Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language, race, and Identity among ethnically diverse youths in Miami

海地人最近移民到南佛罗里达，迅速改变了迈阿密戴德县多数黑人社区的人口结构。这造成了新抵达的海地族裔群体和历史上建立的非洲裔美国人之间的紧张关系。两个种族的居民都指出，这些紧张关系开始在中学。这项纵向研究跟踪了一组新的六年级学生，通过他们在中学的第一年。这些参与者将需要学习中学社区的可接受的种族和民族互动的期望，他们将需要加入或创建社会团体，要么坚持或放弃这些社会期望。当他们适应这些社会期望时，他们会微妙地改变自己的言论，以显示与自己的社会群体的团结，并与其他群体保持社会距离。这些中学参与者的生命阶段对于他们自己成长为社区的青少年和成年成员非常重要，而这反过来又对他们所属社会的进一步发展非常重要。这项工作将促进对青少年如何学习社会期望的科学理解，并将这些知识应用于他们自己的语言行为。它还将通过将以前的知识应用于未充分研究的不同社会群体来扩大对语言变异的研究。这项研究的更广泛的影响，包括公开的青年讲话录音，在中学教师和管理的语言变异和种族欺凌讲习班，并通过新闻稿向公众传播的社会语言学知识。 CoPI是俄亥俄州州立大学的一名博士生，他将在迈阿密的一所中学进行人种学田野调查，集中收集和分析属于同一班级的20至30名六年级学生的数据。该项目的重点是非洲和海地裔美国学生的社会群体的种族构成和量化的变化，这些新生的经验，因为他们成为融入中学的特定社会环境的讲话。两个相关的语言变量将被分析为这个项目：第三人称单数动词的缺席和韵律节奏。第三人称单数动词-s将被编码为每个现在时、现在参考短语的现在或不存在。一些影响-s用法的因素，如动词类型和句子结构，也将被编码。将使用一系列已建立的节律测量（PVI、%V、#8710;C和varcoC）测量韵律节律。这两个语言变量已被证明是不同的，因为双语和社会身份，因此，这个项目有两个主要的独立变量：语言背景和社会网络。该项目采用了一种在语言学、人类学和社会语言学工作中越来越常见的混合方法。它包括不同的数据收集方法：参与者观察，录音语言和人种学访谈，网络分析和语言背景调查问卷。数据分析包括统计分析和定性编码，这增加了结果的深度。这项研究的结果将扩大迈阿密，黑人社区和美国的社会语言学知识在large.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

The relatively recent migration of Haitians to South Florida has rapidly changed the demographics of Miami Dade County's majority Black neighborhoods. This has caused tensions between the newly arrived Haitian ethnic group and the historically established African Americans. Residents of both ethnicities note that these tensions begin in middle school. This longitudinal study follows a set of new sixth grade students through their first year at a middle school. These participants will need to learn the middle school community's expectations of acceptable racial and ethnic interactions and they will need to join or create social groups that either uphold or abandon these social expectations. As they are adapting to these social expectations, they will be subtly changing their speech to show solidarity with their own social groups and to create social distance from other groups. The life stage of these middle school participants is incredibly important for their own growth into adolescent and adult members of their communities which, in turn, is important for the further development of the societies to which they belong. This work will advance the scientific understanding of how youths learn social expectations and apply that knowledge to their own linguistic behaviors. It will also expand research on language variation by applying previous knowledge to understudied, diverse social groups. This study's broader impacts include publicly available recordings of youth speech, a workshop on language variation and ethnic bullying for teachers and administration in the middle school, and the dissemination of the sociolinguistic knowledge to the general public via press releases. The CoPI, a doctoral student at the Ohio State University, will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in a Miami middle school concentrating the data collection and analysis on a set of 20 to 30 sixth grade students belonging to the same homeroom. This project focuses on the ethnic make-up of the social groups of African and Haitian American students and quantifies the changes in speech that these new students experience as they become enmeshed into the middle school's particular social environment. Two dependent linguistic variables will be analyzed for this project: 3rd person singular verbal-s absence and prosodic rhythm. 3rd person singular verbal-s will be coded as present or absent for each present tense, present reference phrase. A number of factors that influence -s usage, such as verb type and sentence structure, will also be coded. Prosodic rhythm will be measured using a host of established rhythm measures (PVI, %V, ∆C, and varcoC). These two linguistic variables have been shown to vary because of bilingualism and social identity; as a result, this project has two primary independent variables: language background and social network. This project employs a mixed methodological approach that is becoming more common in linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic work. It includes diverse data collection methods: participant observation, audio-recorded linguistic and ethnographic interviews, network analysis, and a language background questionnaire. The data analysis includes both statistical analysis and qualitative coding, which adds depth to the results. The findings of this study will widen the sociolinguistic knowledge of Miami, Black communities, and the US-at-large.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.