North American English Dialect Survey
From Claire Bowern:
Some colleagues at the University of Auckland and I are conducting a survey on North American English and trialling the use of flash web recording for phonetic analysis. If you would like to participate by recording a short wordlist, please visit our web site.
Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #8
Taping marriages One of the most frequent uses of linguistic anthropology is to help us understand how people in marriages communicate with each other. Article on people “learning to be married” and the importance of using videotapes to understand how people interact with each other. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/18/AR2010061804509.html?sid=ST2010062404889 This article is on studies from UCLA’s Center for [...]
Idioms are hard
Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman of BP, has apparently upset some Americans with his reference to “the small people.” My first reaction when I heard Svanberg’s remarks was that he must have been aiming for “the little guy” and produced a near miss.
Deadline extended for SLA Annual Student Paper Prizes
Dear SLA Colleagues, I’m posting this message on behalf of my fellow SLA Executive Committee Member at Large, Jillian Cavanaugh, who is organizing this year’s SLA Annual Student Paper Prize competition. In the hope of having more submissions and a more competitive field, she is extending the deadline until June 30. She would also like [...]
Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #7
Arizona on Our Minds Arizona lawmakers have been on our minds, recently. In Roundup #5, Leila talked about their ban on ethnic studies classes and move against teachers with accents. As should be expected, that same “accented speech” issue has attracted the attention of the good people at Language Log, for instance in this recent [...]
University of Arizona Department of Linguistics’ letter to state lawmakers
The Arizona Department of Education is asking school districts to remove teachers who speak “heavily accented or ungrammatical” English from classrooms where students are learning English. In response, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona has drafted a statement summarizing research on language variation and its effects on language acquisition.
Letter to the Census Bureau
On May 27, AAA President Virginia Dominguez sent a letter to the Census Bureau regarding its language questions and classifications, which you can find through AAA Challenges Questions on US Census and the AAA homepage. The letter was written by the newly constituted SLA Committee on Language and Social Justice, which partners with the AAA [...]
