Whose is the voice of the American public? Latinx speech and the standard language ideology of public radio

ABSTRACT

When National Public Radio (NPR) was originally founded, the network was designed to represent the diverse population of the United States. In recent years, Latinxs have become a growing part of the American electorate, but the degree to which NPR incorporates Latinx speech into its on-air broadcasts remains uncertain. Using a case study approach, I argue that NPR employs broadcast practices that privilege white, educated, middle-class listeners excluding speakers of traditionally stigmatized varieties. I ground my arguments in the concept of Standard Language Ideology, or a bias toward an idealized, homogenous spoken language, imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Latinx
• public radio
• language ideology
• civic engagement
• linguistic capital

Notes

1 Queena Sook-Kim, “Why the Heck do Latino Reporters on Public Radio Say their Names that Way?”KQED, February 15, 2015, https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/02/15/why-the-heck-do-mexican-reporters-on-public-radio-say-their-names-that-way/.

2 Susan Tamasi and Lamont Antieau, Language and Linguistic Diversity in the US: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2015), 172.

3 Bonnie Urciuoli, Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996).

4 James Milroy and Leslie Milroy, Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English (New York: Routledge, 2012).

5 Ralph Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996).

6 Ibid.

7 Michael McCauley, NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

8 Bill Seimering, “National Public Radio Purposes,” Current, May 7, 2012, https://current.org/2012/05/national-public-radio-purposes/.

9 Ibid.

10 Jason Loviglio, “Public Radio in Crisis,” in Radio’s New Wave, ed. Jason Loviglio and Michele Hilmes (New York: Routledge, 2013), 24–42.

11 Alan Stavitsky, “Guys in Suits with Charts,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 39 (1995): 177–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838159509364297.

12 Harper, Hilliard. “Latinos Protest NPR Move to Ax ‘Enfoque’,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1988, http://articles.latimes.com/1988-03-03/entertainment/ca-175_1_public-radio-stations.

13 Holly Pretsky, “NPR in Spanish: Approaching Content for a Bilingual Audience,” NPR, December 14, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2017/12/14/570848670/npr-in-spanish-approaching-content-for-a-bilingual-audience.

14 Ibid.

15 Michael McCauley, The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 14.

16 Jürgen Habermas, “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 13 (1970): 360–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/00201747008601597.

17 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

18 Ibid., 37–8.

19 Judith Irvine and Susan Gal, “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation,” in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Paul Kroskrity (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2000), 35–84.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Jonathan Rosa, “Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies Across Communicative Contexts,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26 (2016): 162–83, https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12116 .

23 Ibid.

24 Urciuoli, Exposing Prejudice.

25 Ana Cecilia Zentella, “‘José, can you see?’ Latin@ Responses to Racist Discourse,” in Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, ed. D. Sommer (New York: Palgrave-McMillin, 2003).

26 Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” Language and Politics, ed. Michael Shapiro (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984), 108–38.

27 Ibid.

28 Teddy Wayne, “‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves.” The New York Times, October 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/fashion/npr-voice-has-taken-over-the-airwaves.html.

29 NPR, This Is NPR: The First Forty Years (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010), 23.

30 Jonathan Kern, Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 27.

31 For more information on speech communities, see Alessandro Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

32 Fern Johnson, Speaking Culturally: Language Diversity in the United States (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 324.

33 Ibid.

34 Andy Carvin, “What is the Origin of the Distinctive NPR Speech Pattern?” Quora, January 4, 2011, https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-distinctive-NPR-speech-pattern.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Jerome Socolovsky, “Pronounce Like a Polyglot: Saying Foreign Names on Air,” National Public Radio, April 30, 2019, https://training.npr.org/2019/04/30/pronounce-like-a-polyglot-saying-foreign-names-on-air/

38 “NPR’s Training: Storytelling Tips and Best Practices,” National Public Radio, http://training.npr.org (accessed August 4, 2019).

39 Ibid.

40 Leslie Milroy, “Britain and the United States: Two Nations Divided by the Same Language (and Different Language Ideologies),” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10 (2001): 56–89. doi:10.1525/jlin.2000.10.1.56.

41 Ibid.

42 Thomas Paul Bonfiglio, Mother Tongues and Nations. The Invention of the Native Speaker (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2010).

43 Jeffrey Dvorkin, “Pronunciamentos: Saying it Right,” NPR, November 8, 2005, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4994862.

44 Ibid.

45 Jeffrey Dvorkin. “Why Doesn’t NPR Sound More Like the Rest of America?” NPR, November 8, 2005, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4656584.

46 Ibid.

47 Lynda Muggleston, “Spoken English and the BBC: In the beginning,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik Und Amerikanist 33 (2008): 197–216; Jürg Schwyter, Dictating to the mob: History of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016).

48 Ibid.

49 María Dolores Gonzales-Velásquez, “Sometimes Spanish, Sometimes English: Language Use Among Rural New Mexican Chicanas,” in Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, ed. Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (New York: Routledge, 1995), 421–46.

50 For more information on Radio Ambulante, see http://radioambulante.org/en/.

51 Alan Bell, “Broadcast News as a Language Standard,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 40 (1983): 29–42, https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.1983.40.29.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Delores Casillas, Sounds of Belonging: US Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (New York: NYU Press, 2014).

56 StoryCorps “About StoryCorps,” https://storycorps.org/about/.

57 NPR, “NPR: A Strategic Plan,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/about/strategic_plan/2014_StrategicPlan.PDF.

58 Ibid.

59 Christopher Chávez, Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language, Ideology and Practice (New York: Lexington Books, 2012).

60 Laura Garbes, “How a CPB Task Force Advanced a Prescient Vision for Diversity in Public Radio,” Current, November 13, 2017, https://current.org/2017/11/how-a-cpb-task-force-advanced-a-prescient-vision-for-diversity-in-public-radio/?wallit_nosession=1.