Kelly Wright, an assistant professor of language sciences, paid close attention to the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman, the Florida man charged with (and ultimately acquitted of) second-degree murder and manslaughter in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
But while most of the country was focused on the racial elements of the case, Wright homed in on the treatment of the prosecution’s main witness, Rachel Jeantel. She was on the phone with Martin when he was shot. Her testimony only lasted two days.
“Then, for weeks, the press took apart her language and talked about how ignorant she appeared, because she sounded like she was from the Caribbean,” Wright recalls.
Wright, who had an undergraduate degree in English Literature and had studied linguistics as a graduate student, was deeply troubled by the ways Jeantel’s testimony was devalued because her language differed from what many people considered standardized English. Research on that aspect of the trial inspired her to pursue her own work in the emerging field of linguistic justice. Wright recently left a position at Virginia Tech to join the faculty of the Language Sciences program this fall.
“Linguistic justice is really just equity for language use, so we can create environments where people can more openly communicate their ideas,” explains Wright. “How it plays out is that our ideas about language that is proper or appropriate really influence the way we move through the built environment. A lot of my work focuses on access and equity, particularly in the legal arena. Our ideas about how smart people sound really inform the opportunities that people are afforded.”
Wright points to a capital case in Southern California in which a Spanish-speaking witness to a crime gave his testimony in Spanish using a translator. In closing arguments, the prosecutor suggested to the jury that the witness’ language choice made him untrustworthy — and the jury ended up finding the plaintiff guilty.
“This is a dire example,” says Wright. “But these kinds of things happen all the time. When you start to look at these patterns, the language people use in this hyperformal register of the courtroom directly affects the way that their testimony is understood.”
Much of Wright’s work focuses on the appeals process, where the judge reviews the trial transcript to decide whether there were appropriate grounds. Court transcriptionists only have to achieve 80% accuracy, but research shows that the percentages are much lower for transcribing accented, dialect or non-native speech.
“If only half of what you said on the stand is transcribed accurately, you can imagine how that affects case after case,” Wright says.
In Madison and elsewhere, Wright works with a group of linguists to reach out to legal professionals, judges and advocacy groups to make sure they’re aware of the linguistic justice issues she’s raised. But she’s also working to apply those principles to other environments, like the classroom, public health and the housing market, where it’s not uncommon for potential renters who speak with accents to face discrimination. Wright has written extensively about the latter phenomenon.
Wright started her linguistics work in Ghana, the first sub-saharan former colony in Africa to gain its independence. She interviewed people who had lived through the independence process choosing to do their nation-building in English. The research fascinated her, but events like the Zimmerman trial reminded her that there were communities that needed her sociolinguistic expertise more urgently.
“The idea is continually refreshed for me that having the public understand and love their own language is helpful for these wider linguistic justice issues,” she says. “They persist because folks think there’s a certain way language should be, or that it’s something that’s very static.”
In the classroom, Wright will focus on other aspects of her language universe, including teaching metalinguistics to graduating seniors. Her work on metalinguistics, or “talk about talk,” as Wright describes it, has focused on talking with Black professionals about their work experiences.
“Tell me about your career. Tell me about what your everyday work life is like,” Wright explains. “Those questions may not seem like they’re directly related to language, but people’s answers often are. We train students to analyze linguistic structure and function, and that’s important, but what people say is as important as how people say it. And understanding how the same concept gets conveyed and reframed by different folks in different ways helps us understand, celebrate and catalog linguistic variation.”
Next spring, Wright will teach an undergraduate Honors class on profanity and how it functions in our society.
“It’s my very favorite thing to teach and write about,” says Wright, who has also served as a lexicographer for “The Today Show” website, explaining the use of common modern slang terms like “bruh” and “mid” to help parents and older adults understand what they mean and how they’re used.
But her course isn’t just about the words you’re not allowed to say in polite society. It also tackles key issues surrounding censorship.
“The last unit is, now that we’ve learned everything that we need about language, to build a functional society, let’s write some laws that tell us what words we can and can’t use,” Wright says. “Spoiler alert: It’s impossible. What I’m interested in is reaching students at this place where they really celebrate linguistic diversity.”