LNGST 245
Roles of Language in Equity and Diversity, spring 2020 (first year)
Course Description
Why is language-based discrimination unnoticed and widely justified? This course explores roles of language in society with respect to equity and diversity by using the notion of language ideologies and language practices for negotiating identities. Students connect recent scholarship on language ideology and practices to their daily experiences. The course format is a combination of lectures, small group/class discussions, student presentations, and examination of multimedia.
Course Content
Rationale
From my original proposal: This course examines the role of linguistics in discrimination and social justice. It covers ways in which educators should go about teaching language as well as the values of varieties of English, such as African American vernacular English. This course provides the theory needed to go about linguistic study in an ethical way.
Sociolinguistic Labs
The sociolinguistic lab assignments, which were due periodically throughout the semester, involved connecting class readings to our experiences from real life or from our other courses. Each lab focused on a different topic, including social justice, theoretical frameworks, media representation, and our course text Language Myths (Trudgill & Bauer, 1998). Each lab is linked below.
Final Presentation
For my final presentation, I chose to focus on kebabnorsk, or the Norwegian multiethnolect, and how social stigma contributes to the perception of this language form in Norwegian society. This was the first project I completed on the Norwegian multiethnolect, which I would study more in-depth later in my coursework. The presentation slides are linked below.
Final Exam
Our final exam had two parts, the first being to write a letter to Provost Sortor about issues of diversity and equity on campus and to make suggestions as to how the college could improve using the new OLE Core requirements in the course catalog. The second part was to take our text Articulate While Black (Alim & Smitherman, 2012) and apply it to the college mission statement. The full final exam is linked below.
Takeaways
This course prompted me to consider deeply how often language is used to discriminate against minority groups and how the larger societal framing of certain language varieties is often discriminatory. From this course, I carry with me a critical lens to investigate how language is used to discriminate and try to avoid instances of language discrimination myself. Unfortunately, language discrimination is still very prevalent in modern society, yet often goes overlooked. However, I want to call attention to these instances in my life going forward.
Connections
As mentioned above, this course was the first time I completed an assignment on the Norwegian multiethnolect, which would become a major research topic for me throughout my major. The two courses where I focused most on this topic were NORW 396 (Directed Undergraduate Research: The Norwegian Multiethnolect) and LNGST 301 (Germanic Multiethnolects). This included original research using corpus data from the No-Ta Corpus. Visit the pages below for more information.