Research linguist Daniel Hieber, founder of Linguistic Discovery, shows small business owners how the way we speak shapes how others see us, and how to use that awareness to lead, sell, and hire more effectively.

Every interaction in your business runs on language: a sales call, a customer complaint, a new hire’s first day, an email to a client. How formal we are, how we take turns in a conversation, how direct we are, and how we sound all send signals. Most of us read those signals without realizing it. For a small business owner, a misread can strain a customer relationship, create friction on a small team, or cost you a great hire.

In this episode of The How of Business, Henry Lopez is joined by Daniel Hieber to look at linguistics, the study of human language, as a small business topic. Henry calls it “a completely different topic than I’ve ever addressed over 400-plus episodes.”

Danny got hooked on languages as a kid. He learned Spanish, Latin, and Swahili, studied abroad in Kenya, and found linguistics in a William & Mary course catalog. He knew right away: “That’s what I’m doing with the rest of my life.” He spent five years with Rosetta Stone’s Endangered Language Program, earned his PhD at UC Santa Barbara, and works today with the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana to revitalize their once-dormant language.

Danny opens by rejecting the idea that language works differently at work and in social settings. “Business is a social context,” he says. All day long we move between formal and informal registers, adjusting to the person, the relationship, and even the room. Problems start when two people read the situation differently. A small business owner may keep things casual to welcome a new hire, while that new hire, nervous on day one, is actually looking for structure.

The same thing happens with conversation styles. High-involvement speakers jump in to show they’re engaged. High-considerateness speakers wait their turn. Each can read the other as rude or disengaged. Even filler words have a job: they signal you have more to say. Henry shares how his direct South Florida style came across as brusque to customers in Texas, and how he learned to “speak toward” the point.

Accents raise the biggest blind spots. Danny cites studies in which people were turned away based only on how they sounded, often by people who didn’t realize they were doing it. He reminds us that everybody speaks with an accent, and that an accent says little about education or ability.

The conversation closes on writing, which Danny treats differently from speech. Standard written conventions matter for credibility, and they can be taught.

As Danny puts it: “Your attitudes about the way people speak are never really attitudes about language. They’re always attitudes about people.”

How Language Shapes Business Perceptions – Key Takeaways:

• Business is a social context.
  Every workplace conversation moves between formal and informal registers. Most friction comes from people reading the social situation differently, not from the words themselves.
• Set the tone on purpose.
  Small teams blur social boundaries. A casual welcome may make a nervous new hire less comfortable, so be deliberate about how formal you are.
• Know your conversation style.
  High-involvement speakers jump in to show engagement. High-considerateness speakers wait their turn. Recognizing the difference prevents people from feeling ignored or interrupted.
• Filler words have a function.
  “Ums” and “ahs” signal that you’re not done talking. They help in conversation but distract in a presentation or on a podcast.
• Directness is regional.
  Some regions get right to the point (like in the Northeast states), while others work their way toward it (more common in the South). Adapting to your customers’ style keeps directness from coming across as rude.
• Watch for hidden bias in how people sound.
  Accent bias is usually subconscious, and an accent says little about someone’s education or ability. Judge whether a person communicates effectively, not whether they sound like you.
• Writing is a different skill from speaking.
  Standard written conventions matter for your business’s credibility. Templates and courses can teach them, and weak writing reflects educational opportunity, not intelligence.

Episode Host: Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of this episode of The How of Business podcast show – dedicated to helping you start, run, grow, and exit your small business.

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Resources:

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• Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work by Deborah Tannen

Related Podcast Episodes:

Episode 233: Oscar Trimboli – Listening Skills

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Transcript:

The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.

Episode Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Meet Daniel Hieber

Henry Lopez [0:15]: Welcome to this episode of The How of Business. This is Henry Lopez, and my guest today is Daniel Hieber. Danny, welcome to the show.

Daniel Hieber [0:20]: Thank you, appreciate it.

Henry Lopez [0:21]: This is going to be exciting. This is a completely different topic than I’ve ever addressed over 400-plus episodes on this show, so I’m excited to have this conversation, Danny. Danny, or Daniel, is going to share some of his knowledge of linguistics, which, to put it at a very high level, is the study of human language. In particular, we’re going to talk about it in the context of small business, including our first impressions on our customers, our clients, maybe a prospective employee, or the other way around, and how that might be influenced by our accents, for example. A lot of very interesting things there that we’re going to explore with Danny.

To receive more information about The How of Business, including links to the show notes page for this episode, just visit my website at thehowofbusiness.com.

So let me give you a little bit more background on Danny. Danny Hieber is a research linguist working to document and revitalize endangered languages while studying the cross-linguistic patterns, whatever the heck that means, that we see across the world’s languages. Kind of the things that we have in common across languages.

Daniel Hieber [1:33]: Right.

Henry Lopez [1:34]: He works primarily with the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana to help them revitalize their once-dormant language. Daniel earned his PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and prior to graduate school he worked for Rosetta Stone’s Endangered Language Program to create language learning software with Native American language communities. So once again, Danny, welcome to the show.

Daniel Hieber [2:00]: Thank you very much for having me. I’m excited to be on.

The Path to Linguistics

Henry Lopez [2:02]: Let’s start a little bit with your journey and how you got to what you’re doing today. What led you to the study of linguistics?

Daniel Hieber [2:11]: Well, I’ve always been super interested in languages, ever since I was a little kid. When I would say something, or someone else would say something, I would even kind of repeat it back to myself under my breath sometimes. I’m sure I was kind of a weird kid. But I started learning Spanish and then Latin in middle school and high school, and then I wanted to branch outside of Europe, and I started learning Swahili. I did a study abroad in Kenya. I’ve always been interested in languages.

Then I got to undergrad. I went to William & Mary in Virginia, and I was looking through the course catalog one day and I saw this thing: linguistics. I said, “What’s that?” So I went and read all the course descriptions, and immediately I was like, “That’s what I’m doing with the rest of my life. This is what I want to do.” So it was pretty straightforward from there.

Henry Lopez [2:54]: This early interest in language, was it fostered at home? Did your parents speak multiple languages? What do you think might have exposed you to it early on?

Daniel Hieber [3:04]: No, my parents were always very encouraging of me reading and exploring my interests, and I think that was a major thing. But it’s hard to say why I picked up on that linguistically. There is a little bit of evidence to suggest that gay men are sometimes more attentive to language because they’re attentive to how they speak, and so you do tend to see a lot of gay men in linguistics. But that’s still a little speculative.

Henry Lopez [3:33]: That’s an interesting observation. Similarly, as a son of immigrant parents, I was hyper-conscious of not having an accent, and we’ll talk about accents. I grew up in South Florida. I’m a son of Cuban immigrants, and of course we were ridiculed by the “Americans,” as we referred to them, for our accent. So I was very hyper-conscious, and I also developed an ear for that. My brother and sister have what we call a Miami accent, which comes from the fact that we speak Spanglish a lot, right? A combination of English and Spanish, very fast, and whatever comes first. But I don’t have an accent; people often can’t place me. Now, you might be able to, but I have this non-placeable accent, and it’s because I was hyper-conscious of it early on.

Daniel Hieber [4:24]: Yeah, that’s actually highly relevant, I think, to some of the stuff we might talk about today. Similarly, I grew up in New England. I had kind of a New England accent when I was younger, and then we moved to the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia. I probably should have picked up that accent, but instead I wound up with the more socially prestigious Mid-Atlantic accent. Some people are just a little more socially attentive to the social connotations of different accents when they’re young, and they’ll adjust. I think I was one of those people that did that without realizing it.

Henry Lopez [4:56]: Yeah, I find myself doing the same thing, even now when I travel, as a way of blending in. Not that I blend in, but I think that I do.

Daniel Hieber [5:07]: Sure, sure.

Henry Lopez [5:08]: So how many languages do you speak fluently now?

Daniel Hieber [5:11]: Fluently, just three. I’ve got English, Spanish, and Swahili. Swahili is my best second language because I’ve done a lot of fieldwork in East Africa. But I should point out that linguistics isn’t so much about learning lots of languages. It’s more about the science of how language works: how we learn language, how language changes over time, how language affects cognition and cognition affects language. A joke that linguists sometimes like to use is that asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking a doctor how many diseases they have.

Henry Lopez [5:43]: Right, that’s fair. You could be a linguist and only concentrate on English, and all of the different facets of its origin and so forth, and only speak that one language.

Daniel Hieber [5:53]: Right. As a matter of fact, Noam Chomsky is pretty famous for that. I believe he knows some Hebrew, but he’s one of the most famous linguists, and he mostly focuses on English.

Revitalizing Endangered Languages

Henry Lopez [6:01]: Great observation. So what led to your interest in, not just, but most recently, Native American languages?

Daniel Hieber [6:12]: I became interested in that in undergrad when I was doing fieldwork in Kenya. I’d always been interested in East Africa, and then I discovered there was this whole movement to document minority languages and try to help revitalize them before they disappear. So I started taking an interest in that in undergrad, and then I had an internship with the Endangered Language Program at Rosetta Stone. They make that language learning software. It just so happened that right after undergrad a position opened up, and I was able to work there for five years. We worked with the Navajo, the Chitimacha in Louisiana, which is how I got involved with that group, the Mohawk, and the Iñupiaq, which is one of the Eskimo languages of Alaska. Later, during grad school, I also did some freelance work with them, and we worked on the Luiseño language, which is spoken in Southern California.

Henry Lopez [7:01]: Wow. I watched the video, I think it’s on your YouTube channel, of your presentation on the Chitimacha language and the last two known people to speak it. There’s even a little audio tape of them. Fascinating work. And so you’re helping that tribe bring that language back. I’m curious about the younger people in the tribe. What is their reaction and response to this?

Daniel Hieber [7:27]: Well, a lot of them love it. They love the language and culture classes that they have every day in the tribal school. What’s great about it is that the school is making it really prominent. It’s part of their day-to-day classroom and schooling. They’re not quite at immersion level yet, but the kids don’t think twice about it because it’s just there all the time. They have exposure to the language for the first time in 90 years, and that’s great. We kind of want it so that they’re not thinking twice about it. They just take the language for granted. That’s good.

Henry Lopez [7:59]: Why, in your opinion and observation, is it important? And what is it that we can learn? For them, as an example, other than the nostalgia of it or a sense of pride, what is it that they’re learning culturally about themselves by relearning this language?

Daniel Hieber [8:19]: Oh, all sorts of interesting things. The language has all these hints of the history of contact between the languages and peoples in the region, so there’s all sorts of interesting things there. And just in general, languages often reflect the way that people think about the world. A lot of times, if you talk about something frequently enough, eventually it becomes routinized and becomes part of the grammar of the language, and so the language reflects some of those ways of thinking down the road.

And then of course, for linguistic science, endangered languages are really, really important too, because we have really good representation of a handful of big language families out there. We know a lot about Indo-European, we know a lot about Chinese and Mandarin, but we still know very, very little about languages from all these other minority language families all over the world. Every time I start working on a new language, I discover things that I didn’t even think were possible in language. So I’m still learning.

Henry Lopez [9:15]: It’s pretty interesting how people could express something or describe something, but also you’re getting aspects of their culture that may not have been documented elsewhere. Is that fair?

Daniel Hieber [9:29]: Right. I’ll give you a real quick example. In English, we tend to have what’s called relative directional reckoning. We say left and right. The directions are relative to us and our orientation. But some languages don’t do that. Some languages have absolute directions. Instead of saying left or right, you always orient based on some aspect of geography or the cardinal directions. So you would say that the book is upriver from me when it’s sitting to the left of you, or something like that. That reflects this very intimate knowledge of the local environment, and that’s been coded in the grammar of the language. It’s just one quick example of something that we wouldn’t know about if we had never documented those languages.

Language in Business Is Social

Henry Lopez [10:08]: Interesting. Fascinating. All right, let’s start focusing on how this relates to business, why it’s important, and what we can learn from it as business owners. Let’s start at that higher level, since you’ve done a lot of thinking and sharing of knowledge on this. To get started, what are some of your observations about language in business versus in a social context?

Daniel Hieber [10:33]: Well, I’m actually going to deny the distinction right off the bat.

Henry Lopez: Okay, fair enough.

Daniel Hieber: Business is a social context. As you’re going throughout your workday, you’re constantly moving on this continuum between formal and informal register. We talk about register in linguistics, but it’s basically levels of formality, and that varies depending on the context and the person you’re talking to. It varies depending on how well you know someone, the type of relationship you’re trying to foster with that person, whether it’s a strictly work relationship or you’re more friendly with them. It can even be the physical setting and positioning. A conversation at your desk is very different from a conversation in a meeting room, and that constructs some of the level of formality for that conversation.

Different speech communities of any size can have different conventions about this too. Some startups might be very, very informal in how they talk during the day, and others might be very formal, and it might vary by department or company or region or country. So there are cultural differences involved too. As you’re moving throughout the workday, you’re constantly having to be attentive to the social cues. Formality is often about creating or maintaining or respecting social distance, and that’s a lot of the social work we’re doing throughout the day.

For the most part, people tend to be pretty good at this. We’re very socially hyper-aware animals. We naturally pay attention to these social categories, and we adjust our speech to them, so a lot of times this doesn’t take a lot of work. It’s when you have discrepancies, when people have different judgments about the social situation, or different cultural backgrounds about what’s considered formal or informal or appropriate, that those discrepancies wind up being realized in the language, in how you talk to someone. You might approach someone more informally than they’re expecting, and they might find that rude or disrespectful. But it’s usually not so much a linguistic difference as a difference in your judgment of the social situation.

Henry Lopez [12:44]: I can see where this is particularly challenging for a small business environment, which can be more like the startup. One of the challenges we have as small business owners is not allowing the environment to get too familial, too informal, because that can lead to other issues with the level of respect and the understanding that it needs to be a professional environment. Because it’s a small group, those boundaries are often much more blurry. That social distance is much more blurry, and so it becomes more of a challenge, I think, for small business owners.

Daniel Hieber [13:28]: Yeah, especially because any individual person in any individual context might have slightly different social goals. For example, if you’re bringing on a new hire, you might be trying to create a more informal setting to help that new hire feel more comfortable, so you might be using more informal language. But the new hire is probably feeling pretty insecure. There’s a lot of uncertainty on the first day, right? So they might actually be looking for a bit more structure and a bit more formality in this uncertain environment, and sometimes those two social goals can be at odds with each other.

Henry Lopez [14:08]: That’s a great point as well. It doesn’t happen as much in a corporate environment, because typically that tone has been established for some period of time.

Daniel Hieber [14:20]: Right.

Henry Lopez [14:20]: And you have layers, so there’s a hierarchy that’s established and predetermined before you join.

Daniel Hieber [14:27]: Yeah. I’ll give you another example. I was thinking about this with our email exchanges before the podcast. You’d probably agree that your emails were somewhat more formal and a bit more formulaic than mine were, and I think that’s because we had slightly different social goals. In no way was this in conflict. The formality of your emails makes a lot of sense because yours is a show about business, so you want to give an impression of seriousness and authority. Whereas I’m trying to portray myself as a guest who’s going to come on your show that your listeners will find personable and engaging, right? So I’m trying to close that social distance a little bit. It’s this fine little social dance that people are doing in how they use their language to convey these things.

Henry Lopez [15:11]: Right. And I think that’s why this is such a great conversation. The more aware you are of that, the more you can flex that muscle to your advantage, depending on the scenario.

Daniel Hieber [15:22]: Exactly.

How Accents Shape Our Perceptions

Henry Lopez [15:23]: Excellent. So let’s talk about accents, because that’s such a big part of how we perceive each other, especially as it relates to the business world. I have a bunch of questions here related to accents, but where would you like to start on how accents influence us and how we perceive each other, particularly in the business world?

Daniel Hieber [15:46]: Well, I think it’s important to recognize that most of our perception of accents is very subconscious, and there’s a lot of great research out there that shows how this can affect people’s perceptions of others. A really salient example comes from the National Fair Housing Alliance. They were doing research to test whether renters were being fair or discriminating toward the people who wanted to rent from them. They did these telephone tests where they would call up the renters and ask whether an apartment was available. Some renters would consistently tell their Black applicants that the unit wasn’t available, and then immediately afterwards get a call from a white applicant and tell the white applicant that the unit was available. This was on the telephone, so they never saw the person, and some of the renters, when questioned about it later, weren’t even aware that they had been doing this. They were just going off vibes or something.

There have been hiring studies as well, where they’ll take the same resume and just change the last name of the applicant to a name that’s more typically associated with the Black community, and they’ll see that it gets fewer callbacks. Or someone will call HR asking for an interview, and it can even be the same person just switching between a more standardized dialect and an African American English dialect, and that same person would receive fewer callbacks.

So it’s very subtle. I think language often winds up being one of the last acceptable forms of discrimination, one that a lot of times we’re not even aware of. I say “acceptable” not in the sense that it actually is acceptable, but that we accept it because we don’t realize otherwise.

Henry Lopez [17:36]: Sure. I’ve got to think one of the roots of it is association. In that scenario, we associate it with less ability to pay your bills, that you don’t have the wherewithal or the creditworthiness, whatever the case might be. But in an employer situation, I might think that person isn’t as capable, maybe they’re not as intelligent, based solely on their accent. And you’re saying that I’m making that determination very subconsciously, more than actively, even though it is discrimination. Is part of what I’m reading that that person is less intelligent or less capable?

Daniel Hieber [18:18]: Yeah, and unfortunately that is often what happens, especially with dialects that we’re less familiar with. We associate certain ways of speaking with certain groups of people, and we have stereotypes about those groups of people, so we tap into those stereotypes subconsciously when we’re paying attention to how someone else speaks. But of course, you learn to speak before you ever get to school, before you ever really have a chance at education most of the time. And for most people… you and I are actually the unusual ones. Most people don’t change their accent much after childhood. So after age five or so, no matter what someone’s background is, their accent doesn’t really tell you anything about their background.

Henry Lopez [19:07]: That’s such a good point of enlightenment: it has nothing to do with the fact that they may have gone on to get a PhD. They may have still carried forward their native accent, for lack of a better term.

Daniel Hieber [19:17]: Yeah. There’s a really famous example in linguistics, a great study that was done back in the 1960s. This linguist went around to every Macy’s department store in New York City and the greater area at the time. He found something on the fourth floor of the Macy’s, and then he went to the people working at each of those Macy’s and asked, “Hey, where’s X? Where are the shoes?” or whatever. He knew that it was on the fourth floor, so he knew they would say, “Oh, it’s on the fourth floor.” But of course, if you’re saying that with a New York accent, you’re going to say “fourth floor” without the R. Well, it turns out that there was variation in that, and what he found is that the people who pronounced the R were consistently in areas of higher socioeconomic status. These dialects with the R were associated with the upper class in New York City, whereas the lower-class areas didn’t have this R. So it was this really salient sociolinguistic feature that people picked up on, at least in the ’60s in New York. It was a signal of your class and your status.

Henry Lopez [20:30]: And it’s our instinct, isn’t it? I believe we’re all tribal by nature, to distinguish ourselves: they’re not in the tribe that I think is the right fit or that I want to be associated with. That’s why we subtly, but very impactfully, pick up on those cues, don’t we?

Daniel Hieber [20:52]: Right, but it’s important to remember at the same time that those cues vary depending on your own background. Someone did that same experiment in London about 10 years later and found the exact opposite results. So someone from England who hears that difference in the R is going to interpret it entirely backwards from an American.

Henry Lopez [21:13]: So it proves that it’s completely about our biases, about what that triggers for us based on our upbringing, or what we believe, or who we associate with, or what we’ve been told about a group of people being more or less intelligent, or more or less capable.

Daniel Hieber [21:30]: Exactly. I like to say that people’s attitudes about language are usually never about language itself. You’re usually reacting instead to your ideas about the group that you think speaks that way.

Henry Lopez [21:42]: That’s right. And that’s always a generalization, and that’s what gets us in trouble.

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British, Southern, and New York Accents

Do you know why Americans generally perceive someone with a British accent to be more intelligent, or more proper, or more professional?

Daniel Hieber [23:40]: I think it’s just because British English is thought to be older, and at least from the colonial era onward, it was associated with a higher social class compared to the colonists. So there’s been this long, several-hundred-year tradition of thinking that way. But what’s funny is that some of the features of British English now are actually newer than features of American English.

Henry Lopez [24:03]: Is that right?

Daniel Hieber [24:04]: Yeah. Some of the dialects of New England actually sound closer to what British English originally sounded like during the colonial era than British English does today.

Henry Lopez [24:13]: Fascinating. And of course, if you’re familiar enough with it, you know that there are so many different accents within the UK, and they do the same thing among themselves, right? They judge each other based on what part of the country you’re from.

Daniel Hieber [24:28]: Oh, yeah.

Henry Lopez [24:29]: Perhaps even more harshly than we do sometimes, or at least as harshly as we do as Americans.

Daniel Hieber [24:35]: Well, the longer a language has been in a place, the more time it has to diversify, and as a result there are more social distinctions and social judgments that go along with it. That’s why in the States there’s much more dialectal diversity on the East Coast than the West Coast. The East Coast has a dozen different dialect groups, and most of the time linguists just lump everything from the Midwest west into a Western dialect. There’s variation within it, but not much compared to the East.

The Function of Filler Words

Henry Lopez [25:07]: Okay, let’s take a slight turn here. You had a great video, I think on your YouTube channel, on filler words. This is a big thing for me, because I’ve worked very hard over my career, having come from sales and now doing this in podcasting, at cleaning that up in my language. But you have an interesting perspective on the effectiveness of filler words and sounds. Tell us about that.

Daniel Hieber [25:36]: Sure. One of the fundamental tenets of linguistics is that everything in language has a function. So filler words aren’t just filler; they actually have a use and a purpose in language. One of the purposes your ums and your ahs often have is to signal that you have more to say. If you have a firm pause, a pause tells you, “Hey, I’m done. You can jump in now.” Whereas a filler is like, “Give me a minute. I’m thinking. I still have more to say here.” And if you’re only ever pausing, that can actually be more confusing for other people.

Of course, in a context like this, on a podcast, or if you’re giving a presentation, you’re not trying to leave room for other people to jump in, because it’s meant to be a presentation. So there it can be very distracting to your listener, precisely because there’s no chance your podcast listeners are going to jump through the microphone and into the conversation. To them, it’s just kind of irritating at that point. So the use of these really depends on context. In some contexts, their function is really, really useful, and it’s a great social cue. In other cases, not so much.

Henry Lopez [26:48]: Brilliant. That distinction of context is the key part that I had never really thought about. As you were saying that, I’ve even had a challenge sometimes, because, as we did here, we turn off video. I don’t have any visual cues to lean on, so sometimes I’ve interviewed people whose cadence is a little different, and I don’t know that they’re done speaking, and so I interrupt. That would have been a time when a filler word or sound would have helped me, as the other party in the conversation, know whether you were done before I spoke.

High-Involvement vs. High-Considerateness Styles

Daniel Hieber [27:23]: Well, you touch on a really interesting and important issue, and I think this is very important in business contexts: people have different preferred communication styles, and this is partly a personal preference, partly a cultural preference, and a regional preference. Deborah Tannen, in this great book, Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work, talks about the difference between what she calls high-considerateness conversation styles and high-involvement conversation styles.

High-involvement people are trying to provide feedback and show, “Hey, I’m there with you.” They’re doing what we call backchanneling. They’re giving you “uh-huh, yeah, okay,” and they’re following up, asking questions, interjecting to show, “Hey, I’m engaged. I’m involved. I’m interested in what you’re saying.” But the high-considerateness people are the ones trying to let you say everything you have to say, and they’ll jump in when they can. You can immediately see how this causes some conflict in conversation sometimes. High-involvement people take the pauses given by high-considerateness people as meaning they must have nothing to say, and so the high-involvement people feel like they’re carrying the conversation because no one else wants to contribute.

Henry Lopez [28:36]: Right.

Daniel Hieber [28:37]: Whereas the high-considerateness people often feel like they’re having the floor taken away from them, and when the high-involvement speakers chime in to show support and participation, they feel like they’re being interrupted. But what’s interesting is that when you get two high-involvement people talking, or two high-considerateness people talking, they don’t feel interrupted, and they don’t feel like nobody’s talking. They come away feeling positive about the interaction, because that’s how they expect to interact with people.

Henry Lopez [29:04]: Interesting. One of the things I learned in sales is to try to quickly judge what type of person you’re talking to, and then mimic that to some extent.

Daniel Hieber [29:18]: Yeah, we call that linguistic accommodation, and that’s exactly it. Some people do that all the time. I think everybody does it to a certain extent. If you’re good at sales, you probably do it really well.

Henry Lopez [29:28]: Right, you have to learn to do that well. Southern accents: we alluded to other accents in the United States, and Southern accents are another one where, as you shared, some of us can have a negative perception, right?

Daniel Hieber [29:43]: Right. I think that just has to do with historical disparities in industrialization in the North versus the South. Most of the time, these attitudes we have about language go back way further than we realize. They’ve been latent for hundreds of years, and we’re still seeing the results of that today.

Henry Lopez: You mentioned it as well. Don’t you think we’ve had a similar reaction, and I’m generalizing, to a heavy New York or Brooklyn accent? Can that generate some of the same thing, or not?

Daniel Hieber: No, that’s absolutely true, and I think a lot of it is just a matter of exposure. Generally, the thickest New York accents or the thickest Southern accents are from areas that might be more rural, or might be poorer, lower-class neighborhoods. So they’re not the people that are as physically mobile, and they’re not the people that are going to be in the media spotlight as much. We just oftentimes don’t have as much exposure to these dialects, these accents, and so we find them unusual. We find them weird. And we also associate these dialects with poor neighborhoods or rural areas, and so we think of them as uneducated and backwards.

Accents and Hiring Decisions

Henry Lopez [30:55]: But it also comes back to the point you made about formality, or the lack thereof. Sometimes what I might be listening for, if I’m hiring someone for a particular position, and certainly one that’s going to be customer-facing, is that I tend to look for someone who speaks more like me. I know that’s wrong, and I try to overcome that prejudice. But nonetheless, the way I look at it is, this person is going to be representing my business, and I don’t know that they’re going to be as effective at communicating if they’ve got this heavy accent that I perceive in a certain way. What would you say to me about my perception that that’s going to be an issue in them communicating effectively on behalf of my business?

Daniel Hieber [31:39]: Well, it’s a legitimate concern. That’s not something I would want to downplay, because everybody has these attitudes about language. We’re having this conversation, and it’s good to be aware of these things, but most people aren’t. Most people have never heard of linguistics, or the idea that there is variation in language and that’s okay. Most people have attitudes and ideas about what’s considered standard English. There is an idea of General American, or standard American English. The thing is, this is an artificial variety that nobody actually speaks naturally. It’s that media English. It’s a very constructed thing. But people can be trained to speak that way. That’s what broadcasters and people in the media do, and probably you yourself. You’ve changed the way you speak. So people can be trained to speak in a way that’s perceived as standard, even though nobody actually speaks this standard.

The other thing is that everybody has a linguistic repertoire of the varieties they can speak. We’re not necessarily stuck with one dialect. Sure, I’ll slip into my Appalachian English when I’m back home, but I’ll be speaking more Mid-Atlantic English when I’m giving a presentation at a conference. So if you find someone who has a larger linguistic repertoire and can, like you said, do linguistic accommodation and meet your client, or the other person they’re talking to, at their comfortable accent or conversation style, then that’s someone who’s going to be a lot more useful to your business and a lot more versatile linguistically.

Henry Lopez [33:16]: I think that’s often referred to as code-switching. Is that a term that’s used?

Daniel Hieber [33:22]: Code-switching usually refers to switching between different languages. We also talk about style shifting…

Henry Lopez [33:28]: Right.

Daniel Hieber [33:28]: …and also just accent accommodation.

Advice for Job Seekers With an Accent

Henry Lopez [33:32]: So if we flip it to the prospective employee, what advice do you give to someone who does have one of these accents that might be perceived wrongly? I want to make sure everybody listening understands: I realize that it’s wrong to judge someone by their accent. I get that, and I try very hard not to. But nonetheless, it’s our natural tendency, and that’s what we’re talking about. So from the employee’s perspective, what do you recommend someone with one of these heavier accents should do? One of the things that comes to mind, Danny, is being conscious in the interview process of showing that I can be formal despite my accent.

Daniel Hieber [34:12]: Right. And it’s tricky, because obviously you can speak with a rural accent and still be just as formal.

Henry Lopez: Absolutely.

Daniel Hieber: But like you said, unfortunately that’s not the perception most people have. Most people think a rural accent, or a poor-neighborhood accent, means you’re an idiot. The San Francisco school system… not got in trouble, but there was an uproar about this back in the ’90s. What they were trying to do was teach Black kids in school, “Hey, the way you speak is different from standard, formal, academic English.” They weren’t trying to teach these kids African American Vernacular English, or what’s often called Ebonics. They were trying to show them, “Hey, the way you speak is a little different from what people think of as standard and formal and accepted, and if you’re aware of these differences, then you can control and command both of those dialects much more easily.”

So that’s what I’d encourage people to do: just be aware that there are often attitudes about the way you speak. And the thing is, everybody speaks with an accent. There’s no such thing as speaking without an accent, which means someone out there is going to find the way you speak irritating or dumb.

Henry Lopez [35:30]: That’s right.

Daniel Hieber [35:30]: So if you’re aware of that, and you’re aware of the range of features and the different grammatical constructions that you use versus what other people use, that helps you. It grows your linguistic repertoire, and it can make you better able to move between these different social situations.

Henry Lopez [35:46]: Which brings me to the point that at the end of the day, regardless of our accents, if we can communicate effectively, if I can get across my point or the message or whatever it is that I’m selling or communicating, that’s what’s most important.

Daniel Hieber [36:02]: Yes, absolutely.

Henry Lopez [36:04]: And we can do that in very different styles and with different accents. Now, I may have to follow a particular script that my employer asks me to follow, but that’s okay as long as I communicate it. And I find that sometimes with these accents, and maybe I’m generalizing, just to pick on Southern, I associate a Southern accent with great storytellers, right?

Daniel Hieber [36:27]: Yeah, right.

Henry Lopez [36:28]: So if you channel that the right way, it can be an advantage as well.

Daniel Hieber [36:32]: Oh yeah. I do a lot of TikTok videos, and that’s the one thing: you tell a good story that’s going to engage people. If you do that in a traditional Southern storytelling style, with or without the accent, that’s going to be a viral video for you.

The Mid-Atlantic Accent

Henry Lopez [36:47]: That’s right. All right, you touched on it at the beginning, and I can’t go without talking about the so-called Mid-Atlantic accent. Its origins have always fascinated me. Introduce it, if you will.

Daniel Hieber [37:04]: There are actually two different things known as the Mid-Atlantic accent.

Henry Lopez [37:07]: Oh, okay.

Daniel Hieber [37:08]: The first one is this really interesting mix of American English and British English that was used in the early film industry in the 1930s.

Henry Lopez [37:19]: That’s the one I was referring to.

Daniel Hieber [37:21]: To be honest, I’m not 100% sure where that comes from. I think it might just be a result of the prestige of British English at the time and in the media. What’s interesting about that, too, is that I went to grad school at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Santa Barbara was actually where that early film industry was before it moved down to Hollywood. So we got to learn about some of that history in the area. It was really fun.

The other Mid-Atlantic dialect is the one in the Baltimore, D.C., maybe all the way up to Pittsburgh area. It’s actually a pretty small dialect area, but it’s the one we associate with Washington, D.C. and the speakers there. Because of the prestige of D.C., and the fact that it gets all this media attention and is seen as this formal place, the Mid-Atlantic dialect tends to be fairly prestigious. So no surprise, I think little me, at about seven years old, must have picked up on the fact that it was a little more socially advantageous for me to speak this way as opposed to Appalachian English, and slowly shifted to speaking that way.

Is There a Best Way to Speak in Business?

Henry Lopez [38:31]: Interesting. Fascinating. All right, maybe this is not a fair question, but I’m going to ask you anyway. Is there a way of speaking the language that is most effective in business, and I’m talking about business in the United States, or does it depend?

Daniel Hieber [38:53]: Unfortunately, it really does depend. I think about communication in the workplace a little bit like project management. If you created a project management plan and didn’t create a flexible timeline and build in some buffer time for things to happen, that’s kind of like planning to never have miscommunication in the workplace and never have communication differences in the workplace. So I think the best piece of advice I can give is to just anticipate that there are going to be differences in communication style and dialect, and, to the extent you can, be willing to tolerate those and clarify.

That said, I do think one thing that’s really important to keep in mind is that there’s a difference between literacy and language. Writing conventions are this abstract, formal thing you learn in school after you’ve learned how to speak, and it’s a whole art form to do it well. I know you had an episode with Katie Cronkite recently about better writing and how that can lead to better sales, and that is really important. A lot of people think that when I say there’s no wrong way to speak, that applies to writing too, and that’s not necessarily the case. Formal written conventions have a place, and they’re very important for displaying the level of education, authority, and prestige of your business. So having standardized written conventions, I think, is perfectly reasonable. We expect certain writing styles in a formal context.

At the same time, though, literacy is a matter of exposure to and support for educational opportunities. Not everybody has the same educational opportunities, so it’s important to remember that someone’s writing isn’t necessarily a sign of their intelligence either. It probably is a sign of their educational background and how used they are to doing formal and academic writing, and that can be very, very relevant to your hiring decisions, of course. But that’s also something that can be taught. There are great literacy courses out there that you can ask your employees to take, and they’ll be better at writing emails afterwards.

Henry Lopez [40:53]: Great points. On written communication, one of the ways I’ve tried to apply that in some of my business environments is by having templates, for lack of a better term, or examples that are the standard for common communications.

Daniel Hieber [41:12]: That’s a great idea. Definitely.

Henry Lopez [41:13]: So that sets, to your point, “This is how we do this here. This is the type of language we use when we’re doing written communications.”

Daniel Hieber [41:22]: Yeah. Just like we were talking about earlier, we’re members of multiple speech communities, and we have this wide range of linguistic repertoires. So demonstrating for someone “this is the speech that we do here” is really helpful for employees, because they learn, “Okay, I’m going to communicate this way in this speech community, and communicate this way when I’m home with my family.” We’re flexible. We learn these things pretty quickly.

Regional Conversation Styles

Henry Lopez [41:48]: To summarize here, the other thing we have to be careful about as business owners is that we’re not trying to hire people who speak exactly like we do. More important, I think, for me is: is my customer going to connect, and are we going to be able to communicate effectively with my end customer?

Daniel Hieber [42:08]: Yeah, definitely. If you’re looking specifically for sales, you should look for people who are able to command a wide linguistic repertoire and can do not necessarily accent accommodation, but speech style accommodation.

Henry Lopez: Right.

Daniel Hieber: And this is often an East Coast/West Coast thing. I’ve heard a lot about this, read a bit, and experienced it personally. Moving from Virginia to Southern California, I felt very “interrupty” in California. I felt like people were irritated because I was jumping in too much, because I had a more high-involvement style and a quicker style too. A lot of people on the West Coast, or further west, are more tolerant of small talk and things, whereas on the East Coast it’s like, go get it done, we’re on a schedule. Very different conversational styles.

Henry Lopez [43:00]: Absolutely. Same thing with the Northeast and the South. I live in Florida now, but I spent 31 years in Texas, and there is that very different linguistic style. If I’m following what you’re talking about, in the South we get around to the point, versus in the Northeast, and I’m generalizing, we get right to the point.

Daniel Hieber [43:19]: Right. Exactly.

Henry Lopez [43:21]: And it’s effective in the end, but it can clash sometimes, and that’s what we have to be aware of.

Daniel Hieber [43:26]: Yeah. Growing up in the South, I was always told how New Yorkers are so rude, this and that. Then I spent a good deal of time in Manhattan, and I came to realize, no, they’re just being respectful of your time.

Henry Lopez [43:37]: They’re being more direct. That’s just that linguistic style, and again, time might have something to do with it. But it’s just an approach. I had this challenge when I was managing a business that I owned in Texas. When we would have an issue with our clientele there, both my brother and I, because we were from South Florida, which isn’t Southern… it’s very different, right? South Florida is more New York than it is Florida. So we came to it with that style of getting right to the point, and people took that as very brusque, very short. We had to learn to adapt: you don’t necessarily get straight to the point. You speak toward it, and then you get to your point. We had to adjust to that.

Daniel Hieber [44:23]: One of my favorite sayings for this is, “Sometimes to find out about the hole in the roof, you have to ask about the weather.”

What’s Next for Daniel Hieber

Henry Lopez [44:29]: I love that. Exactly right. All right, I’m curious: what’s next for you? What do you have on your horizon?

Daniel Hieber [44:36]: Two different things. I’m continuing to work with the Chitimacha Tribe, and we’re putting together a dictionary that we’re hoping to release the first edition of this year. So I’m very excited about that. That’s a decades-long project in the making. And I’m also starting to grow my own business, my science communication business, Linguistic Discovery. It’s very recent. It’s only in the past handful of months that I’ve really started taking it seriously as a business and thinking of it that way. So I’m only just beginning to monetize and think about the services and products I’ll offer. But it’s exciting for me. I actually recently subscribed to your podcast, and I’m getting great wisdom there.

Henry Lopez [45:13]: Appreciate that. And where can we go online to learn more about what you’re currently doing and in the future?

Daniel Hieber [45:18]: The best place is linguisticdiscovery.com, and there you can also find links to all of my social media. I post several times a week: different educational videos about language and linguistics and the science of how language works. I’m most active on TikTok, but you can find all of my stuff on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, all under the Linguistic Discovery handle.

Book Recommendation and Final Takeaway

Henry Lopez [45:42]: Excellent. All right, I’m always looking for a book recommendation. You mentioned it already, I believe: Talking from 9 to 5. Tell me about that book.

Daniel Hieber [45:48]: Yeah, it’s an excellent book. It’s a little older, it’s from 1994, but I still think it’s absolutely relevant and highly useful. Deborah Tannen, the author, talks about different conversational styles between men and women in general, and how that causes issues at work sometimes. Both men and women report feeling like they’re interrupted more by the opposite gender, but the behaviors they’re reacting to are slightly different. So she explains how men and women conceptualize what counts as good conversation differently, and how that leads to conflict in the workplace sometimes. I think it’s an excellent book to be aware of.

Henry Lopez [46:28]: Fascinating. Thanks for that recommendation. We’ll have a link to it on the show notes page of this episode at thehowofbusiness.com. All right, we’ll wrap it up with the last question. Let’s bring it all together. What’s one thing you want us to take away from this conversation about linguistics and what we can learn about being more aware of it as small business owners?

Daniel Hieber [46:49]: I think the most important thing is that your attitudes about the way people speak are never really attitudes about language. They’re always attitudes about people. So just be cognizant of that fact. Don’t let language bias you. Remember that everybody speaks slightly differently from you, and the way that you speak sounds just as strange to other people as they do to you. Once you recognize that, you can focus on what you know about the person rather than the way that person speaks. So just embrace the variation that we have in language and in the workplace, and appreciate that diversity rather than trying to fight against it.

Henry Lopez [47:24]: Exactly. Embrace it and appreciate it. And at the end of the day, what I’m going to try to do better and better is listen for: do they communicate effectively, regardless of what the accent might be, or even their use of vocabulary? Can they communicate an idea or a concept effectively, if in fact that’s important to the role I’m hiring them for?

Daniel Hieber [47:46]: Right. Exactly.

Henry Lopez [47:48]: Wonderful. And tell us again where you want us to go online to learn more.

Daniel Hieber [47:51]: Linguisticdiscovery.com.

Henry Lopez [47:53]: Danny, fascinating conversation. I hope to have you back on to chat some more about this. Thanks for sharing all of this, for helping us think through it, and for being with me on the show today.

Daniel Hieber [48:04]: Absolutely. It’s always a real joy to introduce people to language and linguistics and how language works. So thank you very much for having me.

Henry Lopez [48:12]: My pleasure. This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for joining me on this episode of The How of Business. My guest today again was Danny Hieber. I release new episodes every Monday morning, and you can find the show anywhere you listen to podcasts and at my website, thehowofbusiness.com. Thanks for listening.