The Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice

This volume explores and rearticulates the relationship between language and prejudice. Language plays an important role in the conceptualization, enactment, and defence of prejudice at both the individual and institutional level. Language (and language users) can also be the object of prejudice, and language itself can - with some conditions - be thought of as a solution to prejudice. The chapters in the volume examine how prejudice manifests itself, how it is perceived, and how it might be combatted. Parts I - III cover linguistic prejudices relating to gender and sexuality, ableism, and race and ethnicity, while Parts IV - VI explore social issues, politics and religion, and educational perspectives. The final part looks at projects and initiatives to tackle linguistic prejudice in a range of contexts. While recent work in the field has tended to inadvertently construct knowledge according to normative and Northern epistemologies, this volume features contributions that also provide an understanding of linguistic prejudice from Global South perspectives.

Jane Setter, Professor of Phonetics, University of Reading, Sender Dovchin, Professor and Senior Principal Research Fellow, Curtin University, Vijay A. Ramjattan, Instructor, International Foundation Program, University of Toronto

Jane Setter is Professor of Phonetics at the University of Reading. Probably best known as co-editor of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (Cambridge University Press, 2011), she is also the author of the public-facing Your Voice Speaks Volumes: It’s Not What You Say But How You Say It (OUP, 2019) and of Hong Kong English (co-authored with Brian Hok-Shing Chan and Cathy S. P. Wong; Edinburgh University Press, 2010), among others. Her research publications are mainly in speech prosody, investigating pronunciation and phonology in Global Englishes and in children with speech and language differences. She is a National Teaching Fellow of UK Advance HE and an advocate of public engagement with research.

Sender Dovchin is Professor and Senior Principal Research Fellow at the School of Education, Curtin University. She was identified as ’Top Researcher in the field of Language and Linguistics’ under Humanities, Arts, and Literature in The Australian’s 2021 Research Magazine, and in the top 250 researchers in Australia in 2021. Her recent research focuses on empowering vulnerable youth in Australia by combatting linguistic racism, providing a pedagogical view to accommodate the multiple co-existences of linguistic diversity in a globalized world. Her books include Language, Social Media, and Ideologies (Springer, 2020) and Translingual Discrimination (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Vijay A. Ramjattan is an instructor in the International Foundation Program at the University of Toronto, where he also received his PhD in Adult Education and Community Development (with a specialization in Workplace Learning and Social Change). His scholarship relates to the intersections of language, race, and work and can be found in journals such as the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Industrial Relations, Teaching in Higher Education, and TESOL Quarterly. He is also very active on Twitter/X, which he uses to express his research interests in concise form.