Doctoral Dissertation Research: Geographies of language: Identity and indexicality in post-Katrina New Orleans English

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In 2005 the geographies of New Orleans -- linguistic, social, and physical -- were devastated by flooding following the failure of the levees after Hurricane Katrina. The disaster exacerbated what was already a dearth of research that has resulted in a lack of public knowledge of the speech of one of America's linguistically richest cities. New Orleans possesses numerous speech varieties, each linked historically to particular neighborhoods and sociocultural groups, but these varieties, along with the city's neighborhoods and population, have been profoundly disturbed post-Katrina. This dissertation focuses on two locally salient cultural categories, Creole and Yat, in order to explore the intersection of language, place, and identity, and also uses these speakers' experiences to consider how the flooding and population diaspora after Katrina continues to change local perception and construal of linguistic and other cultural affiliations. The historical processes that gave rise to Creole and Yat as cultural categories, current commercial and other discourses about them, and speaker and media use of local linguistic features are examined. Interviews, ethnography, discourse analysis, and participant observation are used to trace how self-identified members of these groups as well as public discourses use language to construct, reflect, and manipulate local cultural identities. The intellectual and academic merits of this study are twofold. First, it begins to redress the deficit of scholarly attention to New Orleans speech. Second, it furthers the study of the intersection of language, place and the performance of identity within the context of cultural appropriation endemic in global commerce generally, and post-disaster diasporic communities specifically. In contribution to the community of study, curriculum modules which link study of New Orleans English with critical language awareness skills will be created for use in middle and high schools, as well as a public, interactive, web-based archival resource for New Orleans speech and culture.