Language and Societies abstracts, vol. 12 (2020)

The abstracts below are summaries of papers by early-career scholars from the 2020 edition of my course, Language and Societies. The authors are undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology and linguistics at Wayne State University. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at this critical juncture, when the authors are making final revisions to their papers.

Ahmed Alaboosi: Modern Standard Arabic and The Iraqi Arabic Dialect: Prestige and Differences In Lexicon

Juliette André: Dishing it out on gentrification: Tracking narratives of urban redevelopment through Detroit restaurant reviews

Jessica Beatty: Discrimination on the Basis of Language Usage and Communication Disorders

Kate Blatchford: The City Beautiful Movement and Discourse on Urban Space

Agata Borowiecki: Late 20^th Century Immigrants in South-Eastern Michigan on Identity, Bilingualism, and Benefit

Jeff Dempsey: The Hebrew Verb System: Changes in Time

Amanda Ford: “Death the great tyrant”: Epitaphs, social inequality, and resistance to acculturation in death

Georgina Gill: Inupiat Language Survival through the Video Game Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)

Bethany Hedden: An EcoJustice Approach to Narratives of Emotions and Bodies: Do police call reports produce centric thinking and a discourse of rationalism?

Todd Hovey: “Shooting, Riding, and Speaking Manchu”: Manchu Language and Identity in Qing Institutions

Hannon Hylkema: Analyzing archaeological discourse: Narratives and arguments of interpreting Inca material culture

Nicole Markovic: Navigating Pronoun Use for Transgender and Gender Non-Binary Students in the Foreign Language Classroom

Joshua Medina: Ad Discourse, Mexico vs. United States: The Cultural Universalization of Coca-Cola

William D. Pizzimenti: Mail-order Muscles: A Comparative Analysis of Early 20th Century Mail-Order Fitness Advertisements, Courses, and Literature

Corrinne Sanger: PrEP, Risk, and the Potential for HIV: The power of public health discourse in a post-AIDS world

Erin Stanley: Cultivating deeper changes through uncovering root metaphors and modernist discourses in the AASWSW Grand Challenges for Social Work 

Laura Sutherland: Art engagement and agency on the websites of dementia care facilities in Michigan

Mikayla Swasey: ALKFJD: The changing metalinguistic understandings of keysmash practices

Elizabeth Watson: Gender(ed) “Equality” in the Home: Online Verbalizations of Experiences Dividing Household Labor

Matthew Worpell: Whatever do you meme? An analysis of the transformation in meaning of signs and symbols on 4chan

Shannon Yee: Minority language orthography and literacy: A case study of Swo in Cameroon