Language variation and change

Speaker: Tsung-Lun Alan Wan (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Disability and Sociophonetic Variation among Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Speakers of Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract: Deaf or hard-of-hearing (D/HH) people differ from each other in language use. Some D/HH people use signed language as their dominant linguistic modality, and some D/HH people use spoken language. Oral D/HH people sometimes speak with “deaf accents”, given that how spoken languages are developed by hearing people, making use of sounds which are not always accessible to D/HH people. In linguistics, most studies of deaf accents focused on how deafness has a physiological effect on deaf accents. Not many linguists have paid attention to the speaker agency of D/HH people. We all know that there are various accents among hearing people, and hearing people use different accents for a variety of social purposes. D/HH people are not different from hearing people in the aspect of how they travel between different speech styles in different situations.

In this talk, I will introduce how variationist sociolinguists can work with linguistically pathologized people, taking D/HH people for example. The main research question is how the disabled identity can mobilize style-shifting when disability is severely stigmatized within the ableist society. I will introduce the findings of three studies I worked on in the past three years. This talk foregrounds how D/HH speakers utilize variation in the three corner vowels and the retroflexed fricative in Taiwan Mandarin to embody the (dis)abled self, and/or negotiate their relationship with the ableist society.

Contact details

Claire Cowie