Linguistic discrimination in urban apartment searches: names and accents across neighborhoods

Description

This presentation uncovers the role that language plays in the distribution of living spaces in a city. One important factor is the hidden or unhidden stereotypes towards certain ethnicities represented through their speech. These often hidden biases lead to landlords’, landladies’ and real estate agents’ decisions on granting apartment viewings towards speakers of certain ethnic names and accents, but less for others. The language-based discrimination occurs statistically less frequently in the more diverse neighborhoods. A discourse analysis of such conversations shows the subtle moves that potentially disempower minority language speakers and re-establish the unbalanced power relationship of the native speakers and the immigrant applicants.