Dr. Kelly Berkson will give our first colloquium talk of the semester regarding the Chin Languages Research project. Join us on Friday, September 16 from 1 to 2 PM in the Cornerstone Esports Theater. The talk will be broadcast live in the venue with the availability of realtime interaction among guests and the speaker. 

https://linguistics.indiana.edu/about/faculty/berkson-kelly.html

Abstract:

This talk provides an overview of the Chin Languages Research Project, a collaboration between speech scientists and members of Indiana’s large Burmese refugee community. Indianapolis, just an hour north of the IU Bloomington campus, is home to a community of more than 20,000 Burmese refugees. Many are originally from Chin State in western Myanmar and speak under- and un-documented Tibeto-Burman languages from the Kuki-Chin branch. Our best estimate is that upwards of 30 Kuki Chin languages are being spoken in Indianapolis. For the most widely spoken of these—Hakha Lai, also called Laiholh or Hakha Chin—syntactic and morphological work exists, but phonetic and phonological work is minimal. Other languages, such as Zophei and Lutuv, are completely undocumented: their names have been mentioned by previous scholars, but no prior linguistic work exists. Yet Zophei, spoken by 20,000 people worldwide (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig 2019), is spoken by 4,000 people in Indiana, including more than a dozen students on the IU campus. Lutuv, with 15,000 speakers worldwide (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig 2019), is spoken by perhaps 1,000 people in Indiana and several students on the IU campus.

Against this backdrop, at least two observations can be made: (1) IU linguists have an invaluable opportunity to engage in intensive fieldwork with many speakers of under-resourced languages just an hour’s drive from campus; (2) Chin community members regularly face communication challenges in both urgent and daily settings which speech scientists are uniquely positioned to help address. I describe how our team of IU speech scientists, student members of the Indianapolis Chin community, and community partners from churches, social organizations, and local businesses is working to engage in scholarship and address practical needs in tandem. I discuss several ongoing initiatives, including translation of Covid-19 information, documentation of traditional knowledge through in-language ethnographic interviews, development of Lutuv literacy materials, and an NSF-funded collaboration that seeks to develop health-related materials for linguistically underserved communities. I also touch on several of the typologically rare phenomena exhibited by Chin languages, in order to highlight the sheer volume of linguistic research that can be done right here on the ground in Indiana. Throughout, I highlight ways in which our undergraduate Chin students are the MVPs on our team—they are incorporated into the research process from the ground up, serving as a bridge between the university and the community and helping to determine new research and service directions.

Title: Speaker Identity and Syntactic Expectations

Abstract:

A lot of research has been devoted to understanding how speakers of multiple languages, multilinguals, use their knowledge of multiple languages to interpret language in context. But less is known about how speakers who know different varieties of a single language (‘dialects’) accomplish this. In this current project, the researchers investigate African American Language (AAL), a variety of English spoken primarily, but not exclusively, by African Americans. The current work plans to investigate how speakers of AAL understand sentences that use linguistic features that are present in AAL but not present in Mainstream American English (MAE), the ‘standard’ dialect spoken across the US. AAL and MAE overlap significantly, but there are specific grammatical constructions where the two diverge. This project investigates when and how AAL speakers use these variety-specific constructions in different contexts. Research into how AAL speakers use context to do this will shed light on how language processing proceeds in more naturalistic contexts, and will also shed light on the usage of a variety of English spoken by a significant portion of the US population.

https://people.umass.edu/anneal/

https://linguistics.as.uky.edu/users/kbmc229

This event has been deferred to a later date. More information to come. 

Title: Language is social: why all phonetics is sociophonetics

Abstract:

The traditional view, among phoneticians and phonologists, is that speech and sign language reveal, at their core, a deeply abstract human ability to map arbitrary signs to signifiers independent of such influences as social knowledge or cultural norms. Under this view, phonetics is concerned primarily with what influence physiology and physics might exert on humans’ ability to perceive and produce speech sounds and hand gestures. Phonology, by contrast, is concerned with the organization —in the mind, in a language, in a syllable— of abstract representations of sounds and the constraints or rules that govern this organization. Language is, in this view, a property of the individual which can then be used to communicate with other individuals; each person a whole, ideal, speaker-hearer with a fully self-contained competence in their own language or languages.

In this talk I will present evidence, from my own research & that of others, that this abstract, individualist view of language is a big part of the reason that, famously, all grammars leak. I will consider the possibility that the smallest unit of “language” is more accurately understood to be at least two people and that social knowledge, including the anticipation of others’ knowledge, is a part of our core linguistic competence from the highest to the lowest levels of cognition. Rather than merely providing a “filter” on a more abstract linguistic competence, sociolinguistic knowledge is an essential part of what we know when we know a language. I will present evidence that a sociolinguistic revolution is well underway in phonetics and will close by arguing that the future of phonology, as a subdiscipline, is sociophonology.

Come see us at our A&S KWeek booth! 

Required department orientation for new MALTT program students. 

This is not a substitute for the university-wide orientation for new TAs. Both of these orientations are required. 

Microteaching (in-person): required for all new TAs at the university regardless of prior teaching experience 

• In-person components beginning in Worsham Cinema of Gatton Student Center on Tuesday (9:00 until 10:00 a.m.), and then breaking out to assigned rooms in Whitehall Classroom Building (10:00 until 12:00 p.m.). Registrants will be notified via email of their specific classroom in Whitehall before the event. (You must attend the in-person sessions on BOTH days.) More information about Microteaching can be found here.

• Tuesday, August 9, 2022, from 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. 
• Wednesday, August 10, 2022, from 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.