If you want to learn about the Detroit Dialect Study from the people who made it, check out our new American Speech Audio Feature:
doi.org/10.1215/0003...
And a subset were transcribed and made available through the Corpus of Regional African American Language oraal.github.io/coraal
The recordings are mostly available through the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/detr...
If you want to learn about the Detroit Dialect Study from the people who made it, check out our new American Speech Audio Feature:
doi.org/10.1215/0003...
Perfect! You should throw on the Severance Defiant Jazz playlist!
“When I joined, linguistics was my second choice. I didn’t know it would be as fun as it is.” news.vt.edu/articles/202...
I heard both pépé and dédé for grandfathers in my town growing up (nw vermont).
Now, people thankfully know a little about this project because of Rickford 2014 (doi.org/10.1215/0003...). As Wolfram often points out, there's a canon in sociolinguistics, and it's worthwhile to dig beyond the classics. 7/7
There's a lot of work that goes under- or un-cited over time, but this is the kind of work that could have been published at any point in the last 50 years. The Southwest Regional Laboratory for Edu Research and Development was super interesting (even if it ended too soon) 6/n
Williams closes with this: "Therefore, it is linguists who must make it known, in the words of Labov (1969) that 'we are unanimous in condemning [the views of the verbal deprivation theorists] as bad observation, bad theory, and bad practice' (1969)." RIP Labov :( 5/n
Importantly:
"If linguists are in a good position to set the record straight and do not do so, then it is perhaps not too harsh to judge them passive contributors to institutionalized racism." 4/n
"For if these theories are incorrect and yet attract a measure of attention among educators, then they contribute to what is coming to be called institutionalized racism." 3/n
"If theories of verbal deprivation do not hold water,then it behooves linguists to take the lead in demonstrating the invalidity of such theories." 2/n
I'm not sure how often people dig through old papers on ERIC, but I came across a great one... "On the Contribution of the Linguist to Institutionalized Racism" by Clyde Williams, an LSA talk from 1969 1/n eric.ed.gov?id=ED039511
I'm fortunate just to have shared space in the same field as him. I'll be thinking about his academic family.
One of the things you learn early on as a sociolinguist is that Bill Labov thought deeply about, and *probably* wrote about, the thing that's interesting to you. I love going back to his early work for offhand comments or footnotes about something he noticed.
the old map i've used in class had a clearer 'other' color in northwest vermont, where we had to deal with kids on cabbage night.
Online Resources for African American Language is now available at oraal.github.io!
Just had a great (recorded) conversation with Walt Wolfram, Ralph Fasold, and Danica Cullinan about early sociolx research and Walt and Ralph's 60+ year friendship.
Krishna Boro works on the Boro language gauhati.ac.in/member/arts/...
This tweet from @mixedlinguist.bsky.social twitter.com/mixedlinguis...
I am really excited to dig into the current volume of Living Languages, called "Awakening Languages", featuring many of my great colleagues from the University of Oregon. scholarworks.umass.edu/livinglangua...
"Yeah, I think so. He's the guy who looks like he came in from the woods?" Someone responding to a colleague about whether they've ever met me.
Yes, that's me.
Nice to see some papers/posters using CORAAL at #NWAV51
