We are thrilled to share that our faculty affiliates Amanda Cardoso (Principal Investigator) and Marie-Eve Bouchard (Co-Investigator) have been awarded a SSHRC Connection Grant for outreach, engagement and public dissemination activities for their research project Language Attitudes and Social Consequences in Diverse Contexts. The UBC Centre for Migration Studies is excited to be the administrator of this grant, and will provide matching funds towards the project to support a research workshop. The project has received other contributions from UBC Language Sciences, UBC Public Humanities Hub and the Canadian Linguistic Association.
The project centres on three areas of interest in language attitudes research: 1) social consequences (e.g.. unequal outcomes in employment opportunities), 2) multilingualism (e.g., impact of language attitudes on learning or retaining a variety), and 3) public voices (e.g., unequal representation of voices in the public spheres through media and speech technology). The project will connect a diverse network of scholars interested language attitudes and social contexts, disseminate research to the general public and specific language communities to promote multilingualism and marginalized languages, celebrate the intersection of language and culture, highlight the benefits of linguistic diversity and combatting language-based discrimination, and initiate discussions in academic and non-academic circles to foreground the social consequences of language attitudes.
Additional researchers involved in the project are Dr Molly Babel (Associate Professor, Linguistics, UBC), Professor Erez Levon (University of Bern, Centre for the Study of Language and Society), Suyuan Li (PhD Candidate, Linguistics, UBC), Angelina Lloy(Graduate, Linguistics, UBC) and Mackenzie Dixon (Undergraduate, FHIS, UBC).