Dissertation Research: Slang and the Social Construction of Race and Identity Among Brazilian Portuguese Adolescents

本项目涉及一位来自斯坦福大学的人类学语言学家的论文研究。 这项研究探讨了巴西青少年如何通过创新和使用俚语来参与和体验种族。 通过深入的，民族志看一个社区的扬声器，这个词汇研究调查巴西青少年如何编码的种族和构建身份通过俚语。参与者将在三所学校内外进行观察，记录实践中的语言，创造第一个俚语民族志。语言分析的定性和语篇方法将被用来说明青少年如何发展和操纵俚语创造社会意义。 这项研究的效用是，它将促进我们对巴西背景下如何经历种族和产生种族主义的理解;它将显示词汇如何表达文化话语，揭示在发言者向调查人员解释其使用俚语时种族对他们真正的“意义”;研究将显示俚语等流行做法如何在青年中解决紧迫的社会问题。通过促进我们对种族、俚语和青少年等重大问题的理解，该项目将提供有助于理解我们自己社会中这些问题的信息。此外，该项目有助于我们对世界这一重要领域的专业知识，并增加了对年轻社会科学家的培训。

This project involves the dissertation research of an anthropological linguist from Stanford University. The study explores how Brazilian teenagers engage with and experience race through the innovation and use of slang. Through a deep, ethnographic look at one community of speakers, this lexical study investigates how Brazilian teenagers encode race and construct identity through slang. Participant observation will be conducted inside and outside of three schools to record language in practice, creating one of the first ethnographies of slang. Qualitative and discourse methods of linguistic analysis will be used to illustrate how adolescents develop and manipulate slang to create social meaning. The utility of this research is that it will advance our understanding of how race is experienced and racism produced in a Brazilian context; it will show how the lexicon articulates cultural discourses, revealing what race really `means` to speakers as they explain their use of slang to the investigator; and the research will show how such popular practices as slang speak to pressing social issues among youth. By advancing our understanding of the significant issues of race, slang and adolescence, the project will provide information useful towards understanding these issues in our own society. In addition the project contributes to our expertise about this important area of the world, and adds to the training of a young social scientist.