Course Description
Recent findings about variation in heritage and minoritized languages will be discussed and students will learn methods to collect, curate, analyze and interpret relevant speech corpus data. The framework for the course is comparative variationist sociolinguistics, a quantitative, empirically-grounded approach to understanding connections between synchronic variation and diachronic change through spontaneous speech data. Heritage languages are unofficial languages acquired at home in immigrant-origin communities and have much in common with other endangered and under-resourced languages.
This exploration of universals regarding linguistic variation considers their extendibility from large, well-documented, hegemonic languages to smaller, less-documented, minoritized languages. Such extension to other languages is essential for inclusive representation and fair testing of hypotheses and principles. While the data to be discussed is from Toronto, Canada, the languages differ typologically, culturally and demographically, from each other and from English.
To motivate our inquiry, recent responses to two questions will be examined: (1) How do we recognize change due to contact (vs. internal change)? (2) What parts of language are more susceptible to change? what levels? similar parts? salient/marked parts? different types of morphology? different phonetic features? Students will design a study to test some specific hypothesis in this domain.
Area Tags: Sociolinguistics, Variation, Morphology, Phonetics, Language Contact, Language Documentation
(Session 2) Tuesday/Friday 9:00am – 10:20am
Location: ILC S331
Instructor: Naomi Nagy
Naomi Nagy is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. She studied sociolinguistics, with particular interest in understanding language contact through variationist sociolinguistic approaches, and making formal theory accountable to variation, at the University of Pennsylvania. Her Heritage Language Variation and Change Project examines variation in 10 languages spoken in Toronto, including Faetar, an endangered Francoprovençal variety. Cross-linguistic comparisons support the development of a generalized understanding of contact-induced language change and helps expand the field of variationist sociolinguistics beyond its monolingually-oriented core. Her upcoming book, Extending variationist approaches to heritage languages, will be published by CUP.
