Six Views of New England
Six Views of New England
The Six Views of New England project is being conducted by Nicole Chartier and Ben Jones from the University of Washington Linguistics Department. Our goal is to have a better understanding of people's perceptions of how English is spoken within New England. While the questions we are asking may seem odd, we can learn a lot about language when we ask people who aren’t linguists questions about their language. This sort of research falls in a category of linguistics called ‘folk linguistics’. Similar research on speakers’ perceptions about regional differences of their language has been conducted in many different places within the USA (Michigan, Hawai`i, Ohio, Washington, Kentucky, and one earlier study in Boston) and in several other countries (the UK, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany). This research has provided valuable insight into people’s beliefs about language and space, and at times demonstrated ways in which non-linguists are aware of variation in language that has not yet been identified by linguists.
Nicole is from southeastern New Hampshire and graduated from the University of New Hampshire, where she studied linguistics. She is currently in her fourth year of the doctoral program in the Linguistics Department at the University of Washington. Her broad areas of study are sociolinguistics (the relationship between language and the people who use it) and phonetics (the acoustic properties of spoken language). Her dissertation focuses on language variation and change in New England. When she's not working, she's spending time with her two dogs, Wyatt and Henry.
Ben is from Midcoast Maine and has studied linguistics at the University of Southern Maine and the University of Kentucky. He is in the second year of the doctoral program of the University of Washington Linguistics Department. His areas of research are sociolinguistics, language ideology (how/what people think about language), and variation in language.