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Perceptions of non-native speech are often guided by listeners’ expectations of a speaker. These expectations are informed by pre-existing beliefs about how particular types of people sound. Perceived ethnicity can affect how listeners evaluate speech (Rubin 1992; D’Onofrio 2019); however, most of this work has been situated in Western contexts. The current study details an experiment that tests for the linguistic profiling (Baugh 2005) of the Uyghur population of China, a group that has been systematically oppressed for their ethnicity and religion. Using name-based ethnicity priming, participants thought they were hearing either a Korean, Uyghur or non-descript speaker of L2 Mandarin. Results showed that participants rated the speaker as significantly more confident, intelligent and hard-working in the Uyghur condition. However, participants were significantly less likely to hire the supposedly ‘Uyghur’ speaker. We propose that these results are evidence of shifting standards (Biernat 2012), whereby listener expectations are lowered by social stereotypes, leading to inflated subjective ratings of minority groups, without leading to positive outcomes.

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Swearwords influence social evaluation of a speaker in a variety of ways depending on social context (Jay & Janschewitz (2008), The pragmatics of swearing. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 4(2), 267-288). Little attention has been paid to the role of linguistic variation in social perceptions of swearing, however. This paper presents two experiments that test the role of sociolinguistic variation in the social evaluation of swearing. Experiment 1 is a variant categorization task, in which participants categorized acoustically ambiguous swearwords and phonetically matching neutral and nonwords as ending in either "-ing" or "-in." Results suggest that swearwords led participants to hear "-ing" on ambiguous items. Experiment 2 is a matched-guise task in which listeners heard a passage featuring a mix of swearwords and neutral "-ing" words in one of four conditions: fully velar (All-ing), fully alveolar (All-in), only swearwords as velar (Swear-ing), or only neutral words as velar (Swear-in).Participants rated speakers on Likert scales (Schleef et al. (2017), Regional diversity in social perceptions of (ING).Language Variation and Change, 29(1), 29-56). Participants again displayed a tendency towards hearing "-ing" on swearwords. As a result, responses to the Swear-in guises were similar to those for the All-ing guises. The This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.