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Speaking Halal in Philadelphia

12/23/2017

by Kyle Martin and Arielle Pinto

Kyle is a senior at Strath Haven High School looking forward to choosing a college major in the coming year. Arielle is a junior at Haverford College, where she is a Philosophy major. Listen to their #LanguageStory here, which includes a contribution from Swarthmore College junior Erick Gutierrez.

Listen: Arabic in Center City.

Arabic is the fastest growing language in the United States. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, “the number of people ages 5 and older who speak Arabic at home has grown by 29% between 2010 and 2014 to 1.1 million speakers, making it the seventh most commonly spoken non-English language in the U.S”[1]. Indeed, the presence of the Arabic language is palpable in the streets of Philadelphia, particularly in Center City, where Halal food trucks adorned with some Arabic signage are widely dispersed.

What began as an attempt to research the semiotic landscape created by these trucks turned into an investigation of the use of the Arabic language in Philadelphia, following an interview with Mr. Amine Helali (an operator of one such truck). From here, we spoke with Professor Benjamin Smith, an Arabic professor at Swarthmore College. We asked them questions about the languages they use in different contexts, and they told us about what they gathered from their own experiences. From both of these interviews, it seemed to us that English has a considerable importance in this community.

Amine Helali is an Algerian food truck vendor who works on the Avenue of the Arts, a largely cosmopolitan, dynamic and artistic neighborhood in Center City. After reading about the French street artist JR’s mural of Ibrahim Shah, a Pakistani food truck vendor, whose image formerly stood on one of the facades of the Graham Building in Center City[2], one of us got inspiration, and decided to further investigate the people working in this business. Amine told us about his multilingual background in Arabic, French, Spanish and English. In his work, he uses all of those languages, but for different purposes...

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Russia in Your Meme

12/22/2017

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by Erick Gutierrez

Erick is a junior linguistics major at Swarthmore College.

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Haverbros, Mawrters, Scripsies, and SPUdents

12/22/2017

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by Juhyae Kim and Anya Slepyan

Juhyae is a junior linguistics major and education minor at Swarthmore College. Anya is a freshman and potential major in Russian, also at Swarthmore College. Watch their video essay below.

College Campuses as Speech Communities.

Watch the Video.

In our #LanguageStory project, we set out to explore the semiotic landscapes of various college campuses to see how certain speech communities and identities developed within them. We first had the idea for the project during fall break, when Anya visited a friend at a different college. Anya and her friend were discussing the school police at their various colleges and realized that though they served the same function, the emic terminology or nomenclature differed from school to school. What Anya called “pub safe” (abbreviated from Public Safety), her friend referred to as “camp sec” (Campus Security).

While this difference may seem insignificant, it made her think about the variations in language across college campuses, and how the unique slang and language varieties helped build campus identities. As a freshman, Anya was especially aware of the fact that she had entered Swarthmore knowing none of the appropriate and community-specific language, but had quickly picked the slang and jargon necessary to navigate the specific semiotic landscape of our college campus. This made her curious to explore the different school-specific language used on various colleges, and to explore how language use may differ at schools of different sizes, types, and geographic locations. At the conclusion of our research together, we found that the existence of campus-specific vocabulary results in unique speech communities on each campus, which is an essential factor that forms campus identity...

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Internet Language IRL

12/20/2017

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by Charis Nandor

Charis is a student at Bryn Mawr College, where she is completing her major in Linguistics. You can watch her video here.

Because Internet.

Internet Linguistics, while not actually being its own field of linguistics (yet) is starting to be a popular thing to study. People use words differently on the Internet. Punctuation is important in a way that’s more obvious than in spoken language. Even syntax (word order) can be different on the Internet.

For example, in spoken language, up to a few years ago, it would be entirely ungrammatical for someone to say “*I want this because reasons.” They would have to say, “I want this because of reasons.” However, this structure became acceptable on the Internet, and now it’s actually spread into spoken language (albeit mostly among frequent Internet-users).

“Blefadula” is Not a Word.

Of course, because language contains so many parts, I couldn’t focus on all aspects of language. I decided to specifically focus on one of the simplest things for a broad audience to understand—words. Everyone knows what a word is. “Happy” is a word. “Blefadula” is not a word. And then, it gets more complicated than that. For some people, yinz is a word. Other people might have no idea what that means, and say it definitely isn’t a word. (For reference, “yinz” is a Pittsburgh term meaning “you guys” or “y’all”.)

The same thing happens with Internet words. While I, an avid Tumblr user, feel perfectly comfortable with doggo or snek, my parents would have no idea what these mean. One of the interesting things to me about Internet words is that they’re often very similar to “regular” English words. In this case, “doggo” is a large, cute dog and “snek” is a cute snake.

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You Are How You Speak

12/19/2017

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by Melanie Ackerman & Emily Williams

When asked to investigate instances of language diversity on our college campuses as an assignment for an Introduction to Linguistics course, we conducted surveys to explore how knowledge of a secondary language affects one’s primary mode of speech. We compiled survey responses regarding Swarthmore College students’ acquisition of new languages with responses from members of the Bryn Mawr College athletics department about the differences in their slang and terminology across varying sports and jobs. Our findings reflect how influential learning a second language or being part of a secondary speech community can be in forming a better understanding of a primary language or speech community.

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#languagestory blog

Speaking Halal in Philadelphia

Listen: Arabic in Center City.

Russia in Your Meme

Haverbros, Mawrters, Scripsies, and SPUdents

College Campuses as Speech Communities.

Watch the Video.

Internet Language IRL

Because Internet.

“Blefadula” is Not a Word.

You Are How You Speak

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