Sociophonetics

“This girl sounds like she puts a question mark at the end of every sentence!". "Dude, the way he pronounces /s/ sounds so gay!" "His th sounds more like a /d/ than anything else!" You may have heard languageoriented statements like these before. Many aspects of pronunciation are easily noticeable for our ears. But how do we linguistically investigate such statements? How do you measure whether or not someone pronounces th?

When we think about what it may indicate to speak in a certain way, we approach the interesting sociolinguistic core of pronunciation. What may a certain pronunciation have to do with a person's identity and the membership in certain social groups? These questions and the complex phonetic and sociolinguistic theories behind them will be the topic of my course this semester. The central aim of this course is to take your knowledge of phonology and sociolinguistics from introductions and deepen it to an extent that allows for the empirical analysis of how sounds in language may relate to the auditory production and perception of language from a social point of view. The course will be research-oriented and will enable you to design your own linguistic research projects.

We will use Kendall & Fridland’s Sociophonetics as a course reader.

Active participation as well as preparation of texts will be required for the successful completion of this course.