"The Language of College": A Case Study of Code-switching and Identity Performance in Northern Appalachian University Communities of Practice
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2017
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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en
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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.