Michelle: You know that old saying, 'It's not what you say, it's how you say it'? We usually think that's about your tone of voice, right? Being sarcastic or sincere. Mark: Yeah, exactly. Don't be a jerk, basically. Michelle: But what if it's literally about your accent? And what if that accent is a more powerful, more fundamental signal for shaping your life—who you trust, who gets a job, who's seen as credible—than even your race? Mark: Whoa, hold on. More powerful than race? That's a huge claim. That feels... counterintuitive. Michelle: It is. And it's the explosive idea at the heart of How You Say It by Katherine D. Kinzler. And Kinzler isn't just a writer; she's a top psychologist at the University of Chicago whose research has been funded by the National Science Foundation. She's dedicated her career to this one, often invisible, form of prejudice. Mark: Okay, I'm intrigued. A University of Chicago psychologist saying accent trumps race. Where do you even start to prove something like that? Michelle: You start thousands of years ago, with a story from the Hebrew Bible that shows how your accent could be a life-or-death password.

Mark: A life-or-death password? That sounds dramatic. Michelle: It was. The story is about two warring tribes, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. After a brutal battle, the victorious Gileadites controlled the escape route—the fords of the Jordan River. They needed a quick, foolproof way to identify enemy soldiers trying to sneak across. Mark: So, like a checkpoint. But they didn't have ID cards. Michelle: Exactly. So they devised a linguistic test. They knew the Ephraimites had a slightly different dialect. So, they would stop every man who tried to cross and ask him to say one word: "Shibboleth." Mark: Shibboleth. What does that even mean? Michelle: It means 'ear of corn.' But the meaning was irrelevant. The key was the first sound. The Gileadites pronounced it with a 'sh' sound, but the Ephraimites' dialect didn't have that sound. They couldn't physically produce it correctly. They would say "Sibboleth." Mark: Oh, I see where this is going. It's a tell. Michelle: A fatal tell. The Bible says that every time a man said "Sibboleth," they seized him and killed him right there at the riverbank. The passage ends by stating that forty-two thousand Ephraimites were slaughtered. Mark: Forty-two thousand? Just for mispronouncing one word? That's insane. It's a level of prejudice that's hard to even wrap your head around. Michelle: It is. And it's the most extreme example of what Kinzler argues is a fundamental human instinct. We are hardwired to use speech as a marker for 'us' versus 'them.' It's an ancient tribal identifier. Mark: Okay, that's an ancient, extreme example. Does this 'us vs. them' accent test still happen today, even if it's not with swords at a river? Michelle: It happens from the moment we're born. Kinzler's own research is fascinating here. She and her colleagues did studies with infants, just a few months old. They would show babies videos of two different people. One person would speak in the baby's native language—say, American English—and the other would speak in a foreign language, like French. Mark: And the babies have a preference? Michelle: A huge one. They consistently stare longer at the person speaking their native language. But it gets even more specific. In other studies, they tested five-month-old American babies with videos of someone speaking English with a native American accent versus someone speaking English with a foreign accent. The babies still preferred the native-accented speaker. Mark: At five months old? They can't even talk yet! Michelle: They can't talk, but they are already absorbing the sounds of their social world and making judgments. They're learning who is 'like me' and who is not. Kinzler even found that babies expect people who speak the same language to like the same foods and be friends with each other. It’s a deep, intuitive social map, and language is the primary coordinate. Mark: So that ancient Shibboleth instinct isn't just history. It's a piece of software that's pre-installed in every human brain. We're born ready to form a tribe based on sound. Michelle: Precisely. And that ancient instinct now plays out in much subtler, but still devastating, ways. It creates what Kinzler calls an 'accent ceiling' in modern life, and sometimes, it surfaces in the most tragic places imaginable.

Mark: An 'accent ceiling.' I like that term. It implies there's this invisible barrier that your skills can't break through if you don't sound 'right.' Michelle: And it can be the difference between being heard and being dismissed entirely. Kinzler points to the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin. The prosecution's star witness was Rachel Jeantel, who was on the phone with Trayvon just moments before he was killed. Mark: I remember her. Her testimony was crucial. Michelle: It should have been. She was the only person who could testify to Trayvon's state of mind. But Rachel Jeantel speaks African American English. On the stand, she was composed, consistent, and her testimony was powerful. But after Zimmerman was acquitted, one of the jurors came forward and said they found Jeantel's testimony "hard to understand" and "not credible." Mark: Not credible? Why? Because of what she said, or how she said it? Michelle: The juror's comments focused on her speech. It was a modern-day Shibboleth test. Her dialect, which is a rule-governed and legitimate form of English, was perceived by the jury as untrustworthy. Her message was lost because the listeners were biased against the medium. She failed the accent test, and her friend's story went unheard. Mark: That's heartbreaking. It's the same principle as the riverbank, just in a courtroom. Your life, or your credibility, depends on whether your pronunciation fits the listener's expectations. Michelle: Exactly. And this plays out everywhere. In housing, studies show that landlords are less likely to call back prospective tenants who have foreign or minority accents. It happens in the economy, too. One economist, Jeffrey Grogger, analyzed wage data and found that a person's accent was a huge predictor of their earnings. Black workers whose voices were identified by listeners as 'distinctly black' faced a significant wage gap compared to those who were not. Mark: Hold on. This is where it gets tricky for me. What about jobs? If you're hiring for a customer service role, or a teaching position, isn't clear communication a legitimate requirement? Where's the line between a legitimate business need and pure prejudice? Michelle: That is the million-dollar question, and it's at the heart of so many legal battles. Kinzler brings up the landmark case of Manuel Fragante from the 1980s. He was a Filipino American man who applied for a clerk position at the DMV in Honolulu. He scored the highest of all applicants on the written civil service exam. Mark: So he was the most qualified candidate on paper. Michelle: By a long shot. But then he had a brief, 15-minute interview. The supervisors who interviewed him said his heavy Filipino accent made him difficult to understand, and they gave the job to someone else. Fragante sued, arguing it was discrimination based on his national origin. Mark: And what did the court say? Michelle: The court sided with the DMV. They ruled that an employer can make a hiring decision based on accent if it "interferes materially with job performance." The problem, as Kinzler points out, is that "difficulty understanding" is incredibly subjective. Research by linguist Don Rubin shows that listeners' biases play a huge role. He had students listen to a recorded lecture. Half were shown a picture of a white professor, and the other half were shown a picture of an Asian professor. Mark: But it was the same audio recording for both groups? Michelle: The exact same recording, spoken by a native English speaker from Ohio with no accent whatsoever. But the students who saw the Asian face reported that the professor had a foreign accent that made him harder to understand. They literally invented an accent that wasn't there, based on a visual, racial cue. Mark: Wow. So the 'communication problem' isn't in the speaker's mouth. It's in the listener's head. Michelle: Often, yes. We think our ears are objective recording devices, but they are deeply biased filters. And that's what makes this so insidious. The person with the bias genuinely believes they are having trouble understanding, so they feel their judgment is fair. Mark: This all feels pretty bleak. We're hardwired to be biased, our legal system struggles to protect us, and our own brains invent problems that aren't there. Is there any way out of this trap? Michelle: There is. And it's a surprisingly powerful one that starts with challenging a core belief most of us hold. Kinzler argues we're held back by a 'monolingual myth'—this mistaken idea that one language is best, and that learning more than one is confusing or detrimental.

Michelle: I once heard a story about a brilliant tax attorney, a real math whiz, who hired a Spanish-speaking nanny to help raise her son bilingually. But as time went on, she got nervous. She was worried that learning Spanish might somehow interfere with his ability to learn math. So she told the nanny to only speak English, except for a half-hour of 'Spanish time' each day. Mark: Honestly, I've heard that too! I know parents who worry that teaching a kid two languages at once will just confuse them or delay their speech. It's a common fear. Michelle: It's a very common fear, but Kinzler shows it's completely unfounded. For decades, flawed, socially biased studies claimed bilingualism was a handicap. But modern research shows the opposite. Bilingual children don't have smaller vocabularies; their total conceptual vocabulary across both languages is just as large as a monolingual child's. They just have different words for different contexts. Mark: Okay, so it's not harmful. But is it actually beneficial? Is there a real 'bilingual bonus'? Michelle: The evidence is mounting, and it's incredible. One of the biggest benefits is in something called 'perspective-taking.' Because bilingual children are constantly tracking who speaks what language to whom, they get a lot of practice understanding that different people have different knowledge and perspectives. They are better communicators because they are better at understanding the mind of their conversation partner. Mark: That makes sense. It's like a constant social workout for the brain. Michelle: It is! And it might even have profound effects on our health. Some research suggests that the constant mental juggling of two languages builds up a 'cognitive reserve' that can help delay the onset of symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer's disease by several years. Mark: Get out of here. Learning a second language could help fight off Alzheimer's? Michelle: It's a real and promising area of research. But the most fascinating effect for me is how a second language can change our moral decision-making. Kinzler highlights the famous 'trolley problem' experiment. Mark: Ah yes, the runaway trolley. Do you pull a lever to divert it, killing one person on a side track to save five people on the main track? Michelle: That's the one. When people are presented with this dilemma in their native language, most say they would not push a man off a bridge to stop the trolley, even to save five others. The emotional, visceral feeling of 'killing is wrong' is too strong. But when bilingual people are asked the same question in their second language, they are significantly more likely to say yes, they would push the man. Mark: Why the change? Michelle: Because, as Kinzler explains, our native tongue is steeped in emotion. It's the language we were praised and scolded in as children. A second language is more emotionally distant. It allows for a more cool-headed, rational, utilitarian calculation. You're less clouded by the immediate emotional horror and more focused on the numbers: save five, sacrifice one. Mark: So a second language can literally make you a more logical thinker. That's a superpower. Michelle: It is. And it's a powerful argument for why we need a 'linguistics revolution.' We need to ditch the monolingual myth and embrace linguistic diversity not as a problem to be managed, but as a resource that makes us smarter, more empathetic, and more connected.

Michelle: So we've gone from an ancient password at a riverbank, to a modern courtroom, to the very wiring of our own brains. The thread connecting it all is that speech isn't just speech. It's a signal of identity that we are profoundly, instinctively attuned to. Mark: It's a signal that can be used to divide and exclude, as we saw with Shibboleth and Rachel Jeantel, but it also holds the key to connection and even enhanced cognition, as we see with bilingualism. Michelle: Exactly. The book's title is How You Say It, but the ultimate message is about how we listen. The prejudice isn't inherent in the accent; it's activated in the ear of the beholder. Mark: So what's the one thing we can do? How do we become better listeners and short-circuit that ancient, biased programming? Michelle: Kinzler's work suggests a simple but powerful mental shift. The next time you find yourself struggling to understand someone with a different accent, or find yourself judging them, pause and ask yourself a question: is the problem their speech, or is it my listening? Am I leaning in with curiosity and generosity, or am I leaning back with judgment? Mark: That's a powerful question. It shifts the responsibility from them to you. It's not about them 'fixing' their accent; it's about you improving your listening. Michelle: It's about recognizing that communication is a two-way street. And every time we choose to listen with patience and empathy, we're pushing back against thousands of years of tribal instinct. Mark: That's a hopeful way to look at it. We'd love to hear your own stories about language and accent. Have you ever felt judged by how you speak, or caught yourself judging someone else? Find us on our socials and share your experience. We read everything. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.