LINGUIST 101 at UMass is titled "People and Their Language." In this course, we look at the idea of language as a treat universal
to, and inalienable from, humanity as a whole. We discuss different perspectives from which language could be viewed, their
comparative strengths and weaknesses, and what, in any of them, is meant by the universality of language. 101 is a class for those who may never have considered language with any more depth than that of a high school English or foreign
language course.
I taught 101 most recently in the Fall of 2012, as Teaching Assitant to Lisa Green
Below are some handouts I used, listing the phonetic symbols used by linguists in descriptions of American English, and some key terms
in the study of social variation of language.
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Handouts
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IPA chart for English (PDF)
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A chart including the IPA characters used to transcribe Western American English. Not included is the sounds [ɔ] as in 'caught', if you are from the Northeast (that is, if for you 'caught' sounds different than 'cot'), which is a low, back, round vowel.
On the consonant chart, the rows represent manners of articulation and the columns represent places of articulation. The chart goes further back in the throat as you go rightward. For any pair of consonants, voiceless is on the left and voiced is on the right
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Key terms in sociolinguistics (PDF)
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A list of terms important to the study of social and regional variation in language. Most of these were discussed 11/9, but some have been added. Examples included.
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Email me! mclauss+AT+linguist.umass.edu
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