ABSTRACT
Given the pervasive, integral nature of speech in everyday life, the potential for implicit language bias is omnipresent. This analysis considers a couple of active venues for implicit language bias, including higher education and social media. The study indicates that, contrary to the explicit emphasis on inclusion in higher education, students who speak nonmainstream varieties are subject to a barrage of implicit bias that affects their participation in the classroom and status in the university community. At the same time, interviews with tenure-track faculty at a Southern University reveal dialect biases that affect the evaluation and status of students in higher education. The social media phase of the study examines a set of YouTube comments about different regional and ethnic varieties, including Outer Banks English, Lumbee American Indian English, African American Language, and the Cherokee language. The differential classification of metacommentary indicates that language serves as a proxy for other social and sociopsychological behaviors and attributes associated with social groups. In reality, language bias is everywhere, and often remains immune to the progressive sociopolitical agendas found in institutions inhabited by even the most educated members of society, in particular, higher education. Accordingly, there should be an imperative to address language inequality that starts from the academy in which we currently reside.
