Drop-in Meet and Greet with Andrew Lynch: Tuesday 1:30-2:30

You are invited to an informal meet-and-greet with Dr. Andrew Lynch, who will be visiting Modern Languages from the University of Miami to give a research talk on Tuesday, 4/12 (the flyer for his talk is attached; abstract below).

 

The drop-in meet-and-greet will be held from 1:30-2:30 in Posner 344 on Tuesday, 4/12. Faculty, please pass along this opportunity to undergraduate students who may be interested.

 

You can find out more about Dr. Lynch's work here. We hope you can come by--undergraduate and graduate students are especially encouraged to come!

 

The research talk will be held at 3:05 in the Grand Room (Posner Hall 340).

 

"Interpreting complexity and contradiction in the study of language attitudes: Spanish in the United States"

 

Heritage language researchers and sociolinguists understand a great deal about the ways in which U.S. Latinxs shift from Spanish/English bilingualism to English monolingualism over time. Emphasis on the structural effects of language shift, however, has obscured the societal causes of this process in bilingual settings. Understanding this phenomenon requires that we explore how varieties of Spanish are perceived vis-à-vis varieties of English. In this talk, I report on the findings of various language attitudinal and perceptual studies conducted in Miami over the past decade. With a majority Latinx population and vital ties to the Caribbean and Latin America, Miami is arguably the most dynamic bilingual city of the Americas. As superdiverse Spanish-speaking migratory flows crisscross hegemonic English language use across all socioeconomic strata of the city, the perception of Spanish 'on the ground' is conditioned by its ideological discursive construction 'in the marketplace'. In this regard, Miami offers an intimate glimpse into the complex vertical scalar orders of language contact situations in postmodernity (Blommaert 2010), and into the rescaling of Spanish in the global era. I suggest that differential degrees of orientation toward the 'language as commodity' ideology of economic neoliberalism and the exigency of English in the broader scheme of things result in an apparent paradox for Spanish in the U.S., i.e. Spanish is positively valued in principle yet disfavored in practice. I highlight distinctions according to socioeconomic class and explicit versus implicit measures.