Apologies for the lack of article reviews and/or pasta recipe comparisons these last few months, but this semester I’ve been solo teaching my first sociolinguistics course while collecting data for my dissertation on truthful and deceptive TripAdvisor.com hotel reviews! I designed a survey and experiment asking people about their dialect background then having them write a truthful and deceptive hotel review (here’s the survey if you’re interested in taking it or passing it along). While my dissertation is focusing only on survey respondents who are undergraduates, I’m hoping to get as many surveys from as many people as possible for future research! Hopefully this summer I’ll be back with some more articles as I work on my literature review chapter as well and thanks for your support!
Just as my research looks at how language is used in truthful and deceptive hotel reviews, this vegan dish is deceivingly like pasta yet a delicious take on the usual sun-dried tomato take in other pasta recipes. The garlic and fresh basil work together to make zingy flavor that compliments the squash, just as I hope to discover if dialect differences may work together with language in shaping online deception. Good Cooking!
We’re really excited to have gotten to interview Sali Tagliamonte at the Linguistic Society of America meeting in January! Dr. Tagliamonte is a full professor at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She’s written a bunch of books and articles about sociolinguistics, and how languages shift and vary over time. You can find out more about her and her work here.
In our interview, we discussed the following topics: - why it’s so important to investigate how teens use language, and what facets of adolescent speech she finds most interesting - what differences we can find in spoken vs. online language use - the Toronto English Project, and the changes we see in people’s language use over the course of their lives - how language might look in the future - how to better inform people about how language variation works - the role of social media in telling people about linguistics, and in language change
… and more! Thanks again to Dr. Tagliamonte for speaking with us. Looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say!
Sometimes it really is just unstable orthography, but other times, often enough, people seem to forget that Middle English had no fewer dialects than Old English or modern British English, and in many cases it might be more informative to talk of something like “Middle Northumbrian”, “Middle Coventrian” etc.
(For that matter I keep wondering how much of the orthographic variation is due to different preferences between writers; clearly not all, but probably some.)
