A college education has become a near-necessity for much of the U.S. population: the equivalent of a high school diploma for earlier generations. As a result, ever greater numbers of students find themselves in contact with peers from beyond their own neighborhoods and home cities. The project will investigate the linguistic outcomes of this contact in two directions: speech modifications made by local students who have accommodated to non-local peers, and longer term changes in local dialects as a result of students bringing modifications into the community during and after college. The primary goal is to evaluate the effect of these outcomes on current models of language change.
The two communities are Philadelphia, PA, where there is considerable awareness of local dialect features (e.g. 'wooder' for 'water') and Lansing, MI, where the vowel system has undergone radical changes (e.g. 'hud' for 'head') that are un-noticed by the public. In each city, first-year undergraduates from local high schools will be recruited in institutions with varying concentrations of local speakers: in nationally oriented research universities, regional universities and community colleges. They will be interviewed by the research team using sociolinguistic techniques which focus on their social networks, as well as their linguistic experience in their first college year. A second interview will take place the following year to assess the impact of college on their local dialect features. The students interviewed will themselves learn interviewing techniques, which they will use to record younger members of their families and groups of high school friends. These recordings will trace the development of the college-influenced Philadelphia and Lansing dialects over time.
The broader impact of this study is the documentation of how language affects successful adjustment to the social environment of higher education, particularly for minority students whose dialects are marked by features considered non-standard. Over the two years of the project the relation between language adaptation and academic adjustment will become evident and should contribute to an understanding of the factors that ultimately determine completion rates in higher education.
