LNGST 301
Germanic Multiethnolects, spring 2022 (junior year)
Course Description
“Multiethnolects” is a collective term for urban contact languages that develop in multiethnic neighborhoods. Students learn to analyze the language structure of multiethnolects, the role of language in social groups, and how people express their identities through language. They also investigate perspectives on multiethnolects from outside the speech community, e.g., how attitudes towards “non-standard” languages influence public debates, and how those debates on language are used as a battleground for resistance against societal change.
Course Content
Rationale
This course was added after my proposal was written, but was a natural inclusion in my major coursework. Besides being another course added in the linguistics department code, this course allowed me to continue the research I had already begun on the Norwegian multiethnolect. This course expands on multiethnolect theory past just Norwegian and draws common threads between different Germanic multiethnolects.
Audiology Project
This assignment had us get familiar with some linguistics software and the transcription process in general. We created a recording of a casual conversation between friends (similar to the way researchers would record multiethnolect speakers) and then used ELAN to create a transcription and analyze the lexical diversity and speech rate during the conversation.
Audiology Project Base Recording
Final Project
This project was a direct continuation of research I began in NORW 396 (Directed Undergraduate Research: The Norwegian Multiethnolect). The project made use of the No-Ta Corpus to analyze the spread of features of the multiethnolect to various regions of Oslo among youth, including those without a minority background. My final report sharing these findings and well as my presentation slides are linked below.
Takeaways
From this course, I was able to further my original research using corpus data. I also learned a great deal about the transcription process and how to make use of data from a recorded interview or conversation. I made use of both of these skills in completing my senior capstone project. Additionally, I learned about other multiethnolects past Norwegian, which I had not previously studied. I was able to compare and contrast the different multiethnolects and investigate common features that define multiethnolects.
Connections
As mentioned earlier, this course was a direct continuation of a project I began in NORW 396 (Directed Undergraduate Research: The Norwegian Multiethnolect). This initial project examined the spread of NMET lexical items throughout geographic and social regions of Oslo, while the continuation of the project in this course focused on the spread of syntactic and morphological features using the same methods. More information about this project and my research findings from this initial report are available at the page below.
I also incorporated an investigation on the Norwegian multiethnolect in my final presentations for LNGST 245 (Roles of Language in Equity and Diversity) and for NORW 260 (Introduction to Germanic Linguistics). These pages are also linked below.