Corpora of Mobile Speakers has launched!

I’m happy to announce the “publication” of the Corpora of Mobile Speakers (CorMS)! So far CorMS consists of two corpora drawn from my own NSF project, the New Yorkers in Toronto Corpus and the Torontonians in New York Corpus, though my hope is that the number of corpora linked to the site will grow (from the work of my own students, or colleagues who also work on mobile speakers). The CorMS website contains information about the corpora and links to a more detailed user guide about how they were built and what they contain; to access the data files (which are currently stored in a Georgetown Box folder), potential users need only register for access via a google form linked on the CorMS site.

If you have any questions about CorMS, find me at ICLaVE in Vienna next month (where I’ll be giving a multimedia presentation about the corpora) or send me an email!

NWAV51 talk

Just back from NWAV51 in Queens, where I presented some work examining the use of classic New York City English features by native New Yorkers who’ve been living in Toronto. The larger point of the talk was that the way we assess second dialect acquisition - taking the (rate of) use of “D2” forms as a straightforward indication of acquisition - is flawed, and that it’s important to consider the positive reasons why mobile speakers might continue to use D1 forms even after they’ve acquired D2 variants.

ICPhS 2023 talk

This month I gave a talk at ICPhS 2023 in Prague, on the cot/caught distinction in the speech of native New Yorkers living in Toronto and native Torontonians living in New York City. Here’s the proceedings paper!

Praha, glimpsed through the trees of Petřín Hill

NSF Doctoral Dissertation Award: Yoojin Kang

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.