Language and Societies abstracts, vol. 15 (2024)

The abstracts below are summaries of papers by early-career scholars from the 2024 edition of my course, Language and Societies. The authors are undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology and linguistics at Wayne State University. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at this critical juncture, when the authors are making final revisions to their papers.

Karsten Allendorfer: Language, Cognition, and Hallucination: How Reddit Posts Offer Insight into the Social Realities of Life with Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder

Ehimare Arhebamen: Can multilingual singers’ ability to sing bilingually be affected by their indigenous tongue?

Joy Barksdale: The Historical and Analytic Origin Story of Japanese Writing

Angela Boyd: An Analytic Comparison of Two Debates on Fanon versus Canon

Jayme Brown: Animals, babies, friends: Examining human-dog communication and its implications for understanding what it means to be family

Adam Conigliaro: American Prisoners and their Linguistic Freedoms: Use of Metaphors to Survive

Patrick L. Dear: Decoding Migrant Hieroglyphics or Drifter Language: An Anthropological Analysis

Brittney Eastin: Creating Calm: Cold War Era Public Messaging from the Civil Defense Agency

Aleah N. Edwards: Multimodality as a form of developing literacy in children’s museums

Dustin Elias: The Social Context of the Development of the Proto-Canaanite/Proto-Sinaitic Alphabet from Egyptian Ancestors

Yoel Gonzalez: Limited Sovereigns: An Analysis of the US Federal Government’s Actions Towards Indigenous Sovereignty Through a Rhetorical Imperialistic Lens

Julie Julison: Entovegan: Evaluating the Potential Hopping Success or Bust in the Discourse of Foodways

Brianna LeBlanc: Historic Horsepower: A Linguistic Analysis of Horses in Detroit

Gabriela Lloyd Pérez: Will Subtitles Suffice? An Exploration of Spanish to English T/V Pronoun Translation in Modern Television

Kellan McNally: Less is more: Argumentation for preserving disabled workers’ subminimum pay

Kayleigh Reimueller: Welcome to Mogwarts: The Language of Looksmaxxing

Ana Saenz: Pets or Pests? How Linguistic Terminology and Discourse Affects the Perception of American Mustangs

Niyaz Najm Salih: Examining the United States’ Role in the Turkish Incursion into Kurdish Territories in Rojava in 2019: A Critical Discourse Analysis Study

Cheyenne Taylor: Serving Cunt: An Ethnographic Analysis of Online Queer Profanity Use

Ricky Underwood: A Linguistic Analysis of Handheld AI Assistants: What is “Natural Speech”?

Mariana Villegas Venegas: Is Variation in Pronoun Usage in Caribbean and Mexican Spanish Contact-driven or Dialectal Preference? 

Peter Zillmann: The Pragmatics of Credential Phishing Email Scams