Professor of Linguistics at the ÇéÉ«ÎåÔÂÌì, Reno and sociophonetician Valerie Fridland has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship award in support of her new book, “Why We Talk Funny.”
The book is on the science and history of accents. It’s going to look into why people have accents and how accents shape how we are perceived by others.
Fridland is planning to study ancient times to look into the first language and how it ended up splintering into other languages such as English and French. She will then look at the science driving how accents form and why we perceive them the way we do.
“I wanted to do something that is true to my heart and my own personal research interests,” Fridland said. “My whole career has been studying the social life of sounds in accents and how people use accents for a variety of different signposting purposes and how sounds are tied to identity.”
Fridland said this topic is important because everyday people talk about accents all the time; they notice accents and even judge accents.
“There are significant real-world consequences for the way that we evaluate each other,” she said. “We can decide we don’t really like that person, we don’t want to engage with them because of the way they sound, or we think that they are cool and posh.”
The book will be based on a lot of the historical research she has done previously. She will also continue diving deep into relevant research in a bunch of different disciplines like psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, sociology and history.
She is working with Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Random House, anticipating the publication to be in 2026 or 2027.
Fridland has also previously received a NEH Fellowship for her book “Like, Literally, Dude.”
“I’m incredibly lucky,” Fridland said. “I’m very thankful that I was able to get it. It makes a huge difference in the ability I have to really focus on this one project deeply, and to have received it twice is incredibly humbling.”
The book from her first fellowship touched on linguistic quirks.
“The things that we love and hate in the speech of ourselves and others is the topic of both books, but they go at it from different directions,” Fridland said.
Support from the grant has provided Fridland the opportunity to completely devote time to writing these books. The awards also give her the chance to travel and meet with her publisher and prepare for pre- and post-publish interviews.
