shortest with the Turkish callers.
They were the longest with the German callers.
There were more minutes and more time spent with
the German, native German caller, and the middle position
also had the Americans.
Yes, so the speakers with the Standard German accent
received significantly the most appointments
in all four parts of town in Bremen and also more information
about that apartment was provided.
So for example, this has a nice bathroom with a window
or oh, it really has a nice view and a balcony.
So the real estate agents and ladies and landlords
were also a little bit friendlier to the German callers.
So I mean, this is in a way unfair, and it's also illegal, as you know,
the Anti-Discrimination Act paragraph three says, you are not allowed
to discriminate because of ethnic, ethnic linguistic background
or any other background, gender, sexual orientation,
disability and so forth.
But it does still happen and the study proves it.
So what we see is separation.
Sometimes immigrants are accused that they don't want to integrate.
But what we see here is that separation is not only sought
after by the migrants, but German landlords
and renting agencies as well.
So even if they wanted to live in certain areas,
they sometimes don't have the options, or at least
they have to put way more effort into this.
The stereotypes even existed to what's the high prestige accent,
the American English and the evaluations of the gatekeepers,
landlords, real estate agents determined to a large extent
who has access to certain urban areas, for example,
can you live in Tenever, or
can you live in Schwachhausen.
The separation and segregation in urban areas functions
through the evaluation of potential inhabitants, migrant
versus non-immigrant,
and in this sense, we also saw that discrimination
and reconstituting institutional power relationships
occur on a micro level, on a discourse level,
within a small conversation already.
In this sense, I discovered a vicious cycle
that we can step out at every step.
So there are pre-existing stereotypes about certain ethnic groups.
So, for example, the stereotype might be that German accented people
were more trustworthy to be renters.
Then the stereotypes might lead to linguistic profiling,
that means people of certain, with certain names and accents
would be not given the opportunity for a viewing.
This linguistic profiling again leads to separation and segregation
within urban areas.
The segregation and separation in certain different neighborhoods
leads to ethnolinguistic vitality and the persistence
of an ethnolect or dialect.
This, again, can lead to a lower educational status
and unemployment in certain areas because it's harder to get a job
or to get a high school degree of a higher level with a certain name
and a certain accent, and the schools are maybe not geared towards that.
Also, we have certain media representations.
I mean, how often do I watch a German TV show
and still we have the villains being represented by some people
with foreign names and accents and ethnic features.
So of course, if we change the media representations
and have more characters that are of very diverse backgrounds,
that have all kinds of social roles and not only the villains,
then that changes the stereotypes
and it could improve the whole vicious circle
of not doing the linguistic profiling, not segregating
and also leading to more educational success
and employment in all groups.
I want to thank you for your attention.
I have the selected literature here and thank you.