Language and Social Context

The Gettysburg Corpus: Testing the Proposition That All Tense /æ/s Are Created Equal

Isaac L. Bleaman
Daniel Duncan
2021

Corpus studies of regional variation using raw language data from the internet focus predominantly on lexical variables in writing. However, online repositories such as YouTube offer the possibility of investigating regional differences using phonological variables, as well. This article demonstrates the viability of constructing a naturalistic speech corpus for sociophonetic research by analyzing hundreds of recitations of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We first replicate a known result of phonetic research, namely, that English vowels are longer in duration before voiced...

Minority language maintenance and the production-prescription interface: Number agreement in New York Yiddish

Isaac L. Bleaman
2021

Standardization is a focus of language maintenance efforts in many, but not all, minority language communities. What is the impact of this choice on interspeaker variation in maintained languages? This study investigates variable number agreement in Yiddish, a minority language spoken by two distinct communities in the New York area: (1) Hasidic Jews, who maintain the language without standardization, and (2) Yiddishists, who are overtly committed to maintaining a "correct" Yiddish. An analysis of data from 40 sociolinguistic interviews shows that Yiddishists have significantly higher...

Gender in Language Project at Lavender Languages and Linguistics 28

May 10, 2022

Ben Papadopoulos (organizer), eleven of his current or former LRAP apprentices, and Jennifer Kaplan will give a panel publically presenting the Gender in Language Project and its preliminary findings for the first time at Lavender Languages and Linguistics 28 on May 23, 2022 at the University of Catania, Italy. These stellar students are Cooper Bedin, Carmela Blazado, Sol Cintrón, Sebastian Clendenning-Jimenez, Keira Colleluori, Jesus Duarte, Julie Ha, Zaphiel Kiriko Miller, Serah Sim, Chelsea Tang, and Irene Yi. Apart from the panel, four other individual papers from Jennifer, Sebastian & Zaphiel (presenting together), Keira, and Jesus will be presented. Ben and eight of the aforementioned students will soon be travelling to the conference. Information about the panel, as well as the individual papers being presented, may be found here. Congrats, all!

Bleaman speaks in Singapore

April 6, 2022

Isaac Bleaman gave a research talk over Zoom for the Language and Linguistics Cluster at the National University of Singapore on Wednesday, April 6 (in Berkeley: Tuesday, April 5). The talk was titled "Language maintenance, prescriptive norms, and community divergence."

Helms published in Isogloss

February 27, 2022

Annie Helms's article "Bay Area Spanish: Regional sound change in contact languages" has been published in Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, as part of the special issue Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 17 with selected papers from the Going Romance conference in 2020. Congratulations, Annie!

Papadopoulos published in Deportate, esuli, profughe

February 24, 2022

Congrats to Ben Papadopoulos, who has just published an article titled "A Brief History of Gender-Inclusive Spanish" in the Italian feminist journal Deportate, esuli, profughe 'Deported, exiled, refugee (women).' Ben wrote the article in both English and gender-inclusive Spanish (in the x gender), and the journal has published both versions.

Kaplan and Cutler win Five Minute Linguist

January 12, 2022

Congratulations to Jennifer Kaplan and Cecelia Cutler (CUNY Graduate Center), whose presentation "I’m Tawkin’ Here: Why don’t New Yorkers sound like Noo Yawkas anymore?" won first prize in the Five Minute Linguist competition at this year's meeting of the Linguistic Society of America! Read all about it here.

Bleaman published in Journal of Sociolinguistics

December 9, 2021

Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, whose article "Minority language maintenance and the production-prescription interface: Number agreement in New York Yiddish" has just been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics. The early view is available here, or contact Isaac for a PDF.

Guébie (Côte d’Ivoire, Ivory Coast) - Language Snapshot

Hannah Sande
2020

Guébie (also known as Gaɓogbo) is a Kru language spoken by about 7,000 people in the Gagnoa prefecture in southwest Côte d’Ivoire. Guébie people are primarily subsistence farmers, growing cassava, rice, corn, and plantains. Many also grow cocoa and rubber for profit. In the past 20 years there has been an influx of outsiders settling in Guébie villages, new roads have been developed which lead to easier access to nearby cities, and new schools have been built where French is taught and use of Guébie is not allowed. For these reasons, among others, French and Bété, the local language of...

Nouchi as a distinct language: The morphological evidence

Hannah Sande
2015

In this paper I argue that Nouchi, a relatively young Ivoirian contact variety, is and should be treated as a full-fledged language distinct from French and its other source languages. Nouchi, an emerging language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire since that late 1970’s (Ayewa 2005), has been treated in the literature as a slang vocabulary or an urban youth dialect of French. Though Nouchi began as a lingua franca among uneducated youth in urban centers, it is now the preferred language of Ivoirians in Abidjan and the surrounding areas of Côte d’Ivoire (Kube-Barth 2009). This paper focuses on...