Visiting Ofstad Scholar Dr. Kelly Wright: “Linguistic High Crimes”

Experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright will consider censorship both from the perspective of an individual language user, navigating their social environment, and from the perspective of local & legal language policies. Wright will present findings which demonstrate users are aware of the direct indexation of the majority of their daily linguistic choices to potent & omnipresent Standard language ideologies. Such awareness makes all language use relevant for success across linguistic markets and often marks non-normative identity performance as unintelligent, crude, or even criminal. Wright will invite consideration of what a general preference for assimilationist linguistic production portends for the future of free speech and for the future of linguistic scholarship.