This course will focus on the role of social and linguistic factors in the transmission and diffusion of featural change in a specific variety—Hawaiʻi Creole, an English-lexified creole spoken by approximately 600,000 people as a first language in Hawaiʻi. Students will be exposed to a wide range of research concerning principles of language change, creole development, and the linguistic ecology of Hawaiʻi. The course will be hands-on, and students will work closely with the instructor to investigate changes in Hawaiʻi Creole using samples from two spoken corpora: one from the 1970s and one from the 2000s. Methods introduced in this class are widely applicable to linguistic analysis, particularly for students interested in using real data to address questions concerning variation, English influence in the Pacific, and language change.
- Lehrende(r): James Grama