Language Discrimination Research Articles

Fine-tuning language discrimination: Bilingual and monolingual infants' detection of language switching.

The ability to differentiate between two languages sets the stage for bilingual learning. Infants can discriminate languages when hearing long passages, but language switches often occur on short time scales with few cues to language identity. As bilingual infants begin learning sequences of sounds and words, how do they detect the dynamics of two languages? In two studies using the head-turn preference procedure, we investigated whether infants (n=44) can discriminate languages at the level of individual words. In Study 1, bilingual and monolingual 8- to 12-month-olds were tested on their detection of single-word language switching in lists of words (e.g., "dog… lait [fr. milk]"). In Study 2, they were tested on language switching within sentences (e.g., "Do you like the lait?"). We found that infants were unable to detect language switching in lists of words, but the results were inconclusive about infants' ability to detect language switching within sentences. No differences were observed between bilinguals and monolinguals. Given that bilingual proficiency eventually requires detection of sound sequences across two languages, more research will be needed to conclusively understand when and how this skill emerges. Materials, data, and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/9dtwn/.

Primary Healthcare Policy Research: Including Variables Associated With the Social Determinants of Health Matters Comment on "Universal Health Coverage for Non-communicable Diseases and Health Equity: Lessons From Australian Primary Healthcare".

Fisher et al have provided a solid addition to health policy literature in their finding that universal health coverage supports equitable access to Australian primary healthcare (PHC), despite factors such as episodic care and poor distribution of services. Their definition of PHC was comprehensive, extending beyond medical care to include social determinants of health and public policy. However, they limited their operational definition for purposes of the study to general practice, community health and allied health. Applying a narrower definition risks lost opportunities to identify policy implications for equity beyond financial accessibility. The populations most at risk of non-communicable diseases also face significant language, culture, and individual and systemic discrimination barriers to access. Future policy research should consider using a comprehensive PHC definition in determining variables of interest and designing research methodologies, to avoid missing important knowledge that allows existing biases within primary care to continue.

Does accent trump skin color in guiding children’s social preferences? Evidence from Brazil’s natural lab

Previous research has shown significant effects of race and accent on children’s developing social preferences. Accounts of the primacy of accent biases in the evolution and ontogeny of discriminant cooperation have been proposed, but lack systematic cross-cultural investigation. We report three controlled studies conducted with 5−10 year old children across four towns in the Brazilian Amazon, selected for their variation in racial and accent homogeneity/heterogeneity. Study 1 investigated participants’ (N = 289) decisions about friendship and sharing across color-contrasted pairs of target individuals: Black-White, Black-Pardo (Brown), Pardo-White. Study 2 (N = 283) investigated effects of both color and accent (Local vs Non-Local) on friendship and sharing decisions. Overall, there was a significant bias toward the lighter colored individual. A significant preference for local accent mitigates but does not override the color bias, except in the site characterized by both racial and accent heterogeneity. Results also vary by participant age and color. Study 3 (N = 235) reports results of an accent discrimination task that shows an overall increase in accuracy with age. The research suggests that cooperative preferences based on accent and race develop differently in response to locally relevant parameters of racial and linguistic variation.

Mapping factors associated with deaths in immigration detention in the United States, 2011-2018: A thematic analysis

BackgroundClimate change, poverty, and violence increasingly drive migration to the United States. United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detain some individuals while awaiting determination of immigration status or potential deportation. Over the last two decades, more than 200 individuals died in ICE detention. In this study, we aim to identify systemic issues related to deaths of individuals in ICE detention to potentially mitigate further harm. MethodsThe ICE Office of Detention Oversight conducts investigations after each death in detention, producing a report called a “Detainee Death Review”. To identify systemic issues in these deaths, we used thematic analysis to review 55 Detainee Death Reviews available between 2011 and 2018. FindingsWe identified 3 major themes of pervasive issues—Detainee Not Patient, System Over Patient, and Grossly Substandard Care— and 11 subthemes. Subthemes of culture of shortcuts, delays in care, and poor care delivered were present in the vast majority of cases. Subthemes bias and discrimination, language injustice, falsification of and inconsistencies between records and reports, willful indifference, security over health, communication breakdown, inadequate resources, failure of protective mechanisms, missing/ignoring red flags, and failure of emergency response were also prominent. InterpretationThis study identified underlying systems issues within the medical care provided in ICE detention. While there are issues with language services, discrimination, and inadequate response to medical emergencies, the greatest issue is the lack of independent, external review. Greater transparency is required, so that adherence to basic standards of care for individuals in ICE detention can be better evaluated. FundingHaas Jr. Fund and the University of Southern California’s Equity Research Institute.

Satirical feminism and the Reparative Tweet: a discourse analysis of the gendered language of @manwhohasitall

ABSTRACT Researchers have established social media as intrinsic to fourth wave feminism. However, even as social media has created a platform for many feminist theorists to share their work, it has also created trolls who perpetuate gender discrimination and gender-biased language. Feminist Twitter users have attempted to push back on discriminatory language, but are often attacked. The Twitter user @manwhohasitall addresses gendered language by using satire, Tweeting from a fictional world where gender stereotypes are reversed. This approach, discussed through a discourse analysis of a corpus of 528 Tweets from the calendar year 2017, illustrates how @manwhohasitall engages with satire, invention, and illustration to address and critique gendered language. This study reveals five major themes that illuminate the media’s gender biases—and identifies a model to humorously address gendered language: Reparative Tweeting. This paper suggests that other forms of Reparative Tweeting or advocacy that relies on satire and community discourse may allow feminists to discuss gender bias without immediate pushback, and offer a model for showing, rather than telling, the story of gender discrimination.

Non-native acoustic modeling for mispronunciation verification based on language adversarial representation learning

Non-native mispronunciation verification is designed to provide feedback to guide language learners to correct their pronunciation errors in their further learning and it plays an important role in the computer-aided pronunciation training (CAPT) system. Most existing approaches focus on establishing the acoustic model directly using non-native corpus thus they are suffering the data sparsity problem due to time-consuming non-native speech data collection and annotation tasks. In this work, to address this problem, we propose a pre-trained approach to utilize the speech data of two native languages (the learner’s native and target languages) for non-native mispronunciation verification. We set up an unsupervised model to extract knowledge from a large scale of unlabeled raw speech of the target language by making predictions about future observations in the speech signal, then the model is trained with language adversarial training using the learner’s native language to align the feature distribution of two languages by confusing a language discriminator. In addition, sinc filter is incorporated at the first convolutional layer to capture the formant-like feature. Formant is relevant to the place and manner of articulation. Therefore, it is useful not only for pronunciation error detection but also for providing instructive feedback. Then the pre-trained model serves as the feature extractor in the downstream mispronunciation verification task. Through the experiments on the Japanese part of the BLCU inter-Chinese speech corpus, the experimental results demonstrate that for the non-native phone recognition and mispronunciation verification tasks (1) the knowledge learned from two native languages speech with the proposed unsupervised approach is useful for these two tasks (2) our proposed language adversarial representation learning is effective to improve the performance (3) formant-like feature can be incorporated by introducing sinc filter to further improve the performance of mispronunciation verification.

ASSESSMENT THE MORAL DON'TS IN THE NEWS SERVICES OF LOCAL TVS IN BAGHLAN

Research subject (review of moral don’ts in the news service of Baghlan local TV). The question of the research is how local TV stations in Baghlan act in order to avoid moral don’ts in their news services? Moral don’ts, in fact, are the red lines in the field of individual and social ethics that obliges journalists to refrain from them in preparing news and reports. The aim of this study is to understand the commitment of journalists of Baghlan local TVs in refraining from ethical don'ts in producing news productions. The importance of the research is that the journalists and officials of the local TV stations in Baghlan, by studying it, should identify the moral don’ts in news service and make efforts to eliminate them, and this will lead to the advancement of ethical journalism. Among the variables or moral don’ts (desecration, distortion of facts, promotion of slavery, and involvement in criminal and political issues, psychological warfare, sexual abuse, racial discrimination, ethnic discrimination and linguistic discrimination) have been studied in the Baghlan local TVs news services. The important findings of the study are that the relationship between four variables (desecration, distortion of facts, racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination) are meaningful in Baghlan local TVs news services; that its two variables (racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination) are common in all three TV stations (Baghlan National, Pasban and Tanwir) and the other two variables are only meaningful on Pasban TV. The present article is based on the theory of social responsibility. In the theory of social responsibility, the media accept and implement certain obligations in society, including refraining from moral don’ts. The research method is a quantitative research method of survey or field type. The statistical population is Pul-e-Khumri city and the sample population were selected using non-random (targeted) sampling. Keywords: ethics, media ethics, television, news service, moral don’ts

“You don’t sound black” African immigrant youth experiences of discrimination in the labor market in Calgary

This paper aims to understand the factors promoting racial microaggression from the perspective of first-generation Black African immigrant youth in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Most of the literature on Blacks and other visible minorities [1] in Canada is centered on integration challenges, which have been identified in terms of socioeconomic and political marginalization. Within the context of immigrant challenges of navigating the job market, one realizes that many institutionalized factors influence access to opportunities. However, there is little research on immigrant youth, notably Black youth, and their experiences of racial microaggressions in Canadian society. This study fills this gap by offering an understanding of the experiences of microaggressions among Black African youth in Calgary. This city is arguably becoming increasingly diverse with the influx of immigrants from different countries and other Canadian provinces. Drawing on qualitative research methods (40 semistructured interviews with Ghanaian and Sudanese youth immigrants, 20 females and 20 males between the ages of 18 and 30 years), we incorporate meaningful insights from African immigrant youth on racial drivers of microaggressions. The analysis is grounded in critical race theory (CRT). Findings indicate that the youth face marginalization in the labor market during the hiring process (linguistic discrimination), discrimination at the workplace, and exclusion because their names are exploited as identity markers. Overall, policies advocating for an inclusive society need to be strengthened to address these inequalities that are ingrained in Canadian cities. [1] In this study, a visible minority is defined by the Government of Canada as ‘persons, other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour’ (Statistics Canada, 2015).

Linguistic discrimination in pedagogical evaluation. A study of teachers of Hungarian language and literature in Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania and Hungary

There is a paucity of research on dialect awareness among teachers, particularly in Hungary. The aim of our research was to explore, and demonstrate the existence of linguistic discrimination. The research involved more than 550 Hungarian Language and Literature teachers and teacher trainees from Hungary (N = 216), Slovakia (N = 128), Romania (N = 108) and Ukraine (N = 50). Data were collected primarily through a technique similar to matched-guise tests, however, the method of the present research had some additional complexity. The pilot test (N = 50) and the large-scale research (N = 502) clearly supported the assumption that linguistic discrimination was widespread in pedagogical evaluation. Oral performances were recorded which varied in content, language variety and code/mode of language use. Oral performances produced in the standard variety and/or in the elaborated code of language use were favored. By contrast, oral productions in dialectal and restricted language—despite the fact that their content was correct—received unfavorable evaluation. Linguistic variability in oral productions with the same content resulted in as much as a full grade of difference in the mean of grades. The differences were statistically significant for each sample, hence the prevalence of linguistic discrimination is proved.

Quantifying the role of rhythm in infants' language discrimination abilities: A meta-analysis

More than 30 years have passed since Mehler et al. (1988) proposed that newborns can discriminate between languages that belong to different rhythm classes: stress-, syllable- or mora-timed. Thereupon they developed the hypothesis that infants are sensitive to differences in vowel and consonant interval durations as acoustic correlates of rhythm classes. It remains unknown exactly which durational computations infants use when perceiving speech for the purposes of distinguishing languages. Here, a meta-analysis of studies on infants' language discrimination skills over the first year of life was conducted, aiming to quantify how language discrimination skills change with age and are modulated by rhythm classes or durational metrics. A systematic literature search identified 42 studies that tested infants' (birth to 12 months) discrimination or preference of two language varieties, by presenting infants with auditory or audio-visual continuous speech. Quantitative data synthesis was conducted using multivariate random effects meta-analytic models with the factors rhythm class difference, age, stimulus manipulation, method, and metrics operationalising proportions of and variability in vowel and consonant interval durations, to explore which factors best account for language discrimination or preference. Results revealed that smaller differences in vowel interval variability (△V) and larger differences in successive consonantal interval variability (rPVI-C) were associated with more successful language discrimination, and better accounted for discrimination results than the factor rhythm class. There were no effects of age for discrimination but results on preference studies were affected by age: the older infants get, the more they prefer non-native languages that are rhythmically similar to their native language, but not non-native languages that are rhythmically distinct. These findings can inform theories on language discrimination that have previously focussed on rhythm class, by providing a novel way to operationalise rhythm in language in the extent to which it accounts for infants' language discrimination abilities.

Acculturation, perceived discrimination, academic identity, gender and Chinese language learning among Ethnic Minority Adolescents: a structural equation modeling analysis

ABSTRACT Parents, teachers and policy makers are concerned about how immigrant students acquire the mainstream language and achieve academic success. Therefore, researchers face an urgent need to examine the broader ecological factors that influence immigrant students’ academic identity construction and mainstream language learning. This study investigates the nexus of acculturation, gender, identity and Chinese language learning among 881 South Asian immigrant adolescents in Hong Kong. The results indicate that students with stronger academic identity report superior Chinese reading and writing, and the results show that among ethnic minorities, girls reported higher level of Chinese reading and writing than boys. Paradoxically perhaps, students who perceived greater discrimination didn’t show significantly different academic identity from other students and reported higher proficiency in reading and writing Chinese. This implies the necessity of providing more school and social support to these students. The study also shows that students with greater assimilation have weaker academic identity and hence report poorer Chinese reading and writing. The negative link between assimilation and mainstream language learning suggests the importance of maintaining the heritage identity and sense of belonging to heritage culture for enhancing the ethnic minority students’ mainstream language learning. This result informs policy makers developing suitable immigration policy.

Chinese International Students’ Face Concerns, Self-Stigma, Linguistic Factors, and Help-Seeking Intentions for Mental Health

ABSTRACT Chinese international students (CIS) in American universities encounter serious mental health issues, and they also underutilize campus mental health care services. The current study examined several factors which result in this phenomenon, such as Chinese face concerns, self-stigma of seeking help for mental health services, as well as English proficiency and language discrimination. A survey with 433 CIS in multiple U.S. universities was conducted to analyze the relationships between these factors above, help-seeking intentions, and mental health problems (depression and anxiety). The SEM results suggested that face concerns increased the risk of mental health problems such as depression and anxiety and also increased self-stigma toward seeking mental health services. However, face concerns positively influenced help-seeking intentions. The self-stigma had a negative effect on help-seeking intentions. Perceived English discrimination increased mental health problems while English proficiency increased help-seeking intentions. Meanwhile, both linguistic factors above were significantly associated with face concerns. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed to investigate how to address mental health problems among Chinese international students.

Language learning as uncertainty reduction: The role of prediction error in linguistic generalization and item-learning

Discriminative theories frame language learning as a process of reducing uncertainty about the meaning of an utterance by discriminating informative from uninformative cues via the mechanisms of prediction error and cue competition. Previous work showed that discriminative learning is affected by the order in which information is presented during language learning. Specifically, learning suffixes, where complex stems precede affixes, promotes better generalization than prefixing, which tends to promote better item-learning instead. We explored this in two large-scale web-based artificial language learning experiments with adult learners (total N = 434), as well as two computational simulations implementing a discriminative learning model. While we did not find an overall benefit of suffixing over prefixing in generalization, consistent with our theoretical and computational predictions, we found that participants in the prefix condition were unable to discriminate between frequent, but uninformative cues and low-frequency, informative cues. This resulted in them being more likely to show incorrect overgeneralization of that feature for low frequency test items than participants in the suffix condition. We did not find a benefit of prefixing in item learning (although there was overall better item-learning of low type-frequency items), which we discuss in terms of the methodological limitations of our empirical paradigm. Taken together, these results underline the crucial role prediction error plays in learning linguistic generalization, and have implications for how generalization interacts with item-learning.

A receding paradigm as a tool of language discrimination

AbstractThe 1Sg forms of ik-verbs are identical in the definite and indefinite conjugations in Standard Hungarian. The use of nonstandard forms can evoke discrimination despite the fact that it has been well-known for a long time that by the 18th century the ik-paradigm survived only in some eastern and western dialects of the language (Simonyi, 1906a, p. 14; Brassai, 2011, p. 253; Benkő, 1992, p. 213). In the early 19th century the language revival movement revived the disappearing ik-conjugation (Révai, 1806) and made it part of the educated, literary, and later standard variety.The present paper demonstrates how a paradigm that almost completely receded became the tool of language stigmatization as a result of the actions of those with linguistic power, and shows, on the basis of a questionnaire based study, to what extent the ik-paradigm is present in the language use of 14–19-year-olds at the beginning of the 21st century.

Language Shapes Socially Constructed Gender Roles: Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’ in Focus

Language plays an important role in human life that can be seen from various perspectives such as the cultural perspective, linguistic perspective, social perspective, psychological perspective, perspective of gender and moral and ethical perspectives. This is undoubtedly a proven fact that we use language and at the same time, language uses us to define, designate, tag and shape our places in the society (Cameron, 2005). This role of language is generally suitable for all human race either male or female but the basic purpose of this study is to explain how language shapes a woman’s place and identity in society. Often we find that women face linguistic discrimination in two different ways: one is the way; they are taught to speak and use language and the other way is about how language treats them (Lakoff, 2004). These linguistic disparities tend to specify a woman’s role and function in the society as a sex object, a servant, a wife, a daughter, a mother and specifically a woman (Kerber, 1988). The researcher collected the data for this study from Ibsen’s (1999) ‘A Doll’s House’ in which different lexical items, phrases and sentences were uttered intentionally to explain the role of the main character Nora as a wife, as a daughter and as a woman. The researcher examined the speeches of different characters only to show the language –made and man- made places of women in the society. For this purpose, the researcher used a theoretical framework based on the qualitative approach while consulting the related ideas of Lakoff (2004) who, in her ‘Dominance Theory,’ explains how language shapes a woman’s place in the society by analyzing her own speeches and the speeches of different people in the society. The findings of the study go a long way in telling people and the upcoming researchers that language not only specifies gender roles individually, but also internally and externally as well. Basically different social characters surrounding a woman use language in such a way that it starts shaping a woman’s character in different sub- characters as explained in the work of Ibsen (1999). Furthermore, language use tells us that a man remains a man in every situation either as a father, as a husband, as a son, and above all as a man but a woman’s place in society is changeable according to language use and those tagged names that men have used for women ever. For example, if a little girl talks roughly like a boy, she is scolded by her parents and friends (Lakoff, 2004). This process of socialization is harmful in the sense that it is making women weak, incapable and less –confident but if we analyze the last lines spoken by Nora in the selected text of Ibsen (1999), we come to know that constant battering and hammering of socialization and generalization are now making women aware of their individual place and identity in the society and they are now looking at life from a different perspective that is still unacceptable in the man-made society (Kramer, 1974). This study will open new avenues for sociolinguists to study language and gender keenly and critically.

The development of infants' sensitivity to native versus non-native rhythm.

Speech rhythm is considered one of the first windows into the native language, and the taxonomy of rhythm classes is commonly used to explain early language discrimination. Relying on formal rhythm classification is problematic for two reasons. First, it is not known to which extent infants' sensitivity to language variation is attributable to rhythm alone, and second, it is not known how infants discriminate languages not classified in any of the putative rhythm classes. Employing a central-fixation preference paradigm with natural stimuli, this study tested whether infants differentially attend to native versus nonnative varieties that differ only in temporal rhythm cues, and both of which are rhythmically unclassified. An analysis of total looking time did not detect any rhythm preferences at any age. First-look duration, arguably more closely reflecting infants' underlying perceptual sensitivities, indicated age-specific preferences for native versus non-native rhythm: 4-month-olds seemed to prefer the native-, and 6-month-olds the non-native language-variety. These findings suggest that infants indeed acquire native rhythm cues rather early, by the 4th month, supporting the theory that rhythm can bootstrap further language development. Our data on infants' processing of rhythmically unclassified languages suggest that formal rhythm classification does not determine infants' ability to discriminate language varieties.

The ontogeny of early language discrimination: Beyond rhythm

Infants can discriminate languages that belong to different rhythmic classes at birth. The ability to perform within-class discrimination emerges around the fifth month of life. The cues that infants use to discriminate between prosodically close languages remain elusive. Segmental information could be a potential cue, since infants notice vowel mispronunciations of their names, show the first signs of word recognition and the first signs of perceptual narrowing for vowels around 6 months of age. If infants have in place some proto-segmental information, most likely it is about vowels. Another potential cue infants may use to discriminate languages is intonation. We tested participants using sentences in Eastern Catalan, Western Catalan and Spanish. The two Catalan dialects and Spanish belong to the same rhythmic class, they are syllable-timed, but they differ in terms of vowel distribution, given that only Eastern Catalan has vocalic reduction. The vowel distributions of Western Catalan and Spanish are more comparable. However, they differ in terms of their intonational patterns. In Experiment 1, we tested the ability of 4.5-month-old infants learning Eastern Catalan and/or Spanish to discriminate between sentences in Eastern and Western Catalan and in Experiment 2 their ability to discriminate between sentences in Western Catalan and Spanish. In order to disentangle the contribution of segmental and suprasegmental information, we also tested infants using low-pass filtered sentences in the two dialects (Experiment 3) and low-pass filtered sentences in Western Catalan and Spanish (Experiment 4). Infants discriminated the two Catalan dialects only when the stimuli were natural sentences, whereas they were able to discriminate between Western Catalan and Spanish when the stimuli were either natural or low-pass filtered sentences. The research also provides evidence of equivalent language discrimination abilities in infants growing up in monolingual and bilingual environments.

Variance Normalised Features for Language and Dialect Discrimination

This paper proposes novel features for automated language and dialect identification that aim to improve discriminative power by ensuring that each element of the feature vector has a normalised contribution to inter-class variance. The method firstly computes inter- and intra-class frequency variance statistics and then distributes the overall spectral variance across spectral regions which are sized to contain near-equal-variance difference. Spectral features are average pooled within regions to obtain variance normalised features (VNFs). The proposed VNFs are low complexity drop-in replacements for MFCC, SDC, PLP or other input features used for speech-related tasks. In this paper, they are evaluated in three types of system, against MFCCs, for two data-constrained language and dialect identification tasks. VNFs demonstrate good results, comfortably outperforming MFCCs at most dimension sizes, and yielding particularly good performance for the most challenging data-constrained 3s utterance length in the LID task.

Language Shapes Socially Constructed Gender Roles: Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’ in Focus

Language plays an important role in human life that can be seen from various perspectives such as the cultural perspective, linguistic perspective, social perspective, psychological perspective, perspective of gender and moral and ethical perspectives. This is undoubtedly a proven fact that we use language and at the same time, language uses us to define, designate, tag and shape our places in the society (Cameron, 2005). This role of language is generally suitable for all human race either male or female but the basic purpose of this study is to explain how language shapes a woman’s place and identity in society. Often we find that women face linguistic discrimination in two different ways: one is the way; they are taught to speak and use language and the other way is about how language treats them (Lakoff, 2004). These linguistic disparities tend to specify a woman’s role and function in the society as a sex object, a servant, a wife, a daughter, a mother and specifically a woman (Kerber, 1988). The researcher collected the data for this study from Ibsen’s (1999) ‘A Doll’s House’ in which different lexical items, phrases and sentences were uttered intentionally to explain the role of the main character Nora as a wife, as a daughter and as a woman. The researcher examined the speeches of different characters only to show the language –made and man- made places of women in the society. For this purpose, the researcher used a theoretical framework based on the qualitative approach while consulting the related ideas of Lakoff (2004) who, in her ‘Dominance Theory,’ explains how language shapes a woman’s place in the society by analyzing her own speeches and the speeches of different people in the society. The findings of the study go a long way in telling people and the upcoming researchers that language not only specifies gender roles individually, but also internally and externally as well. Basically different social characters surrounding a woman use language in such a way that it starts shaping a woman’s character in different sub- characters as explained in the work of Ibsen (1999). Furthermore, language use tells us that a man remains a man in every situation either as a father, as a husband, as a son, and above all as a man but a woman’s place in society is changeable according to language use and those tagged names that men have used for women ever. For example, if a little girl talks roughly like a boy, she is scolded by her parents and friends (Lakoff, 2004). This process of socialization is harmful in the sense that it is making women weak, incapable and less –confident but if we analyze the last lines spoken by Nora in the selected text of Ibsen (1999), we come to know that constant battering and hammering of socialization and generalization are now making women aware of their individual place and identity in the society and they are now looking at life from a different perspective that is still unacceptable in the man-made society (Kramer, 1974). This study will open new avenues for sociolinguists to study language and gender keenly and critically.

LANGUAGE DISCRIMINATION AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

This article is about discrimination in linguistic and political correctness in the language, where words, expressions are used that a certain group of people in different areas, e.g. related to nations, religion, skin color, age, disadvantage or gender, can offend or offend. For almost forty years, political correctness has shaped many languages, taking more and more expressions and replacing them with others that do not sound so offensive, but which are also viewed as censorship and can violate the freedom of the press. This cultural-linguistic, linguistic-historical contribution focuses on aspects that provide insights into the linguistic use of four terms “Sinti”, “Roma”, “Jenische” and “Zigeuner”. The purpose of the analysis is to illustrate the way in which the phenomenon of this minority is expressed in the literary examples and in a political speech. It also shows the historical background that contributed to the fact that the use of the word is different today. Linguistic discrimination is first implicitly prepared in thought and action and then leads to racist verbal utterances. If some terms in classical works were perceived as acceptable, they sound racist today because, after many centuries of use, they are connotatively negatively charged with many historical events. When talking about Roma, Sinti and Yenish, historical external names on the one hand and contemporary self-names on the other hand must be distinguished, whereby the word “Zigeuner” nowadays has to bear the full weight of the tragedy of this largest minority in Europe.