“You are so articulate!” How Discrimination Shows up in and through Language w/ Dr. Chu May Paing

Let’s welcome WALC Executive Director, Dr. Chu May Paing, for our second Immigration Learning Circle of the 2026 year!

In our society, when we say “discrimination,” we often tend to think about racial and ethnic discrimination. Yet, discrimination based on one’s language use such as accents and language varieties also happens in everyday encounters and is often gone unnoticed, and as a result, unchallenged.

In this talk, Dr. Chu will offer theoretical understandings about how language and language ideologies (people’s attitudes towards language) is inherently intertwined with race and ethnicity. She will also offer examples of their own personal encounters with linguistic discrimination as an immigrant in the US, and tangible ways with which we can work together to eradicate systemic forms of linguistic discrimination.