In an increasingly mobile world, people frequently resettle in areas away from their home region or country and form new social ties in a diaspora community. The new dynamics of cultural preservation and assimilation to customs of the host region undoubtedly have an impact on language/dialect variation and change. Intergenerational convergence is likely to occur as the host language shifts, over time, from being a second language for the migrants to a first. Similar changes may be found in dialect diaspora communities that begin to shift from using a non-standard or regional dialect to the host dialect or mainstream variety. Some groups may even negotiate multi-group membership by style-shifting between both available dialects. For example, Sharma and Sankaran (2011) find that older second generation British Asians of Indian origin employ both the local British realization of /t/, as well as the Punjabi feature (tretroflexion) as they navigate between both British and Indian social groups in a bi-dialectal way. Younger second generation speakers, however, show assimilation to neither the local British norms nor the heritage variety. Instead, they associate with and linguistically assimilate to a newly-formed local British Asian community norm. It is those generational shifts and divides in language development from diaspora communities that we are particularly interested in for this workshop.
We aim at bringing together research from different speech communities with a particular focus on language variation and change in a modern-day diaspora speech community setting. Our goal is to dissect linguistic practice over several generations in the changing social conditions of a transnational community. We hope to better understand the dynamic pattern of migration and settlement, dialect formation, family and peer influences, transnationalism and social change through the study of linguistic change. We hope to discuss research results established from sociolinguistic, ethnographic, as well as quantitative variationist research methods. The focus will be put on naturalistic communities rather than teaching situations.
The selected keynote speakers provide extensive knowledge and research experience in the theme of the workshop. Prof. Devyani Sharma is an expert in research on dialect change in contact situations and is currently the principal investigator for a project researching dialect style and development in a diasporic community within families of Indian origin in London. Not only is she an expert in the well-established research methods used in sociolinguistics (fieldwork, sociolinguistic interviews, qualitative language analysis), but she also has experience in the quantitative analysis of language data. Prof. Rob Podesva will bring an additional aspect to the theme of the workshop that is of particular interest to the organizers. In his work, he focuses on phonetic variation and its social significance. In his research on voices of California, he analyses speech in under-researched regions of the state that may show individual patterns or assimilation to the larger cities of California. Finally, Prof. Naomi Nagy focuses on yet another important aspect of the workshop theme, as she is interested in language variation and change found in the heritage language rather than the host language. With the input of several experienced keynote speakers working alongside junior researchers, we expect a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge in the field of sociolinguistics.
Reference
Sharma, D., & Sankaran, L. (2011). Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift: Gradual change in London Asian speech. Language Variation and Change, 23(3), 399-428. doi: 10.1017/S0954394511000159
