Doctoral Dissertation Research: Documenting Sociolinguistic Variation in Diné bizaad (Navajo), a Native American Language

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Previous linguistic research has definitively demonstrated that an unvarying speech community is an idealization. In fact, linguistic variation is an important component of the documentation of a language. That variation frequently carries social meaning, often below the level of consciousness. This project documents and analyzes such variation as found in speakers' current usage of a Native American language. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. Regional, generational, and sociocultural diversity are all factors in the diversity of a given language, but very little linguistic variation has been documented for this language. The documentation will form the core material analyzed in a doctoral dissertation produced by the CoPI. Broader impacts include recordings and descriptions of variation, of value for language planning and the development of pedagogical materials, and a publicly available deposit of the recordings and transcriptions at the Alaska Native Language Archive at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and locally at the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department. Because much is already known about the sound patterns and word structure of Diné bizaad (Navajo), and due to the relatively large number of speakers, the language is a compelling candidate for a study of indigenous language variation. The CoPI, a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will record interviews including word lists, personal narratives, and ethnographic background questions with participants from different regions, of different ages, and with different linguistic backgrounds. The researcher will collaborate with a team of Diné bizaad speakers to transcribe and translate the discourse data for public archiving and in-depth analysis. These data will serve as the basis for an analysis of specific linguistic variants and how they correlate with social factors such as region, generation, and Diné bizaad usage. Through analysis of connected speech, this project will investigate morphological, syntactic, and discourse-level variation, and an acoustic analysis of targeted phonetic/phonological variables will provide evidence for ongoing sound change or sociolinguistically conditioned variation. Of particular interest is how speakers variably use Diné verbal morphology, which is famously complex. Sociolinguistic studies based on small indigenous communities are relatively rare, though extant studies suggest that such communities offer insights about socially meaningful patterns of variation. Further, this study will contribute to scientific understanding of language change by analyzing internally and externally motivated change at multiple levels of linguistic structure. It will also shed light on variation within the Athabaskan language family, which has figured importantly in theories of morphology and phonology, and which includes members in the Southwestern U.S., like Apache, as well as languages along the Pacific Coast, in Alaska, and in Canada.