Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language and Identity among Ethnic Minorities

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How do linguistic variables gain social meaning in everyday interaction? What role does language play in creating identity? Is there a way of speaking that uniquely identifies a group, and if so, what are the linguistic characteristics? Under the direction of Dr. Gregory Guy, Carina Bauman will investigate the interaction of language and ethnic identity by investigating language use within an Asian American sorority to answer the question how do these young women from diverse ethnic backgrounds work to collaboratively define what it means to be "Asian American." Important discourse events will be recorded to determine how particular linguistic resources are used to construct identities and community membership. Interviews will be recorded at the beginning and at the end of the academic year, and specific linguistics variables, such as prosody, phonation type, quotatives, and rising intonation, will be analyzed to investigate if they reveal patterns associated with ethnic identity. Linguistic data will also be collected from two control groups: Asian-American students not involved in an Asian-American sorority and college students of various ethnic backgrounds.Since Asian Americans have until recently been a relatively understudied group within sociolinguistics, this study has the potential to make an important contribution to our picture of language and ethnicity in the United States.