Professor Lauren Hall-Lew Inaugural Lecture

Hello. Can you hear me? O. Yes. I think you can hear me. Welcome, everybody. My name is Holly Brannigan, and I'm here as head of the School of Philosophy Psychology and Language Sciences. And I'd like to welcome you to the inaugural of Professor Lauren Hall-Lew. So on behalf of the Department of English Language and Linguistics, the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and the College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences. There's a lot of words there. I'd like to welcome all of you who've joined us this evening from across Edinburgh and indeed much further afield for this special event. And I would like to give an especially warm welcome to Lauren's family and friends, and in particular, her father, Alan and stepmother Mable, who've come all the way from the USA to join us this special evening. And to her husband, Jefferson, her daughter, Isla and her son Liam. We're so pleased. And we're so pleased that you're able to be here with us. So let me introduce our inaugural lecture. Professor Lauren Hall-Lew was born in Hilo, Hawaii. She holds a BA in linguistics from the University of Arizona and an MA and a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. Following the award of her PhD in 2009, she won a prestigious Andrew W Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she undertook at the University of Oxford. And subsequently attracted no doubt by the similarity in climate between Hawaii, Arizona, and Edinburgh. She moved to join the Department of Linguistics and English Language in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences here at the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in 2010, and she was promoted to Reader in 2017. Then in August 2022, she was promoted to Professor and awarded a Personal Chair of Sociolinguistics. It's for her inaugural lecture in this role that we're here to celebrate this evening. I'd like to something about her research interests. Her research focuses on how speech conveys social information, and she has published extensively in this area, including work that investigates linguistic variation and ethnic identity in North America. The relationship between language identity and tourism and the expression of identity in Scottish politicians' language. She's co editor of the book Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation, Theorising the Third Wave, which was published with Cambridge University Press in 2021. Professor Hall-Lew's recent work includes a study of the impact of COVID through the Lothian Diaries project, which she set up in collaboration with colleagues in the midst of the pandemic, shows what a dedicated researcher she is that in the midst of all that difficulty, one of her first thoughts was, what research can we do here and how can we make it useful? That project investigates individuals experiences of the pandemic. In 2022, she was awarded a highly competitive Personal Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to pursue this work. And highlighting the relevance of her work for society beyond academia, her work on COVID 19 was shortlisted for the University of Edinburgh Impact Prize for Responsible Engagement and Innovation. A new line of research she was awarded a British Academy Small Grant earlier this month to conduct the first study in sociolinguistics on homelessness. Now there are so many fascinating topics that Professor Hall-Lew has studied? I feel slightly bad about mentioning some of the ones that she's not going to be talking about tonight because they sound so interesting. These include her work on regional dialects of Akan, the dominant language of Ghana, her work on social class differences in the English that's spoken in Edinburgh, and the work that she's been carrying out in collaboration with Professor Graeme Trousdale about the pronunciation of the word Brexit. Is it Breksit or is it Bregzit? But though we won't be having any formal question session after the lecture today, I'm sure that she would be happy to answer any questions you have about those topics during the post talk reception, which will be taking place outside the lecture hall. As well as her own research, Professor Hall-Lew has made a substantial contribution to her disciplines to her editorial work, including her work as associate editor of the pre-minent linguistics journal, Language. From January 2025, as co-Editor-in-Chief of her field's flagship journal, the Journal of Sociolinguistics. Now, although it's very easy to focus on Professor Hall-Lew's outstanding research achievements, and you can see quite how substantial they are. I would also like to mention some of the other amazing work that she's done. Because truth to tell she is a role model in so many ways. She's a devoted teacher who every semester is nominated for her excellence in teaching, and in 2013, actually won the top Edinburgh University Students Association Award for Excellence in teaching in Humanities and Social Sciences. She's also, I can personally attest, a generous colleague who freely shares her time and experiences with her colleagues as a mentor. She is a community builder in all kinds of ways. Everywhere she goes, she sets up networks and support for those around her. And she's made a particular contribution to equality, diversity, and inclusion throughout her career. At Edinburgh, as well as the contributions that she's made to EDI within the school, including as our EDI director, where, for example, she set up our Global South Speaker Series. She's been active within the university, most notably for her work in creating and running a university wide network and mentorship scheme for racialized staff. This substantial achievement was done so much to support and develop the experience of staff and is highly appreciated by all the staff we've benefited from the support and mentoring that it offers, was recognised in 2021 through the award of a Principal's Medal. Now you might think that with all of these academic and academic related activities, Lauren would be too busy to find time for anything else. But no, there is more. She's a volunteer for the charity Streetwork and spends her Sunday afternoons giving manicures to women who are living in temporary accommodation. In what spare time remains. She studies British Sign Language and Scottish Gaelic, sings karaoke, I suspect very well, and looks after her friend's miniature schnauzer, Hamish. And fittingly for someone who's published on work-family balance in academia, Lauren manages to do all of these things, as well as enjoying time with her family. And as I mentioned earlier, we're delighted that members of her family, including her father and stepmother and her husband and her children are here with us this evening to enjoy what I know will be a fascinating talk. So please join with me in welcoming Professor Hall-Lew to give her inaugural lecture on sociophonetic indexicality as a window onto language and society.  Thank you, Holly. That was a nice introduction. Sorry, just a second. I need to get this set up. So putting together a talk like this, it's an exercise in reflection. And so before I get started with my talk, I would like you all to join me in a moment of silence. I've been thinking a lot about the people who have influenced me and about those who have left us too soon. Members of our families, our communities, people that have left us too soon from the United States, also in Gaza, West Bank, and Lebanon. So if we could just take a brief moment of silence, please. Okay, thanks. I want to thank each and every one of you for taking time out of your busy lives to be here tonight. It is really wonderful to see you here. As Holly mentioned, there's not going to be a Q&A session, but I am going to be talking past 6:00, probably past 6:15, and I know people have places they need to go, so don't worry at all if you have to get up and leave in the middle of the talk, that's absolutely fine. Um, so I am going to be talking about sociophonetic indexicality. So what I study is when language users attribute social meanings to fine grained variation in linguistic production. I'm going to walk you through the different aspects of this term. So the socio part of sociophonetic, it refers to social meanings or social information. So as I speak right now, you might perceive me as being an American. Being an adult, being a woman, giving a lecture. Those are for social meanings. They are correct social meanings. But there might be other things that you also perceive or think you can perceive about the way that I'm speaking. Those may or may not be accurate, but all of them, whatever they are, count as social meanings. If you happen to work in fields that distinguish between social and cultural things, we're not worried about that so much here. So when I say social meanings, it's encompassing cultural meanings as well. Social factors, cultural factors. So social meanings obviously depend on the person who's using the language, but it also depends on the person who's interpreting that language use. So it's all about the context, right? And each and every one of you are going to have a different set of slightly different set of social meanings you might attribute to the way that I'm using language. If all of us were in the United States, for example, it would be less salient that I'm an American than it is that I'm giving the talk here. That's the socio part. The phonetic part refers to the part of linguistics that is below the level of the word. We're looking at fine grained differences. Course grained differences would be like the words that you use and fine grain differences are like the vowels within the word or the consonants within the word or the pitch or intonation, rhythm, voice quality, those kinds of things. These are all aspects of spoken phonetic variation that sociophoneticians study, and there's parallels in signed languages as well. Differences in sign that again are more fine grained than the word level. And then for the big word, indexicality. So indexicality comes from semiotics, from Peirce, and that is the study of signs. So it's about the relationship between signs and meaning. So indexicality, the way that we use it in my field, it refers to the relationship between a sign and a meaning that depends on the context or depends on things co occurring together for that meaning to arise. So if you think about it like your index finger and pointing, it's about a relationship between one thing pointing to another. So in my case, it's like pronunciations and speech that point to social meanings, and that is context based. You have to be in a particular context to get those social meanings. So you could say that the way that I'm talking, it indexes me being an American, it indexes me being an adult, it indexes me being a woman, et cetera. So, indexicality is something that is absolutely in every linguistic interaction that exists always. And most of the time, we don't think about it overtly. It's just there. We're inferring it all the time. And when we try to explain what it is that people are doing, when they make those inferences, it gets really complicated real quick, and that's why it's fun, and that's why I study it. So, first, I work on speech and not sign, and I'm going to give you a very, very, very quick introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet. So this is not for you to memorise these symbols, but I'm going to show you some of the symbols, and I want you to kind of understand what the symbols are doing. So on the left here, it's just the top half the international phonetic alphabet. Each symbol corresponds to a particular sound attested in a human language somewhere, a spoken language. These symbols are organised and labelled according to where and how in the vocal tract, they are made. That's why we have a little vocal tract here on the right. I'm going to give you just one example just so you get a flavour of it. So If you take this upside down y symbol, which you're going to see in a little bit. It refers to a palatal lateral approximate. So it's produced with the tongue up on the hard palate. It's also made with the lateral or sides of the tongue, and it's kind of vowel-like. And so that's why we call that an approximant. So it's kind of like an English L combined with an English Y, so it's not la or ya, but like lya, lya, something like that. So that's a sound that we don't use to distinguish words in English, but other languages do use it. Okay, so I'm mostly going to be talking about vowels in this talk. I'm going to spend a little bit of time on that. Also, vowel variation can be really, really subtle, especially in English. The main introductory thing to know about vowels is that some are pronounced further front in the mouth, like "ee", this little guy or further back in the mouth, like, "oo" Then those two are called close or high vowels because they're made high up in the mouth, and that's in contrast to -- close because it's like a closed mouth -- But that's in contrast to an open or low vowel like, "aa" which is made with the jaw very open. So vowels are important to English sociophonetics, because the English language has a lot of, a lot more vowels than a lot of other languages. And so when accents of language differ, they often differ in terms of their vowel pronunciation. And what's amazing is that even though we have so many, we still play around with them in terms of presenting different styles and different dialects and accents. And so you can have very, very subtle differences between vowels, just a little bit higher, just a little bit lower, and you can actually get all sorts of different social information from those small differences. And I find that kind of just cognitively amazing. So just to reiterate the sociophonetic indexicality that I'm going to be talking about is in speech, but it can also be studied in signed languages. So you can see there's this signer on the right who looks for some reason like a naked superhero or something, but the difference is that in sign languages, so this is your articulation space in spoken languages, whereas in sign, you have the whole articulation space, that's manual, you have the posture, you have the facial expression, you have stance and all those things. That's the articulation in a signed phonetic context. Okay. So first, let's look at an example of indexicality. I think sometimes it's easier to just talk about words first before we talk about sounds. And I also think it's important to embarrass your kids at inaugural lectures. So my first example is this one. Imagine that you hear a child referred to as a "bairn." What social meanings do you associate with that word? Maybe you'll know that bairn is a Scots word for child, and maybe you know that it's specifically Eastern or Northern Scots, because in the South and the West, they say "wean" instead. Maybe you associate "bairn" with Edinburgh and "wean" with Glasgow. But regardless of whether you hear "bairn" or "wean," you can probably safely assume that whoever's doing the talking also knows the English word, "child." And if that's the case, and there's a reason that they're using "bairn" or "wean." What's that reason? And that's where we get into sociolinguistic indexicality. All of these things refer to the same thing. They all refer to a young human. They're not doing anything different in terms of what we're referring to in the world. But each of these words indexes a different set of social meanings. Some of them are regional, like I said, but when someone says any one of these words, they are conveying, more, whether they want to or not, than just the regional identity. The linguists job then is to map out those possible meanings, and then in doing so, we can discover things about language and society. So I'm going to walk you through this, and I'm just going to stick to two of the variants, "child" and "bairn." So the late linguistic anthropologist, Michael Silverstein, raised the profile of indexicality and Peircian semiotics in the 1970s. And I found that one of the most useful insights from him is this really basic one, which is that for any linguistic form to take on social meaning, it has to first be "marked." And that means it has to stand out in some way as being unexpected or unusual compared to another variant that could refer to the same thing. Once it's marked, then people will start to use it to index social meanings that are also marked. And what's really important is that what counts is marked depends entirely on the context. So me, if I refer to Isla as my "bairn," that would be highly marked. Whereas, for many of the homeless women that I visit every Sunday, "bairn" is the default unmarked form for them, right? And so this contrast in markedness is the foundation from which all social indexicalities then can emerge. So there's two ways of looking at this. First, we can look at the different social meanings indexed by these words in their unmarked form. So what makes me different from the women that I visit every Sunday. So nationality, yes, but also, you know, housing status, employment status, income, education, all of these things. Also race and ethnicity. So does the word "bairn," does it index Scottishness, or also social class, or also something that combines them, or what exactly are being indexed there? Maybe it's yeah, an interaction. So the way that go about this then is to look at more than just me and the women that I volunteer with on Sunday, but to get a representative sample of speakers, right? And then try to start to make better guesses, better arguments for who is likely to have child be their default and who is likely to have "bairn" is their default. Now, when we do that, we will see the child is the unmarked word in a very wide range of contexts. And "bairn" is an unmarked word in a very small number of contexts. And crucially, "child" is unmarked in institutional contexts and among speakers with access to institutional power, like the space that we're in right now. And then that tells us that just based on these two words and the whole scope of things they index, that there is something that language conveys about how power is constructed in society, how power is maintained in society. But indexicality is a lot more than just that. So people use language agentively, and one of the clerest examples is when we use marked variants. So these are where new indexicalities tend to emerge. So if I'm talking about Isla and I call her my "bairn," people are going to notice, they're going to wonder why? Am I making a joke? Am I being sarcastic? Am I just trying very hard to be Scottish? Am I trying to maybe connect to the person I'm talking to who maybe use "bairn" first? Maybe I'm matching what they do? There's all sorts of different reasons. And how do those reasons compare to someone who usually says "bairn," but then they choose to use the word "child"? They aren't going to be the exact same reasons because of that relationship with power that I just described. So in the abstract, we can't really know the fundamental principle of indexicality, which makes it equally fascinating and very, very difficult, is the possible social meanings are always underspecified. They're always indeterminate. They could be absolutely anything. And what we're trying to do is, we can't predict what they're going to be. We're not in the business of predicting. We're in the business of trying to describe all the things that are possible and account for why they happened. Whatever the interpretation, though, you can be sure that lots of social meanings are indexed, whenever a person uses a linguistic variant they don't normally use. So the new social meanings, then let's build on the previous one. So you can't be like a Scottish wannabe unless Scottish is indexed first, right? It's also an empirical fact that the way that this process happens is through negotiation and interaction. So this is not people saying, I am now going to index, but it's people talking about what well, let me just show you an example in a second. First, though I have to embarrass my other child. I don't know if he's paying attention. Okay, we're going to consider another linguistic variable, and this time it's going to be phonetic. Instead of looking at Scots, I'm going to switch to another one of our national languages, Scottish Gaelic. So Isla and Liam here are Gaelic speakers. They'll probably critique my pronunciation. My Gaelic pronunciation indexes my lack of fluency. But the word for "baby" in Gaelic is pronounced something either like lyehn-oo or lyehn-uhv. A more common example of the same pattern is the verb to make or to do, which is giehn-oo or giehn-ehv. But, you know, baby pictures. So. Now, if you haven't learned Gaelic, you won't know which of these pronunciations is more marked, and you won't know what they might index. You can't really know, you could guess. But the relationship between the pronunciation and the social meanings, you can't know because this is something we learn when we learn a language as part of our linguistic knowledge. I'll go ahead and tell you it's the U variant that's the marked variant across the most Gaelic speaking places. So if we know that, then we might ask, what is indexed by saying lyehn-oo instead of lyehn-uhv or giehn-oo instead of giehn-ev. Who says it? When would they say it? Where would they be? What would they be doing? This isn't a research project that I've done per se, but I did a little thing for this talk, which is that I went online, and I looked at comment threads and discussion boards and subreddits because this is a great place to find language ideologies. So I'm going to show you what I found. According to people who are on the Internet. The main social meaning for that lyehn-oo variant is geographical. These online commentators, they don't agree on where though. So this is a picture of the outer Hebrides. The Scotland, Scottish Gaelic is traditionally spoken in the Outer Hebrides, so that's where we find regional dialect differences The islands off the West Coast. Each island is perceived as having its own variety of Gaelic. So people online say that lyehn-oo is a feature of Lewis Gaelic in the North. Others say that it's Barra Gaelic, and maybe also Uist Gaelic in the middle or some people say that it's Argyll Gaelic down south. For example, you get this Reddit thread like this. "A" says, I would always advise the shoo (the "oo" variant) way as that's the cool people dialect. "B" says, "Are you from Lewis haha?" "A" says, "Of course not. Continue south about 100 miles." For B, the "oo" pronunciation indexed or indexes Lewis. But after that, then A says that it apparently actually indexes Uist. So they're negotiating. What does it actually index? Right? The framing of the "oo" pronunciation as "cool," It's probably just like a joke about local pride, right? But what's interesting is that that's an introduction of a new social meaning. "Cool" itself has the potential then to be detached from region and become a new social meaning. And so I don't know if this was related, but I found one comment like this. So, "...that has almost nothing to do with dialect in the main. "uhv" is the more conservative and careful pronunciation, "oo" is a more progressive pronunciation. So we have several different conflicting indexical associations with the "oo" variant. And what we can do as linguists is analyse these, which we call "folk linguistic" comments. We call them by assembling a list of the potential social meanings that come up, associated with the particular pronunciation and put them together like this. So my former supervisor, Linguist Penelope Eckert, calls this an indexical field. So this is a symbolic space where you can list all the potential social meanings. These are never active all at once. They're often contradictory. They're actively negotiated in interaction. And the whole field of meaning is never a part of any individual's linguistic knowledge. The idea is that these are all the possible attested meanings of a linguistic community, and any of them could potentially be activated depending on the context. So who's talking to whom and where they are, et cetera. So we can then ask which aspects of context are likely to predict the activation of which social meaning. And then that is what gives us a window onto society. So who shares the same corner of indexical space as who else? Who accesses a different part of the field, entirely and we can see which aspects of society are important to members of that society based on what gets indexed by the phonetic variation. So for any individual person, we want to understand where their indexical knowledge comes from, what shapes the corner of the field to access. Since most of you are not Gaelic speakers, you can see how this must be learned. Personally, when I was first learning Gaelic. My association with the "oo" pronunciation was just "Lewis" because I only knew one person who used that word, and she was from Lewis. And I had also heard that people from Lewis have an unusual accent. And so I was kind of on the lookout for things like that. So even though I knew the one person, I then generalised it to a social meaning that had to do with geography rather than the individual. And this is what we do all the time. We take lived experiences and we generalise them to make sense of the world. And these generalisations draw on our pre existing cultural knowledge and our past observations and reveal our ideologies about the way our society functions. Again, we usually don't think about what we're doing. The process of drawing on indexical inferences, it feels automatic, natural, intuitive. If you ask someone, how did you know Lauren was a woman, based only on how she talked? That would be a strange question. But our growing cultural awareness of gender diversity shows us that it's not actually an obvious question. It's a culturally specific question. It just feels obvious because that's how ingrained ideologies are. So I don't mean ideological in the sense of them being false or irrational, rather that they're fundamental to our presumed beliefs about the way society and culture work. If society changes, and if our knowledge and beliefs about society change, then the indexical possibilities also change. These terms I've listed here, for example, are just the tip of the iceberg with gender, right? And that's the case for every indexical field. And one of the most amazing things about sociophonetic indexicality is how many different complex social meanings may be associated with just the tiniest differences in language use. As a researcher, we can ask some empirical questions to start out with. What makes it likely for a particular variant to be produced? So, the who, what, when, the where and the why. Then, what are the identifiable social meanings? And then what makes it likely for a particular social meaning to emerge? Again, that's another different who what when where and why. The answers to this give us a window into society, the differences and similarities that matter to people in a particular community and how they're negotiated. That's the society side. I also said that this is a window into language. We can also ask, is the linguistic variable part of a larger style, like an accent or a dialect or soci ect? Is it part of a language change in progress? Is one variant taking over another variant? This one gets to one of the fundamental truths about language. The language is always changing. One of the biggest questions in linguistics is what makes change likely to occur or not occur. And my main theoretical contribution to the field is to critique how language change, scholarship represents the role of social meaning in models of sound change. And I will move on now to talk about that work. Now, sadly, I just work on English, really, but lest my kids think I'm only embarrassing them, here's one last leanabh. That's me. Um, I've noticed that there's a lot of different genres of inaugural lectures. Some of them are just research talks. But sociolinguists, think that who you are affects the research you do, and we think it's good practise to discuss our positionality explicitly. And so I am going to be following the genre of the timeline of my life. The least important thing about me is something that Holly already mentioned. I was born in Hilo Hawaii. I'm not Hawaiian. I moved away before I can remember it at all. So what matters is this Uh, my grandparents, and my extended family all lived in California. So my dad's parents on the left, the Lews, came from West Germany and Southern China. They lived in Sacramento, California. That's the yellow pin. My mom's parents on the right, the Halls, or "Haw", came from Northern California and Southern China, and they lived in San Francisco. And that's with the blue pin. And I was raised in Flagstaff, Arizona, with the red pin, and I lived with my dad and my stepmom, who are here and also in the picture with my siblings as little kids. And also with my mom and my stepdad shown on the right. So, in 1998, I left for University in Tucson, Arizona, that green pin there. And I'm going to be talking today about two examples from my research. One to do with Flagstaff Arizona Speech, and another to do with San Francisco, California Speech. But before I get to that, I'm going to tell you about a book that I read when I was 16. You might know this book. It's fairly famous. It's a book by the late neurologist and science communicator Oliver Sacks, and each chapter is an anecdote of his encounters with medical patients. So my dad gave me this book in 1996, and I'm going to read you an excerpt from Chapter nine, The President's Speech. "What was going on? A roar of laughter from the aphasia ward, just as the President's speech was coming on. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him or did they perhaps understand him all too well? Natural speech consists of utterance, and uttering forth of one's whole meaning with one's whole being, the understanding of which involved infinitely more than mere word recognition. And this was the clue to the aphasiac's understanding, even when they might be wholly uncomprehending of words as such. Expressiveess, so deep, so various, so complex, so subtle, is perfectly preserved in aphasia, though understanding of words be destroyed. In this then lies the power of understanding, understanding without words, what is authentic and inauthentic. This is why they laughed at the president's speech." Okay, so you may have noticed something. This is basically sociophonetic variation. Years later, this is the only chapter from the book. I remember. I remember it better than the chapter about the man who mistook his wife for. So it seems pretty clear that I probably should have gone straight away into sociophonetics. But as all the linguists in this room know, high school teachers and high school students don't know what linguistics is. So what did I do? Oliver Sacks was a neurologist, right? So I was going to do neurology, so that's what I set out to do. I went to university. I was determined to be a neurosurgeon. So 1998 to 1999 was an interesting academic year. I majored in molecular and cellobiology. I joined the Undergraduate Biology Research Programme. I was a research assistant to a neuroscientist who worked on the olfactory neurons of the Manduca Sexta moth. I spent the summer of 1999, dissecting the brains of moth pupae. I spent the year shadowing my family doctor and neurosurgeons at the local hospital, and in the evenings, I became a registered Emergency Medical Technician. (And I still am your first aider for PPLS.) So I'd probably not be a linguist today, but the following things happened. One, I could not get my moth neurons to grow in the petri dishes. And two, I couldn't find a single doctor who was really happy. I had a minor in psychology. I briefly switched to a major in psychology for about one semester. Then I found out there was someone in the Cog Sci department who was looking for a research assistant, and they were looking through the undergraduate biology research programme because that was allowed for some reason. Now, she was a linguist, and linguistics was one of the courses that fulfilled the psychology degree. I switched from microscopes and moth brains to computers and speech analysis software. This linguist, her name is Malcah Yaeger-Dror. She's a sociophonetician. She was not permanent faculty there, but she had secured a large National Science Foundation grant, and it allowed her to hire one undergraduate RA. She took me on without me knowing a single thing about linguistics. Her NSF grant was on this question. What determines how English speakers pronounce the word "not"? When do we contract it to "n't", and when do we not? When do we put emphasis or prosodic prominence on it, and when do we not? For example, there are at least four ways I can lie to you about preparing this talk today. I did not get nervous. I didn't get nervous. I did NOT get nervous. I DIDN'T get nervous. All lies. Linguists had claimed that "n't" is important to say fully and emphasise because it's usually introducing new information to the listener, and new information is cognitively important. But Malcah was a sociolinguist, and she had studied people and how they will try to be polite and not confrontational and not face threatening. It would be important in those cases to de-emphasize the word "not" lest the person think you're trying to argue with them. How do these two contradictory factors play out in real speech? My job was to code the word "not" in all sorts of spoken English data and participate in conference talks. So this is the first one I ever went to when I was 19-years-old, and coincidentally, it was in my hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona. But in a nutshell, what we found was that variation is actually predicted by dialect and social context, and that the "n't" form is more frequent than we might think, even in most informative contexts like air traffic control. And the prosodic prominence of saying NOT instead of just "not". It is there when new information is presented as predicted, but it's even more prominent in adversarial context like debates. So cognitive and social pressures interact. So that's like my undergraduate baseline, basically. So that leads into my next example, which is about something that happened when I visited my hometown in 2001. So this was leading into the final year of university. I was back home in Flagstaff, Arizona. I was at a doctor's visit, and I can't remember anything about this appointment. I only remember being taken aback by the vowel that came out of my mouth. I did not intend this. I just said "what?" So we often hear at Edinburgh about students who come here, and then they go back home and their families make fun of them for having changed their accent while they're here. So this wasn't that. It's not like Flagstaff and Tucson, Arizona have really different accents. What I was doing instead was I was using a pronunciation that I had heard before, but it wasn't one that I usually used. I felt like I was speaking in this way that was trying to show politeness and deference to the doctor, and then that was the way that it happened much to my surprise. What this was is the pronunciation of the vowel "oo." This is where we get into the real subtle fine grain differences. This is more subtle than lyehn-oo versus lyehn-uvh. This is just the pronunciation of the word do like "do" or "deew", if it's very fronted or as opposed to "do", which is very back. This y symbol, it's like the "ee" sound, but if you round your lips, you can do this with me. "ee"-"oo". That's a distinct vowel in some languages. It's not distinct from "oo" in English. It's a variant. It's a different way of saying "oo" Now, it turns out that the way you can talk about this is fairly straightforward. It's about where in the mouth that sound is articulated. You have this in the back and this in the front and then all the sounds in between, and that's the "what." What we're trying to figure out is why I did that, what's going on. Now it turns out -- my computers frozen? -- That /u/-fronting is one of the most well studied sound changes in varieties of English around the world. One study from 1987, for example, documented that it wasn't just spoken by Valley girls in Southern California. It was actually also heard among middle class White and Asian women in San Francisco. Another study in 1999 shown here, looked at Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and found that the fronted /u/ pronunciation was used more by women than by men. Middle class speakers produced the fronted /u/ more often than working class speakers, and whether or not the speaker was affiliated with gang culture was also a predictor. Given that California and Arizona are right next to each other, we could make hypotheses about a lot of the social meanings that Arizona listeners might give to fronted /u/ pronunciation, even though no one had studied Arizona before. That might include young, middle class, female. Given that I was a young, middle class, female, it would make sense that I would be adopting this. But my family is also Californians. Is this to do with me being an Arizonian of a particular type or something to do with my Californian identity? Questions like that lead linguists to do fieldwork, recording speakers of community to see how they talk, how it relates to who they are, where they are, what they're doing, and why they're doing it. The "when" is really, really key because again, language is changing all the time. If you have a difference between how younger people speak and the way older people speak, that's often indicating a change in progress. It turns out that this is true for the English vowels as well. Which I found out. I started out with a pilot study that I wrote up for Natasha Warner's phonetics class, and then I ended up taking it to graduate school, presenting it as a qualifying paper in a book chapter in the early years of my PhD. And what came out of this is to to introduce me into the field of research on language change, or sound change, as we call it when we look at sounds. So like a lot of other Englishes, the /u/ in Flagstaff Arizona was changing over time from "oo" to "eew". And I discovered this was true for women, but only true for urban oriented men. Turns out there was another kind of fronted /u/ in Flagstaff Arizona that was not part of the sound change, and this is produced by men with cultural ties to cattle ranching, and they're shown here in purple. This vowel has a quality to it that's a little bit different than the one that we hear in California and in most of Arizona. It turns out that my friend, Chris Koops, found the exact same thing in Houston, Texas. There's these two different sets of people, and therefore, indexical fields that are related to two very phonetically similar sounds. So you have in both places in Houston, Texas and Flagstaff, Arizona, this reflects the settlement patterns of English speaking settlers to those areas. So here's an example from a speaker who anonymized as Nick. "...before when we lived up the ranch. when you get out of school, you got do the school bus and you went home." Sorry. I'll say that again. "where before when we lived up the ranch, when you got out of school, you got do the school bus and you went home." Okay. The funny thing, by the way, about studying sociophonetic indexicality. You choose the community you're going to study, but then you can't choose beyond that what aspects of study you're going to focus on because you're trying to explain all of the language. And so you have to learn what's important to everyone in the community. And that means you have to do ethnography. And you can't make assumptions and you end up being a bit of an expert on things like high-desert cattle ranching, which you didn't expect to have to become an expert on. "...before when we lived up the ranch, when you get out of school, you got on the school bus and you went home." Okay. I promise you, this is the most technical slide. Okay, so each of these is a spectrogram of the words "school you." The first is cut out of Nick's interview. The other two are me saying the same sentence as him, and then I cut out "school you." And I produced a more fronted /u/ in one and a more backed /u/ in the other. So see if I can play these. "School you." "School you." Do you hear those differences? "School you." Okay. So the numbers on the left in red show basically how front the vowel in school is. So Nick is around 1,400 hertz, mine is around 1,200 hertz, and my backed one is around 800 hertz. And, in fact, one of the big differences between the city and rancher Flagstaffians, is that the ranchers have this before and L sound, which is something that's typically not found in California, despite the stereotype "kewl" as a word. That's like the only word. What you get that. On the right, you can also see there's a difference in how back the vowel becomes in the word. I did clip it off a little bit, but you can see Is it coming up? Oh, I'm sorry. So mine slopes steeply down, but Nick does not. Okay. So I'm going to jump many many steps of the research ahead in the interest of time and propose two indexical fields that describe language and society in Flagstaff Arizona, and this is in 2002, because time is a crucial part of context. The right is the fronted with a steep slope, the way that I pronounce it, and then on the left is the one that's more like Nick's pronunciation. And the social meanings in these circles, they're a mixture of the attitudes that people express, kind of like what I showed you before with the online comments, and also the demographic factors that corresponded with the research that I did in the statistics. So I put local there in the middle because these are both local ways of being, but I haven't actually investigated that. I'm still years on, the only person who's looked at Arizonan sociophonetics. If you know anyone who wants to do this, there's a lot still to be pursued. What I want to do here is present to you a really important concept in our field of sociophonetic indexicality, and that's the idea that these fields maybe are better represented by single persona or character types or social types. So in this case, you can propose that there might be two persona that are active in the ideological imagination of residents of Flagstaff about what it means to be a resident of Flagstaff. Persona are character types that have enough social prominence to be named, so Valley girl or Cowboy. They often serve as ideological reference points or icons for how language users imagine the relationship between language use and social identity. Now anthropologists, Judy Irvine and Sue Gal, describe a process of iconization, where "it's as if the linguistic feature somehow depicts or displays a social groups inherent nature or essence." With Nick's speech, you can think of, sometimes people talk about a southern drawl sounding slow, and then taking that as if it expresses something more about who that person is than just the way that they talk. So /u/-fronting, for example, is interesting because of the fact that it occurs across most varieties of English. It's one of the most prominent features of Scottish English. And the context completely matters because no one in this study is trying to index being Scottish. That's not what they're doing, even though that is a indexical field for fronted /u/ So it depends very much about what are the salient character types and what matters socially to a community, you need to know those things in order to understand Uh, what the language variance indexing, and then when it comes to language change, as that change occurs, what people are maybe thinking of that change, how they're making sense of that change. And then thinking about to my initial shock, at hearing myself use this variant, it's important to remember that most of the time, again, this all happens below the level of our conscious awareness, like, you know, being conscious of our emotions, it's not something that we normally typically do. Our conscious social attitudes are just a tiny, tiny part of our knowledge about these relationships. So sociophonetic indexicality, it's more a regular part of how our body and our mind just do language. And since it's so frequent and ubiquitous, it's a great window onto our social world. Now, of course, the clearest sign, that socioponetic indexicality is entirely ideological is the fact that pronunciation variants are often called right or wrong or good or bad. Basically, these kinds of meanings emerge when a pronunciation indexes a social meaning that's socially stigmatised. You can think about the social associations around sounding gay or for those of you of the right age, the term Ebonics, if you're familiar with that. It was a term that briefly referred to African American language. And both sounding gay and Ebonics, they technically only refer to social identities, gay or African American or Black. But the prevalence of homophobia and racism means that you, I think, probably all can intuitively guess which of these two indexical fields those speech varieties would go into if we were describing dominant mainstream American society. So This is often why linguists like me end up in the news media because the belief in good or bad language, it's so deeply ingrained that someone just saying that it's not the case is itself newsworthy. Okay. We're at 6:05, and I've only gotten up to my second year at the PhD. So what I'm going to do is breeze through what I've done in the past 22 years. I love collaborating and the faces that are shown here are the collaborators whose research, I am not going to get to mention today, but several of them are here in the audience, and so you can ask us about it afterwards. Here are some of my projects. First, building on my work in Arizona, Mary Rose and I compared Arizona ranchers with Wisconsin dairy farmers. We looked at how language indexes the concept of working the land and characteristics of the communities that identify with that. Then Nola Stephens and I collected data from the border of Oklahoma and Texas, and we argued that linguists should take seriously the concept of talking Country, just as they take seriously the concepts of talking Southern or Rural. With Rebecca Scarborough and others in her phonetics class, we study differences in how Stanford undergraduate students spoke to a White American English speaking woman versus a Chinese woman. In short, Foreigner Directed Speech is a thing. You ask me about it later. I have also worked a lot on methods. I think methods are really, really crucial to getting the right results. So Sonia Fix and I, we looked at one sociophonetic feature that happens to be found in both African American language and Chinese American English. And we showed how inconsistent different linguists are in measuring it, even if they're specialists in this feature. And then Jennifer Nycz and I looked at a different sociophonetic feature, one that happens to characterise both New York City English and San Francisco English, and we propose new and better ways of measuring that. One of the things I'm probably best known for is my work with Rebecca Starr and Liz Coppock, where we were the first to look at the fact the phonetic variation can correlate with a person's political party or political orientation. We did that in the US, and then later Ruth Friskney and Jim Scobbie and I looked at how that played out in the UK Parliament among Scottish MPs. And since being at Edinburgh, I've worked with my dad, who is a retired tourism geographer and with my former students, Amy Fairs, and Inez Paiva-Couciero And we looked at the role of sociolinguistic indexicality in the Scottish tourism industry, how languages commodified the relationship between sounding authentic and sounding credible, for example, among Scottish and non Scottish tour guides in Edinburgh. Zac Boyd, Josef Fruehwald, and I worked on how listeners attribute social meanings when listening to foreign languages that they don't know. So English -- we looked at English French and German and English listeners, in particular, are happy to transfer their ideologies about pronunciation to other non English languages, even if they don't know what that language is. Tsung-Lun Alan Wan, Claire Cowie, and I looked at how sociophonetic variation can index the emotions that hard of hearing Taiwanese Mandarin speakers have towards their disability. And just this summer, with Shermain Ang, I'm working on these concepts with respect to depression, and I'm drawing on my own lifelong experience with dysthymia and drawing on theories from Critical Disability Studies, Crip Linguistics, Mad Studies, and all these exciting new concepts that have not yet been introduced to the field of linguistics. And as Holly mentioned, I'm conducting research with recordings that we made during the COVID 19 lockdowns with my very diverse interdisciplinary team here. We have experts in sociology, social policy, health, psychology, and history. And we have a brand new website, so you can check out what we're doing there. The project that I've spent by far the most time on is the study of sociophonetic, variation, change in indexicality among Chinese Americans and White Americans in San Francisco, California. This was the topic of my PhD, and 11, subsequent journal articles, and book chapters. So solo authored, some co authored with these fine folks. It's the project that best shows how sociophonetic indexicality is a window onto language. And so I'm going to end with a presentation of that work. Okay. My last example. So consider these two lists of words. If you're from Scotland, Ireland, Canada, or the Western United States, and other places, I'd be curious to hear. You'll probably say these words the same. I say them the same. chock chalk, cod cawed, don dawn, fox Fawkes, et cetera. If you do, you have the cot-caught merger, like I do. Those of us who have it like to refer to it as the Lot-Thought merger, because then it's clearer. And the dialect I'm looking at today. This happened when the round, back open mid vowel there in that bluish green became pronounced like the back unrounded open vowel here that's in the red. Sometimes it's called the low back vowel merger. And mergers are sound changes. They happen in all sorts of languages all around the world. There's also splits, so things go both ways. But when you have a merger, you end up with one less vowel or one less consonant than you had before. So it's kind of an interesting kind of sound change. One question is, does social stuff, to social information, socio phonetic indexicality, does it matter to the process of that sound change? So in the 1990s, the Lot vowel and the Thought vowel were considered fully merged in all areas of the Western United States, except for San Francisco. So on this map from the Atlas of North American English, you can see that San Francisco is sitting outside of this green line. We call this an isogloss or a dialect boundary line. But the Atlas only sampled white or Black speakers. And one thing that makes San Francisco really interesting is that has a very large Asian and especially Chinese population and a long history of Chinese settlement dating back to the founding of the city when people like my grandmother's grandparents arrived. So my research focused on the Low Back Vowel Merger in San Francisco, and I looked specifically at one neighbourhood. It was 50% Asian and 50% white, and this was in 2008. These graphs show how far apart the Lot and Thought vowels are among some of the people I interviewed in 2008. So zero on the y axis means like lot thought, they're completely overlapping. And then the higher up you go, the further apart the vowels are. So I don't know if you can read that, but what it shows is that for the Chinese Americans, the vowels, like we saw for the /u/ graph, they're showing a merger in progress. They're getting closer and closer together as you get younger and younger speakers. And this matches the rest of the Western US. But you have this funny thing going on for the white population of the European Americans. They have vowels that are pronounced close together, but they aren't merging over time. They're kind of hanging out without getting all the way overlapping. And this finding was the first case in US dialectology of a non white ethnic group participating in a wider regional sound change than the local white group. And what's also interesting is that this is the opposite of what I thought might be going on. Like, I thought that maybe the reason that they're staying outside was because maybe the Chinese Americans kept the vowels separate. So it turns out ethnicity matters, but in a more complex way. So I'm going to make a case that socio indexicality offers a way to understand how this merger happened, and so I'm going to build on this timeline here. So these are the birth years of the San Franciscans in my study arranged by decade. And then this is just a textual representation of the graphs so that I just showed you. So the Chinese San Franciscans born before 1950. They have very distinct vowels. Those born in the 1980s, and later, they have this one vowel. And then if they're born in 1950-1980s, they have something that's kind of close. So this is one we could maybe call it a near merger. For complicated reasons, I won't get into. We might not call it that, but anyway, I'll call it in near merger for now. It means they have two distinct vowels, but the vowels are really close together. And European Americans seem to be kind of stuck there. They're just like regardless of when they're born, they just have this near merger. That's the sound change. Now we want to consider the social change that's happening at the same time. A highly simplified version of the community's history is plotted here. Before the 1950s, everyone was white because housing laws were racist. Then those laws were lifted. Chinese immigrants could move in Chinese Americans because also move in, from China and from Chinatown. This was followed by a period of racial conflict and unrest in the 1970s and 80s. And then in 1990s, we start to see white flight, you probably heard about this from other urban areas in the United States. So those with European heritage started moving out of the neighbourhood into wealthier suburbs, and Asians, especially Chinese continued to move in. So over the whole century, Chinese Americans have this increasing claim to local authenticity. And by 2008, people were calling this neighbourhood the new Chinatown. In contrast, the white population had always had more of an isolationist or exceptionalist regional identity. So for them, San Francisco is culturally distinct from the rest of the San Francisco Bay area. Like Oakland was like way over there. This is we're not part of them. And this was a very important part of their identity, but it wasn't really as important to the Chinese Americans. In case you're wondering, my mom's family was one of the ones who moved from Chinatown out to this neighbourhood. And we still had relatives in Chinatown, so this was me as a kid visiting them. And then this is the upwardly mobile grandmother of mine in front of her car and her house in the 1970s. Okay. We have sound change, we have social change, and the last piece to see if they might be connected is indexical change. The first thing to think about, just in general, regardless of this context, is that for every language change, you're going to have the "before" form, the way Shakespeare used to talk, whatever, and then you have the new form and the after form. Before the change starts to happen, there's nothing really to talk about because you don't have that after form yet, right? But then the new form first appears, and then that's going to be the weird one. That's going to be the marked one. And it's going to be less frequent, "kids these days." That gets marked out as strange and odd. And then if it maintains its life beyond teenagers talking in a certain way and actually stays on into adulthood for those young people, then that becomes the new norm. The way that the older people talk, that starts to get marked. Then it's like, that's the way the old people talk, or in one case of Montreal, French, a study on R, the only occurrence of this one R was when people were mocking an old person. We can see as the language form changes, so does this indexicality. The interesting bit then comes in between as the changes happening in the middle. So in the case of the Lot Thought merger in San Francisco, it was the Thought vowel that's lowering and fronting and becoming to sound like this Lot vowel. So you can think of it like "cawffee," becoming more like "cahffee", so moving down. So it's the pronunciation of Thought, in particular, that's making that change, that indexical change. Lot isn't changing. So what's happening phonetically to that Thought vowel and indexically, to that Thought vowel is what I think is interesting. Okay. What's happening in the middle of the sound change is that old Thought, "cawffee" pronunciation that starts to get noticed. It starts out as unmarked, but then it becomes marked over time. In the community I studied, it became gradually more associated with an older persona, but not just any old persona, because of the way this community worked, that old persona meant "white" because that's who the original people were in this neighbourhood. It also indexed a kind of salient persona in that neighbourhood, like the Cowboy or the Valley girl. This is an Irish cop or an Irish civil servant. The way of being white related to Irishness, particularly important to the San Francisco culture, kind of the way that it is in Boston and New York. And so that became associated in a marked way with the thought pronunciation. Now, for the lower pronunciation, the new one, that Thought vowel, that's already as you saw on that map, that's how everyone else in the West is already saying it, right? So it's already this unmarked variant that's out there. So even though it's the new pronunciation, there's ways of thinking that it's actually not that marked for people who are oriented to that being the new norm, so younger people. It's not ever attached to any particular set of people. It's not like the way those young people speak, really, because it's kind of like the way everyone speaks outside of San Francisco. So it over time, but fairly quickly, over a few decades, became the unmarked way of speaking in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the original pronunciation, that Thought pronunciation, it became so marked that in 2008, the average local San Francisco would ask a speaker of that form if they were from New York or Boston, rather than realising that they're from San Francisco. And yeah, like I said before, when you're sudying sociophonetic indexicality, you end up becoming expert in things you didn't think you would like late 19th century Irish American culture. Okay. Now, the last thing I had to tell you about is this interesting phonetic aspect of this change. So if you think about the people who were born and raised in the 1970s, the 1980s, they're in this, like, hot pot of social change and sound change and all interesting things going on. And there's something that two of the speakers showed, which is called phonological "flip-flop." For the sound change we're talking about, flip-flop is when someone pronounces Thought like Lot and Lot like Thought, or they pronounce Thought so much like Lot that it goes past Lot. They keep them as separate vowels, but they pronounce them in opposite ways. It turns out this Lot Thought merger, it's been studied a lot, pardon the pun. Across varieties of US English or North American English. In every single study, there's one person who shows flip flop, and it's always a young woman. Now, we know as researchers on sound change, that women often lead men in sound changes, and indexicality is the reason, but I can't get into that here. But it's very interesting that no one's ever really taken that individual and seen what it tells us about the sound change. So I'm going to show you one of them. This is Mary. So Mary was a fifth generation Irish American woman. But when she was about Isla's age, all she wanted to be was a little Chinese girl. And in her interviews, she talks at great length about the social practises that were cool in her school that she didn't have access to being in a tall Irish American body. The other woman who has flip flop is a Chinese American woman who attended an Irish high school and who experienced a horrible time and a lot of racism. So there's two very different people, but have two unique motivations for attending to the social signalling that's available in language around them. So you can see Mary here overshoots Lot in the front-to-back dimension. And interestingly, the other woman overshot it in the height dimension. But in either case, I argued that their speech patterns were a useful indicator of the direction of the overall change and also how the change was spreading across the community with respect to age and gender and race and ethnicity. So it suggests there's something indexed by that thought vowel that affects the way that that sound change is progressing. So there's a big debate in linguistics actually about the extent to which the social world can explain the way language change progresses. Some say yes, some say no. My main point is the way that people usually represent the social is highly simplified. It's not nearly complex enough. Social meaning doesn't just attach to a pronunciation and then stay there for the duration of the sound change, it changes over time. It changes from moment to moment. And so we need to model that if we want to understand the role that it actually plays. We use language for social reasons. We probably should incorporate that into how we understand language use. So I'll like to say, sociophonetic indexicality is a window onto language, as well as society. Okay, so thank you for sitting through all of that. That is in a nutsell what I research. The main takeaway is if you judge a person's language, you're judging, the very core of who they are, so don't judge their language, just enjoy it. It's fascinating and wonderful. Okay. So I thought about this issue that I wanted to thank people as well, and I was like, Oh no, they're gonna clap when I say that. This is the part of the lecture where people usually thank their spouses if they have a spouse. Jefferson Kodwo Robert Shirley, is my partner for over 20 years. He's supported me through grad school. He gave up a career in math education to move to Edinburgh. He took the bulk of a parental leave. He works part time. so he can look after our family and our home. And everything in my talk tonight was made possible because of him. And Isla and Liam. Thank you for sitting through this. It is over now! You both make me so proud to be your mom. Thank you to everyone that I showed up here on the slides tonight. Thank you to my colleagues in Linguistics in English Language. Thank you to the friends and mentors and comrades listed here, and thank you again for coming.