welcome!
The Sociolinguistics Brown Bag is one of the laboratory-based discussion groups housed within the Department of Linguistics, University of Washington. We typically meet weekly throughout the academic year to read and discuss articles, explore issues of current interest in sociolinguistic theory, learn about best practices in study design, research methods, and data analysis, discuss member research, and provide mutual support in our work. Sociolinguistics is broadly defined as the subfield of linguistics that investigates the intersection of language and society. Our members come from various departments on UW campus, whose research touches on various aspects of this theme, including: Linguistics, English, Anthropology, Communications, Speech and Hearing Sciences, and Women's Studies. Navigate to our links page to find urls for these campus units.
current research
At present, members' areas of research interest include: language and social networks, language shift and revitalization, language attitudes, morpho-syntactic and phonological variation, regional and ethnic dialect variation in American English, phonological restructuring under dialect contact.
Current group members are conducting fieldwork in the Pacific Northwest and Southern US, Jamaica, Hawaii, Chile, Japan, and Canada.
Here are links to the web pages of projects currently underway by Brown Bag members. This list updates periodically, so please do check back from time to time to find out what we're up to. As a service to sociolinguistics community, we publish some of our Human Subjects Division-approved research tools on our Elicitation Materials Clearinghouse page [[add link]].
The Pacific Northwest Vowels project - Alicia Wassink and Jeffrey Conn (Portland State U), Principal Investigators, National Science Foundation BCS#0643374
The Brown Bag generally meets weekly during the academic year. See the calendar for upcoming events.
In addition to the Brown Bag discussion series, the group is also active in working to coordinate guest lectures and colloquiua pertaining to language and society.
listserve
The Sociolinguistics Laboratory maintains an active electronic mailing list. To subscribe, members of the UW campus community and brown bag guests may go to the UW Mailman and have themselves added.