Introduction: The Research, The Team, The Leader

On November 21, of 2012 (my 25th Birthday, btw), while sitting at the local StarBucks and studying for my upcoming exams, I received an e-mail that read as such: 

Hello Students, 

Welcome to the amazing world of Sociolinguistics! 

My name is Sali Tagliamonte and I am looking forward to seeing you all in class next term. 

Right now, I am writing to tell you about an amazing opportunity. I have been awarded funds to take six students enrolled in the class on a fieldtrip to England. 

Find out how you can be part of the overseas team. Read this attachment! 

Sali

Who would have thought that one e-mail would change my life so dramatically? It was like I was being given a birthday gift from the Big-Man upstairs! I immediately started getting my application together. Not too long later I got the follow up e-mail that I was accepted to be one of the six students going to England (York, specifically). At this time, the research itself was a little vague - but let's be honest, fully expensed trip to England? I was not going to pass this down! Going to England has been on my Bucket List before I even knew what a Bucket List was!

Before I continue, let me give you a little bit of my background. Because if you're reading this blog you might want to know who I am and what perspective I'm going to be giving in this blog. So here I go:

My name is Assad Quraishi (in case you did not know), but most of my friends call me Sid. I am a student of the amazing University of Toronto, finishing my BSc this semester. I will be graduating with a major in Computer Science, a minor in English and a minor in Linguistics. 

I focused my Computer Science major in software testing, hardware testing, and algorithm design and analysis - essentially, I'm very skilled at methodologically finding issues in a product, making reports and suggesting to developers how to fix the problem. I have also done a cumulative of 16 months of internships in this field. 

My minor in English was focused on looking at each genera of literature and seeing how the professor justifies it in a philosophical, emotion and metaphorical way. I focused on the logic and the express ways literature can be used. I also spent a lot of time writing poetry. 

Finally, with Linguistics (mon amour), I've taken a shotgun approach to learn as much as I possibly can. So far I've done courses in Phonetics, English Grammar, the history of Canadian English, the history of the English language; currently I'm taking Sociolinguistics, Adult Language Disorders (aka, BRAIN!), Language Acquisition, and Writing Systems. I am also spending time to teach myself French, Korean and Arabic. My goal is to be able to be fluent enough in French and Arabic so one day I can write poems Boustrophedon style, and frame the poem in Korean.

(Side note) I jokes with my friends that during an interview, if I'm asked, "what languages do you know?" I can respond with, "Java, Python, Shell Script, conceptual skills in C, French, English, verbal skills in Urdu, and I can write in Korean and Arabic."

As for the remaining 5 students in the team, I'll ask them to introduce themselves later on, or if they start their own blogs I will link to those blogs. What personally excites me about this team is how we all come from different points life. We're not all in our early 20's, 3rd year students. The age range within the group is pretty astonishing on its own. On top of that, we all have different levels of education in Linguistics. Some are specialists, others majors, I'm the only one minoring in the discipline. But we are all equally passionate about this project.

And now I will get back to talking about the project. I don't want to say too much right now – I will let some things unravel themselves as the project progresses; also, I don't want to say something that might skew that project in anyway. So this is what I will say, Professor Tagliamonte has displayed a strong excitement in the question, how does a linguistic change evolve? And that's what we are going to try to capture - linguistic change! 

The goal of the project is to build two corpora: 

- One of them will be of young speakers in York, England, as they speak today - this will be done with the team I'm going with. 

- The other will be gathering the same data from Toronto, Canada - this will be done by the rest of the class who is not going to York. 

The criteria we are given is to meet people who have been born in the target city, and are no older than 30. With each person we meet, we sit down with the person and conduct a "sociolinguistic interview". It is not a standard interview, but more like holding a conversation with a person. The role of the interviewer is do provide topics and let the interviewee speak. We record the conversation and that's it. We just want to hear the way people talk. (By the way, if you are in the Greater Toronto Area or York, England, meet our criteria and are interested in getting interviewed please message me! Thanks!) 

After all the interviews are done, we will compare these new corpora to ones made in Toronto and York over a decade ago. The hope is to capture some pretty dramatic changes - but that's always the hope in research. Outside of the dream, we are tracking a particular variable and seeing how its usage has changed over the years. The aspect that makes this research particularly exciting is that this research is comparing data in 4 ways via temporally and spatially.

Unfortunately I can't get much more specific than that for now. As things progress I'll try to add more details.

Finally, let me take some time to talk about Professor Tagliamonte and why she is the perfect person to be leading this adventure. There's no point on doing this objectively, because if you want to know about her you can read about her background and research here: Sali A. Tagliamonte's Professional Website. Or you can google search her yourself. It will not take you too long to find out that she knows what she is doing. She has several books published; more than a dozen articles published, and she has done a lot of speeches, interviews and talks on sociolinguistic topics. 

So I will add a little bit of my own point of view of the Professor. Passion is an attribute that I admire a lot in anyone, and that is something I see every time I sit in her class room. She loves what she does. This is a trait that I have seen dissipate in a lot of people when they're in the same field for too long, but it is still there with Professor Tagliamonte.

It is time for me to wrap this first blog up with a brief breakdown of what you can expect in the future from this blog. While we are in York, you can expect a daily update on how the project is going, difficulties we experience as a group, exciting information that we find, and all the awesome things we see in York (we are researchers first, and tourists second; but we are tourists nevertheless, hahahaha). After we return from York, I will try to do a post at least once a week to update the events of the project until my involvement ends - which will probably be at the end of the semester.

Till then, au revoir à tous!

~ Sid

I also love quotes, so I'm going to do a new one at the end of each blog. I might as well start with the one that is attached to Professor Tagliamonte's e-mails:

"The real life of language is in many respects more clearly seen and better studied in dialects." (Henry Sweet, 1900:79)