Ofstad Speaker Examines “Linguistic High Crimes”

Scholar Kelly Elizabeth Wright will present “Linguistic High Crimes” at 7 p.m. April 11 in Ophelia Parrish 2210 as part of the Ofstad Reading Series.

As an experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer, Wright will discuss censorship from both the perspective of an individual language user navigating their social environment, and from the perspective of local and 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 and 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.