The Project:
The data we present here is based on results from 104 interviews with Black speakers born and raised in the Eastern Massachusetts area. Black Dartmouth College students recruited speakers through Instagram and conducted interviews over Zoom. The research team, along with students in the courses Language and Ethnicity at Dartmouth College and Sociolinguistic Field Methods at Indiana University, created and contributed to the website content.
Our speakers range in age from 17 to 74 years old and come from predominantly Black neighborhoods including Mattapan, Roxbury, Brockton, and Randolph. Many identify as either African-American or first-generation Caribbean-American.
Our research team has published some results from this project in Linguistics Vanguard: A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences in an article titled ‘Socially distanced but virtually connected: Pandemic fieldwork with Black Boston area natives’. Other publications are in the works, so be sure to follow us!
Members of Boston YBP (Young Black Professionals)
Clark, E. (2022). Small Business Saturday. Getty Images. The Boston Globe. Retrieved August 21, 2023, from Getty Images
Clark, E. (2022). Tenth Annual Princess Day. Getty Images. The Boston Globe. Retrieved August 21, 2023, from Getty Images
Rinaldi, J. (2018). 5th Annual Black History Month Celebration for Seniors In Dorchester. Getty Images. The Boston Globe. Retrieved August 21, 2023, from Getty Images
Learn more about the Black Community in Boston
Our Team:
I am an Assistant Professor at Indiana University. I research language variation and change during times of social change. I am a mom, an avid hiker, and I love to cook.
I am a Dartmouth College alumna where I graduated Magna Cum Laude with High Honors as a Presidential Scholar. As an undergraduate, I double majored in Psychology and Linguistics modified by Marketing with a minor in Human-Centered Design. Currently, I am a design strategy consultant at Ernest & Young.
I am a Ph.D. Student in Linguistics at Indiana University, focusing on language documentation and sociolinguistics. I currently research languages spoken in the Burmese refugee community in Indianapolis, Indiana. I'm from Philadelphia, PA, and in my free time, I enjoy listening to podcasts and spending time outdoors.
I am a Dartmouth College alum where I graduated with High Honors and double majored in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Linguistics. I research queer kinship and community memory. Outside work, I enjoy journaling, hiking, and jewelry making.
I'm a PhD student in General Linguistics with a minor in Hispanic Literatures and Cultural Studies. My main interest is sociolinguistics with a focus on AAL, Black Queer English and related areas in Brazilian Portuguese. I'm from Queens, NY and in my free time I enjoy music concerts, hiking and cycling.
I am currently a Dartmouth undergraduate student with a prospective double major in Anthropology and Government. Outside of academics, I love to play tennis, swim, and read in the sun.
Acknowledgements:
We’d also like to thank other students that have contributed to this project, including George Stain, Soren Tyler, Gabrielle Morrison, Tessa Muller, as well as other Dartmouth College and Indiana University research assistants and students in Dr. Nesbitt’s Language and Ethnicity & Sociolinguistic Field Methods courses.
The Website:
If you wish to cite the Black Boston Speaks website, please use a citation similar to the following:
Nesbitt, Monica. 2023. Black Boston Speaks. [Website].
Background research for this study is based on “Boston Dialect Features in the Black/African American Community” by Charlene Browne and James Stanford (2018), New England English: Large-Scale Acoustic Sociophonetics by James Stanford (2019), “Bring on the Crowd! Using Online Audio Crowd-Sourcing for Large-Scale New England Dialectology and Acoustic Sociophonetics by Chaeyoon Kim et. al (2019), the Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash & Boberg, 2006) and the Harvard Dialect Survey: Massachusetts Results (2003).
The website is maintained by Dr. Monica Nesbitt currently located at Indiana University Bloomington. If you have any questions about the data or wish to contact her please email her at nesbittm@indiana.edu.
