The ability to communicate through elaborate linguistic and symbolic systems is part of what makes humans social beings. Across cultures, different communication styles flourish at various levels of complexity in terms of language use and semiotic resources. These resources include gesture, space, body adornment, intonation and other forms of non-verbal communication. This course is concerned with the language, discourse and symbolic systems that construct and represent race, class and gender in the US. We use methods from linguistic anthropology and communications to explore language ideologies and the relationship between power and powerful speech. In this course we will observe and analyze naturally occurring and scripted conversation and discourse and will review and critique theories of language, communication, culture, and identity as they relate to ethnicity, race, gender, and nationalism. In particular, we are interested in how language mediates and constructs identity, how we associate language with race, class and gender, and how we resist and manipulate these associations. To answer these questions we examine both public and popular culture, as well as education, literature, film and other media.

Course PDFs