Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Ideology and Cultural Pluralism in Montreal's Haitian Radioscape

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Doctoral student Chantal White, under the guidance of Dr. Bambi Schieffelin, New York University, will undertake research on language ideologies, language practices, and identity though formal linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis of radio communication. The researcher will examine how radio producers in a multi-ethnic and multilingual context draw on, mediate, and transform the ideological marking of different language varieties. The research will be conducted in Montréal, Canada, where the researcher will focus on the particular case of the development of Haitian identity. While situated within the larger socio-historical context of Québec's official cultural and language policies, aimed at forging a distinct society through the promotion of the French language, the researcher will pay particular attention to the choices and influence of the people who are most directly affected and targeted by these policies. The investigator will combine participant observation, semi-directed interviews, social network analysis, textual analysis of radio documents, and conversation, discourse and phonetic analyses of on- and off-air language practices. The data gathered through these methods will be used to answer the following questions: 1) Who is involved in Haitian radio production in Montréal and what are their everyday work and linguistic practices that contribute to generating audience-appropriate programming and representing an image of a plural Québec within Haitian radio? 2) How are decisions to broadcast in a language or a variety of language arrived at, implemented and justified at the organizational level and what are the consequences of on-air language choice on the daily operations of these radio stations? And 3) What are the language ideologies undergirding and shaping French and Kreyòl language choice and language policy at each radio station both on- and off-air, and how are they made evident through language practices? By attending to the ways Haitian radio producers negotiate their insertion into Québec's cultural landscape through their on-air language choices, this research adds to the theorization of radio, a widespread yet understudied medium. While much work has been done on the ways communities make use of visual media to represent and define themselves, this research will contribute to an understanding of the different ways a community get represented through its voices. The project also contributes to the education and training of a social scientist.