Language and Race
Instructor(s): Elaine Chun
Description:
This course explores the relationship between language and race by merging anthropological understandings of race and ethnicity with sociolinguistic methods of description and analysis. It will introduce students to a range of sociolinguistic models of language and race as well as the problems and politics inherent in them; the course will give particular attention to research conducted in sites that complicate traditional models. The course will also examine how sociolinguistic knowledge of language and race has been applied to real-world contexts. The course opens new lines of inquiry by problematizing approaches that overlook complex relationships between ethno-racial categories (e.g., between Asianness, blackness, brownness, and whiteness) and that treat race as isolatable from other social dimensions, such as gender, sexuality, class, and place. It will also treat ethno-racial language not as a describable set of features but as a sociocultural practice that produces meanings, identities, and ideologies.
Prerequisites:
An introductory-level linguistics course, An introductory-level sociolinguistics course
LING7800-042
Days/Times:
Tue & Fri 3:30-5:15
Classroom: ECCR 105
Areas of Linguistics:
Sociolinguistics and Anthropological
Linguistics
Applications of Linguistics