Schedule of Events for SoSy 2022
February 24, 2022
*All times provided are in the CST timezone. Compare with your timezone.
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Please register for free on our website:
https://publish.illinois.edu/sociolinguisticssymposium/registration/
08:00-08:20 am: Conference Zoom room is open (Link will be emailed to registrants the week of the conference. Registration is free, but required.)
08:20-08:30 am: Opening Remarks – given by Dr. James Yoon
08:30-09:30 am: Morning Plenary:
Dr. Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi, Deccan College, India
A Century of Dialect Surveys in India: From Procedures to Insights
*Braj and Yamuna Kachru Distinguished Lecture in the Linguistic Sciences
Session Chair: Britni Moore
09:30-09:40 am: Short Break
09:40 am-1:00 pm: Individual Presentation Session 1 (20 min talk/10 min Q&A):
Session Chair: Allison Casar
09:40-10:10 am: Muhammad Yasir Khan and Liaquat Ali Channa, BUITEMS, and Syed Abdul Manan, Nazarbayev University
Why mother languages acts fail in Pakistan?: The challenges in the implementation of Balochistan Mother languages Act, 2014
10:10-10:40 am: Athit Wu, Chulalongkorn University
Language attitudes of Thai high school students towards non-standard varieties of German /r/: an empirical study
10:45-11:15 am: Sachin Wanniarachchi, Bhiksu University of Sri Lanka
Sahan Wanniarachchi, University of Peradeniya
Understanding Hegemonic Masculinity/ies in the ESL Textbooks Prescribed for Monastic Education in Sri Lanka
11:20-11:50 am: Fatima Hafeez & Baneen Asghar, University of Sargodha
Investigating the Social Factors causing Second Language Anxiety among Pakistani ESL Undergraduate Learners
11:55 am-12:25 pm: Maryam AlAli
Style shift in Kuwaiti TV stations: A quantitative analysis on the impact of contexts and gender on the pronunciation of the Daad variant
12:30-1:00 pm: Esma Latić
Paradise Lies Under the Feet of Mothers: A Critical Analysis of Discourse on and by Muslim Women in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia
1:00-1:30 pm: Lunch Break
1:30-2:30 pm: Afternoon Plenary:
Dr. Reem Bassiouney, American University in Cairo, Egypt
Methodological challenges to Arabic sociolinguistics
Session Chair: Wafa Al-Alawi
2:30-2:40 pm: Short Break
2:40-5:30 pm: Individual Presentation Session 2 (20 min talk/10 min Q&A):
Session Chair: Elizabeth King
2:40-3:10 pm: Azler Garcia, University of the Basque Country
A rapid study of Basque (lako): Local identity construction and the dying fishing sector
3:15-3:45 pm: Tania Rodriguez Chavez, Universidad Mayor de San Simón
Quechuas in the border: Ethno identity construction in migration contexts
3:50-4:20 pm: Victor Hugo Mamani Yapura, Universidad Mayor de San Simón / Université Catholique de Louvain
Spanish the “new” language of the Sikuyas
4:25-4:55 pm: Sara Castro Cantú, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Constructing identity through language: Perceptions of fluency of English and Spanish bilingual speakers
5:00 -5:30 pm: Raegeom Lee & Yoko Hama, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Linguistic attitudes of Korean and Japanese immigrant communities in Latin America: Contrasting ethnic identities and motivation for language maintenance
5:30-5:40 pm: Short Break
5:40-6:40 pm: Evening Plenary:
Dr. Whitney Chappell, University of Texas at San Antonio
Sociolinguistic perceptions of the self and the other: Divisions and connections between the Global North and South
Session Chair: Jonathan Pye
6:40-6:50 pm: Closing Remarks – given by Dr. Rakesh Bhatt
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Plenary abstracts:
Morning Plenary (8:30 – 9:30 am CST) Dr. Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi, Deccan College, India
A Century of Dialect Surveys in India: From Procedures to Insights
*Braj and Yamuna Kachru Distinguished Lecture in the Linguistic Sciences
Abstract:
Given the focus of this year’s SOSY on sociolinguistics in the global south, I propose to present an overview and a perspective on the development of Indian Sociolinguistics in relation to dialect survey practices and findings in the region. It is a cliché today to refer to India as a sociolinguistic giant. The count of Indian languages varies from 122 (Census of India 2011) to 447 (Ethnologue) or 860 (PLSI 2013). The discrepancy in the counts makes evident both the vagaries in defining language vs. dialect as well as variant methods of documentation and enumeration used by surveyors. The bhasha / boli (language/dialect) distinction has been a perennial thorn in the eye for chroniclers of Indian languages.
Tentative attempts to enumerate and classify the languages of the subcontinent began with the curious foreign scholars who visited the region in pre-British times. The colonial chronicler observed that Indians understand and separate dialects with hair-splitting subtlety but are unable to understand the concept of ‘language’ (Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1909. Vol.1: 350-351). The accuracy of this observation is arguable. The task of systematically collecting specimens of the land’s languages and of grouping these into languages and dialects on the basis of linguistic descriptions was assigned to the British officer, Sir. George Grierson. Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (LSI, 1898-1928) remains an indispensable resource for scholars of Indian languages even today. The LSI’s modus operandi included administering a standard word list, a sentence list and the elicitation of a narration – a field procedure which continues to be used in the majority of Indian dialect surveys. The presentation of the findings of the field survey in the form of (skeleton) grammars (rather than dialect maps used by traditional dialect geographers or the quantitative techniques of dialectometry or data visualisation techniques enabled by the use of computer technology) is preferred in Indian dialect studies with very few exceptions.
Ironically, a nation-wide survey of Indian languages matching the LSI in scope and detail has not been replicated in independent India. The New Linguistic Survey of India (NLSI, 2008 – 2010) held the promise of providing a comprehensive linguistic survey of modern India but instead became a casualty of an evasive bureaucracy. The People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI 2013) was an ambitious effort to chronicle Indic languages with the active participation of speaker communities. However, the unsystematic use of data collection methods in different parts of the country and variation in the presentation of the survey results compromise cross-linguistic /dialectal comparison. The nation-wide enumeration of mother tongues / languages via the decennial Indian Census has continued since colonial times. The Census procedures of rationalisation and classification have been criticised by scholars; the creation of Hindi as the single-most populous language in India is seen as an artefact of these procedures. The Census, however, remains an important record and often provides indirect data on bi- and multilingualism, the impact of literacy on bilingualism, language shift, etc.
India’s linguistic diversity is crisscrossed by social, cultural, religious and geographical plurality. This rather complex sociolinguistic reality poses peculiar challenges to a chronicler of dialects in India. The use of social dialectological methods for capturing such variation is the hallmark of modern dialectology; yet their systematic inclusion in large-scale surveys of Indian languages has been rare. A number of isolated studies of regional dialects have, however, investigated the effects of one or more socio-demographic factors such as education, social and geographical mobility, urbanisation, exposure to media, etc. in addition to region on the distribution of linguistic features. Dialect surveys of Marathi-Konkani, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam were carried out from the 1960s until about 2000 albeit with a partial focus: the partial focus was either on generating grammatical descriptions of predetermined dialects (e.g. Ghatage 1963-71; Gusain 2003), or on documenting occupational vocabulary (e.g. Bh. Krishnamurti 1971) or vocabulary in selected semantic fields, (e.g. Dhongde 2013), etc. Dialect surveys of dialects spoken by indigenous / tribal populations (e.g. Phillips 2012 for Bhili and Siro 2017 for Apatani) highlight the importance of perceptions of shared history/ethnic identity and familiarity with regional dialects through long-term, active multilingualism rather than mutual intelligibility due to shared grammatical structure. The presentation will conclude by showcasing an on-going survey of Marathi dialects at Deccan College, Pune conducted using computer technology for data collection and data visualisation. The dedicated survey website (www.sdml.ac.in) provides interactive map displays of variation in selected lexical and grammatical features besides an annotated digital corpus of regional and social varieties of the language. The computer-generated maps based on comparable grammatical data are compared with the LSI record to infer processes such as dialectalisation, attrition and accretion in the region.
Afternoon Plenary (1:30 – 2:30 pm CST) Dr. Reem Bassiouney, American University in Cairo, Egypt
Methodological challenges to Arabic sociolinguistics
Abstract:
Recently, the field of critical sociolinguistics has brought to the forefront challenges to the way the field conducts research. These challenges pause methodological problems in research on Arabic sociolinguistics and need to be addressed in future research.
So far, research has almost taken for granted that the linguist is a neutral researcher devoid of her/his own cultural package, prejudices and ideologies. There is also the assumption that language and society are linked in a binary way in which social independent variables affect a static unified community and its usage of linguistic codes and variables, and in which there is a standard code and a non-standard one. In addition, the term ‘native speaker’ has been dealt with as a static description of a person’s ownership of a language, and usually only one language. Future research needs to address power and inequality while taking an ethnographic approach to data. This approach should be more reflexive. There is also an urgent need to address sociolinguistics more globally, while realising that the focus of research has hitherto been on Anglo-American settings, and to some extent European settings, and then applying these theories to other settings. This also means acknowledging the dominance and hegemony of the Western perspective and publication venues, and the minimisation of the role of the south in research.
Evening Plenary (5:40 – 6:40 pm CST) Dr. Whitney Chappell, University of Texas at San Antonio
Sociolinguistic perceptions of the self and the other: Divisions and connections between the Global North and South
Abstract:
In an unprecedented time of technological modernization, globalization, and international migration, Spanish speakers of the Global North and South are increasingly connected and exposed to each other’s varieties. The present talk focuses on the sociolinguistic consequences of large-scale Latin American migration to the United States, on the one hand, and Spain, on the other, to determine how certain variables, varieties, and visuals are used to position others across the Global North-South divide in two sociolinguistic perception experiments. In the first, I investigate how 150 Mexican and Mexican-American Spanish speakers perceive coda /s/ reduction in Mexican and Puerto Rican voices, and in the second, I explore how 217 Spaniards in southeastern Spain make value judgments about the identity of three men based on their voices (from Argentina, Colombia, or Spain) and faces (a more mestizo or more white male face). Based on the results of mixed-effects linear regression models fitted to the data, I demonstrate that English-dominant Mexican Americans perceive coda /s/ reduction in much the same way as monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers. Both Mexican and Mexican-American listeners evaluated [h] as indicative of a Caribbean identity, lower status, and lower confidence, and evaluations were more nuanced for in-group Mexican voices, suggesting that variant-based judgments can extend across borders, generations, and differential language dominance, connecting the Global North and South. On the contrary, linguistic variety was used to create hierarchical divisions between locals and immigrants in southeastern Spain; a Spanish voice received the highest status, occupational prestige, and income ratings, and an Argentinian voice
elicited significantly higher status and trustworthiness ratings than a Colombian voice.
Additionally, visual information impacted evaluations: the Colombian voice was perceived as significantly more religious when combined with a picture of a more mestizo face, which indicates that stereotypes evoked by dialect can be enhanced by visual information. I contend that listeners make use of the most salient cues available to them as they categorize unfamiliar speakers in social space. However, these evaluations are not static, depending crucially on listeners’ regional backgrounds (Paltridge & Giles, 1984), conceptions of community (Chappell, 2021), and attitudes toward others (Babel, 2012). I conclude that seemingly bright symbolic boundaries based on language are easily blurred (Alba, 2005), with identities, judgments, and ideologies permeating the Global North/South divide.
**SoSy is held in conjunction with the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society (ILLS) conference. ILLS is a general linguistics conference open to all subfields that will take place on Friday and Saturday, February 25-26, 2022. If you are interested in ILLS, you can find more information at: http://ills.linguistics.illinois.edu/