Our Mission

Welcome to Language Maps, Language Clouds!

Intrigued by language diversity and awareness, our team is interested in learning about language awareness among American college students and how they talk about them. Our goal is  to think of language as something that always surrounds us, immersive, patterned and understandable. We seek to describe language awareness by exploring distinctions between proficiency and familiarity, by inquiring into domains where students encounter languages not their own, and inviting respondents to use “ordinary language” in the form of everyday speech or informal writing. Beginning with the invitation to “list all the languages that you know,” we seek to learn the different levels of knowing that can encompass reading, writing, understanding, speaking or identifying.

Our questionnaire under the page “Give Data” is a revised version of our original questionnaire that began as index card free lists/pile sorts in 2015-2016. In 2016, we offered a new section called “Get Data” for anyone who wishes to make use of free raw data consisting of short textual descriptors for languages identified by participants. Now on our third year and third cohort of interns, we are developing a new section on language and the US Census that will be launched in Fall 2018. Even though our original sample was and is college students, we encourage any and all contributions to our research. This site is developed with a Creative Commons license which allows free use of our data and content but with an expectation of acknowledgement of the source.

This project was initially funded by a 2016 Digital Humanities Faculty Fellowship with an additional year of support in 2017-2018.

On November 20, 2019, Dr. Jennifer Delfino gave a guest lecture on “African American Language (AAL) Education and Social Justice.”  Students in Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology posed questions—read more here.