Contact, Change and Social Networks: A Study of Yakama and Mexican Sociolects in Washington State
Loading...
Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
11-3-2024
Abstract
Dialectological research into the phonological systems of nonwhite groups in the US has tended to focus on how or whether such groups participate in ‘majority’ dialect features and sound changes. For example, in Oregon, Peterson (2019) found participation in /u/- and /o/-fronting (two key sound changes in the so-called Western Vowel Pattern) in women of color. In Washington, Wassink & Hargus (2020) and Wassink (2016) reported that Yakama and Chicanx speakers do not show Western US-like fronting of /u/. However, these approaches tend to center the majority ethnicity in a broader region, regardless of who the most important local groups in contact really were. Anthropological and historical texts documenting the history of the Yakima Valley in south-central Washington state make clear that earliest, year-round, non-intertribal contact in the region involved the Yakama and Mexican peoples.
Recommended Citation
Beckford Wassink, Alicia. "Contact, Change and Social Networks: A Study of Yakama and Mexican Sociolects in Washington State." (2024). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/crs_presentations/33
Comments
Dr. Alicia Beckford Wassink is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington. She is the Byron and Alice Lockwood Endowed professor of the Humanities, and director of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory. She was recently nominated to serve as Vice-President/President Elect of the Linguistic Society of America. She is an Affiliate Professor in the Center for Mind, Brain and Learning, University of Washington (now iLabs), and an external examiner in Phonetics for the University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston, Jamaica. She has served as principal investigator of the English in the Pacific Northwest study since 2006. She most recently served on both the executive committee of Linguistic Society of American and the executive council of the American Dialect Society. Wassink's research interests lie in production and perception of the time-varying features of vowel systems, racial bias in automatic speech recognition, social network modeling, dialect contact, language ideology, development of sociolinguistic competence in children, and creole linguistics. Her work has appeared in books on Language and Identity (Edinburgh University Press), African-American Women’s Language (Oxford), Best Practices in Sociophonetics (Routledge), and Language in the Schools (Elsevier). Primary reports of her research have appeared in the Publications of the American Dialect Society, Speech Communication, American Speech, Journal of The Acoustical Society of America, Journal of Phonetics, Language in Society, Language Variation and Change, Journal of English Linguistics, and the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.