Language and Society: What Your Speech Says About You

Begin to investigate how language both reflects and shapes our social world. Observe the ways in which your speech signals information such as your age, economic class, gender, ethnicity, or place of origin. Grasp how even subtle linguistic variants such as -ing versus -in' (e.g. going vs. goin') in verb endings communicate important information between speakers.

Explore how social life affects language use, and how our social roles impact the way we organize our world linguistically. On the flip side, investigate how conceptual constructs regarding time, spatial relationships, and gender are encoded into language, influencing our perceptions and directing our thoughts into habitual patterns.