Investigating potential linguistic prejudice in the youth justice system: a participatory child-centred sociolinguistic approach to evaluate the impac

This proposal is tailored to the requirements set out in the project funding brief and begins with a brief overview of the literature and current debates surrounding the topic, including any potential gaps in the research and how these may be addressed.
Literature review
Language and accent are both identity markers to age, gender and race which are protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010. However, language and accent are not protected characteristics, meaning linguistic biases that people hold can cause stigmatism and negatively affect the number of opportunities people have access to.
Young people can face these stigmatisms from multiple directions early on, as language policy and policing in schools is based on standard language ideologies, meaning children can be considered as 'deficit' language users if they speak in ways outside of dominant language practices (Cushing, 2021), which includes speaking in regional accents, ESOL speakers, or using 'urban youth language' (Drummond, 2018). Children can face stigmatism in wider aspects of society due to the ways they speak, with discourses in the mainstream media and in British politics criticising their employability prospects or labelling them as 'uneducated' (Dray and Drummond, n.d.).
Standardised language ideologies perpetuate potential for linguistic discrimination within the Youth Justice System (YJS) because they create value judgments and biases about the ways people speak, regardless of the content. Cantone et al., (2019) demonstrate that accent bias towards stereotypical ways of speaking can lead to harsher judgements by jurors, especially when racial bias is included. In a recent study conducted in the UK Frumkin & Stone (2020) state that even eyewitness accounts by people who are not on trial are subject to value judgements on their accents, alongside age and race, with 'lower status accents' being rated less favourably than 'higher status accents'. These cases demonstrate the high stakes and...