Language and Race with Professor Nicole Holliday

It’s rare to meet your academic inspiration incarnate, and even rarer to take a class with them, so I was enthralled, overjoyed, and sweating my pores out when I got the chance to take Professor Nicole Holliday’s Language and Society class. This past semester, I witnessed all that Professor Holliday brings to linguistics: superb teaching, endless energy and enthusiasm, an insatiable love of learning, and innovative research methods. Her experiments seek truth and action: from politicians, to ASR, to digital voice assistants, to biracial individuals, she studies prosody and suprasegmentals, aiming to answer one question: what does it mean to sound black? Throughout this episode, Professor Holliday and I discuss the impact of her research and findings; we talk about how AI can discriminate and reinforce linguistic bias against people of marginalized identities. We parse apart theories of dialect evolution and the development of African American English, and we examine the intersections between different subfields of linguistics. Finally, Professor Holliday explains how studying language will help you make sense of the world, humans, and human invention. This is an episode for sociolinguistic nerds, avid, prospective, or otherwise. 

Dr. Nicole Holliday, an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Pomona College, is a recipient of the LSA's Early Career Award. Check out the links below. . .

Professor Holliday's Website

Professor Holliday's Google Scholar

• ⁠Language-specific Effects on Automatic Speech Recognition Errors for World Englishes⁠
• Holliday and Dan Villarreal--"How Black does Obama sound?": ⁠Intonational Variation and Incrementality in Listener Judgments of Ethnicity⁠
• Perception in Black and White: Effects of Intonational Variables and Filtering Conditions on Sociolinguistic Judgments, With Implications for ASR
• ⁠Siri, you’ve changed! Acoustic properties and racialized judgments of voice assistants⁠

Professor Holliday's Twitter

Joey Stanley, BYU

Rachel Weisler: U of Oregon

Rob Podesva: Phonation type as a stylistic variable: the use of falsetto in constructing a persona

John Rickford