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

2005年，卡特里娜飓风过后，新奥尔良的地理环境——语言、社会和自然环境——都被洪水摧毁了。这场灾难加剧了本已缺乏研究的状况，导致公众对美国语言最丰富的城市之一的语言缺乏了解。新奥尔良拥有众多的语言变体，每一种都与特定的社区和社会文化群体有历史联系，但这些变体，以及城市的社区和人口，在卡特里娜飓风之后受到了深刻的干扰。本文聚焦于两个当地突出的文化类别，克里奥尔语和雅特语，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考虑卡特里娜飓风后的洪水和人口散居如何继续改变当地对语言和其他文化联系的感知和解释。历史进程产生了克里奥尔语和叶特作为文化类别，当前的商业和其他话语关于他们，和说话者和媒体使用当地语言的特点进行了检查。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如何使用语言来构建、反映和操纵当地文化身份。这项研究的智力和学术价值是双重的。首先，它开始弥补学术界对新奥尔良演讲关注的不足。其次，它进一步研究了在全球商业中普遍存在的文化挪用背景下的语言，地点和身份表现的交集，特别是灾后散居社区。为了对学习社区做出贡献，将为初中和高中创建将新奥尔良英语学习与关键语言意识技能联系起来的课程模块，以及新奥尔良演讲和文化的公共、互动、基于网络的档案资源。

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.