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I. Good afternoon, everyone.

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My name is Rosie. I'm an assistant professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

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And I'm really delighted to be here today. It's really great to talk to you.

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And in 2017, Hari Kondabolu released the documentary The Problem with APU,

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addressing the representation of The Simpsons character APU, the Indian immigrant who owns the Kwik-E-Mart.

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Which which click. Thank you. Got it!

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And for Kondabolu, APU represents a caricature of a South Asian American immigrant and his voicing by a white actor

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for the purposes of entertainment can be compared to blackface minstrelsy in the 20th century.

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We've all heard someone put on an accent before in Bermuda.

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It's typically through the stock phrase down the road, which can be used to demonstrate key pronunciation features of the Bermudian English dialect.

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But isn't this common type of dialect play an innocent, relatively harmless?

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Perhaps perhaps predictably, the answer, according to associate linguists like myself, is that it really depends.

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In the case of The Simpsons, Hank Azaria is voicing of APU is problematic because,

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as so often with dialect parody, the mock accent isn't really about the phonetics of Indian English speech.

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Not that there's anything wrong with any of these dialects,

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but what it's really about is the stereotypes that these arbitrary features of pronunciation

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have come to represent in a society in which South Asian Americans are racialized as other.

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In other words, when a when approaching any type of dialect parody,

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we need to take into account the social context, as well as the balance of power between imitator and imitated.

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In order to understand the social meaning of what's going on. Sorry.

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And more often than not, what language is used as a relatively safe, covert way to express racist,

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sexist or classist prejudices under the guise of humour when it's used by privileged groups?

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And we've seen this very recently, for example, in Donald Trump's discussion of bad hombres.

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Jane Hill, for example,

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has described mock Spanish in the United States as part of the everyday language of white racism seen recently in Donald Trump's comments.

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And it's very easy for parodies to get away with this type of dialect parody because it's it's

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very common for them if people object that they're simply accused of lacking a sense of humour.

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Today, I'm going to discuss a type of language mocking that's common in Bermuda amongst white men.

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In my Ph.D. research, I've shown through qualitative and quantitative analysis that this specific type of dialect mocking

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upholds power imbalances in Bermuda and society and reinforces harmful stereotypes about black Bermudian.

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And I should say here, before I start talking to you about my data that I'm using these labels black and white, not uncritically,

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but in line with the goal of understanding mock language as it's used to construct these racialized categories in Bermuda.

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Doing a Bermudian accent is a favourite party piece amongst white Bermudian and so-called expats,

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which is the term that's usually used for whites immigrants in Bermuda.

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And as a white Bermuda and myself born to non Bermudian parents, I grew up surrounded by this type of dialect parody,

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this type of language mocking, and it's also been known to have been done on stage.

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Then not the Amum show was there, not the show was a live comedy stage show popular with white audiences in the 1980s,

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comprising a troupe of five wealthy white, successful businessman acting out comedy skits in strong Bermudian accents.

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That and these are accents that they do not themselves have or use in their everyday life.

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In this gets characters with strong accents are all unhelpful customer service assistants,

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homeless or unsuccessful job seekers with undesirable qualities like swearing, low intellect or alcoholism.

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One scene set in a courtroom involves a criminal on trial having to be translated into standard English so that the judge can understand.

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I argue that these are not just performances of Bermudian English or Bermudian ness generally, but specifically of black Bermudian English,

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and they have been interpreted by many members of the black community as such in Bermuda, as you can see from these quotations here.

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Clearly, then the not the Amum performances link black Bermudian accents to negative personal qualities, and they propagate harmful stereotypes.

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They're part of the common phenomenon of white people assigning homogenising attributes

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to disempowered groups and then appropriating these linguistically for social gain,

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in this case, humour or supposed humour during sociolinguistics fieldwork in 2016.

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I also found that white speakers engage in the same type of mock language that's happening on stage in recorded interviews with me.

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Perhaps assuming that as a white comedian, I would also be an injuria of this type of dialect party,

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though perhaps these performances should come with a health warning. I'll now give you some examples.

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I was going to play audio, but if you'd like to listen to them, you're very welcome to contact me.

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I'll just give you the transcripts on the screen.

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So in the first example here, you've got someone putting on a very strong Bermudian accent and pretending to be somebody drunk in a job interview.

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And then in the second example, there you've got someone being very, very strongly ridiculed, basically in a made up story.

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Now, it's clear from these examples, of course, that the speakers are constructing ridiculous caricatures of Bermudian this in their performances.

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Now it's also evident from the discourse surrounding these caricature so that the performers commenting on

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their own linguistic performances that these caricatures are being constructed as black in the performances.

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Sometimes it's clear from the content, which often mocks black majority political stances such as pro-independence,

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and sometimes the speakers actively say that they are performing blackness, as in these examples here.

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Now, despite these kinds of direct statements that they are voicing black Bermudian

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when challenged or asked about the meaning of their performances in interviews,

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these speakers describe them quite defensively as an act of self-parody.

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So here I am saying, but you guys are in a way making fun on stage, aren't you making fun?

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And they say, Absolutely, I'm going to make fun of my own people. I'm making fun of Bermudian.

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I'm not that claiming not to be doing anything racialized or racial icing whatsoever.

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This exchange summarises a strong belief amongst the performers that they are entitled to perform in the way that they do

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hear the speakers positioned themselves as Bermudian is making fun of Bermudian and appealing to the mainstream ideology.

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That mock language is not offensive if it's performed by an in-group member.

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They also appeal to the political ideology of oneness common amongst white Bermudian that's often used to shut down conversations about race.

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This is part of the ideology of colour-blind racism in Bermuda.

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The white speakers position what's very obviously performance of the other as performance of the self.

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Though I don't have time to go into it today, this is also confirmed by the quantitative acoustic analysis of the recordings that I've done.

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So they're claiming to perform features, linguistic features, pronunciation features that they have in their own speech.

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The quantitative evidence shows that they do not have these speech. These speech features in their own language.

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So basically, I've shown qualitatively and quantitatively that these speakers are parodying features

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in their performance that they do not have as part of their normal repertoire.

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In other words, this is linguistic minstrelsy disguised as linguistic self-mockery, and ultimately,

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it's a practise that racialized speakers and reinforces racist stereotypes rather than deconstructing them heroically, as the speakers claim.

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The approach used in this study allows an insight into the ways in which speakers

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selectively construct and deconstruct categories of race and Bermudian ness authenticity.

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The analysis reveals inconsistencies between what the performers do with their speech and what they say they're doing with their speech,

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and therefore provides useful and a useful tool in scrutinising claims of self parody,

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as well as shedding light on racialized and racist linguistic practises.

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Thanks very much.