Ep. 36: The Social Science of Dialects with Dr. Christine Mallinson

12:14AM Feb 28, 2023

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Campus Connections

Dr. Christine Mallinson

Alex Andrews

Keywords:

baltimore

accent

dialects

language

students

linguistic

linguists

hear

umbc

social

linguistic features

question

patterns

varieties

differences

called

people

podcast

grew

cs3

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

When I first moved to North Carolina as an impressionable, 11 year old, I swiftly realized that there would be a period of cultural transition. Not only were the kids in my neighborhood far more interested in things like college basketball and warm weather hobbies like surfing and swimming than I was, but I sometimes found that the other kids could instantly identify me as someone apart whenever I opened my mouth. I mean, they asked questions that I couldn't always answer like, who do you pull for? A question that normally had only three possible answers that I didn't know about: UNC, Duke, or NC State. But even when they asked me more conventional questions like hey, what's your favorite Pokemon? I would often get sideways glances when I would respond to the tune of "oh, Pikachu don't you know." And by the time I turned 12, those long Minnesotan vows had been remodeled into something more appropriate for the suddenly muddled dialect of Raleigh, where kids from the midwest and the northeast are moving at a record pace.

You know, my dialect story is a fairly innocuous one, but it signals something vital that I remember it so clearly. Dialects are vital outward aspects of our social selves. But where did they come from? And how can social science, most notably sociology, help us understand their consequences? To unpack these questions, I'm delighted to bring you my recent conversation with Dr. Christine Mallinson, Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture at UMBC, affiliate professor of Gender and Women's Studies, and Special Assistant for Research and Creative Achievement in the Office for the Vice President of Research. And you know, not only is Dr. Mallinson an accomplished researcher who has published several important books on dialects and language, she's also the director of our very own Center for Social Science Scholarship, the sponsor of this podcast. So it's long overdue for Dr. Mallinson to appear on this show, and that's why I'd like to bring you our recent interview right now.

Today, I am really delighted to welcome Dr. Christine Mallinson, who is not only our featured guest for today's episode, but also the director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. Dr. Mallinson, first of all, thank you for all of your great support of the podcast, we're super grateful that we're able to do this under the aegis of CS3. But also thank you so much for being here as well.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, in a way, it's kind of a long time coming, right. So it's, I'm really grateful that we have you today. And, of course, to talk about some of the fascinating work that you're doing on dialects, on accents, on language features, how those things differ, where they come from. There's so much that I want to jump into with this because I think it's a topic that you know, everyone can relate to, right? We all have this notion, we hear different dialects, different accents in film and television. It's a it's a fascinating topic. And you know, I want to start out just asking you a little bit of the broadest kind of possible set of questions about this, which is to ask you where accents even come from, right> How is it that we have these differences in our languages? And why do they tend to evolve that way? And why do we end up having these differences where we can pinpoint, you know, who sounds like what and be able to associate them with various areas or various, even other social descriptors?

Such a great question. And, you know, thanks again for having me, because this is one of my favorite topics to talk about. As my students know, I could I could go on for hours, and you're quite right. People really enjoy talking about language. Everybody uses language. It's one of the things that defines us about being human. And we are incredibly sensitive to a social differentiation of language as as humans. Even as a young kid, what got me interested in this was that I had, I grew up in in the US South in North Carolina, where there was a very strong regional accent. And my parents were not from that area. They were from New York and Pennsylvania. So I heard my dad say things like "warsh" and I heard my friends say things like "y'all." Meanwhile, I had grandparents who were immigrants from Germany and so I heard all of their different linguistic features. I also heard them use language in ways that would be called, you know, mistakes by some people who were native English speakers. So I grew up with all this sort of swirling personal insight into how language can be a way of opening doors, a way of relating to other people, a sign of affiliation, a sign of culture, a sign of belonging, a sign of identity, and also sometimes a barrier to opportunity. A feature that other people might have implicit or explicit bias about. So that is what led me to trying to study language not just from the perspective of linguistics, but also from sociology. So I, this is how I sort of came to this question of the social differentiation of language, I knew somehow that it had to do with who we are, where we come from, the groups we associate with, right, and our and our backgrounds. So I pursued studying linguistics and sociology simultaneously, because I knew,and anthropology as well, because I knew that there were these there must be, there had to be some social factors that explain how we get the different ways that that we sound. And that is, in fact, the case. So the first thing to really emphasize here is that variation in language is completely normal, completely natural. Language is always changing. And that, I tell my students, if there's one thing that I want to emphasize is that linguistic variations or linguistic differences are not deficits. They're simply variations, right? Whether we say "pop" or "soda," we may feel some type of way right about that, but intrinsically, there is no difference. It's simply a matter of who you are, where you come from, where you grew up, who you affiliate with. And so that's, that can help us explain looking at social group differences, that can explain part of why we talk the way that we do, we tend to sound like our peers in the place that we grew up in. So one of the things that that linguists like to say is, we tend to sound like our peers, not our parents, because by the time you get to the age of about my daughter's age right now, 10 ish, 11 ish, you see that kids are very oriented to accommodating to the ways that their peers talk, but it even goes beyond that. So I was a kid who grew up in North Carolina, and you may not hear it now when you hear my, my voice, but I had a pretty strong accent as a kid especially. And I grew up to parents who did not have that accent. So we absorbed the language of the communities around us. Now, where did those differences come from? Well, that's where we get into things like history, settlement patterns, right, groups that, you know, came to areas of North Carolina, or Baltimore, or different groups that settled the urban northeast versus the south. The reason that Charleston, the Charleston, South Carolina has a bit of that dropped "R"is because of the strong concentration of folks from England and Great Britain who settled in that area. Same for other parts of the country like Boston. When you get out west accent seem to fade a little bit, and that's because the migration and settlement patterns, right, were not so concentrated there. So especially, you know, west of, you know, sort of the you know, Mississippi River, Rockies, the further you get away from the dense urban settlement patterns, the more diffuse, you might get in terms of the the history of the dialects and varieties and regionalisms that have emerged. Now, at the same time, it's not just historical, because language is always changing, right to get back to that principle. So there are groups that are innovating language at the same time. This is why even though you know, accents, the the accents of the of the east coast may have diffused a bit by the time, the time they got to the west coast, it doesn't mean that we don't see variation on the west coast because new innovations are happening. "Hella" meaning "really" and other you know, variations that folks might pick up on who know those areas well, came about because people are creative, people are dynamic, and there's you know, lingo and you know cultural insight or terms that grow within communities. In the African American community, for instance, words like "jazz" and "cool" that may have emerged out of musical traditions, African influenced language patterns, all of these things you can sort of see echoes of in contemporary speech, and at the same time, there's innovations in contemporary speech. So language is not only, language can be a mirror to our past, but it is not only a mirror to our past, it's also a mirror to our present. So there's also in addition to history and and, you know, settlement patterns, and immigration patterns, migration patterns, there's also sociological factors like residential segregation that helped maintain some of the speech patterns that we have. So, you know, the neighborhoods that we live in, who we associate with, which are often driven in part by choice but in part not by choice, especially historically, have helped contribute to concretizing some of those patterns as well. So that is a brief introduction to some of the sociological factors that are behind some of the linguistic patterns that we see.

Oh, wow, amazing summary, first of all, and so much to think about and chew on. And, at the same time, also something that I at least can relate to so, so deeply, and so personally. Our backstories are surprisingly similar, which is quite interesting, right? So I grew up at least for my high school and middle school years in North Carolina, as well. I came from Minneapolis, Minnesota, though, which is where I was born. And so we were very mixed up in terms of the linguistic features that we had acquired from, you know, the Minnesotans, right, and then brought to North Carolina. And also another parallel here, interestingly, is that my, my grandmother and grandfather were from England. And so they, right, they had actually a totally different, you know, manner of speaking and obviously, accent. That was also something that we had as a comparative case, I guess, if you will, from in our formation or development. And my parents had spent most of their lives living up in, you know, upstate New York and Connecticut. And so it kind of, it's amazing to think about so many people, not just you and me, but so many people have these kinds of, you know, histories of movement across space, and they pick up linguistic features, and it all kind of gets jumbled together, and you can imagine how that produces sometimes these, you know, sort of homogenization, as you're describing as people emigrated from place to place. But at the same time, you know, I think about sometimes my grandmother would be telling me something as a small kid, and I would really struggle to understand what the heck she was talking about, right? And I started to realize, oh, my gosh, maybe she really is, to some extent speaking in an entirely different language. And I wanted to ask you also, you know, obviously, we've heard so much about the various, you know, factors, sociological factors that go into creating differences across, you know, linguistic patterns, but at what point do those differences grow to the point where they're no longer considered just dialects, they're no longer considered accents. At what point are we really talking about a new language emerging? And does that happen?

This is such a great question, and there is no one clear and true answer. The one one way to think about it is in the words of a famous linguist, Uriel Weinreich. He put it as "a language is simply a dialect with an army and a navy." (Anson: Oh, wow). As a political scientist, you'll appreciate that we're getting that here, Right? Mind blown!

My mind is reeling.

What he's getting at here is that these distinctions are sociopolitical distinctions. They are not hard and fast linguistic distinctions. Now we could see for instance that let's say Mandarin Chinese and American English are different languages, right? But it is not so crystal clear the difference, say between Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, right? We know that these are widely considered dialects because of the socio political context of China. However, to speakers of those different so-called dialects, they are not always what linguists will call mutually intelligible, which means easily understood by speakers of each. By contrast, there are several Scandinavian languages that are fairly mutually intelligible, but that are considered different languages simply because they have the political status to be so. Now, interestingly, in the United States, our listeners may or may not realize that we do not have a declared official language in the US, right? We may have what is considered a de facto official language of English, meaning more or less, everybody uses English to get around and especially to accomplish things like schooling and, you know, bureaucratic affairs.

Road signs, all that stuff.

Road signs, yeah, exactly, exactly. But you know, increasingly in airports, in, at the DMV, we see multiple languages. In hospitals. I mean, you know, just walk into Johns Hopkins Hospital, you'll see signs in 12 or 15 different languages. And you'll increasingly see bilingual signs in English and Spanish. The US always has been a multi lingual country and I think we're increasingly because of migration, immigration, settlement patterns and so on, population growth. We are increasingly a multilingual society. In addition, I would point out too that there are so many varieties and this is again a somewhat fuzzy distinction almost like a you know it when you hear it type distinction between dialects. We can pretty much, you know, maybe pinpoint that a southern accent or dialect sounds different, like you said from Minnesota, right? There are certain patterns that are very different than Minnesota versus that "o" of the South, and incidentally, the "O" of Baltimore, right? We can hear these differences. But where's the dividing line? Well, there's a branch of linguistics called dialectology, that tries to pinpoint some of those dialect boundaries on maps. Again, you know, it is somewhat doable and, and at the same time, somewhat fuzzy. So, for instance, African American varieties, African American accents are not bounded by region, and in many ways are unique to regional locations, but also share many differences as well across regions. So it's not quite as easily determinable, as we might think. The the way to think about it to go back to that famous quote is, who gets to decide whose language is important? Who gets to decide whose language is supported in schools, or in the courtroom? Who gets to decide whose language to make fun of? Who gets to decide whose language is prestigious? So a British accent might sound prestigious to those of us in the US. And we may not fully understand or appreciate all of the different accents that there are in the UK, and the way that a lot of those are mediated by things like social class and bias that they may understand there, that we may not understand here. And same goes for for accents, and varieties and dialects of any language. There are social distinctions there. So to go back to sociology, I truly believe we can't understand language, . Unless we understand human behavior, and psychology and culture, and all of all of those things that make us who we are.

Fascinating, fascinating insights, I'm just totally struck by this notion that, you know, even across history, right, we see various governments, various regimes taking different attitudes, even towards language. I mean, I have some experience in in the French context, right, in thinking about the sort of extreme measures that many sort of the absolutist rulers of France went to homogenized, French or even going to all these various regions, that at one point, were independent, you know, many hundreds of years prior, and then comparing that to certain other other kinds of languages. Like I mean, you know, if you go to Switzerland versus parts of Germany, right, you know, German is gonna sound very different. Whereas in France, right within the exact good NATO, they exhibit on the sort of six, six cornered main main region of France, right, you'd see pretty homogenous linguistic features. So yeah, yeah. The political consequences are massive, right. But maybe you want to take us away from from France and Germany and Switzerland back to back to Baltimore, because we've talked about some of the linguistic features of Baltimore specifically. And as a relative newcomer to the region, I've only been here what for seven or eight years now, I guess that's, that's now a little longer than, than just arriving. But I've really remarked that how interesting and how sometimes difficult to emulate or difficult to encapsulate those sorts of Baltimore accent is, but as you're describing the sociology of these accents and their development, it strikes me that, you know, there really isn't just one Baltimore accent as their right. How is it possible that in one geographic space, you have such variety of linguistic features?

I love this question, because it gets to my my one key talking point that I love to bring up about Baltimore, is that there are many accents and varieties of Baltimore, there is no one true Baltimore accent. And the reason I say that is because sometimes Baltimore is characterized as having the Baltimore accent. And by what what is usually meant by that in the in, in, you know, various media outlets is the Hon accent, that white working class accent that was popularized in John Waters films, super important to Baltimore history, right? But it is in no way shape, or form, the Baltimore accent, it cannot be considered the only Baltimore accent or variety. And it isn't. If you go downtown to the harbor, you'll hear lots of different varieties, lots of different languages. So and that is because Baltimore is a metropolitan area with lots of historical patterns of residential in migration, and also residential segregation that for many, many years, I mean, there were active redlining policies keeping African Americans in certain neighborhoods, Jewish populations out out of those white suburbs, and that concentrated we might say, the linguistic patterns of those groups in those areas. At the same time, Baltimore has seen tremendous in migration, right especially from Latinx groups, but from all over Spanish speaking countries and often bringing their indigenous languages with them as well. There's many contingencies from from elsewhere in the globe, especially the Philippines. And so Baltimore really is a cosmopolitan place these days. At the same time, Baltimore has a lot of linguistic pride in who we are. And the place where you can really hear that is that the O's game where during the national anthem, everyone says, "O!" in the ""oh say can you see," and that is because the feature that what linguists will call a fronted O, because it's produced very far in the front of your mouth. "O," you can say it and try it out. That fronted O is very canonical, it has become what linguists call indexical of Baltimore speech. It's it is characteristic, but we've also assigned it characteristic meaning, social meaning as a marker. So when everybody says, "O" what we're saying is, we all know what that means, we're all Baltimoreans. It feels very nice to pull us all together. Now, in reality, not everyone in Baltimore is going to share that linguistic feature, right? There are many patterns in Baltimore, and one of the focuses of my own research has been to demonstrate the wide variation and the the, the fantastic dynamism, linguistic dynamism of our city, where you can hear all of these dialects, varieties, accents, languages, just from a single walk around the Harbor, from visiting different neighborhoods. Greektown, Highland town, you know, Pikesville, Sandtown- Winchester, I mean, we have all these wonderful neighborhoods. When I moved to Baltimore, I was told that Baltimore was the city of neighborhoods. And it truly is, and I think what you can experience when you go and you visit the different neighborhoods is a little bit of that linguistic history. And also a little bit of that current linguistic innovation and contemporary language that we hear that makes Baltimore together such a fascinating, a linguistically fascinating, place to be. And also a way for us to see the fact that language reflects who we are, and who we are is a dynamic, diverse group of people who live here. And language really reflects that in Baltimore.

Wow. So on the on the topic of this research that you're talking about, so I read a little bit about some research that you actually conducted with some of your students on this topic. So tell me a little more about this project. So how did this come about? What kinds of methods did you use to track down these various Baltimore accents, plural?

So I really loved doing these projects with my students, because many of my students were living in Baltimore, grew up in Baltimore, had lots of insights into Baltimore. And at the same time, other students who didn't were excited to, you know, roll up our sleeves and get in and figure out, you know, what we could, what we could find out about language in this city. So I've had a couple of different iterations of a graduate socio linguistics seminar that I teach. And we have focused on Baltimore for several years now. And in that class, we have done various different projects, and I'll talk just about a couple of them. One of those projects was that we conducted interviews in different neighborhoods in Baltimore, and we pulled those interviews together with interviews with experts, with linguists, and sometimes cultural studies experts, and we pulled them together into podcast episodes. And we had a podcast about the hon dialect, the hon accent in Baltimore. We had a podcast about the African American, Black Baltimorese you might call it. African American varieties in Baltimore, that was conducted by my former student Inte'a Deshields, who is a fourth generation black Baltimorean, and was able to interview some of her family members. And we did a podcast on multilingualism, in and around Baltimore. And all of these podcasts, all of the interviews were done by the students. All of the expert interviews were done by the students. They created the narrative with the podcasts, and we've been able to then use those in high school classes, they're posted online, they're at Baltimorelanguage.com, use them in other classes so that students can listen to these episodes as a way to learn about these accents, varieties, dialects where you can also hear them in use, because it's not quite the same to just read about pronunciations. It's really good to be able to hear them, right. One of the other projects that we did as a result was we did a project where we learned how to edit Wikipedia pages, and we edited the page for Baltimore accent. I can already imagine that your listeners are you know, seeing where I'm gonna go with this because we made very sure that the page did not talk about one singular Baltimore accent. We edited it to refer to all of the many varieties and how we got here in Baltimore. What, what does the different variation look like? What social groups can we sort of observe as having these different language patterns? And so if you go to the Baltimore accent Wikipedia page, you will see our students' handiwork there. It was back in 2017 when they did this, this editing, and much of what they are citing includes some of the work that my students have done over the years in collecting interviews and doing research in Baltimore. So we're really contributing to the literature. There's very, surprisingly very little sociolinguistic work on Baltimore, which is surprising because there's a ton of work that had been done in Philadelphia, a ton of work that had been done in New York City, for instance, even Washington, DC to an extent, and very little on Baltimore and it's such a fascinating tapestry that we really wanted to contribute to that literature and our students did. The the last project that I want to tell you about is that in one of one of the iterations of this class one year, we produced a short video called Voices of UMBC, where the students interviewed other students on campus about what language means to them, how they identify linguistically, and we compiled this into a short, five minute film. The students did everything, including participating in some of the interviews themselves as as the interviewee not just the interviewer. And we compiled those into a video called Voices of UMBC and that is also on the Baltimorelanguage homepage. And the students -- what did the students get out of this? Well, they learned the traditional socio linguistic methods of interviewing and, you know, analyzed linguistic analysis, analyzing what they what they learned, and they also used anthropological methods of ethnographic research, observing in communities ,working with participants in these communities. They also learned the skills of scholarly communication and public engagement, where they're figuring out how can we communicate the social scientific insights broadly? And how can we do that in a way that honors the diversity within the community that is appealing for community members to listen to, and to learn about? And so the website that I have, Baltimorelanguage.com, was also set up as a way to not only house those projects, but also give the students a place where we can all sort of communicate from that platform as a way to reach the public. And I mean, I think I've got something like more than 30 or 40,000 hits on that website where people are, you know, finding it. And it has led to media outreach in the Baltimore Sun, including a multimedia feature on African American varieties in Baltimore, including a museum exhibit where we, a student of mine and I presented at a table as part of a museum exhibit that featured Tallahassee Coates, about words for for the future, I think is what we, what it was called. And all of these things I'm so proud of because the students really got in there themselves, rolled up their sleeves, and were able to do this work in a way that I think they really learned from, and hopefully are contributing to this body of knowledge that tells other people about who we are in Baltimore and all our diversity.

Well, first of all, you mentioned that you have, you know, several, you know, dozens of 1000s of hits on this, on this website, I can anticipate maybe having a few more, because we'll definitely be dropping those links in the show notes so that interested listeners can check that stuff out and see a little more of the detail of the incredible work that you're doing with your students. I would also say that maybe you'll have a few more interested students who want to learn a little bit more about Dialectology, and about accents and all this fantastic work that you're doing and teaching in the classroom at various levels. So yeah, I really hope that our listeners appreciate as much as I do the incredible work that you're doing in these various projects. And yeah, I mean, it's great to think that Baltimore's getting that representation in terms of, into the study of these of these accents, because it seems to me that this is a very interesting case, from the perspective of, of this field of study, just just having been acquainted and getting to know the city and its eccentricities and its features, and its diversity, as you said. I think that's, that's an incredible, incredible project. And so speaking of those students, and the students that will hopefully be joining your classes in the near future to learn more about this stuff, I wanted to ask you, if you wouldn't mind just giving us a little bit of advice perhaps for some students who might be thinking about going pro in the social sciences. Maybe they're galvanized by this, they've had similar experiences to the ones that you related at the top of the episode and they say, I want to study, I want to study linguistics. I want to study language. What advice would you give to students who want to do this in the future?

This is such a good question because As for me, it really speaks to how important it is, I think to study something from multiple angles, we have disciplinary areas in the social sciences, right? You might be a political scientist, you might be a linguist, you might be, you know, a geographer, but I would emphasize I've had a very interdisciplinary career. And I would emphasize not everybody has to do interdisciplinary work, but I think everyone benefits from thinking about a case, a problem, a challenge, a scenario from multiple angles. And I think the best way to do that is by learning the different frames that different disciplines can contribute. So I somewhat intuitively knew this from my lived experience as a kid growing up with lots of linguistic diversity around me that I needed to know that social piece, and I think that it's not that I was particularly insightful, I think it was that I was really surrounded with with things that piqued my interest. And I would tell students, follow that guiding star. If you feel called to do you know to study something in a new way, or to feel that you really need to gather lots of information from multiple angles to do the research or the work or the learning that you want to do. I think that is the way to go. And I think the one of the really good ways to go about that are to find professors and mentors and community folks who can help support you in that. Someone who is not going to say, "well, that's not linguistics," or "well, that's not sociology.", Find somebody who says, "I love that you're interested in multiple things,. What insights can we learn from all of these ways of, you know, looking, looking at this problem, or this situation or scenario." So I encourage students to just learn everything that you possibly can learn that relates to your topic. And if you're like me, you'll find everything interesting, and eventually find ways that they all relate. And I just, you know, I welcome any student who wants to get in touch with me about ways to bring in a study of language into whatever they're studying, or bring that interest in the study of language more broadly to the social sciences. So I would I would love for students listening to this to reach out to me at any point.

Awesome, what fitting advice from the director of CS3, obviously, which is also an institution that is sort of dedicated to bridging these gaps and, and bringing social scientists together. And I want to thank you so much also for coming on the show and for you know, bringing your social scientific insights to this audience, and to me, I learned I learned a lot as well. And I'm sure that the listeners did, did too. So thank you again, so much. And thank you for your ongoing support of the podcast.

This, it's, it's my favorite podcast, so thank you so much for hosting it.

(Campus connections, campus connections, campus connections, campus connections, campus connections).

Now it's time for Campus Connections. The part of the podcast where we connect today's featured interview to another work happening at UMBC. Our intern Alex has done his research and has found yet another fascinating study from our faculty to share with us today. Take it away, Alex.

Thanks, Dr. Anson. This installment of Campus Connections, we'll be discussing a chapter from "Reconceptualizing the Role of Critical Dialogue in American Classrooms" called "Empowering African American Student Voices in College." This chapter was written in part by Dr. Mallinson, and while normally I don't do our Campus Connection on our featured guest, I really enjoyed her work, and I thought it would make a great Connection. The chapter discusses the differences in attention and respect towards the voices of African American students in higher education. After interviews were conducted with several African American students from both west coast and east coast institutions, there was a common theme found. African American students frequently faced linguist bias in higher education environments. These firsthand accounts really highlight the importance of linguistics research. But that's all for this Campus Connection. Back to you, Dr. Anson.

Thanks, as always, Alex, for filling us in. And thanks to you for tuning in today to hear about the social science of dialects. Until next time, keep questioning y'all.

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our Associate Director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Alex Andrews. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at social science.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3 events. Until next time, keep questioning.