Hey guys, I'm in a sociolinguistics class right now and collecting data for my final paper. If anyone is willing and knows 2+ languages, could you fill out a survey for me? It's anonymous and just asks some questions about your language experience and some things you might have noticed when learning a foreign language. I'm focusing on people who know 3+ languages, but anyone who knows 2 would help as well because then I can compare things and see if I get any results that way. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/38HN987 Anyways, who wants to talk about linguistics or interesting things you've heard related to linguistic research? For a different class a couple years ago now, I did a paper looking at how people referred to subjects of unspecified gender (like a theoretical person in a question that gives no indication of sex/gender). I can share the results of that with you guys if anyone is interested. Just... linguistics and research, guys! So cool. Even if data collection is really hard sometimes >.<
I have a BA in linguistics and now I'm going through getting certification to teach ESL. I just... so many wonderful things to talk about in these classes! The lingusitics stuff I'm already familiar with, but the stuff about teaching really has me thinking, you know? Just in my first semester of this program, which is a 2 year one. Because of my background in linguistics, there's a lot of stuff in the grammar class I'm taking that the other people are unfamiliar with or I refer to in a different way. Like I forgot the word conjunction but remembered complementizer during a presentation.
Linguistics = funtimes! One of my fave examples of cool linguistic shit: the habitual be, as used in AAVE (and it's present in other languages as well--Irish has a similar construct). Basically, as an example: "John be reading" does not mean that John is, necessarily, currently reading--it means John reads regularly. There was a study done with a group of white kids and a group of black kids that explained it pretty well--the Cookie Monster study. Basically, both groups were given a picture of Elmo and Cookie Monster, in which Elmo is eating cookies and Cookie Monster is not. When asked "who be eating cookies?", the white kids pointed to Elmo and the black kids pointed to Cookie Monster, but when asked "who is eating cookies," both groups correctly indicated Elmo--because while Cookie Monster is not eating cookies in that particular instance, it is something he does on a regular basis. The black kids, having grown up with the habitual be, were naturally inclined to recognize that construction and use it correctly, whereas the white kids, who hadn't grown up with it, assumed "be" meant the same thing as "is" in that context. I think that's super fascinating!
I recently took a linguistic class that IMO should be a prereq for sociology majors where I go to school. It made a really good case against linguistic determinism, which I hear way too much in a lot of sociology research papers and seminar discussions.
I aim to be a professor and I am in particular interested in anthropological linguistics. Filled with horrible racism as that is it is what I am most interested in. Language is the soul of culture. Its backbone. Culture is fascinating and IMPORTANT. Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. Do not let your souls die. At any cost.
-sits- probably going to do classics and then middle eastern dead languages (i want to learn sumerian so bad people) so sort of linguistics adjacent. I guess.
@Acey That Cookie Monster study is adorable and cool. Ah! Also, dead languages are cool. And would you guys mind discussing what you're talking about in anthropology/sociology relevant to linguistics? I haven't taken any anthropology classes, and I focused on sociolinguistics classes when I had a choice outside of the phonology, phonetics, syntax required in my undergrad. We've talked about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in my classes before, and one of them this semester to talk about the strong vs weak interpretation. Strong being that language determines thoughts etc and weak being that it can have some effect but isn't deterministic. Being in language education, we definitely lean towards the weak interpretation. Also I'm looking at the responses I've gotten for my survey so far and oh man, this will be weird to interpret and look for trends, but this is so cool!
The weak version is pretty uncontroversial, and actually has a good deal of support from subfields like conversation analysis, as well as cross-cultural neurological studies. The problem is that a good amount of pop-sociology and sociology grads try to take the strong position, which generally a pretty untenable position when you put it under the scope for real.
Wow. Like, you can find a list of languages that don't use gendered pronouns with a quick Google search. Does that mean they don't get the difference between male and female? No. They just don't encode that in their pronouns because *shrug* Like in my story with shapeshifters, I decided that their language uses a pronoun system of living/nonliving. And that you differentiate your parents by attaching the word for parent to their name since shapeshifter -> can change sex so mom may not always be a mom.
I am currently working on my general ed so we aren't talking about abything in class due to my not being in class. So all I know is private self study. Have used some studies of the anthrolinguistic nature in intro to ling for a paper. Had to do with confidence levels of ESL speakers. And how part of American culture they feel. Also read ethnographies on learners of Gaelic tongues. One man in particular was mournful that he wasn't a native speaker of Scottish Gaelic. He said "this could have been mine." Which I cried about. It could have been mine too but we are murderers.
I think the best way I saw the weak position explained was that it influences what you have to think about. I can talk about my neighbour in English without mentioning a gender, but I still know that she's a woman; in French, I have to talk about my neighbour.male or neighbour.female. Last year I recruited a bunch of kintsugi to help with my project on foodies/people interested in food and labelling food colours. The results basically boiled down to foodies being more likely to use concrete terms to describe colours (like brick red or wine vs light red).
Hey guys, it's finals week and I just finished and submitted my paper. And damn, I could not figure out how to divide things up for graphs or tables because that data was so complicated, so I just summarized trends I noticed. Basically... the bilingual people were less likely to give me detailed data about cross-linguistic influence, but there were also only 8 of them out of 49 respondents. A couple people were outliers in interesting ways I can't really address in this paper, like my friend who says her L2's affect her L1 more than the other way around. Which... Yeah. I lived with her a year and she'd lapse into German when upset or just whenever even though English is her L1. Polyglots showed a decent amount of influence between L2 and L3 (like I suspected). People returning from immersion experiences often reported a period where it was hard to switch back into the appropriate language. Languages influenced each other in all sorts of interesting ways, ranging from just substituting a word to using sentence structure from the wrong language to code-switching based on what felt best for the meaning trying to be conveyed to case and gender from one language influencing the other. Linguistics is cool. This paper was much easier to do than the last linguistics paper I had to do my own research for, but the data on this one is much more nebulous.
I AM WRITING ABOUT DYING LANGUAGES AND I HATE THE WORD SMALLPOX. so i am happy you had a happier paper to write
What... what does smallpox have to do with it? Oh god, it's because of groups dying out due to epidemics, isn't it? Fuck! D: Also the cat helped keep me happy because she kept coming over to play and get petted while I was writing. So distracting but also cute.
Yes. Yes it is. All but one of the languages I picked to look at briefly have lost a lot of speakers due to epidemics of small pox. One was also ravaged by epidemics of venereal diseases. All of them save one was also damaged by residential schools. Most were also effected by forced relocation efforts and one was the victim of an extermination plan. However the ones that weren't effected by that were so damaged by smallpox and other diseases that it really didn't matter that colonialism wasn't breaking down their doors with guns.
