The Social Networks of Ethnic Minority Group Speakers in Washington State

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This research investigates the linkages between social network composition, ethnicity and linguistic structure. Spoken language use reflects many factors, including cognitive constraints on production and perception of sound, speech community membership, and cultural practices, among others. This study models the interrelationships between these factors and participation in regional sound changes or resistance to change, bilectal use of mainstream English together with a heritage language variety used in the local speech community, or monolectal use of an ethnic variety of English. The study site is Washington state. Unlike many places in the United States where ethnic groups settled into small communities with relatively insular social networks (resulting in the famous ethnic enclaves of the East coast and Inland North), the Pacific Northwest has long been characterized by regional and social mobility. The notion of "community" itself is complex, but requires better understanding as non-white, mobile individuals become a larger part of the US population. This study also uses practice-based, rather than assignment-based methods for determining ethnic group membership. General practice in the language sciences in North America has been to sample primarily from majority-ethnicity groups in a speech community. The assumption taken has been that non-white speakers do not participate in regional sound changes, but are embedded in separate speech communities defined by shared ethnic identity. While partly true, this assumption has been shown to be a vast oversimplification. There is scholarship showing that speakers' use of ethnolectal forms is not predicted by race as much as by social network composition. But complex social models need to be better-integrated into linguistic research. Race has been conflated with ethnicity, for one thing. Race (physical appearance or genetic heritage), rather than ethnicity (cultural heritage, practice, and perceived affiliation) has been used as an initial tool for constructing research samples, leading to a priori determinations about speech community membership. This project utilizes social network measures of localness of affective network, homophily (similarity-based affiliation), network range, and referential network. Linguistic data are drawn from vowel system recordings and measures of the acoustic cues to phonetic production, focusing on sets of features known to be associated with mainstream as well as local dialects. Spoken data provide the stimuli for cross-dialect testing of listener sensitivity to fine-grained, time-varying differences in sound. The result is a model of participation in linguistic change relevant for mobile, non-white Pacific Northwest speakers, contributing to sociolinguistic theorization of dialect evolution and interethnic contact, as well as listeners' use of social information in the perception of phonetic variation. The study involves collaboration between researchers at the University of Washington, and Heritage University, located on Yakama First Nation lands in Toppenish, Washington. 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.