by Jamie A. Thomas

by Rhiannon Smith & Gretchen Trupp

Our video project surveys an area of the city of Philadelphia called the Gayborhood, which is located in Washington Square West covering about 9 blocks, and which has rainbow street signs and crosswalks in addition to rainbow flags on many establishments. There are a variety of buildings in the Gayborhood, ranging from subsidized housing to historical bookstores to LGBTQ-specific health clinics to luxury apartments, restaurants, stores, and clubs. While a variety of different people live in the area, its original intended purpose was as an inclusive neighborhood space with a higher queer population* and to offer support and solidarity for these persons. 

by Amy Giacomucci, Aurora Martinez del Rio, & Richard Monari 

We visited Finely a Knitting Party two times. During our first visit, we filmed a Saturday afternoon knitting class run by Cathy Finley, the owner of the shop. We photographed the space and conversed with the attendees, both on and off camera. At this time, we chose to collect footage of community-driven interactions interspersed with occasional questions from us regarding their current projects and past experiences with knitting. Then, in our second visit, we interviewed Cathy about her experience as the owner of the knitting shop and as a member of the knitting community. The physical space of the knitting shop and the community within it are tied together to form a linguistic landscape. A linguistic landscape is the interaction of different language communities within a physical space.

By Jamie A. Thomas

I've learned so much from working with video from my fieldwork, and deliberately formulating it for a public audience, that I've begun to incorporate it into my teaching. This semester, my students have been engaging the Philadelphia community to learn more about how signs, symbols, and communication connect our everyday lives. Students in my introductory course in sociolinguistics at Swarthmore College come from all over the country, and from other institutions in the area, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Our theme has been linguistic landscapes, the physical and imagined dimensions of language use that intersect with and govern our daily practices. In class, we've discussed the linguistic landscape of digital speech communities within Twitter and Yik Yak. We've also touched upon the very real ways in which we use words and multiple ways of speaking to connect in the classroom, in our homes, and in other settings, such as restaurants, libraries, coffeeshops, and Quaker meetings. 

Using our discussions as a foundation, I've guided students in my introductory course in sociolinguistics in methods in qualitative interviewing, field research, and visual anthropology, to enable them to conduct interviews and work collaboratively to compose videos on their original research. Their semester-long research culminated in new short videos for the #LanguageStory project, and exemplify another key component I value in research: Openness and adaptability. For many of these students, this was their first experience in soliciting interviews out in the field, and putting together a cohesive visual + digital story to detail their insights.

In the next few posts for the blog, I'll be featuring the collaborative written and visual composition of student teams from my class. I'm so very proud of their efforts. Their deeply reflective videos explore multiple, intersectional aspects of life in the Philadelphia area, and offer critical insights on:

• Gentrification & the Gayborhood
• Knitting as a community practice
• Communication in Quaker Meetings
• The role of mural arts in generating community
• Change in North Philadelphia
• Coffeeshop atmosphere
• Asianness and Chinese Cuisine

What I love most about these videos is how they illustrate the strong observational skills these students have developed over the semester, and are the shared vision of between 2 and 3 student researchers. I look forward to sharing their work here, and to the conversations and discussion I hope their work will generate. These discussions will carry the hallmark of #LanguageStory's purpose as a visual + digital project deeply rooted in engaged research, and the power and significance of language, from the learner's point of view.

A Desire to be Understood
At the core of our social experiences is a desire to be understood, to be heard, and to connect with users we find a commonality with. We want people to discuss our ideas with, validate our concerns, and share in our joys. When we turn to new and additional languages, we are celebrating these human threads in new modalities of self-expression and community. Time and again, this has been my personal experience, when I learned Malay, and later Swahili, and Arabic. This is how I know language learning to be the ultimate journey in self-awareness and communication. 

Working with new speakers of Arabic in Jordan in 2014, I used ethnographic techniques to investigate their attitudes toward dialects of Arabic, and their preferences for Jordanian Arabic. What I learned, and experienced with them through participant observation, was the importance of using colloquial dialects in everyday settings, and the personal dimensions that language embodies for each user. This is what Winnie, a Chinese American speaker of Arabic, shares with me in our interview, that: "It's necessary to have language through which you can express yourself well."

Localization in Real Time
In our day-to-day lives, we spend maybe 40-50% of a weekday in a formal work or school setting. However, even in formal settings, our speech and conversations may not all be conducted in fully formal registers of talk. We can usually get a joke in edgeways here and there. 

In Arabic, it's the formal, information-bearing bits that are communicated in mostly Modern Standard Arabic, and the jokes and gab and gossip that come across in a colloquial variety. Interestingly enough, it's Modern Standard Arabic that adult language learners are taught in colleges and universities in the U.S. If learners can gain access to instruction in other dialects of Arabic, these opportunities typically become available through study abroad (though a few U.S. universities offer courses in Egyptian and Levantine dialects on a limited basis).

As you might imagine, there's a certain excitement in learning a new dialect, or unique version, of a language you've already studied for some time. This was the case for the American learner of Arabic that I worked with in Amman, Jordan. We were excited to see all the ways that Jordanian Arabic replaced words in Modern Standard Arabic with words of its own, and presented alternative expressions that we could begin using. But we also recognized the powerful utility of the colloquial dialect. Over time, I could see learners strategically avoiding use of Modern Standard Arabic, in favor of the local variety.

I began to realize that what they were doing was localizing their experience in study abroad. In our desire to speak with locals, we began to speak like locals, to minimize distance in our conversations. In other words, there didn't seem to be a way to talk informally, casually, or personably in the Standard variety. This was why we turned to Jordanian Arabic, so we could express ourselves with a type of speech that mirrored the feel of