Serditova, Dana

Course content: This course offers an in-depth look at the relationship between language and society. It covers key concepts and methods in sociolinguistic research, such as language variation and change, code-switching, language ideologies, language policies, language and education, and the role of language in constructing social identities and power relations. The course will combine readings, discussions, and research projects. Students will learn to collect and analyze sociolinguistic data and understand how language both reflects and shapes social structures.

This advanced seminar looks into what makes texts “texts” and how they work — linguistically, stylistically, narratively, and socially.  We will investigate how textual structures (cohesion, coherence), stylistic choices, and narrative forms construct meaning within and across genres. At the same time, we will look at how texts reflect, reinforce, or challenge social ideologies (power, gender, race, etc.). We will cover such key aspects of the discipline as Speech Act Theory, Thematic Progression, Text Typology and Genre Theory, Macro-structures and Macro-rules, Intertextuality, and more.

Students will engage in close analysis of a wide range of authentic texts — from political speeches and media articles to recipes and public instructions. We will focus on how language operates across different registers, genres, and communicative contexts. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to perform nuanced stylistic and functional analyses of texts, with applications ranging from literary studies and media criticism to professional and academic writing.

Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and floods often result in large-scale displacement and radically change the social, cultural, and linguistic landscapes of affected communities. This timely seminar is at the intersection of linguistics and environmental studies. We investigate how natural disasters influence language practices, shift linguistic ecologies, accelerate language loss or revitalization, and reconfigure patterns of multilingualism and identity.

Language technologies increasingly mediate everyday communication, but they often fail to adequately accommodate the diversity of real-world language use. This course, positioned at the intersection of sociolinguistics and speech technology, aims to uncover some of these technology biases. It focuses on how systems such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), voice assistants, and large language models deal with linguistic variation in humans. Students will learn about such concepts as linguistic identity, variation, and accommodation in the context of conversational AI (e.g., Siri, Alexa, ChatGPT), as well as explore experimental methods (e.g., Wizard-of-Oz). Key theoretical pillars of the course are linguistic accommodation, salience, indexicality, and enregisterment. The course will include critical readings, hands-on analysis, and project work, in order to understand how social factors like gender, class, ethnicity, and region are reflected in the performance of language technology. Topics include fairness and bias in ASR, dialect representation in training corpora, dialect erasure, and communicative adaptation in human-machine interaction.

Dreaming of a road trip through North America but can't take a gap year? This class might be the next best thing. This intermediate-level course examines linguistic variation in key urban centers across North America. Students will explore areas including, but not limited to, Pittsburgh, New York City, Toronto, and New Orleans, as well as their sociolinguistic features and the cultural, social, and historical factors that impact the realization of these features, including in marginalized communities. Students will also have an opportunity to present on any North American urban dialect of their choice, making the course flexible and tailored to their interests.

The course will include hands-on activities and hypothetical linguistic scenarios, such as the analysis and compilation of sociolinguistic maps, mock datasets of language shifts, and language policy debates. It will also cover key aspects of urban sociolinguistic theory and sociolinguistic methods.