Vineeta Chand (University of Essex). 14 de juny a les 11:30. Edifici Omega, aula S205 (planta -2). Campus Nord de la UPC. Language dynamics in contemporary India

Resum: In this talk I will introduce sociolinguistic aspects of contemporary India (language politics, changing fluencies, contemporary practices) as a situated case study with broader ramifications for sites of multilingualism and language contact across the globe. Specifically, I will focus on mixed practices (codeswitching) from two angles: (1) language shift dynamics in the Hindi Belt within a predator-prey modeling framework and (2) the quantitative characteristics of two mixed codes, Benglish and Hinglish, with respect to Zipf’s Law. There are theoretical linguistic, sociolinguistic and evolutionary linguistic conclusions to be drawn from such research, which will also be addressed.

Bio: I am a sociolinguist at the University of Essex. I completed my BA at UC Berkeley (Cognitive Science), and my MA & PhD at UC Davis (Linguistics), supported by NSF and Wenner-Gren dissertation grants. My NIH/NIA-funded postdoctoral research was in the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the UC Davis Department of Neurology. My PhD research explored English dynamics in India. My research currently focuses on Indian sociolinguistics and clinical linguistics. I explore language politics and changing fluencies in India from sociolinguistic and applied physics approaches, while my clinical research explores language changes related to Alzheimer’s dementia. My journal publications include papers in Language in Society, Journal of Sociolinguistic, Current Protocols of Neuroscience, The Journal of Gerontology, and Physica A.

Via: Albert Bastardas