Gareth RobertsDo any of my sociolinguist friends have thoughts on ways a smart 10th-grader (a friend's son) could get involved in learning about language variation and change? Any projects he could get involved with? Any ongoing citizen science opportunities? Thanks!
Especially US-based things, as he's in California.
DanC@garicgymro there's a brilliant MOOC from Uni of York. Would really recommend this https://www.york.ac.uk/language/undergraduate/mooc/
@garicgymro but I'd also recommend the Manchester Voices project (Manchester Met) and the Dialect and Heritage project (Leeds Uni).
Duck Marshall 🚲@garicgymro point him at A Way With Words radio show at waywordradio.org which is really fantastic if he's interested in etymologies!
mostaleoht@garicgymro OK, bullcrapping as a non-professional: pick a game with a big following, do corpus analysis on in-group texts about this game (reddit?). Something like Factorio, Hollow Knight, some multiplayer shooter - anything with a unique slang. Go in the past, find the origin, ngram-like curves. Ideally, find words that fell out of use after a few months.
@garicgymro Similar, but more obvious, pick some hot new spellings, like rizz, compare and contrast with idk yeet. A 10th grader should have at least some 2-3 years of observations under their belt now.
@garicgymro If they follow youtubers / twitch people, compare the phonetics of their speech now and some 5 years ago. Are there any interesting changes? Do people tend to move together, or are paths very different? Do they converge? Or do they build a brand?
(I'm thinking of people like Dunkey who really went through 2-3 accent phases in the course of their career, but I suspect it's a more broad phenomenon)
@garicgymro Lazy project: interview all their friends, find words that only exist (or are unusually common) in their family-lect. Interview parents of their classmates, asking if they retained in their "internal adult talk" any cute words that their now-adult(ish) kids mispronounced as babies. I bet almost any family / parent has these little oddities that parents keep using even when their kids move away and turn 30...
@garicgymro Another obvious project for the US, to work with bilinguals / immigrants. Interview people on what English words they bring in to their non-English language. Create lists, find commonalities. Maybe do sociology of folk linguistics by asking them about their vision of why these words, and not some others, migrate from English back to the other language.
@garicgymro I don't know much about California, but maybe run a study on uptalk and/or vocal fry among their peer group, just because there were some studies on these topics, and the studies are already a bit dated, meaning that the community might have moved on. Do people have less uptalk now? Or is it normalized? What about vocal fry? Any stratification by age?
@mostaleoht Thanks! Though I get the impression he's more looking for existing resources/projects than self-led project ideas.
@mostaleoht though something like a book called "How to do sociolinguistics projects from your kitchen" would be an awesome suggestion. If that doesn't exist, someone should write one!
@garicgymro Omg, would you write one? ;) I'd read one!!
@garicgymro Yeah, it makes sense... Although with some guidance, one could potentially learn more from a project, science-fair-style, than from an existing resource... Watch crash course linguistics, watch 2-3 college-level lectures on linguistic variation, get 🤯 by the fact that "incorrect language" isn't incorrect, and then embark on a personal journey!
@garicgymro Or is it precisely, what you are looking for; a collection of good youtube videos? ;)
Aaron Earned An Iron Urn (Baltimore Accent) (@dooleyfunny)
@garicgymro I have my little list from when I homeschooled my kids during covid, if it helps... Although I'm sure there are dozens of cool resources that appeared since then ; the pandemics was a real catalyst for cool online resources!
https://github.com/khakhalin/Teaching/blob/master/Homeschooling/linguistics.md
