"The Language of College": A Case Study of Code-switching and Identity Performance in Northern Appalachian University Communities of Practice

Date
2017
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Producer
Director
Performer
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
Crew Member
Funder
Rehearsal Director
Concert Coordinator
Moderator
Panelist
Alternative Title
Department
Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
Type
Original Format
Running Time
File Format
Place of Publication
Date Span
Copyright Date
Award
Language
en
Note
Table of Contents
Terms of Use
Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
Rights Holder
Access Restrictions
No restrictions
Terms of Use
Tripod URL
Identifier
Abstract
This paper investigates the distribution of Appalachian and Southern speech markers in an Eastern Ohio College Community and the sociolinguistic implications of the distribution. I combine a qualitative approach that uses the content of participants' speech to understand the sociolinguistic pressures and expectations within four different Communities of Practice (CofPs) with a quantitative approach to measuring variable feature frequency across the CofPs. Frequencies of lajl monophthongization, lej/ shifting, and 101 fronting are contrasted across CofPs. Occurrences of the two stages of the Southern Vowel shift (SVS) are also contrasted. The findings here suggest that the distribution of these three feature types is controlled by the linguistic capital values associated with them in each CofP. Participants demonstrated acute awareness of social bias from non-members of the community against features that the participants themselves thought of as rural. CofPs that give high linguistic capital to 'mainstream' English, such as a traditional writing class, create low-capital situations for Appalachian and Southern speech markers. I found that frequencies of Appalachian and Southern features distributed separately, but that both increased in contexts which were contextually linked to ruralness, or whose social structure was relaxed.
Description
Subjects
Citation
Collections