Category: Speech Community

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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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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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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Language and Emoji-ology at Swarthmore College

12/1/2017

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by Emilie Hautemont and Rebecca Rosenthal
🇫🇷🇯🇵👨🏻‍🎓👩🏽‍🎓

Language Ideologies and Emojis.

People (especially Swarthmore college students or Swatties) have strong opinions; so it’s no surprise that these strong opinions extend to the use of language. In our Introduction to Linguistics course this semester, we learned more about language ideology, a term for a person or group of people’s views on how language should or should not be used. We decided to investigate some of the language ideology held by Swatties. After all, these ideologies about language have been shown to impact how well two people can collaborate [1], what sort of language appears on public road signs [2], and even if a speaker is perceived as, like, one type of person or another based on their usage of the word “like” [3]!

We looked at two aspects of language use among Swarthmore College students: (1) learning another language and (2) using emoji. Since all Swarthmore students have a language learning requirement for graduation and many (if not all) are fluent users of electronic devices, we expected to see a wide variety of ideologies regarding these two specific types of communication.

Understanding this context, we administered surveys to assess how our peers' communication - both studied languages and the more informal, digital emojis - is impacted by their biases and stereotypes. We asked questions about how students perceived the use of a second language or emoji as well as their personal habits for using emoji and reasoning for learning a second language.

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Donald Trump’s “Bad Hombres,” Language Appropriation, and the Reproduction of Whiteness by Linguistic Disassociation with Racial Others

11/2/2016

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by Melanie Kleid

During the final presidential debate of 2016, Donald Trump’s response to the issue of immigration is charged by determination to secure America’s borders and disassociation with non-White Mexican people. Trump, with urgency, calls Clinton’s “amnesty” plan as a disaster.

As he stresses the importance of building the southern border’s wall, words and phrases like “illegally,” “pouring and destroying their youth,” “poisoning the blood of their youth,” ultimately bring him to his potent conclusion: “...one of my first acts will be to get all of the drug lords, all of the bad ones- we have some bad, bad people in this country that have to go out…” and, finally closing in on these unnamed culprits, “we have some bad hombres here and we’re gonna get ‘em out” (my emphasis) (Bush & Desjardins, 2016). Interestingly, neither Wallace nor the audience audibly acknowledges Trump’s racially-charged uttering of “bad hombres.”

Rather, Wallace thanks Trump and moves onto Clinton’s response. Clinton’s begins by referring to the people-at-hand as hard-working “undocumented people” a term widely recognized as less alienating to immigrants. Words like “citizen,” “children,” and “families” are scattered throughout her response; she, like her opponent, includes some violent language, repeating that she believes mass deportation would only work to rip families--and, later, our country--apart (Bush & Desjardins, 2016). Still, Clinton’s far less aggressive naming of undocumented people provides a crucial contrast not only in opinion, but also in linguistic behavior and affect.

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#languagestory blog

Speaking Halal in Philadelphia

Listen: Arabic in Center City.

Haverbros, Mawrters, Scripsies, and SPUdents

College Campuses as Speech Communities.

Watch the Video.

You Are How You Speak

Language and Emoji-ology at Swarthmore College

Language Ideologies and Emojis.

Donald Trump’s “Bad Hombres,” Language Appropriation, and the Reproduction of Whiteness by Linguistic Disassociation with Racial Others

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