Signed languages and Deaf communities
I was lucky enough to get to work with Ceil Lucas on her NSF-funded survey of variation in ASL. That study led to these papers and this book. See my links page for some interesting sites on ASL and other signed languages.
Linguistic variation presents interesting problems for studying social practice, because it is constrained not only by social structures and the limits of individual agency, but also by, well, grammar. My research combines attention to grammar and phonetic constraints with ethnographic methods to explain the social meaning of linguistic variables for the people who use them. You can download my CV here.
Language in later life
I took the photos on these pages while doing fieldwork in a small town in the dairy-farming countryside of eastern Wisconsin. I spent several months hanging out at the Senior Citizens’ Center there, participating as much as I could. So many questions about language at this life stage have yet to be asked, much less answered: Are the social differences made in part through language still significant late in life? How do our ways of speaking change as we age – when we are working instead of studying, when we are retired instead of working? How do the acoustic characteristics of aging voices influence our own and people’s perceptions of our age? And what are those characteristics? I’ve written about sociolinguistic variation in this Wisconsin community of elders here and here.
Language in rural spaces
Linguistic geography and even sociolinguistics have their roots in an old tradition of searching the ‘rural hinterland’ for older words for things. But as Lauren Hall-Lew and I have argued, the meaning of linguistic variability in rural places has as much to do with the symbolic power of working the land as it does with geographic and cultural distance from urban centers.
