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WVU to host documentary and panel discussion: “Talking Black in America”

WVU Today

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia University’s  David C. Hardesty, Jr. Festival of Ideas series will address African American English, the most controversial and misunderstood variety of speech in the United States, during a documentary and panel discussion titled “Talking Black in America” April 10 at 7 p.m. in the Mountainlair Ballrooms.

The documentary showcases the history and symbolic role of language in the lives of African Americans and highlights its tremendous impact on the speech and culture of the United States. It also addresses the persistent misinformation about African American speech and situates it as an integral part of the historical and cultural legacy of all Americans.

A panel discussion, led by WVU linguistics professor Kirk Hazen, will immediately follow, and focus on the social complexity of one of the most stigmatized dialects in the United States, as well as explore the impact of language discrimination in people’s lives.

Kirk Hazen – Moderator
Kirk Hazen is Professor of Linguistics at West Virginia University, where he is the founding director of the West Virginia Dialect Project and a Benedum Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities. His research, teaching, and linguistic service are all centered on social and linguistic patterns of language variation. His most recent book is An Introduction to Language (Wiley 2015), and he is co-editor (with Janet Holmes) of Research Methods in Sociolinguistics (Wiley 2014).

Renee Blake – Panelist
Renée A. Blake (Stanford PhD) is a second-generation Caribbean American by way of Trinidad and Venezuela. She is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Linguistics and Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her research examines language contact, race, ethnicity and class with a focus on African-American English, Caribbean English Creoles and New York City English. She is the recipient of several grants including Fulbright, Rockefeller, and National Science Foundation. In 2010, she was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award at New York University. She has also served as a consultant to organizations including Disney and the Ford Foundation.

Walt Wolfram – Panelist
Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University, where he also directs the Language and Life Project. He has pioneered research on social and ethnic dialects of American English since the 1960s, including early research on African American speech in the urban North and later work on its regional distribution in the rural South. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books and over 300 articles, including four books and more than 100 articles on African American Language. He has served as a linguistic consultant to Children’s Television Workshop, the producers of Sesame Street, and been the executive producer of more than 10 television documentaries on language differences in American society, including several Emmy-winning documentaries. He has also served as President of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society, and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, and received numerous awards, including the North Carolina Award (the highest award given to a citizen of North Carolina), the Caldwell Humanities Laureate from the NC Humanities Council, and the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America.

The David C. Hardesty Jr. Festival of Ideas was created in 1995 by former WVU president David C. Hardesty Jr. and is produced by  University Events. It was inspired by events he organized as WVU’s student body president in the 1960s. Today, the lecture series spans the academic year and engages a diverse group of newsmakers, public figures, thought leaders and WVU’s own superstars.

The event is free and open to the public.

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