This course will examine the social aspects of phonetic variation, paying particular attention to the relationship between method and theory. The course will introduce students to the field through a survey of contemporary research, drawing on studies from variationist sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and laboratory phonology. Basic methods for studying the production of different types of phonetic variables (vowels, consonants, voice quality, and prosody) will be introduced to give students the foundational tools for conducting sociophonetic work. In the second half, we will discuss how listeners perceive both sounds and speakers, and the implications of both inter- and intraspeaker sociophonetic variation for theories of phonology.

Students will be assessed in the first two weeks by an essay and in the second two weeks by a project proposal of the students’ design. (2000 words or 4 pages each.)