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

2005年，新奥尔良的地理--语言、社会和物质--在卡特里娜飓风后堤坝坍塌后被洪水摧毁。这场灾难加剧了本已缺乏研究的情况，这导致公众对美国语言最丰富的城市之一的演讲缺乏了解。新奥尔良有许多不同的语言，每一个在历史上都与特定的社区和社会文化群体联系在一起，但这些变化，以及该市的社区和人口，在卡特里娜飓风后受到了深刻的干扰。本文聚焦于两个当地显著的文化范畴，克里奥尔人和雅特人，以探索语言、地点和身份的交集，并利用这些说话者的经历来思考卡特里娜飓风后的洪水和人口流散如何继续改变当地对语言和其他文化联系的感知和解读。考察了克里奥尔语和YAT作为文化范畴产生的历史过程，目前关于它们的商业和其他话语，以及说话人和媒体对当地语言特征的使用。访谈、民族志、话语分析和参与者观察被用来追踪这些群体的自我认同成员以及公共话语是如何使用语言来构建、反映和操纵地方文化认同的。这项研究的学术价值和学术价值是双重的。首先，它开始纠正学术界对新奥尔良演讲的关注不足。其次，它进一步研究了在全球商业中普遍存在的文化占有的背景下，特别是灾后散居社区的背景下，语言、地点和身份表现的交集。作为对学习社区的贡献，将创建课程模块，将新奥尔良英语学习与关键的语言意识技能联系起来，供初中和高中使用，并将创建一个公共的、互动的、基于网络的新奥尔良演讲和文化档案资源。

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.