Guest speaker: Nicole Holliday (University of Pennsylvania)

We are delighted to have the chance to welcome Nicole Holliday, an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania - a prolific, groundbreaking scholar of sociolinguistics, raciolinguistics, and suprasegmental phonology - as a virtual guest speaker for our department. Her talk, "Sociolinguistic variation and identity among black/biracial men", will be taking place on Friday, January 22, from 3 PM to 4:30 PM, via Zoom, and a reception will follow.

Over the past 50 years, sociolinguistic studies on black Americans have expanded in both theoretical and technical scope, and newer research has moved beyond seeing black speakers as a monolithic sociolinguistic community (Wolfram 2007, Blake 2014). Yet there remains a dearth of critical work on complex identities existing within black American communities as well as how these identities are reflected and perceived in linguistic practice. In this talk, I will present results from three studies that expand our knowledge of the rich tapestry of linguistic features employed by speakers who have not been traditionally considered in the sociolinguistic literature. Using a corpus of data from 20 biracial men who variably identify as black and/or biracial, aged 18-32, in the Washington D.C. area, I examine the ways in which racial identity is constructed via the use of intonational variables such as variable pitch accents and peak delay intervals, as well as a suite of morphosyntactic features associated with AAL. Results of a number of Bayesian and frequentist models suggest that speakers employ both intonational and morphosyntactic variation in the service of performing highly individualized racial identities, with speakers who self-identity as more black being more likely to utilize intonational features associated with AAL. In a complementary study on morphosyntactic variation within the same corpus, results revealed variation primarily conditioned by interlocutor race, as opposed to speaker identity, demonstrating that these speakers use different levels of variation to do different types of identity work (Eckert 2008, Benor 2010). Finally, I will discuss topic-based intonational variation in the same corpus, showing that these young men may alter their use of ethnically-linked intonational phenomena when discussing how their identity is performed and perceived in different contexts. In particular, I focus on intonational variation in identity performance in discussions of situations with speaker perception of material risk, such as interactions with law enforcement. The results of these three studies expand our knowledge about how the complexities of speaker identity are reflected in sociolinguistic variation, as well as press on the boundaries of what we know about how speakers use variation to reflect who they are and who they want to be.