Every region has unique dialect variations distinguishing it from surrounding states and even counties. Undergrad Hallie Davidson researched this phenomenon and looked at two variations from her home state of Utah.
Utah-specific dialects have been a topic of linguistic discussion for years, leading to greater recognition of niche word pronunciations such as Hurricane and even mountain. Utah native Hallie Davidson (Applied English Linguistics ’27) grew up hearing accent differences in her community. With the help of Assistant Professor Joey Stanley (Sociophonetics, Dialectology), she studied what perceptions are associated with the familiar linguistic variations and how language biases can impact personal beliefs.
Building a Linguistics Study
Davidson noticed her interest in sociolinguistics—the study of how language and society influence each other—as a freshman. She later connected with Stanley and, using funds from a Humanities Undergraduate Mentoring (HUM) Grant, studied two under-researched variations of the Utah dialect: the addition of a t sound in between l and s (Nelson versus Nel-t-son) and between l and th (health versus heal-t-th). “We were trying to discover if a variable that’s so infrequent can have perceptions attached to it,” Davidson says.
Stanley and Davidson traveled to the New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) sociolinguistic conference in November 2024. During a special poster session, they presented the abstract of their research and gathered feedback from other sociolinguists on the logistics of the study. Then, with their plans in place, they selected individuals from the Western United States—namely California, Idaho, and Utah—and recorded participants reading sentences with the targeted variations. “I used the Corpus of Contemporary American English to find sentences that were natural sounding,” Davidson explains.
These audios were then compiled into an online survey format, and a second group of participants then listened to each recording and ranked the speaker based on certain perceived characteristics—their professionalism, education, authenticity, and kindness, to name a few. “We initially thought that, as the t goes longer in the words, people would have stronger feelings about it,” Davidson recalls. After analyzing the data, she didn’t find conclusive evidence of this trend; however, she found statistically significant results that indicate “as the t got longer, people perceived the speakers as more rural.”
Recognize Your Linguistic Biases
As Davidson nears the conclusion of her research, she feels grateful for her experience developing a study of her own and the many ways it has deepened her education. “I learned more about linguistics from doing this project than I did from any of my classes during my first two years at BYU,” she says regarding her hands-on research experience.
Her biggest takeaway, however, doesn’t involve one dialect or variation; it relates to language itself as a tool for communication. “Every time somebody talks to you, you’re making judgments about them, and you don’t even realize it,” she says. “It’s important to be aware of our biases so that they won’t stop us from seeing people the way they ought to be seen.”
Learn more about HUM Grants here.