This article is an external contribution of María Méndez Santos, professor and secretary of the Research Institute iLingua at Universidade de Vigo. She is a PhD Graduate in Spanish Language. Her research interests focus mainly on language teaching, Spanish morphology and linguistic discrimination.
The Glass Always Fills with a Drop — The Last One
A glass always overflows because of a single drop—the last one. Sometimes that drop isn’t even the worst, but it marks the exact moment when someone explodes after being unable to endure a situation any longer. This happens because, before reaching that breaking point, there have already been many other drops: moments of irritation, discomfort, embarrassment, or humiliation.
We can easily imagine that such situations often are rooted in intrusive comments about someone’s competence or incompetence, their appearance, ethnicity or race, sexual orientation, or personal life. Yet another form of social shaming, less discussed but equally powerful, involves questioning a person’s linguistic identity.
Shame is a complex, socially mediated, not universal, and culturally conditioned emotion (Etxebarría, 2008). Broadly speaking, individuals living in a given society tend to protect what Erving Goffman (1967) called their public face—the social self they wish others would recognize. This concern arises because appearance and self-presentation are closely tied to shared social codes and expectations (Goffman, 2021). Others judge our status and worth based on numerous factors: physical appearance, clothing, the kind of car we drive, and so on. When there is a mismatch between these social expectations and how someone presents themselves, discomfort, mistreatment, discrimination, and even social exclusion can emerge. Understanding the roots of shame, therefore, is crucial.
Among the many elements shaping our social status, linguistic cues also play a key role—alongside factors such as education, social class, ethnicity, legal status, gender and gender identity, profession, and age. In other words, people judge others not only by their social characteristics but also by linguistic ones: a name, the status as a native or non-native speaker, the language used and the prestige associated with it, or the way we speak—whether neurotypical or not, standard or nonstandard, prestigious or stigmatized, oral or signed, and so on.
A single comment about any of these traits may seem harmless. It happens; the person feels briefly ashamed, then moves on. But when such experiences accumulate, they can trigger deeper feelings of inferiority, confusion, and insecurity—and even avoidance behaviors. The logic is simple: if my clothes are mocked, I stop wearing them; if my way of speaking is criticized, I stop speaking that way.
This is not a trivial matter. Shame and stigmatization can have serious consequences. Studies have shown that having a foreign accent or name can make it harder to find a job or rent an apartment. Being multilingual is often said to improve employability—but usually only when the languages involved are prestigious, international, or European, markers of “elite bilingualism.” When the languages in question are less prestigious—minoritized, or associated with migrants or “poorer countries”—the effect tends to be the opposite.
In short, being stigmatized and feeling ashamed can lead speakers to experience what scholars have termed, to varying degrees, linguistic vulnerability, linguistic discomfort, linguistic shame, linguistic insecurity (García & Espinosa, 2020; Gerald, 2022), self-hatred (Ninyoles, 1969; Montoya Abat, 2015), or even linguistic trauma (Busch & Macnamara, 2019).
This phenomenon—what we might call language shaming (by analogy with more widely known forms like body shaming)—can manifest in many ways. Consider the following examples:
- A migrant might change their name to fit better into the host society, distancing themselves from their family culture.
- A speaker of a minoritized or stigmatized language might abandon it altogether to escape feelings of inferiority or self-rejection (Nguyen, 2019), hoping for social advancement.
- A speaker of a nonstandard variety (say, Andalusian or Murcian Spanish) might modify their accent to sound more “neutral”, in order not to be labeled incompetent, lazy, or uneducated.
These behaviors are evidence of how individuals internalize dominant social discourses about their supposed linguistic inadequacy or inferiority. All of them are clear manifestations of linguistic discrimination.
Linguistic discrimination may surface as language shaming, suspicion, hostility, or even symbolic, institutional, and physical violence. The last of these may sound extreme, but it is not. In many countries, migrants and refugees are denied adequate interpretation or clear communication in healthcare, legal, or social contexts, leading to linguistic vulnerability (Reynolds & Brickley, 2024). In the United States and the United Kingdom, speakers of varieties of English deemed “impure” or “non-native” are often ridiculed or attacked—sometimes literally, as countless viral videos attest. In Spain, the history of linguistic oppression includes physical punishments for children speaking Catalan, Basque, or Galician in schools (Callón, 2024).
In our forthcoming research on language shaming (to be published in 2026), we worked with Andalusian Spanish speakers. Of a sample of 118 participants, 84.74% reported having received comments about their way of speaking at some point in their lives. In other words, they feel socially marked and singled out because of their accent. Such comments—whether positive or negative—label them in ways that do not affect other speakers. As one respondent put it: “I have to say where I’m from, even though no one else gets asked that kind of thing” (participant 10, questionnaire).
A closer look at these comments reveals several distinct mechanisms of language shaming:
- Stereotyping: Assigning to speakers traits believed to represent their community, whether or not those traits are accurate.
“Not now, but when I was younger, yes. People would ask me to speak so they could hear my accent, or ask if I could dance sevillanas…” (participant 26, questionnaire).
- Mockery and imitation: Mimicking someone’s speech in a parodic way that is amusing to others but not to the speaker.
“Yes, sometimes. Usually people imitate me.” (participant 10, questionnaire).
- Linguistic insecurity: A defensive feeling that leads speakers to question how to present themselves linguistically. Expecting to be judged, they protect themselves in advance.
“Yes. When I went to class outside Andalusia, at first I didn’t want my accent to be noticed, so I tried to tone it down. I was the only one not from northern Spain and didn’t want to be singled out.” (participant 18, questionnaire).
- Offense, repression, or prohibition: Situations where speakers are directly forbidden or discouraged from using their variety or accent.
“Yes, a university professor once forbade me from using my accent when speaking in class.” (participant 56, questionnaire).
The consequences of such experiences include insecurity, shame, and even a loss of self-esteem. As one interviewee confessed: “It’s something that wore me down so much that even when I answer the phone, I automatically change my accent.” (participant 32, interview).
Our findings suggest that many speakers modify their speech—often unconsciously—depending on several factors: (1) the degree of stigma attached to their variety; (2) the context (formal or informal, professional or not); (3) the power dynamics between speakers (teacher/student, employer/employee, interviewer/interviewee); (4) their age and the level of linguistic empowerment; (5) the stakes of the interaction (for example, a job interview); and (6) their political and national identity (how strongly they identify with their linguistic community).
As one interviewee noted, she “deactivates the alert” when she senses goodwill in her interlocutor and allows herself to speak naturally (participant 8, interview). Another reported anticipating mockery even in personal settings: “At a wedding in Salamanca, I went thinking that …” (participant 11, interview), we will finish her sentence: someone would comment her accent… and she would not be able to fully enjoy the event.
For all these reasons, it is essential to continue reflecting on the mechanisms of linguistic discrimination and oppression. Such dynamics undermine social harmony. Understanding how language shaming operates should, therefore, become a much more visible topic in contemporary social debate.
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This article is the result of the research made by the ESTIGMA project (II Concurso Nacional para la Adjudicación de Ayudas a la Investigación en Humanidades 2025 de la Fundación Ramón Areces). The ESTIMA Project (Estudio sociolingüístico, actitudinal e identitario de la glotofobia y microagresiones en español actual en España) is aimed at analyzing the causes and consecuences of linguistic discrimination in the Spanish context, evaluating its impact in different contexts of social life: housing, work and private. This research answers two main questions: (1) how linguistic discrimination manifests in public spaces such as the working space and the housing market; and (2) how it reflects on personal and private spaces.
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