Science Night @ Hope Elementary School
Advancing documentation and social justice through community-led collaborations in the Mesoamerican diaspora in California
The diversity and richness of the language practices of Indigenous migrant populations are often neglected in both public policy and research. In this talk I highlight contributions of two ongoing interrelated research projects carried out in collaboration with Mixtec and P’urhépecha community members in the California diaspora. First, I analyze speakers’ metalinguistic reflections on intelligibility between two different Mixtec varieties (or languages) spoken in the Central Coast of California. I argue that hybridization (Sanchez-Stockhammer 2012) serves as an accommodation strategy to facilitate intercomprehension, expanding on the multilingual repertoires and translanguaging practices (Wei 2018; see also García & Wei 2015). Next, I discuss Justicia Social de Intérpretes de Lenguas Originarias (JSILO), a collective of five Mixtec interpreters and two UCSB researchers whose goals are to create and disseminate multilingual and multimedia resources for interpretation into Indigenous languages (www.glosarioindigena.com) and to provide training for Indigenous interpreters in the diaspora in practical workshops (Ávila et al. 2023). Both projects center the voices and experiences of community members, who have identified a need for a greater understanding of the Indigenous languages spoken in the diaspora to advance language and social justice (Marie Uliasz 2018; Maxwell et al. 2018) and to create more equitable access to resources in domains such as public health while fostering the communities’ traditional linguistic and cultural practices.
Phonological typology of central vowels: a preliminary survey
Coffee Hour with Khalil Iskarous (USC Linguistics)
Congratulations to our recent UCSP SPArK graduates!
Congratulations to our recent doctors, Jiyoung Jang, Karen Tsai, and Caroline Crouch!!
Jiyoung just completed her thesis on Functions of prosodic boundaries in an edge-prominence language: Marking focus and phrasing in Seoul Korean.
Karen’s thesis assesses Edgy prosody: an articulatory investigation of the role of lexical pitch accent in Tokyo Japanese boundary marking.
Caroline’s thesis is on Postcards from the syllable edge: sonority and articulatory timing in complex onsets in Georgian.
