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Purpose:This study examined the race identification of Southern American English speakers from two geographically distant regions in North Carolina. The purpose of this work is to explore how talkers' self-identified race, talker dialect region, and acoustic speech variables contribute to listener categorization of talker races. Method:Two groups of listeners heard a series of /h/–vowel–/d/ (/hVd/) words produced by Black and White talkers from East and West North Carolina, respectively. Results:Both Southern (North Carolina) and Midland (Indiana) listeners accurately categorized the race of all speakers with greater-than-chance accuracy; however, Western North Carolina Black talkers were categorized with the lowest accuracy, just above chance. Conclusions:The results suggest that similarities in the speech production patterns of West North Carolina Black and White talkers affect the racial categorization of Black, but not White talkers. The results are discussed with respect to the acoustic spectral features of the voices present in the sample population. 

Abstract We analyze Asian American comedian Ali Wong's linguistic and embodied performance in her 2016 stand‐up special,Baby Cobra, through a genre‐specific lens to investigate how stand‐up comedy's performance conventions shape her comedic persona. We argue that Wong uses communicative forms indexically associated with Blackness to perform racialized and gendered figures of personhood, including the white “Karen,” “sassy Black woman,” and “Asian grandmother.” This performance allows Wong to challenge hegemonic whiteness and dominant racializations of Asian women but relies on signs potentially interpreted as reproducing anti‐Black ideologies. We situate Wong as an individual performer, “Asian American” as an ethnoracial category vis‐à‐vis Blackness, and the linguistic practices of Asian and Black American communities within racial capitalist histories that have shaped contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies. Rather than approach language varieties and racialized groups as necessarily distinct, we treat them as relational—as necessarily intimately and historically connected. 

Abstract Though Creole nominal systems have been intensely researched, in-context, corpus-based examinations are uncommon, and there are Creole languages whose noun phrases remain understudied. I use a corpus of conversational data and a pattern-building task designed to elicit demonstrative and definite noun phrases, exophoric reference, and co-speech pointing gestures to explore the noun phrase in Kwéyòl Donmnik, an endangered, understudied French lexifier Creole. I focus on noun phrases that are bare, marked by the post-nominal determiners definitela‘the’ or demonstrativesa-la‘this/that’, or accompanied by the pre-nominal indefinite determineryon‘a(n)’. Results pinpoint the readings conveyed by each noun phrase type, identify the word categories of their nouns, and address similarities in usage between definitelaand demonstrativesa-la. 

Purpose:The presented work was invited following the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association SIG 19 Virtual Talk “Speech Science in Diverse Populations” that occurred on September 2, 2021. The purpose of this article was to introduce the historical and theoretical frameworks of gender and race from a decidedly North American (United States) perspective to an audience that may be less familiar with those topics as they relate to the practice of communication sciences and disorders. Race and gender are huge topics. Entire fields of study and lifetimes of work are dedicated to understanding these constructs. Therefore, it is hoped that this brief review of race and gender will prompt the reader to evaluate how the two constructs are used to categorize people and whether being a member of a marginalized or a minoritized group affects the person's access to or use of intervention services. A critical theoretical discussion of race and gender is beyond the scope of this text. In this limited space, this work presents an overview of current and historical discussions of gender and race and a challenge to the reader to accept that their perspective is indebted to a specific belief system. In the United States, that belief system often evaluates human differences into binary categories on a weighted continuum. Speech-language professionals often use that continuum to identify and measure difference into either acceptable variation or disorder. Conclusions:The profession of speech-language pathology was established during a time when variation from middle-class White American communication norms was frequently defined as undesirable and sometimes as disordered. The communities and individuals we encounter deserve to be accepted as they are. We must resolve to expect and accept wide variation in human communication without pathologizing its existence, to expand our thinking about disorder in speech and hearing science, and to accept culturally competent communicators as competent communicators. 

Abstract In this essay, we highlight the colonial invention of oppositional and binary categories as a dominant form of social sorting and meaning-making in our society. We understand language as a tool for the construction, maintenance, and analysis of these categories. Through language, these categorizations often render those who sit at the margins illegible. We center the Black woman as the prototypical “other,” her condition being interpreted neither by conventions of race nor gender, and take Black womanhood as the point of departure for a description of the necessary intersecting and variable analyses of social life. We call for an exploration of social life that considers the raciolinguistic intersections of gender, sexuality, and social class as part and parcel of overarching social formations. In this way, we can advocate for a shift in linguistics and in all social sciences that accounts for the mutability of category. We argue that a raciolinguistic perspective allows for a more nuanced investigation of the compounding intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social status that often function to erase Black womanhood. 

In this article, we discuss various public-facing scholarly activities we have engaged in and how these initiatives have reached large audiences to widely spread messages about language and linguistic equity and inclusion. We provide guidance for how to launch, coordinate, and carry out public outreach initiatives and community-engaged research, how to navigate potential pitfalls and position these efforts for success, and how to demonstrate the direct value and relevance of the work. We also offer strategies and advice for other linguists engaging in public outreach endeavors, especially with regard to connecting community-engaged work with teaching and research for maximal impact within the scholarly ecosystem. Community-engaged research and public-facing initiatives are best conceptualized and undertaken in comprehensive, intentional, informed by, and planned in ways that align with best practices in the literature and integrated into the scholarly enterprise. We assert that public-facing work is critical to the relevance and impact of linguistics and higher education. Most importantly, public-facing work that makes insights from research relevant to the public can help advance the broader goal of education for social impact and the public good. 

While writing studies and linguistic scholarship has interrogated race and college writing instruction over the last fifty years, we contend that explicit, actionable, and supportive guidance on giving feedback to Black students’ writing is still needed. Building on the legacy of work visible in theStudents’ Right to Their Own Languageoriginal (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1974) and updated (2006) annotated bibliography, as well as the crucial work done since then, our interdisciplinary team of linguists and writing studies scholars and students constructed the Students’ Right to Their Own Writing website. We describe the research-based design of the website and share evaluations of the website from focus group sessions. Acknowledging the contingent and overburdened nature of the labor force in most writing programs, the focus group participants particularly appreciated the infographics, how-tos and how-not-tos, and samples of feedback. The result is a demonstration of how to actually take up the call to enact Black Linguistic Justice (Baker-Bell et al., “This Ain’t Another Statement”). 

This article examines linguistic variation in relation to the critical social institution and social domain of education, with an emphasis on linguistic inclusion, focusing on the United States. Education is imbued with power dynamics, and language often serves as a gatekeeping mechanism for students from minoritized backgrounds, which helps create, sustain, and perpetuate educational inequalities. Grounded in this context, the article reviews intersecting factors related to linguistic variation that affect student academic performance. Empirical and applied models of effective partnerships among researchers, educators, and students are presented, which provide road maps to advance linguistic inclusion in schools within the broader social movement for equity in education. 

Pragmatic markers (PMs) are multifunctional elements that allow language users to organize and coordinate discourse and to express their attitudes and cognitive states. This study compares the discourse-pragmatic functions and distributional features of four PMs in Kwéyòl Donmnik (konsa ‘so’, èben ‘well’, papa/Bondyé ‘papa/God’, la ‘there’) with those of their etyma in French, Kwéyòl’s lexifier ((ou) comme ça, (eh) ben, bon Dieu, là), and with their counterparts in English, the colonial source language with which it has been in contact for more than two centuries (so, well, oh my God, there). The properties of the Kwéyòl PMs are determined through a corpus analysis and are then compared to descriptions of the French and English PMs in previous studies. Each of the four Kwéyòl PM’s has functions in common with its French etymon and its English counterpart as well as its own unique functions. In addition, English so performs functions in the Kwéyòl data that are unique to Kwéyòl konsa ‘so’, suggesting that so is being integrated into Kwéyòl. This study expands the limited body of work on Kwéyòl and deepens our understanding of language contact and Creole emergence at the discourse-pragmatic level, particularly in cases involving a second, non-lexifier colonial source language.