Shana Poplack
Encyclopedia
Shana Poplack is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov
William Labov
William Labov born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics...
. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American Vernacular English
African American Vernacular English
African American Vernacular English —also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular , or Black Vernacular English —is an African American variety of American English...
.
She is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa
University of Ottawa
The University of Ottawa is a bilingual, research-intensive, non-denominational, international university in Ottawa, Ontario. It is one of the oldest universities in Canada. It was originally established as the College of Bytown in 1848 by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate...
, where she directs the Sociolinguistics Laboratory and holds the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in New York City, she studied at Queens College and New York University, then lived in Paris for several years, studying with André Martinet
André Martinet
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential by his work on structural linguistics....
at the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where she took her PhD (1979) under Labov's supervision.
During three years as a researcher at the Centro de estudios puertorriqueños, City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
, her studies of code-switching
Code-switching
In linguistics, code-switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals—people who speak more than one language—sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other...
among Puerto Ricans in New York
initiated her characterization of universal patterns of intrasentential language mixing, and demonstrated that fluent code-mixing is a bilingual skill rather than a defect. Over three decades, she made numerous contributions to the understanding of
bilingual syntax in social context, many involving typologically contrasting language pairs.
In 1981 Poplack moved to the University of Ottawa
University of Ottawa
The University of Ottawa is a bilingual, research-intensive, non-denominational, international university in Ottawa, Ontario. It is one of the oldest universities in Canada. It was originally established as the College of Bytown in 1848 by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate...
, where she assembled,
transcribed and concordanced a “mega-corpus” of conversations among
French speakers in the Canadian capital region, providing her and many other researchers with an extraordinary research resource on modern vernacular French.
Poplack's analyses of vernacular varieties of New World Spanish
Caribbean Spanish
Caribbean Spanish is the general name of the Spanish dialects spoken in the Caribbean region. It closely resembles the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands and Andalusia....
, Canadian French
Canadian French
Canadian French is an umbrella term referring to the varieties of French spoken in Canada. French is the mother tongue of nearly seven million Canadians, a figure constituting roughly 22% of the national population. At the federal level it has co-official status alongside English...
and English
Canadian English
Canadian English is the variety of English spoken in Canada. English is the first language, or "mother tongue", of approximately 24 million Canadians , and more than 28 million are fluent in the language...
and Brazilian Portuguese
Brazilian Portuguese
Brazilian Portuguese is a group of Portuguese dialects written and spoken by most of the 190 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a few million Brazilian emigrants, mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Canada, Japan and Paraguay....
are characterized by skepticism towards standard explanations of variation
and change based on language simplification or external influences, in
favor of historical and comparative studies of internal evolution.
Poplack's work on the origins of African American
Vernacular is based on evidence from elderly descendants of American
slaves recorded during fieldwork in isolated communities in the Samaná
Samaná
Samaná is a province of the Dominican Republic. Its capital is Santa Bárbara de Samaná, usually known as Samaná.Samaná is located on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in the northeastern part of the Dominican Republic. It is known for its mountains of which it is almost entirely formed...
peninsula (Dominican Republic) and in Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the most populous province in Atlantic Canada. The name of the province is Latin for "New Scotland," but "Nova Scotia" is the recognized, English-language name of the province. The provincial capital is Halifax. Nova Scotia is the...
. This showed widespread
retention of syntactic and morphological features (including the entire
tense and aspect system) from earlier British and colonial English,
contrary to previous theories attributing such features to a widespread
early American creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
.
Current projects (2008) focus on contact-induced change in English as a minority language and the role of the school in impeding linguistic change.
Among her awards, she held a Fulbright visiting scholar
Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...
award (1990) in Brazil, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
Royal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada , may also operate under the more descriptive name RSC: The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada , is the oldest association of scientists and scholars in Canada...
in 1998) and won that society's Pierre Chauveau Medal
Pierre Chauveau Medal
The Pierre Chauveau Medal is an award of the Royal Society of Canada "for a distinguished contribution to knowledge in the humanities other than Canadian literature and Canadian history". It is named in honour of Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau and is awarded bi-annually. The award consists of a...
(2005). She was awarded a Killam Research Fellowship
The Killam Trusts
The Killam Trusts were established in 1965 after the death of Mrs. Dorothy J. Killam, the wife of Izaak Walton Killam. Mr. Killam was a Canadian business figure. He died in 1955, but before his death he and his wife discussed in extensive detail a scholarship plan, on which the Killam Trusts were...
in 2001 and the Killam prize in 2007, was the University of Ottawa Arts Faculty Professor of the Year (1999) and Researcher of the Year (2003), was awarded a Canada Research Chair in 2001, renewed in 2007. Poplack was elected Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...
(2009) and won a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship (2007) and the Ontario Premier’s Discovery Award (2008).
Poplack's works include Instant Loans, Easy Conditions: The Productivity of Bilingual Borrowing (1998), with Marjory Meechan, The English History of African American English (2000) and, with Sali Tagliamonte, African American English in the Diaspora (2001).