Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

D-Place: A Global Database Of Cultural, Linguistic And Environmental Diversity, Kathryn R. Kirby, Russell D. Gray, Simon J. Greenhill, Fiona M. Jordan, Stephanie Gomes-Ng, Hans-Jörg Bibiko, Damián E. Blasi, Carlos A. Botero, Claire Bowern, Carol R. Ember, Dan Leehr, Bobbi S. Low, Joe Mccarter, William Divale, Michael C. Gavin

Biology Faculty Research

From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access repositories. In this paper we introduce D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. This expandable and open-access database (accessible at https://d-place.org) brings together a dispersed corpus of …

Bilingual Latino Middle Schoolers On Languaging And Racialization In The Us, Sarah Hesson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores bilingual Latino middle schoolers’ articulated understandings of their language practices as well as the links between language practices and processes of racialization and discrimination in the US. The research was conducted in the context of an after-school program whose explicit aim was to not only document students’ experiences, but to use those experiences as a basis for generating individual and collective critical understandings among participants. The findings of this case study center on the ways youth understand processes of racialization, translanguaging, and translation in the context of an English-dominant society, and how these understandings are connected to …

Ideology, Access, And Status: Spanish-English Bilinguals In The Foreign-Language Classroom, Michael E. Rolland

Graduate Student Publications and Research

Spanish language teaching in US higher education is today generally divided between ‘foreign language’ courses for novice learners and ‘heritage language’ courses for Hispanic/Latinx students with some knowledge of the language. However, ‘heritage’ students are a linguistically diverse group, and are also often enrolled at institutions where heritage courses are not offered. Little research to date has studied ‘heritage’ speakers enrolled in ‘foreign’ language courses. For this study I conducted semi-structured interviews to explore the affective and ideological characteristics of bilingual students enrolled in elementary Spanish courses. As the literature suggests, I find that these students have a generally low …

Social Capital And Cultural Identity For U.S. Korean Immigrant Families: Mothers' And Children's Perceptions Of Korean Language Retention, Su-Jin Sue Jung

Dissertations and Theses

Through increasing immigration, the U.S. society is becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse. Yet, as many U.S. language minority groups seek to assimilate, they face many challenges. One challenge is that their home language does not match the dominant language, English, that their children are learning at school. For Korean communities, maintaining Korean language presents a problem for families, especially for the mothers and children. The purpose of this study was to explore the U.S. Korean immigrant mothers' and children's perceptions of and experience with maintaining the Korean language and the effect that has on the development of social capital …

Lingua Franca: An Analysis Of Globalization And Language Evolution, Abigail Watson

Honors Projects

This project details the evolution of languages and how globalization and advances in communication have effected smaller language groups. A world community in which communication is standardized by a Lingua Franca is in most cases harmful for isolated language groups without many speakers. The extinction of language is harmful for human society and culture, and there are many different ways to help prevent language extinction.

This project includes an essay, an animation, six illustrations, and a coloring book that all relate to endangered languages.

Perceptions Of College Instructors Toward Accented English Measured By The Auditory Multifactor Implicit Association Test, Eunkyung Na

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the implicit language attitudes of college-level instructors toward accented English and the effect of gender, teaching experience, and home language background on those attitudes. The auditory multifactor Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to measure the implicit attitudes toward Standard, Chinese, Hispanic, and Korean accented English. For the current study, audio stimuli were embedded into the multifactor IAT, which became available for the first time in 2014. The auditory multifactor IAT generated implicit preference scores of six pairs of accented English: Standard vs. Chinese, Standard vs. Hispanic, Standard vs. Korean, Chinese vs. …

Ñaan Baat : Ousmane Sembène Et L’Adaptation Wolof Comme Discours Accessible Sur La Politique Linguistique Sénégalaise, Xavier Lee

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Utilisant les romans écrits en français d’Ousmane Sembène et leurs adaptations respectives réalisées en wolof, j’avance que nous pouvons mieux comprendre la politique linguistique de la société dakaroise, particulièrement au sein des langues wolof et françaises, à travers une analyse sociolinguistique de la consommation et la production de littérature et cinéma au Sénégal. En particulier, j’essaie de mélanger une étude sociolinguistique avec une analyse littéraire et une critique culturale afin de comprendre comment Sembène utilise les langes pour atteindre une audience sénégalaise dans ses adaptations wolofs. J’avance que l’existence des « langues internes » démarque une réalité de la vie …

Subject Pronoun Expression In Second Language Learners: A Corpus Study, Falcon Restrepo-Ramos

World Languages & Cultures Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Flip Cup: Problems Related To Alcohol Consumption In Modern China, Helen Lamm

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The habits and attitudes surrounding the consumption of alcohol, in any culture, are just another lens through which we can look to better understand social life. The hierarchical social systems in China, which dictate common behavior, are unique. Much work has been written on the topic of guanxiand face: the defining factors for China’s ubiquitous, self-affirming system of relationships. Drinking culture is perhaps more interesting to travel bloggers than academics, but I believe that China’s drinking culture is a direct practice in guanxi production. The darker side of China’s drinking culture is anexercise in preserving face.

The gap in …

Pax Populi: Utilizing Technology And Education As A Means To Achieve Peace, Anand Balar

Engagement & Service-Learning Summit

This project of Pax Populi was presented to the students in the Honors course called Beyond Afghanistan taught by Dr. Brite as an opportunity to do service learning. The goal of Pax Populi as taken from their mission statement is to “put the tools of peacemaking into the hands of ordinary people through initiatives that advance peace through education and economic development within a framework of human rights.”

The tool we used in this case was Skype web conferencing to communicate with an Afghan tutee the students were individually partnered up with to teach English skills to whether they be …

Chinese Slang, Robert L. Moore

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Voicing The Other: Mock Aave On Social Media, Hanna L. Smokoski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the use on social media sites of features of African American Vernacular English by nonspeakers of it. This outgroup use of AAVE does not require nor reflect any true proficiency with the variety, but instead is often used to exaggerate the social distance between the stylizers using it on social media and the marginalized people for whom AAVE is a genuine mode of communication. Through double indexicality, nonspeakers of AAVE use features of it to annex certain positive qualities associated with Black or hip hop culture—toughness, coolness, an anti-establishment stance—for themselves, while reproducing negative stereotypes of …

Iis It Really “Fine”?: An Analysis Of The Paralinguistic Function Of Punctuation In Text Messages, Meridean Shim

Scripps Senior Theses

This study has two major purposes: (1) to investigate if and how punctuation conventions have been rewritten in text messages to compensate for lack of paralinguistic cues and (2) the sociolinguistic implications of these findings. Data for this study was collected through an online, anonymous questionnaire in which participants gave their judgments about the meanings and function of punctuation used in sample text messages. The results show that punctuation is used to convey differences in meaning in direct and indirect ways and most are dependent on the context. Furthermore, age showed to be a factor in punctuation style and interpretation. …

On The Shithouse Wall: The Communicative Value Of Latrinalia, Thomas Lively

Online Theses and Dissertations

Graffiti has communicative value, and it is a medium through which individuals voice their innermost thoughts, concerns, and beliefs. Restroom graffiti or "latrinalia" offers a unique space for graffiti writers to deliver their messages. The sole focus of this paper is to examine the meaning and communicative value of latrinalia as found in the men's restrooms of a medium-sized university. For this study, restrooms in 17 buildings were visited and a total of 965 instances of graffiti were recorded and codified into 14 different categories. The four most common categories of latrinalia were signature, sexual, artistic, and discriminatory. Latrinalia was …

The Perception Of Creaky Voice: Does Speaker Gender Affect Our Judgments?, Kaitlyn E. Lee

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study focuses on the phonetics of creaky voice saliency and the perceptual sociolinguistic indexes that are evoked during creaky voice use. This study consists of two experiments: the first a listener judgment based Likert scale, the second an AXB study. The first experiment used modal and creaky voice statement-of-fact tokens to determine whether the speaker is or isn’t x characteristic (intelligent, feminine, educated, masculine, hesitant, and confident). This study found that both male and female speakers were found to be less intelligent, less educated, less feminine, more masculine, less confident, and more hesitant when using creaky voice phonation as …

Hebrew And Computer-Mediated Communication: The Effects Of A Language Manipulation On Perception, Identity, And Preservation, Tamar Nir

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study aimed to explore the ways in which Hebrew is currently being manipulated online through a linguistic deviation called Fakatsa. In this study, participants were asked to rate random statements of frivolous or serious topics in either standard grammatical Hebrew or Fakatsa Hebrew conditions on specific judgment values. It was hypothesized that participants would rate the Fakatsa writer negatively on certain characteristics, such as intelligence, education, religiosity, and nationalism and positively on other characteristics, such as femininity and creativity. Twenty-four participants completed this experiment. Results showed that participants responded as expected for certain negative attributes typical of Fakatsa and …

The Push And Pull Of Language Ideologies : Multilingual Communicative Practices Among Youths In An Indonesian City, Kristian Tamtomo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis deals with the use of Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia and English in the spoken and written communication of high school youths in the city of Semarang, Central Java. The thesis aims to understand the patterns in which youths make use of these languages in various communicative contexts and the way youths use languages to either enact or negotiate the polycentric "push and pull" of the various language ideologies associated with local, national, and global language. Data collection was conducted using ethnographic methods, which involved participant observation, recordings of conversations, collection of texts, as well as interviews with youth groups …

Cries From The Jungle: The Dialogic Linguistic Landscape Of The Migrant And Refugee Camps In Calais, France, Jo Mackby

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Since 1999, migrants and refugees from across the Middle East and Northeastern Africa have squatted in makeshift camps in and around the strategic port city of Calais, France, hoping for the opportunity to stow away on a ferry or lorry to England. The inhabitants of these camps seek to engage the world in a dialogue, and although they speak a variety of languages, the voices the refugees and migrants in The Jungle of Calais raise through their protest placards and graffiti are more homogeneous. Like in many other protests, the languages of these messages are universal; they are French and …

The Deserving Patient: Blame, Dependency, And Impairment In Discourses Of Chronic Pain And Opioid Use, Maureen Nickerson

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Negative stereotypes about people with chronic pain pose a barrier in the delivery of care; contribute to worsening symptoms of physical and psychological distress; and play a role in policy decisions that adversely affect patients and providers. Pain-care seekers may be accused of malingering, laziness, mental aberration, attention seeking, and drug seeking. The propagation of stigmatizing attitudes was explored in this Critical Discourse Analysis of online-reader-comments responding to a series of pain-care policy articles published by a large metropolitan newspaper. Results suggest that framing pain patients as legitimate and deserving can inadvertently reproduce the inequities advocates seek to redress. Ascriptions …

Actitud De Los Ciudadanos Andaluces En Cuanto Al Empleo Del Dialecto Andaluz En Los Medios De Comunicación Audiovisuales, Victoriano Pimentel Rivas

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This study presents regulations and linguistic awareness respecting the use of Andalusian dialect on television, radio, and cinema among others to provide a full description of the subject. The qualitative method will reveal aspects more fine-grained through data collection of the different habits and reactions of participants with TV, radio, internet or another audiovisual platform. For example, this research concludes, among other factors, that young Andalusians are more in contact with their dialect than older ones. Empirical and statistical data reflects that the young individual is open to different audiovisual platforms apart from TV and radio. Finally, this thesis leads …

Cultural Relevance In An English Language Learners' Classroom: A Qualitative Case Study, Katherine L. Roe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Colleges and universities typically provide remedial reading coursework for English language learners (ELL) to develop academic reading proficiency. However, a disproportionate number of ELLs fail to exit remedial classes. Prior research has indicated cultural relevance can motivate and stimulate learning; however, the extent to which a culturally relevant classroom curriculum makes a difference in the ELL classroom experience has not been fully explored. This study describes the experience of cultural relevance in an academic reading ELL college class. Moll's funds of knowledge was used as the conceptual framework in a qualitative case study to examine how cultural strengths and knowledge …

Ideologías Lingüísticas, José Del Valle, Vítor Meirinho

Publications and Research

This article provides an introduction to the concept of linguistic ideologies and its applicability to sociolinguistic analysis.

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

Design Research: Typography Within The Israeli Linguistic Landscape, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

A linguistic landscape signifies language used within a physical or virtual public space, in which communication is presented in typographic form, portraying a message to an audience. Within the state of Israel, the linguistic landscape presents a unique situation in which it is common to view municipal and commercial multilingual signs that are designed using Hebrew, English, and Arabic letterforms. By studying the diverse linguistic landscape within Israeli urban environments, the article offers perspectives on the use of multilingual visual language, based on discussions with five Israeli designers in the summer of 2015.

Language Policy In Turkey And Its Effect On The Kurdish Language, Sevda Arslan

Masters Theses

For many decades the Kurdish language was ignored and banned from public use and Turkish became the lingua franca for all citizens to speak. This way, the Turkish state sought to create a nation-state based on one language and attempted to eliminate the use of other languages, particularly Kurdish, through severe regulations and prohibitions.

Firstly, this thesis traces the language planning policies in the 20th century which resulted in the invisibilization and denial of Kurdish through an attempted linguicide. Through decade long oppressions which resulted in mass killings, arrests, re-location of Kurds, monopolization of education in Turkish and eventually the …

First-Generation College Students, Identity, & Empowerment Labels, Curtis Green-Eneix, Gail Shuck

Idaho Conference on Undergraduate Research

First-generation college students (FGCS) have been the primary focus of college retention research due to more FGCS entering universities, and FGCS’s low retention rates. Recent research has focused on quantitative studies of FGCS from comparing education and social backgrounds to non-FGCS, to outside constraints FGCS face while in college. These findings result in general understandings of FGCS dealing with additional hardship to moments of severe loneliness. This study explores (1) how FGCS—from Boise State University’s Student Success Program (SSP)—perceive their identity in a college community, (2) how they have or have not experienced identity conflicts while pursuing a degree, and …

Talking Back, With Reawakened Voices: Analyzing The Potential For Indigenous California Languages Coursework At California Polytechnic State University, Logan Cooper

Ethnic Studies

The legacy of colonialism in the United States, including genocidal practices and cultural assimilation, has left Indigenous languages endangered. Native peoples, scholars, and activists have been working to revive and heal the languages of America’s first peoples, and the cultures those languages speak to, yet more work remains in the field of language revitalization. California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo currently does not offer any course specifically teaching or discussing Indigenous languages, even those of the Chumash people who know the San Luis Obispo area as their ancestral homelands.

By synthesizing revitalization and Indigenous activist literature with the narratives …

A Case For An Ecological Approach And Against Language Commodification In Elt, Vinicius O. Souza

MA TESOL Collection

This paper aims to provide an alternative approach to the English language education practiced in many developing countries which can help reverse their current low-proficiency status, as revealed by standard international examinations such as the PISA scores and others. The author argues that this can be best accomplished by adopting an ecological approach to teaching which promotes language learning as emergent and socially situated phenomena, two concepts largely neglected by current teaching methods. In fact, many of these countries have long been dominated by an extremely commodified and cognitivist ELT market, where business interests have taken precedence over pedagogical considerations. …

The Effect Of Cultural Competence On The Acquisition Of French T/V Pronouns, Stacey C. Latimer

Open Access Theses

The appropriate use of Tu/Vous French pronouns in everyday situations proves to be an ongoing challenge not only for native speakers but also for learners of the language. The complexity of the use of these pronouns goes beyond grammatical conjugation as it necessitates a consideration of the sociolinguistic and pragmatic situation with which one is presented. As a result, students with less exposure to T/V pronoun usage in the French culture will consequently have more difficulty in understanding the proper use of these pronouns. ^ Although some studies have looked at students' use of T/V pronouns in online interactions (Belz …

Being A "Good Parent" In Parent-Teacher Conferences, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

This research advances our understanding of what constitutes a "good parent" in the course of actual social interaction. Examining video-recorded naturally occurring parent-teacher conferences, this article shows that, while teachers deliver student-praising utterances, parents may display that they are gaining knowledge; but when teachers’ actions adumbrate student-criticizing utterances, parents systematically display prior knowledge. This article elucidates the details of how teachers and parents tacitly collaborate to enable parents to express student-troubles first, demonstrating that parents display competence -- appropriate involvement with children’s schooling -- by asserting their prior knowledge of, and/or claiming/describing their efforts to remedy, student-troubles. People (have to) …