Howdy, y’all!
April certainly was a busy month here at the San Diego Project (the research team behind the San Diego Speaks! website) — so busy that we seemed to have missed an update or two! Well, as always, we recorded some new participants, coded some linguistic stuff, analyzed some data. But the real excitement has been with the on-going development of the website. With all the new stuff we’ve uploaded and the changes we’ve made, now would be a great time to have a look around the site! Start off by meeting our team— even though the end of May marks the end of the semester and the roster is sure to change soon enough. And congratulations to Yoojin Kang– she completed her MA thesis this semester and will soon be starting a full-time research position in Korea!
After checking the research team out, head over to our communities page to see what real, live San Diegans sound like. This page is the heart of the San Diego Speaks! website– we’ve got a new navigable map with links to audio and video from some of our participants (not all, though! we’re still working it!)– next we’ll be adding clips of performances of “Danny the Dolphin” and linguistic descriptions of what we think is happening with language variation in San Diego. We’ve also got a very rough break-down of how we’re using a “fuzzy-set” of ethnic and gender categories to try and see what social factors might have an impact on language use– we’ve tried to explain our basic methods on the Learn More page, but these categories are by no means absolute, nor are they the only way to consider how people, language, and society interact. As with everything in research, our methods are a work in progress– so how does your experience with people in San Diego (or in other parts of the “Southwest”) match up with our categories? Tell us all about it ….
… over on our Guestbook! What do you think of when you think of “language” in San Diego? Do San Diegans have they’re own way of talking? Tell us! This map above isn’t ours– it’s from Joshua Katz at NC State, based on word done by Bert Vaux at Harvard. This method ranks how similarly people in San Diego speak compared to other parts of the US. Take the quiz here and tell us all about your results in our guestbook! What do you think is more important for language– a sense of the words and sounds of a “dialect” or a sense of the different ways communities use language? Let us know! And you can even record a greeting for us!
Anyway… enjoy the site! Summer is almost here! Huzzah!
-dsb