One topic that came out of a departmental forum on institutionalized white supremacy yesterday was the extent to which who we decide to cite can perpetuate racist boundaries within fields. So, I started to think about just who we cite in phonetics and what research we decide is part of the field. One major divide within phonetics is between papers which are mainly concerned with theory-building and those which investigate empirical observations from experiments or from corpus data. Many fields place the former on pedestals (at least for a time) while the latter comprise the bulk of the work that allows us to amass evidence in favor of certain perspectives. Moreoever, since there is just so much that has never been studied on the phonetics of different patterns in different languages, there is no shortage of empirically-motivated topics in phonetics. If I complete a study on the phonetics of tone in Triqui or another language that has been under-studied, my work is categorized as both a contribution to phonetics and a contribution to endangered language (or areal) research. Yet, the same allowance is often not afforded to research on minority groups in the US. A study on speech production or perception among speakers of Black English or among speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish is often not placed within the phonetics canon, but within the sociolinguistic or sociophonetic canon. As far as being part of phonetics, there is nothing inherently different in between doing speech production research on Black English or Triqui or Finnish. Yet, historically, dialectology has fallen within sociolinguistics rather than having been treated as what we might more broadly call "Language diversity." And note that once I say "language diversity", linguists kind of like to think of this as a course taught by a sociolinguist. Diversity is not under the purview of sociolinguistics though. Both phonetics and sociolinguistics can be equally focused on individual languages or interested in a diversity of languages. Research on the syntax of Black English is no more inherently research on sociolinguistics than research on the phonetics of Kera is. What binds linguistic research into sub-disciplines is the domain of study and the approach to the phenomenon, not the language. What this might mean in practice (at least in phonetics - I can't speak about other disciplines as much) is that the boundaries of the field are logically broader than currently defined. The growth of sociophonetics as a discipline has pushed quantitative phonetic research forward by forcing us to normalize discussions of language varieties in well-studied languages. However, it remains the job of sociophoneticians to tell other phoneticians that variation matters - linguists do not yet own language diversity as an issue for the entire field. Yet, a dismissal of sociophonetics has also probably kept it from being incorporated into what phoneticians would call "research on speech production and perception." I'll own that there was a time when I did not always see sociophonetics as being as rigorous as phonetics, but I no longer feel this way. It probably is also the case that by being sidelined, research on different language varieties has not undergone the same type of reviewer-ship that papers in "speech production and perception" might get. If I were to submit my own research to journals evaluating variation though, I shudder to think at how my work might fare. In other words, it's easy to elevate the importance of traditional metrics for scholarship when one is examining idealized language varieties and to under-value metrics that might be applied from a variationist standpoint. So, one way that phonetics might move forward here is to start to accept that many of our theories of production and perception that we tend to elevate are mostly not informed by any work on language diversity and, in fact, we know very little. The implications of this are as huge as the number of different languages and varieties and dialects and communities that have not been studied. We all own language diversity.
No comments:
Post a Comment