Results for LINGUIST150

This course explores the social life of spoken language. Students learn to address the following big questions about language and society: Why do languages vary across different time periods, locations, and social groups? What do our opinions about the way other people speak tell us about society? How do our social identities and goals influence the way we speak? And how do we use language to alter our social relationships?

Many people have strong beliefs that there are right and wrong ways of speaking, good and bad versions of their language. These norms are reinforced explicitly in the education system, and implicitly in the ways that people talk about language or see it portrayed in media. Students will learn about the history, development, and linguistic structure of three language varieties that are sometimes characterized by non-linguists as "bad English": Singaporean English, Jamaican Creole, and African American Vernacular English. By critically examining public discourses about these language varieties and learning to identify their systematic patterns of grammatical structure, students will discover that popular ideas about "good" and "bad" English are rooted in the narratives that surround language, not linguistic fact.