Mass media and schooling have made language an unreliable identity clue

Evidence

As we have just seen, lawbreakers are no longer mutilated. That is, body markings no longer provide clues to the strange other’s moral categories. … And while language (should we hear the other speak) may be of some help in identifying his or her ethnicity, home region, or class (Ellis, 1967), universal schooling, status mobility, and movies, radio, and television have done much to limit its reliability. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 443

Categorization

• XREF: Why the flâneur’s ear fails him — connects to reader’s cross-reading of how the observant narrator misreads strangers he overhears. — connects to: Schooling is the most massively inculcated of all cultural discourses after media — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1103