Written By: Alan Flurry, writer and producer for Franklin College of Arts and Sciences

The vanishing Southern accent in Georgia has been well-documented, most recently by linguists from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech in 2023. In a new study, the same research team shifted their investigation from the White population to the accents of Black Georgians, with results that highlight the effects of migration and education on the accents of Black Generation Z speakers.

This month Florida International University and the University of Miami hosted the 52nd annual Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) conference in Miami. Our Linguistics Department was fortunate to have multiple faculty members and students participate this year. 

Ph.D student Keiko Bridwell presented the paper “Place, Politics, and the Southern Vowel Shift.”

The Computer Museum of America (CMoA) visited the Linguistics Department to explore the role of Navajo language in historical encryption and technology. 

Late September, PhD Jean Costa-Silva alongside Dr. Vera Lee-Schoenfeld published the article, "Syntactically branching out beyond the traditional classroom: A report on the discovery method", in Language - the flagship journal of the Linguistics Society of America.

Abstract: