Languages have often been used to judge people, and a series of experiments by Kinzler et al, the native language of social cognition (doi:10.1073/pnas.0705345104), shows that this prejudice emerges early in development.
To start with, the authors showed a group of 5-6 month old infants two videos of adult females speaking American English. In the second video, however, the sound was played backwards. Despite the reversed speech having a similar temporal structure and sound spectrum, the infants preferred the “natural” speech condition.
They then did a similar experiment, but compared a video of American English to a video in Spanish. Once again, the infants (a new group of them), preferred to watch the person speaking in English – the language they were familiar with.
To test the effects of this bias on social interactions, the authors took a group of slightly older infants (10 months), and shown videos in English and French. Once the speaking was over, the ladies on the videos silently offered the infants a toy. Once again, the infants preferred the speakers of their own language, and tried to get the toy off them instead of the other speaker. So – the infants social interactions were heavily influenced by their language.
To follow this finding up, the authors took some young English-speaking children (5 years old), and showed them photographs of two unfamiliar children. The children then heard the unfamiliar children speak in French or English. When asked who they would rather be friends with, the children strongly preferred the child who spoke the same language as they did. Moreover, in another experiment, the authors showed that the children preferred speakers who had the same accent as them, over a speaker who spoke English, but had a different accent.
All in all, these results quite strongly point to an early developing social preference for speakers of the same language. Depressing, eh?
The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading
to Ephraim, and whenever a survivour of Ephraim said,
“Let me go over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are
you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All
right, say Shibboleth.” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because
he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized
him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two
thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
Judges 12:5– 6.