Doctoral Dissertation Research: High school choice and the social meanings of a sound change in language

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Understanding how and why language change occurs is central to understanding the nature of human language. Recent work among adults has found that the type of high school an individual attends can influence how that person engages with place-linked linguistic features (such as regional accents). However, although adolescents often lead linguistic change, the impacts of high school choice remain under-examined among high school students themselves.

This doctoral dissertation project builds upon previous work on an important regional sound change currently occurring in American English by examining how the social associations adolescents attribute to the features undergoing change relate to their own use of these features and how the social environments within different types of schools might influence the social meanings that are associated with these and other regional linguistic features. In addition to the training of a doctoral student, results will be shared publicly with participants and community members.

Through sociolinguistic interviews, social evaluation tasks, and perceptual dialectology tasks with adolescents in different types of high schools, this project provides new and deeper insights into the social meanings that high school students attribute to a specific set of regional accent features. The exploration of how adolescents' own understandings of the social meanings of linguistic features relate to their social environments in school and their placed, racialized, and classed identities will in turn enhance our understanding of the mechanisms – both social and linguistic – at work during the course of language changes.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.