Student Opportunities

Student scholarships

The Linguistics Program makes some of its funds available directly to students in the form of scholarships. These funds allow recipients to attend conferences or other events that contribute to their professional and academic development. Examples include the scholarships to attend the 2024 and 2025 editions of the LSA (Linguistic Society of America) conferences in New York City and Philadelphia (some pics below). All linguistics minors and majors are invited to apply!

Timing: Throughout the year.

four students at the Welcome Linguists 2024 LSA ANNUAL MEETING

Multiple students sitting down at a table eating

Group of students at the 20 LSA Annual 25 Meeting

WCU Linguistics Society

WCU’s own student linguistics club, the Linguistics Society organizes events, film viewing, games, and other fun linguistics-focused activities! For information, contact the Society faculty advisor, Dr. Raclaw.

Timing: Throughout the year.

Spring Speaker Series

Join us for presentations on the latest research in linguistics by scholars from around the country and abroad! Organized yearly since 2016 and open to the public. Below are the presenters at our latest Spring 2025 edition

Timing: Spring semester.

Bryan Kirschen (Binghamton University, SUNY) Thursday, March 27 3:20 - 4:20 pm EST via Zoom Toward Virtual Communities of Practice: The Case of Judeo-Spanish in the Twenty-First Century This talk explores the development, endangerment, and revitalization of Judeo-Spanish, focusing on online preservation through communities of practice (Eckert 2006) and postvernacularity (Shandler 2006). Specifically, this study examines the Enkontros de alhad series, which features speakers and learners of different varieties of Judeo-Spanish. Unlike prior studies on textual analysis (Brink-Danan 2011; Bunis 2016; Held 2010; Romero 2017), this research examines realtime discourse, particularly Haketia, the Moroccan variety of Judeo-Spanish. Utilizing just over ten hours of content from the series, this study explores contact between Western and Eastern Judeo-Spanish, as well as the use of Arabic-originating lexicon in Haketia. A discursive analysis reveals how speakers engage with other varieties of the language, commemorate significant places and periods in Sephardic history, navigate linguistic insecurity, and adapt to variation. This study contributes to growing scholarship on the digital preservation of Judeo-Spanish, particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Emma Breslow (University of Hawaii at Mãnoa) Tuesday, April 8 3:20 - 4:20 pm EST via Zoom A Diasporic Yiddishland: Endangerment and Authenticity in a Placeless Language. The landscape of Yiddish spoken today is shaped by two distinct speech communities, each spread across diaspora. This talk offers a map of this landscape, often referred to as a metaphorical or virtual Yiddishland, by examining the endangerment status of the language and speakers' perceptions of what counts as authentic Yiddish. First, we will establish a baseline understanding of Yiddish and how it fits within common measures of language endangerment. Then, drawing on interviews with contemporary secular Yiddish speakers, we will explore diverse perspectives on Yiddish's vitality and what it means to speak "good Yiddish." Finally, we will take a broader look at the experiences of diasporic communities by comparing these findings to attitudes about Armenian and Hawaiian. In examining the shared and unique experiences of these three language communities, I emphasize the complex dynamics of diasporic languages and the need to consider such experiences when discussing language shift and maintenance.

Rexhina Ndoci (Ohio State University) Tuesday, April 29 3:20 - 4:20 pm EST via Zoom In and out of ethnoracial identities through the use of ethnoracial labels/slurs and morphophonolical adaptations In this talk I discuss findings from 36 ethnographic interviews I conducted with first- and second-generation Albanian migrants in Greece. I show that their personal and family names function as a vehicle for their racialization bringing to the foreground negative stereotypes that are attached to their othered ethnic identity. Often their ethnic identity is masked via name changes and morphophonological adaptations that are overtly or covertly imposed by the hegemonic population. This masking or deracialization (Bucholtz 2016), together with language shift (Gogonas 2009, Gogonas & Michail 2015), leads to the loss of the indexical association of the subjects with their ethnic identity, Albanianness, and a superficial re-racialization with the hegemonic ethnicity. Greekness. Moreover, I show that the racialization of migrants is further achieved via the exonymic labels describing their ethnicity that have come to be ethnoracial slurs in addition to being the standard way of referencing the ethnicity. I argue that the slur meaning of the labels derives from the negative indexical meaning that they have acquired in the hostile xenophobic context of migration. To navigate the ethnoracial slurs and their racialization, subjects opt for innovative morphological marking of labels, resurfacing of learned morphological variants of low frequency. and siur reciamation which vary by migratory generation.

Linguistics Student Research Conference

Organized in the spring by WCU Linguistics Students, this conference brings together undergraduate and graduate students from the Philadelphia region – a great venue to present your ongoing research and get ideas for future research directions in a fun, relaxed atmosphere! Keep your eyes peeled for a call for papers in the spring (usually around February-March), with the conference being held before the end of the spring semester.

Timing: April

Linguistics Student Conference image

Linguistics Student Conference Image