Next Meeting: Sally Thomason! (plus free pizza)

Thanks to all who came to watch the Confederate States of America. We discussed how the film portrayed language: how the prestige dialect shifted to the Southern dialect, how certain lexical items which are taboo today might possibly be acceptable if slavery were still around, and how our own presumptions about prestige in a dialect made it harder for us to notice that the upper-class characters in the commercials were speaking a Southern dialect, because we index wealth with a more Northern way of speaking. The movie was fascinating and provided an interesting opportunity to discuss sociolinguistics in an entirely different context than we're used to.

Next meeting (Monday, October 3rd, at 7:30 in 403 Lorch), we have the distinguished Sally Thomason joining us! She is the head of the University of Michigan Linguistics Department, and has held high-status positions as a well-respected linguist in such large societies as the Linguistics Society of America, where she was once President for a term. She is best known for her work on Language Contact (for which she wrote the standard textbook), and she currently does fieldwork in Montana on Montana Salish, an endangered Native American language. Her talk will focus on this part of her academic career, and she will discuss with us some of the practical aspects of field work:

"I'll talk about some of the pitfalls of linguistic fieldwork -- especially fieldwork on endangered languages -- and on how to avoid those pitfalls. For instance: how to collect lots of lexical data from speakers who haven't spoken their language regularly for decades; how to collect data on nonstandard dialects when everyone who goes to school gets taught the standard dialect; how to avoid offending your consultants; how to collect data on rare grammatical constructions; how to deal with speaker-to-speaker variation; how to keep cultural taboos from preventing data collection."

In addition to her high status as a well-known linguist, Sally is also an excellent speaker and a delight to listen to. Please join us for this very special event! Also, we will be having free pizza. Hope to see you Monday!