The language of the Caribbean diaspora: identity-based variation in online and face-to-face contexts
Lars Hinrichs
(Department of English
UT Austin)
This talk presents completed as well as ongoing research from my work on
Jamaican e-mail and speech recordings that I obtained during fieldwork among
Jamaicans in Toronto this year. In this heavily data-driven research, I combine
qualitative and quantitative approaches in the attempt to model the ways in which
speakers combine different varieties of English to create meaning in discourse.
In particular, I consider the social meaning of nonstandard orthography, the
meanings of codeswitching between English and Jamaican Creole in web-based
communication, and the use of standard English and Creole phonology in informal
speech.
Jamaican immigrants to North America have a uniquely rich array of English
or English-based linguistic codes at their disposal. Speakers deploy these as
stylistic resources in meaningful contrast to each other. Research into the
language of Anglophone Caribbeans in the North American diaspora is a unique
opportunity to pursue questions at the center of current sociolinguistic debate:
how do individuals employ different linguistic resources in their discursive
strategies of identity construction? How can we model a multicodal setting in a
way that helps us understand the interface between individual usage, communities
of practice, and the speech community? What are the roles of variationist and
'Third Wave' sociolinguistics in this agenda?
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