Talk:Linguistic profiling

Structure of page
There seems to be a lack of in-text links (it needs to be 'wikified'). Also, I feel that the section "Distinction Between Linguistic Profiling and Discrimination" is an extremely important point and perhaps should be placed before the examples of institutional occurrences, just so that readers will keep the distinction in mind as they look through the examples. Otherwise, I love the detail in the page. Vanessa (talk) 23:48, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

This is an excellent page and it's extremely informative and interesting. However, even at first glance it seems out of place for a Wikipedia article because there are so many large blocks of text! If anything, this looks like if you took out the section headers, it could be a really really good research paper (and I mean that in the best way possible). But that said, for a wikipedia article I think you could really try to break it up more; perhaps not into sections because you have plenty of those, but into examples, charts, references, etc (note that you don't link to any other pages until the very end) which could maybe make the page a little less "formal paper"-ey and more like an encyclopedia article. All of the info you provide is very interesting, but I think it would be even better if you could find some way to make it more concise (not on the whole, just with respect to your style of writing) and easier to "skim", if you will. As far as content goes, this was, again, a really great page... I agree with everyone else with regards to cross-cultural examples but other than that I was happy with what I learned! :) Benjpianist (talk) 08:37, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I'd have to agree with the posters above. I wish there were text links for a lot of the concepts mentioned, because I think the ability to click through throughout the article is really an important characteristic of Wiki pages. The references should also be more uniform in format. As Benj said, I also wish the text was broken up a little more. As it is, it's a bit difficult to get through. Finally, I wish the last section had been elaborated on more, because I don't think the distinction was made sufficiently clear. If you added references to this section, that would be good too. Jdhlee89 (talk) 17:04, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Just curious, was this supposed to be naive or native? [Clopper and Pisoni (2003) found that naive listeners could successfully categorize speakers as hailing from New England...] I only say that because it gave me pause as I was reading it. Kraecarpenter (talk) 15:16, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

General
I think you guys do a great job of explaining linguistic profiling and giving examples of it in the US, especially having to do with African Americans. I think it would be an interesting addition to add some more cross cultural examples, since I feel as though linguistic profiling could occur in many different places in many different ways. Even within the US I feel as though there are different groups that could be mentioned in addition to African Americans, perhaps those with 'gay' speech and southern dialects. Hollyhelena (talk) 04:09, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the above critique. I was hoping to encounter more cross-cultural examples. I think that this page did a great job of touching on the various outlets of linguistic profiling. However, it would have been nice if you had focused and elaborated on few of the sections and included more social groups. There seems to be a lack of citations as well. The introduction could use a bit more clarification also, especially the latter part. (greene.katelyn)

I think that your page has a lot of details and has good descriptions! Since you have extensive coverage of the connections to racial profiling, is it possible to develop the descriptions of the topics that are less related to that (the geographic origins region for example)? I think there are a few formatting issues on the page. You do not have many links to other pages within the text and "Salaberry, M. Rafael. Language allegiances and bilingualism in the US. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2009. Print." shows up instead of the citation number in your Legal Precedent section. Also, I think there is a typo in the Geographic Origin section ("Clopper and Pisoni (2003) found that naive listeners...") and a random "(citation!)" in the employment section. Ahwu (talk) 05:47, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I think the page could use more concrete examples of linguistic profiling in regards to what speech acts are indexed as belonging to which groups. I also think that you could write a section about how this topic relates to indexicality, because it definitely seems highly interconnected to this idea of the way one says something pointing to a particular first order indexical. It seems then, that the discrimination comes in with second order indexicality, where accent indexes personality traits, whereas first order indexicality is not necessarily leading to discrimination. Thus in your paragraph about discrimination vs using linguistic profiling as an auditory tool, you could use this as another distinguishing factor. Rebeccakoganlee (talk) 07:23, 12 October 2011 (UTC)rebeccakoganlee

After reading over the page, I felt like it was missing a discussion on the effects of linguistic profiling. The page has sufficient examples of situations/cases in which the phenomenon is present, but it does not touch upon the reasoning or significance behind such results of profiling (based on speech production) found in society. Also, I thought that the page as a whole touched far more, or stressed, racial profiling to a greater degree than the auditory cues used by those particular groups. Because of this, I think Rebecca brings up a very good point. It seems that certain linguistic variables index a group of people along with particular stereotypical assumptions about their attributes. I think adding this role of indexicality will allow the page to have more of a focus on the subject matter. Skang03 (talk) 15:19, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree with what everyone has said so far and also think that this is a really good page. As others have said, I think that it could use a few more concrete examples as it is a bit dense and perhaps might be difficult for people without a linguistics background to read through. I think that it might be helpful to include a definition of Standard American English and some of the dialects you use in your examples. Perhaps an explanation of how the dialects differ phonetically would also be helpful. The AAVE wikipedia page actually has an entire section on phonology, so you could even link to that within the page. But overall, it's definitely a great page. Gkneveu (talk) 09:39, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I was curious about Hans van Halteren's work or if it isn't relevant to the topic at hand, as it is only discussed in one sentence. It seems like his work might be dealing with 1st order indexicals in linguistic profiling, whereas the examples of profiling given mostly discussed are 2nd order? I came away thinking that linguistic profiling might do primarily with race and I question that a bit. I think maybe that most of the research may have been done on race it looks like, but does that kind of emphasis in this discussion leave out other types? Kraecarpenter (talk) 15:16, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Organization
I'd be inclined to place less emphasis on Baugh personally, since the idea has been picked up by others. Having done so, I would suggest taking the 'emergence' section and subsume it in the following section as a discussion of inter-racial (rather than intra-racial) instances of linguistic profiling. Ldmanthroling (talk) 14:02, 12 October 2011 (UTC)