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As sophisticated linguists we may find this silly or trivial, but we are going to argue that this is very important.

PS – Pittsburgh won.

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Actually, this is actually an important resource.

This talk will be about citizen sociolinguistics and the way that social media can be

used to enhance sociolinguistic understanding.

Citizen Sociolinguists (Rymes & Leone, 2014) are people who use their senses and

intelligence to understand the world of language around them. Citizen

Sociolinguistics, then, is the study of these understandings. Some practitioners of

Citizen Sociolinguistics will be traditional academics who write articles for peer-

reviewed journals, and others may be those who are blogging, commenting, or taking

dialect quizzes online and talking about them. Any individual, with or without formal

sociolinguistic training, who comments on talk or the way people use language can be

considered a citizen sociolinguist. We foresee a growing overlap between these two

types of citizen sociolinguistic work, and we do not, out of hand (a priori), judge

either as superior to or more relevant than the other.

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Some of you have probably already been citizen sociolinguists in your free time! Many of you have probably

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Like “citizen scientists” who have been enlisted to tag migrating butterflies, monitor their own cholesterol intake, or track

Definitions of these things are on your handouts [see final slide] – we’ll be coming back to them throughout the talk.

What kinds of things do these concepts help us mediate?

- The case of “outliers” – if Joe Shmoe is an outlier, it might not mean much. But if Jaden Smith is an outlier with over a million Twitter followers, that might mea

- Assigning categories – The Census tells us that a particular area is classified as X, but the people who live in it classify the

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Rymes (2013): The term communicative repertoire is now used to refer to the collection of ways individuals

(gestures, dress, posture, accessories) to function effectively in the multiple communities in which they

languages, dialects, & registers, in the institutionally defined sense, but also gesture, dress, posture, and

of food or drink, and mass media references …

Rymes (2014): In any interaction, metacommentary signals an understanding of what a sign means without

to that sign’s situated communicative value. Moreover, … metacommentary permeates any act of communication

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Any site on- or off-line where participants monitor each other, create their own criteria for inclusion, and mentor new people i

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So, participatory culture, built as it is through virtual and face-to-face social networks, creates social value. To understand

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Ultimately, what creates meaning for traditional 1.0 research may not be meaningful to 2.0 social actors: while a linguist may notice “vowel length”, “nasalization”, or “Voice Onset Time” and be able to measure it in detail via Praat, the social value of these data emerges through reports circulated online by people who say things like “That sounds ignorant,” “He talks white,” or “If I actually talked like that I’d pull a gun on myself” (see Moore, 2011). Perhaps these judgments correlate to vowel length, nasalization, or Voice Onset Time, but those linguistic distinctions and their precise measurements are far removed (practically and epistemologically) from the networked participatory culture that builds social around certain emblematic distinctions.

Interestingly, the accent tag videos that we are looking at have taken 1.0 research tools and transformed them for 2.0 engagement and inquiry.

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Kurath’s research resulted in 6 bound volumes of 713 dialect maps of New England. You can’t get much more 1.0 than this.

Some variationist sociolinguistic research methods later worked by eliciting the telling of emotionally charged stories from participants as a

Fast-forwarding to Vaux’s 2000 Harvard Dialect Survey, the idea of an authentic way of speaking persists, for which it asks participants to “[answer] each question with

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The parameters of the dialect survey are not quite as constrained in the accent tag format, nor is there a trained researcher

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As can be deduced from the introductions to their videos, neither of them claims to be an expert about what exactly the Phila

The well-known New York Times dialect survey generated minimal citizen sociolinguistic input compared to the some 300,000 accent tag and accent challenge v

The accent tag/challenge videos by two YouTubers from Philadelphia, with usernames LifeTracking and

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Autobiographical info about the informants

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An analysis of fourteen Philadelphia accent tag videos shows that the most commented-on lexical item was the word “water”, also

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It is possible that a term which is meaningless to the researcher is a major point of interest in the comments section, or vi

These speech acts containing emblematic features subsequently circulate widely among people who are likely to creatively repr

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The importance of social salience in citizen sociolinguistic analysis

Urban Dictionary (launched in 1999) is a Web 2.0 site of citizen knowledge and creativity (part dictionary, part encyclopedia) that goes beyon

Far from being a neutral definition, the popularity of the first entry (Fig. 1) nonetheless indicates that it is the most soc

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Citizen Sociolinguistic Work in Virtual Linguistic Landscapes

Operating on a largely online platform, citizen sociolinguists use a variety of modes of expression in order to communicate,

As citizen sociolinguists generate such questions and as they piece together data that might lead to some answers, more (rele

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Citizen corpus analysis

Another telling source of information about public consciousness, private thoughts, and citizen sociolinguistic wonderings ab

These results are, in theory, partially representative of what’s “out there” on the Internet and what is being searched for o

Something to address regarding the point of doing citizen sociolinguistic research: In

all research, from the most qualitative to the most quantitative, we (as trained

linguists, sociolinguists, applied linguists, or linguistic anthropologists) run the risk of

collecting, and then analyzing, data through biased lenses. Then, too often, we report

this data to colleagues who either think the same way as we do or who at least operate

within the same paradigm.

Citizen sociolinguists won’t refer to vowel charts or spectrograms as being the last

word in their ways of understanding the world of language around them, and the

hypotheses that they form about language are likely to have developed from

interactions with a far more linguistically and intellectually diverse population of

people (family, teachers, friends, neighbors, people they met on vacation, people on

YouTube, people on TV, etc.) than the average researcher would encounter when

doing fieldwork. Furthermore, the stances that they take toward particular language

varieties, stylistic elements, and the people who speak them are all forces which push

up against the citizen sociolinguist’s own linguistic identity development, and which

therefore help shape it. Now more than ever,

geographic/socioeconomic/ethnic/racial/native/nonnative categories do not suffice as

means of drawing clean boundaries around a group of individuals with diverse

experiences with language.

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This work is not simply having students explore things that sociolinguists have already discovered (eg

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From Labov (1972): “Some Principles of Linguistic Methodology”:

… [M]ethodological self-criticism leads to a continual refinement of our methods,

introducing safeguards, reliability tests, cross-checks, typical of the scientific attitude

which can profitably be practised even at the pre-scientific stage where we now find

ourselves [circa 1972]. But such methodological rigor is often justifiably identified

with the dead end of a worn-out approach. By the time the methods are perfected, the

most important work has often been done, and the methodologists continue oblivious

to this fact, proceeding on the hopelessly unrealistic program that everything which

can be described should be. At this point, we find cropping up a second kind of

methodology, a revolutionary criticism which identifies new problems and

fundamental faults in the older methods which cannot be repaired. A new

methodology with new kinds of data is then called for. But if new data has to be

introduced, we usually find that it has been barred for ideological reasons, or not

even been recognized as data at all, and the new methodology must do more than

develop techniques. It must demolish the beliefs and assumptions which ruled its

data out of the picture. Since many of these beliefs are held as a matter of deep

personal conviction, and spring from the well-established habits of a lifetime, this

kind of criticism is seldom accomplished without hard feelings and polemics, until the

old guard gradually dissolves into academic security and scientific limbo. (p. 99)

Agha—Social life of cultural value

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Also, not just an Internet phenomenon. Its how social meaning is generated—Internet speeds it up, makes it possible to empirically track.

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Citizen sociolinguistic research assumes that all speakers have a diverse and

constantly changing communicative repertoire (Rymes, 2010) that they draw upon in

order to navigate the complex nature of everyday life and language use as it is situated

socially. Far from being static texts, performances of “accent” or “dialect” circulate

across YouTube, other social media, and real life, where other social agents can

actively reinforce, negate, or tweak particular renditions of these varieties of speech

through response videos or comments. For this reason, citizen sociolinguistic data is in

the metacommentary and second-order descriptions of language rather than in the

documentation of unmonitored speech as perceived by the researcher. What is iconic

(Irvine & Gal, 2000) or emblematic (Gumperz, 1971) of a given variety or style is

likely what will resurface in other iterations of a performance of that type of speech,

and also what will likely gain more social value, meaning, or relevance the more it is

shared, commented on, or responded to.

Agha—Social life of cultural valueAlso, not just an Internet phenomenon. Its how social meaning is generated—Internet speeds it up, makes it possible to empirically track.

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For fun – This is Vaux’s collection of Accent Tag videos that were based (without his

knowledge) on his Harvard Dialect Survey and circulated (without his intervention)

around the world.

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