Linguists Investigate Language Borrowing in the Field and the Lab

For work on sociolinguistic borrowing, linguists Gareth Roberts and Betsy Sneller created two alien species, the “Burls” (left) and “Wiwos,” assigning study participants each to a group. Players then communicated via a made-up language, where one species used “b” in place of “f.” The researchers observed these conversations to determine whether any borrowing occurred.

There’s this idea in linguistics called sociolinguistic borrowing, in which one group of people adopts a feature of another group’s dialect. Usually it results from a positive association with the group that originally used the feature. But Betsy Sneller, a fifth-year Ph.D. linguistics student, discovered something different.

In fieldwork on one South Philadelphia block, she found that those doing the borrowing actually espoused negative views about those from whom they borrowed. She teamed up with Gareth Roberts, an assistant professor in Linguistics, to further investigate this phenomenon experimentally in the lab.

“It wasn’t just this coincidental opposition,” Roberts says. “It was the ones who were most aggressively negative doing it the most.”

“This is pretty unusual,” Sneller added. 

Sneller and Roberts presented their work at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in January and recently submitted a paper on the topic for potential publication.

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