Doctoral Dissertation Research: Changing Language Ideologies

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Language ideologies, or taken-for-granted systems of belief about language, are often implicit in discourse. What is considered "standard language", "correct" or "appropriate" is a product of the current time and societal forces at work, yet can also be contested. This dissertation project examines language ideologies among individuals and community organizations regarding gender labels, pronouns, and other linguistic practices that are understood as having important implications for different identity groups. It examines how individuals both reproduce and challenge broadly circulating ideologies about language in the United States. This study consists of a year of participant-observation among community organizations along with the analysis of a select number of interviews. These methods allow the investigators to identify community members' strategies of rationalizing language choices, including appeals to language ideologies. Additionally, this project analyzes a corpus of Twitter data in order to offer insight on how local discussions relate to those that circulate broadly on social media. The linguistic description that results from this project sheds light on how individuals negotiate their identities through their language choices, how they make sense of these choices, and how novel language practices may shape and become shaped by broader cultural change.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.