On Thursday evening, the LSA 

Opportunity Hub hosted a workshop 

in the LSA Building on celebrating your 

voice at work. About 20 students attended 

the event, which explored different 

dialects and the identities they represent 

in an attempt to answer questions 

about the roles they play in professional 

industries. The workshop was the third 

installment of the Hub’s bigger campaign 

to engage with identities while pursuing 

a career. 

Kierra Trotter, director of student 

engagement for the Opportunity Hub, 

explained the purpose of the campaign.

“We’re trying to help students explore 

and learn and develop, starting with 

who they are and how they want to see 

themselves in the future,” Trotter said.

The 
Thursday 
seminar 
and 

discussion was led by Kelly Wright, an 

experimental linguist in the Linguistics 

Department whose research involves 

dialect discrimination.

Wright began the seminar by 

explaining categorical perception and 

the role it plays in interpreting dialects. 

The relationship between people’s 

cultural expectations, their physical 

senses as well as the words that come out 

of their mouth all play off of one another, 

she said.

Wright explained that each specific 

dialect reflects individuals who think 

alike and talk about the same thing.

“We use all of our perspectival 

systems, every one of our senses and 

experiences in the world,” Wright said. 

“And we adapt to the patterns around 

us and the dominant languages in our 

community.”

According to Wright, where an 

individual is from and their own lived 

experiences often lie at the root of 

how they relate to others. Citing the 

“Michigan accent,” as an example, 

Wright explained that people often 

associate what is considered a “normal” 

accent with whatever their regional 

accent is. 

“It’s all about our understanding 

of culturally defined categories in the 

world,” Wright said. “We really do have 

very strong expectations of what we 

are going to see — how we parse up our 

signals and senses have to do with our 

interactions within the physical world.”

The workshop then transitioned into 

an interactive activity for its participants. 

Wright handed out a map of the U.S. and 

asked participants to circle the regions 

they thought could be associated with an 

accent or a dialect. 

“We have an egocentric perception 

— we are carrying all this information 

around about where we are in the world,” 

Wright said. “Who we are and where we 

are has a lot to do with how we hear other 

people.”

According to Wright, sociolinguistic 

variables are attached to different groups 

of people. That is, vowels, consonants 

and the sounds words make are often 

associated with specific communities. 

In this way, people are able to garner 

social information from a mere voice 

because their brains are keyed into social 

conditions. 

“Subject position is really strong for 

the ways we categorize,” Wright said. 

“Sometimes we hear things that aren’t 

there, but also that we don’t hear things 

that are there. This means that voice 

matters.”

This becomes a problem, Wright said, 

when linguistic discrimination occurs. 

In other words, when individuals are 

treated differently based on the way 

they sound. Such instances correlate 

with social stereotypes that are already 

present.

“This natural phenomenon of 

recognizing social knowledge has 

some pretty nasty consequences,” 

Wright said.

According to Wright, when people 

start to equate the way individuals 

speak with certain social groups, 

it can influence the natural speech 

perception system.

“Black 
voices 
are 
seen 
as 

aggressive or lazy, female voices 

sound shrill or pitchy, southern voices 

sound uneducated or slow-paced, 

New England voices sound fast-paced 

or confident to a fault,” Wright said.

After the event, LSA senior Carly 

Marten reflected on how different 

perceptions and generalizations can 

negatively impact communication.

“People need to think about how 

they have ideologies about language 

that are based on ideologies about 

groups of people who speak those 

languages,” Marten said. “They need 

to consider and deconstruct those 

narratives in order to interact with 

people as their true selves, rather 

than a caricature that is based on 

stereotypes in larger discourses.”

Wright 
noted 
how 
dialect 

discrimination is not addressed by the 

law explicitly.

“The law doesn’t feel that a 

voice is enough to establish social class 

membership,” Wright said. “It’s not 

provable that something fell out of my 

mouth and you heard me being in a 

particular group, but we know it works 

that way.”

Marten spoke about recognizing 

her privilege and keeping others in 

check when it comes to linguistic 

discrimination.

“Everyone changes the way they 

speak given who they are around,” 

Marten said. “I think people with power 

need to be intentional about the way in 

which they use language to judge and 

ultimately marginalize other people.”

Wright used the U.S. housing market 

to illuminate the real-world impacts 

of 
dialect 
discrimination. 
Before 

segregation laws, housing discrimination 

was overt; policies such as Eisenhower’s 

highway project, where a physical 

highway divided regions by class, 

illuminated that. With policies such as 

the Fair Housing Act, discrimination, 

instead of being eradicated, was pushed 

under the table, becoming covert.

Wright discussed the implications of 

this.

“Homeownership is the cornerstone 

of 
economics,” 
Wright 
said. 
“It 

determines things like generational 

wealth, school districts and tax bases. 

Keeping me out of the door when I call 

on the phone affects everything. This 

is about systematic, covert oppression 

based on race, voice and class.”

The workshop ended with Trotter 

emphasizing the importance of identity 

expression within the workplace.

“We want to make an impact on 

the employer, not just tell students to 

change who you are,” Trotter said. “We 

treat culture as a coat we have to take off 

before we go to work. You should be able 

to wear that coat in the workplace.”

Though career and style guides are 

changing to focus on the individuals 

themselves rather than fitting a mold, 

listeners were encouraged to become 

part of that change — to incorporate their 

personal stories into their professional 

prospects.

Alia Orra, global alumni and employer 

relations manager for Communications 

and Outreach at the Hub, explained 

the 
importance 
behind 
reframing 

the foundation of professional career 

advising.

“So much of career coaching is 

about adjusting your identity to match a 

norm,” Orra said. “We want to empower 

students to ask who created the norm 

and why.”

2 — Friday, March 29, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
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LSA freshman Barbara Collins on her story “Concerns rise over safety 
protocol for individuals with disabilities”:

“I got assigned the story Friday night and I knew that I would be having to interview 
people with disabilities, and I knew someone from home that was in a different journalism 
program that does have a disability, so I ended up contacting him to ask what the proper 
terminology was and how I should go about this, so I definitely did some back-up research 
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TUESDAY:
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THURSDAY:
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FRIDAY:
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WEDNESDAY:
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MONDAY:

Looking at the Numbers

QUOTE OF THE WE E K 

Thank you for all your incredible work and for the number of 
resolutions that you’ve worked on. I just want to end in saying 
that please make sure you stay committed to Central Student 
Government, our campus community or whatever community 
you may end up in the next year or the next few years. It’s 
important to stand up and be proud and to fight for inclusivity, and 
make sure that you don’t let hate or negativity decide the actions 
you take.”

Central Student Government President Daniel Greene at the final meeting of CSG’s eighth assembly 

LSA Opportunity Hub hosts workshop 
on dialects and identites in workplace

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“

‘Your Voice at Work’ talks embracing regional differences in speaking, code-switching

