Nev[æ]da or Nev[ɑ]da?

As a person from New Jersey who now lives in DC, I do not have strong opinions about how “Nevada” is pronounced - but Nevadans sure do! I’m quoted a few times in this fun Atlas Obscura piece on the sociolinguistics of this perennial debate.

LSA Executive Committee

I’ve been elected as an At-Large member of the Linguistic Society of America Executive Committee for a three-year term starting in January! I’m looking forward to serving my field and learning more about how the professional society sausage is made.

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