011 // How important is the way we speak?

Kathryn Exon Smith -

Some scholars have identified spoken language as a defining social practice. The way we speak conveys many things about us, including our background, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and social class as well as more nuanced things like the personae we project and our attitudes toward locally-salient issues. How do aspects of the speech we use shape our identities, and how are we shaped by them? How do they influence how others perceive us? What biases do different dialects and speech patterns elicit, and can we overcome them?

Julia is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics and Language Development department at San José State University, where she teaches about language, culture and society, sociolinguistics, and bilingualism. In addition to work on English dialects, Julia has also collaborated with researchers in education to address institutional discrimination against students from stigmatized language backgrounds.

The Social Motivation of a Sound Change
(1963). The Social Motivation of a Sound Change. WORD: Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 273-309.
Taylor & FrancisWilliam Labov Department of Linguistics Columbia University New York 27, New York
Bag Across the Border | American Speech | Duke University Press
Umbrella Alt TextBook Authors

This salon took place January 18, 2019.