University of California, Santa Barbara
Post-Doc, Linguistics
University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow
Thesis Title: Language Contact and Regional Variation in African American English: A Study of Southeast Georgia
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Renée Blake
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About
I came to linguistics as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota under the tutelage of the creolist Geneviève Escure. It was there that I became interested in the study of pidgin and creole languages and African American English, an American English dialect. As a graduate student at New York University, I worked with Renée Blake, John Singler, Greg Guy, and others, on several areas of research related to African American English and Atlantic Creoles. My dissertation, "Language Contact and Regional Variation in African American English: A Study of Southeast Georgia," explores language contact, sociocultural identity, and regional linguistic variation in southeast Georgia, which is home to speakers of African American English and speakers of Gullah-Geechee, an English-lexifier creole.
Currently, I’m a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Linguistics Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. My faculty mentor is Mary Bucholtz. I work on the grammatical structure, phonology, and semantics of African-influenced language varieties like African American English, Gullah-Geechee, and Haitian Creole. I seek to enhance the syntactic and semantic descriptions of African American English while also contributing to the scholarship on social and regional variation in African American English. I am also interested in the historical relationship between African American English and Gullah-Geechee, particularly in southeast Georgia.
As a sociolinguist, I am interested in identifying linguistic features that serve as markers of social difference, as this work helps us to characterize the relationship between language and social identity and thus shows how individual and group identities are defined and shaped by language use. Exploring the ways in which culture shapes linguistic practice is also of interest to me. My other research areas include language contact, language variation, contact linguistics, and grammaticalization.
