Sociolinguistics Projects

Sociolinguistics projects are a nice way to get students interacting with people and observing language outside of the classroom. Here are a few ideas for projects that you can assign or let your students choose from. With any of these ideas, you can have students create a simple report including a hypothesis about what they expected to happen, a summary of how they conducted their study, and an analysis of the results.

Dialect Survey

A dialect survey is an easy way to capture students' interest and teach them about linguistic elicitation. You can find sample questions by clicking on the "Maps and Results" link of the Harvard Dialect Survey page (which you may also find informative for a class lecture on dialect differences). Have students choose a subset of questions to ask respondents, or assign questions of your choice based on the differences you perceive may be most salient in the region where you teach. You may want to require students to interview a certain number of respondents and/or to interview equal numbers of respondents from different age, regional, or gender groups.

Labov Replication Study

You will most likely teach your students about Labov's (1966) study of [r]-deletion in New York City (cf. Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). You may want to have your students reproduce such a study (if they live in an area where [r]-less dialects are spoken) or conduct a similar study using another variable. One where differences may frequently be found in urban and suburban areas is the pronunciation of "street" with either a stop or affricate realisation of the /t/ phoneme. You can have students pretend to be lost and ask directions to a locally well-known place with "Street" in part of the address (cf. Durian, David. (2007). Getting [s]tronger every day?: Urbanization and the socio-geographic diffusion of (str) in Columbus, OH. NWAV 35 Conference Proceedings. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 13(2), 65-79).

Colour Study

If you teach about the colour naming experiment by Berlin & Kay (cf. Kay, P., & Berlin, B. (1999). Basic color terms. New York: McGraw-Hill), you may want to have your students investigate whether and how speakers of the same language but of different genders name colours differently. You can have students collect paint chip sample cards from a hardware store and cut them apart so that the names are not showing, then ask respondents to categorise the chips by colour to see how many different categories are produced and what names are given to those categories. Some students also enjoy doing this project with students in different majors to see whether there is a difference in the responses of students of fine arts, liberal arts, business, or sciences.

Hesitation Study

You can have your students investigate stereotypes about whether men or women say "like" or "um/uh" more often. Have them select a task that forces respondents to think about the answer (for example, "Recite the alphabet backwards" or "Name the last five presidents/first ladies/prime ministers of Great Britain backwards") and pose as Jay Leno-style interviewers on the street. They can count the number of times a respondent says "like" in his or her answer, or how many times men and women say "um" versus "uh."