by Erick Gutierrez

Erick is a junior linguistics major at Swarthmore College.

by Juhyae Kim and Anya Slepyan
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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.

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...

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.

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).

by Jacob Clark

Jacob is a freshman at Swarthmore College. Watch his video on the complexities of language ideology here.

For my Sociolinguistics (LING 025) final project, I’ve been gathering data on the language ideologies (language ideology being defined as the set of beliefs one has about languages they have access to/knowledge on) of native Albanian speakers who also speak English. I’ve been interested to see if any strong differences in language ideologies occur due to different language upbringings.

• My first informant was Irisa. Growing up in Albania, Irisa was only exposed to Albanian. Irisa and her family moved to the U.S. in 2008 when Irisa was 8 years old; this began Irisa's interactions with English.
• My second informant was Erika, born in the United States as the daughter of Albanian immigrants. Erika was exposed to Albanian and English at the same time.

While interviewing Irisa, she mentioned that English and Albanian are divided in terms of where she makes use of either language. Albanian is the language Irisa uses the majority of the time: when she is with her family, when she is with Albanian friends, and even when she is thinking, the language is Albanian. Just as a reminder, Irisa began learning English when she was 8 years old and put into English-based schooling. For her, English is reserved for school and communicating with friends that are not Albanian-speaking. As she shared with me, “I have a hard time expressing myself in contexts outside of school.”