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

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

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.