Congratulations to my doctoral student Yoojin Kang, who has officially been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to support her dissertation research! Yoojin will study the production and perception of dialect features by two groups in South Korea: natives of Kyungsang province who have been living in Seoul, and natives of Seoul who have been living in Kyungsang.

Seoul is urban and its dialect is considered prestigious and "standard", while Kyungsang is more rural and its dialect is relatively stigmatized. So probably everybody from Kyungsang who moves to Seoul just abandons their home dialect for the standard while Seoul migrants to Kyungsang maintain their native variety, right? In fact, Yoojin's previous work has suggested more complex patterns of behavior depending on the specific dialect feature involved, the attitude of the speaker, and how these and other factors interact with more global notions of (non)standardness. Her dissertation will expand and broaden this work, significantly contributing to knowledge about how people vary and change their dialects as a result of mobility and new dialect input.