User:Sfkiesling

Professor and Chair of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. I'm interested in understanding the relationship between the language produced by humans and our social identities. By social identities, I mean our relationships with other people, whether those are the people we are speaking to in a particular interaction, or our relationships to all the other people in our society, and every relationship in between, including relationships with ourselves. I've been particularly interested in gender identity and language, specifically men's identities and language, which was the subject of my dissertation. In this vein, I have also been investigating how dominant or hegemonic (young white cis-male middle class heterosexual) identities are linguistically performed, and how these performances (re)create structure and power in society. When I was in Sydney in 1996-1999, I also became interested in the role of ethnic identity and migration in the actuation and spread of linguistic change in Australian English. Currently, I am beginning a project to describe and explain variation and change in what is locally called 'Pittsburghese' with Barbara Johnstone. There are lots of papers available at academia.edu.