The West Virginia University Department of English will host a talk on regional dialect by Mary Kohn, Ph.D. of Kansas State University, on Nov. 19 at 4:30 p.m. in room 130 of Colson Hall on the WVU downtown campus.

The talk, titled ”’People say I sound country’: African American English and the localized sound of an ethnolect,” takes a tour of North Carolina communities to investigate localized sound patterns in African-American English. The Big XII Conference is sponsoring a weeklong visit by Kohn to train linguistic researchers in the Department of English.

Kohn is an assistant professor of linguistics in the Department of English at Kansas State University. She currently works on several research endeavors including projects at the Frank Porter Graham Institute and the Southeast Raleigh Project.

Through her research she hopes to create a better understanding of how children’s accents change during the school years, and how cultural geographic factors interface with trajectories of language change. The broad goal of this type of research is to provide insight into the intersection of language and society in order to understand how and why language changes over time.

A more immediate goal for such research is to increase understanding of language diversity, which will hopefully assist educators, speech pathologists, and test designers in creating equitable learning environments, interventions and assessment tools.

Kohn’s research has recently appeared in several journals including American Speech, Language Variation and Change, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

She is currently working on a monograph of language variation across the lifespan.

The talk is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

For more information, contact Kirk Hazen at 304-293-9721 or kirk.hazen@mail.wvu.edu.

-WVU-

kh/11/12/14

CONTACT: Kirk Hazen, English Professor
304-293-9721, kirk.hazen@mail.wvu.edu

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