Language & Identity in the New South

Goals

This VIP offers data to understand English as spoken by diverse populations in Georgia. We produce academic articles and presentations about regional and ethnic language variation; change over time; and accents as signifiers of identity and attitudes. Students develop skills in human subjects research, sociolinguistic theory, phonetic measurements, statistics, data science, and academic literacy. The team fosters a welcoming socio-intellectual community and a growth mindset, encouraging humanities-confident students to learn technical tools and inviting computing-confident students to appreciate the social richness of language data.

Issues Involved or Addressed

Language, politics, society, linguistics, psychology, demographics, speech. With approval from the Georgia Tech IRB, we are building an audio corpus of the speech of over 180 young adults who grew up in Georgia, from which we measure the position of the tongue in the mouth when producing vowels in order to quantify sociolinguistic variation in accents across individuals and over time. Our participants are all young adult college students who grew up in Georgia, but they are diverse with respect to gender, ethnicity, hometown, and their attitudes towards the South.  It’s been argued that the “southern accent” is losing ground to a new pan-regional, pan-ethnic sound system known as the “Low Back Merger Shift.”  We explore the extent to which different people use these different vowel systems as a function of their demographic traits and ideological orientations.

Partners/Sponsors

DILAC, Dr. Jon Forrest, Assistant Professor of Linguistics (UGA)