Linguistic prejudice is the last form of socially acceptable racism in the United States.
I hadn’t heard of the term “linguistic prejudice” until I saw a video of a man yelling at a Latinx worker for speaking Spanish. It turns out that linguistic prejudice is a modern manifestation of racism in America based off of the way people speak. This judgement could be induced by an accent, a dialect, or by a person simply speaking a different language other than English. Pretty interesting right?
From there, I did a deep dive into how linguistic prejudice, or “linguicism” lives in the United States. This project posed a unique strategy challenge for me. I essentially put together a research brief before thinking of a brand. Here’s a little bit of my process below:
Research questions:
What exactly does linguistic prejudice look like?
What causes a person to look down on another based off of speech?
Where is linguistic prejudice happening in-person?
Where is linguistic prejudice happening via the internet?
Which media platform pulls the most hate speech content?
Strategic process:
Establish research questions
Dig into secondary and primary sources
Identify key insights
Research brands able to have a voice in the issue
Develop a creative strategy
Pitch to the creative team
From there we needed a story and a brand able to own American communication. Verizon was the answer to both.
The Brief: Get / Who / To / By
GET the every-day working american
WHO is unaware of their linguistic prejudice tendencies
TO consider their biases when other people sound different than themselves
BY showing how the melting pot culture of America is reflected in how we communicate every day.
(yes I threw a get-who-to-by in the mix—thank you Julian Cole)
Strategist: London Halls
Producer: London Halls
Director: Caleb Blackhurst
Art Director: Austin Warnick
Art Director: Sarah Gledhill
Copywriter: Matt Ostler
DP: Trevor Free
Editor: Reese Hansen