Voices of Oakland
Keith Johnson, Professor
Linguistics
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
The linguistic description of "California English" is based on observations of relatively few people, often college students, speaking in rather unnatural contexts. This project aims to document conversational speech of ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds who grew up in Oakland.
Role: Together with the PI, apprentices will conduct on-camera socio-linguistic interviews with Oaklanders. You will help recruit speakers for the study, and travel to locations in Oakland to meet people. Crucially, you will help transcribe and process the resulting videos. In doing this work, you will learn to conduct interviews, to use automatic transcription software, and to produce phonetic transcription of speech. You will also learn to pay close attention to how people actually say things, and a good bit of the vocabulary that linguists use to talk about speech patterns.
Qualifications: Required: You should like to talk to people, and be comfortable using audio/video equipment. You should be able to take time in the week to go to Oakland and meet people at senior centers, recreation centers, churches, etc. and also have time for a weekly project group meeting where we will work together in the same room, transcribing interviews. You will need to complete training for human subjects research (see https://cphs.berkeley.edu/training.html).
Desirable: It would be great if you grew up in Oakland and could reach out to family and friends for the project. It would also be a boon to the project for you to have taken course work in qualitative research, in anthropology, sociology, or linguistics. Finally, the project needs a web page, so if you have web design skills we might be able to use you.
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: Downtown Oakland Senior Center, 200 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94610 Laney Community College, 900 Fallon St, Oakland, CA 94607 Other off campus sites to be determined.
Related website: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~kjohnson
Social Sciences