Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Change, Stylistic Resources, and Verbal Performance

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Individuals migrate for a wide variety of reasons, including economic pressures, natural disasters, and political conflict. In some cases, they are able to return home after the factors which drove them to migrate have receded. However, in other cases they cannot return. Refugees who have fled political conflict and resettled in host countries represent one group for which return may be challenging, or ultimately impossible. Refugees also often lack economic or social resources that they can utilize after migrating, resulting in lives marked by precarity and uncertainty. While they may lack access to certain resources, language is a resource that refugees can creatively use as they navigate life in their host countries. This linguistic and anthropological project aims to understand how human beings adapt to long periods of precarity and uncertainty by examining how refugees use language in myriad social contexts: to maintain connections to their homes, assimilate themselves into their host societies, and articulate their needs or desires. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project would broadly disseminating its findings, and innovate more effective methods for preserving historical and scientific records related to language documentation. Further, it would broaden the participation of groups underrepresented in science, and build capacity and scientific infrastructure through international scientific cooperation. William Cotter, under the supervision of Dr. Natasha Warner of the University of Arizona, will explore the relationship between language, performance, and the construction/retention of identity and memory in contexts of long-term displacement. Using methods drawn from linguistics and anthropology, this project investigates refugee language use through field research conducted with Palestinian refugees in the Jordanian capital of Amman. This is an apt research setting both because Palestinian refugee communities have lived in Jordan since 1948 and because many have acquired formal rights as Jordanian citizens. Through semi-structured interviews, researchers will first investigate how Arabic dialects spoken by these refugees have changed over time. Language change is common when individuals or communities migrate and come into contact with speakers of different languages or dialects. The audio data from these interviews will be subjected to statistical analysis to determine how their Arabic dialects have changed over time. Researchers will compare the results from this portion of the project to how these refugees use language in the context of performance (e.g. poetry, songs, telling stories). Examining performance will allow the researchers to see how Arabic dialects are used across contexts, and how the stylistic use of language allows refugees to situate themselves as members of the Palestinian community, while simultaneously navigating their relationship to the country in which they currently live. Findings from this research will provide insight into how refugees experience life in the diaspora and how they use language as a tool to articulate their place in their communities and integrate themselves into their host country. 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.