THURSDAY 26 NOV 4.30-6pm

Sydney Speaks Project

Presented by Catherine Travis & Katrina Hayes (Australian National University and the ARC Centre for Excellence of the Dynamics of Language)

The Sydney Speaks project seeks to document and explore Australian English as spoken in Sydney, considering both contemporary language use and change over time, and taking into account the increasing ethnic and linguistic diversity Sydney has experienced over the past 40 years. This will be done through comparisons of spontaneous speech recorded in the 1970s (based on the Sydney Social Dialect Survey collected by Barbara Horvath) and a comparable contemporary corpus that is currently being collected. In this presentation we introduce the project, and situate it against the background of Sydney’s changing demographics from the 1970s to today.

Sydney Social Dialect Survey

Presented by Barbara Horvath (Sydney University)

In the middle of the 1970s, I arrived at the newly established linguistics department at Sydney University, consisting of just Michael Halliday and me. I set about doing a study of Australian English fresh from the US and armed with all the trappings of a sparkling new paradigm.  I proposed to do a study of Sydney English modelled on Labov's study of New York City.  Reflecting on that study from the distance of some 40 years is instructive.  I will share some tales of data collection and analysis so that people using my collection of Sydney interviews might get a feel for the situational characteristics of the processes involved.  But most important to me, at least, is sharing some of the questions I did not investigate that I hope others will pursue.

Post-seminar drinks at CoEDL to follow

FRIDAY 27 NOV 11.00-12.30pm

Flight from New York: Current developments in New York City English

Presented by Gregory Guy (New York University)

Many features that long characterized New York City English are receding or disappearing in contemporary speech.  Vocalized (r), which in Labov’s 1964 study was nearly categorical in casual style, is now rare for most New Yorkers.  Raised BOUGHT is lowering.  The NYC short-a pattern, with tensing before voiceless fricatives, voiced stops, and front nasals, is giving way to the kind of nasal system that is very common in North America.

Two factors are implicated as likely drivers of these developments: demography and language attitudes.  The ethnolinguistic makeup of the city has changed dramatically in the last half-century.  In today’s population, half speak a language other than English at home, and one-quarter are African American.  The city also has substantial numbers of in-migrants from elsewhere in the US (such as most of the faculty and students at NYU!).  Hence, the New York-born-and-raised white speakers, who were treated in prior dialect research as the focal speakers of NYCE, now form no more than a fifth of the city’s population.  Acquisition and retention of traditional NYCE features is further deterred by the substantial stigma that has long been attached to the NYC dialect.

Lunch at University house to follow; all welcome

Please direct enquiries to: Katrina.Hayes@anu.edu.au (Sydney Speaks Project Manager)