* New word. You saw it here first, folks!
At our first Zoom session (which turned out to be fun, I thought), we talked about a few ideas for potential surveys (online, obviously, given the present circumstances). As I recall, these were as follows:
Pittsburghese — There are reports that Pittsburghese is experiencing considerable dialect swamping, and is beginning to fade in the speech of younger generations. Conversely, to what extent are incoming outsiders picking up aspects of Pittsburghese in their own speech as tokens of acculturation? Can we figure out a way to explore these questions?
Dialect & Gender — There are all kinds of ways in which our gender influences our speech. Reading up and focusing on some of those patterns, can we devise some kind of survey that would show this in action?
Language of Social Media — There is a lot of research on this of late, but I don't know what's in it. People would have to read into it and figure out how to do something with it. Could be very interesting...
Loss of Rural Vocabulary — A whole lexicon of older mostly rural expressions of Western Pennsylvania seem to be disappearing. The last time I taught this class we looked into some of this; there is a lot more to explore...
Personally, I think they all sound like fantastic research avenues. So why don't yinz-all think about them and decide which ones you think sound interesting to you, that we might like to work on as a class in the time we have left. Maybe we could even break into groups to tackle more than one of them...
Thoughts, anyone? (You can blog on these ideas yourselves, as well...)
I personally would be really interested in looking at dialect & gender, language of social media, or a combination of the two.
ReplyDeleteI know in this week's zoom session we focused a lot on gender which I found to be fascinating. I grew up hearing the valley girl parodies but not really understanding where they came from. I enjoyed getting to see the actual linguistic variations within the type of speech.
I found an interesting article about this titled "From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We 'Policing' Young Women's Voices?". Within it, it discussed how inherently problematic it is that society degrades how women speak without looking at how men also have similar vocal tendencies. Only women are punished for speaking in a certain way. I particularly appreciated how the article explained how no matter how different the dialect is (Valley Girl vs. vocal fry) the fact that is is used by women is what causes it to be disliked - not for the speech pattern itself necessarily. I think I may use this article for a blog post of my own -- it has some thought-provoking conclusions.
On the internet language front, I think looking at social media would be a compelling place to start. There seems to be no end to studies about social media and its effect on people -- although most studies I have looked at have been from a sociological perspective. It would be nice to try and analyze it from a linguistic perspective instead to provide a fresh take on the subject.