Langauge Change in Progress

Josef Fruehwald

2/6/23

About me

https://jofrhwld.github.io/

  • Assistant Prof Linguistics Department

  • Research interests in sociolinguistics and language change, specifically in sound systems

  • Computational and quantitative methods

  • Director of the Linguistics Computation Lab

  • Maintainer & developer of the FAVE suite

Sound Change - A Denim Analogy

Rather than start with the details of acoustics, let’s think about an analogy with another kind of cultural change.

Instead of “speech sounds”, let’s think about the innovation, adoption, and changes to blue jeans.

Owning and Wearing Blue Jeans

Denim wash

Category Creation

Originally

 

Now…

 

Category Creation Path?

Gradient truncation?

Category Creation Path

A sudden cutoff?

But for real

Speech is a highly practiced and precise physical activity, not as easy (or desirable!) to change as a pair of jeans.

But pronunciations do change, and one way we can study language change is to do acoustic analysis of recorded speech.

20th Century Philadelphia

20th Century Philadelphia

Acoustic analysis

Before

Now

Research: Computational Methods

Once we locate a vowel sound in audio, how do we “measure” it?

Research: Quantitative Methods

Once we’ve gotten these measurements, how to we analyze them?

Research: Results

Thanks!