Ep. 19: The Myth of Standard English: 3 profs talk about how language works

Title: Languaging in Hampton Roads

Episode 19: The Myth of Standard English: 3 profs talk about how language works

Hosts: Jill Winkowski and Prue Salasky

Date: September 6, 2025

Length: 46 minutes

Publication Frequency: Fourth Friday (approx) of each month

What exactly is linguistics? Quite simply, linguistics is the study of language, not the study of one particular language, but language as a whole. So, when we talk about Applied Linguistics, we’re talking about how linguistic theory translates to practice, whether teaching TESOL or a foreign language to English speakers, understanding language variations and dialects, recognizing the bias and power inherent in standardized or normative language, or how language changes and what that tells us about history, culture and identity.

For this episode, we returned to interviews we conducted over the past 18 months with three linguists at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Hampton Roads to learn just how linguistics applies in so many aspects of life. And particularly about the standard English bias and its effects. Each professor talks about her linguistic path, her specialty and the broad reach of the field.

We revisited our Jan. 2025 talk with sociolinguist Dr. Bridget Anderson, director of the Tidewater Voices oral history archive at Old Dominion University, a  collection of local dialects gathered over more than 20 years, https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/tidewatervoices/. Anderson is an expert in acoustic phonetics and language variation. 

We also pulled from our spring 2025 conversation with professor emeritus Dr. Janet Bing, a phonologist, and a driving force behind the establishment of the university’s Applied Linguistics masters program (the only one in the region), and teacher of teachers of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other  Languages). 

And we returned to our dialogue with Dr. Staci Defibaugh, graduate program director of the Applied Linguistics program at ODU, whose research focuses on discourse analysis of speech in health settings.

In this episode we discover the shared features of linguistic discovery and what it can teach us about social standing, bias, and much more.

In our earlier episodes (see below), we drew on their specific areas of expertise.

Ep. #13 Guinea Talk: Gloucester County’s Unique Dialect https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/languaginghr/id1727246364?i=1000688235981, 

Ep. #16 How do you say Norfolk? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/languaginghr/id1727246364?i=1000706264104,   and 

Ep. #4 How are you doing? Diagnosing Health Talk

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/languaginghr/id1727246364?i=1000654121382,

Here are links to the Great Vowel Shift and the IPA vowel chart for American English, as discussed by Dr. Anderson

https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/021dYoM3E3G2qxJg0p5VlIoRg#IPA_chart_for_American_English

http://eweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm

Send your feedback and questions to languagingHR@gmail.com, and be sure to visit our website, www.languaginghr.wordpress.com