This week is Finals week, and I took a Sociolinguistics class this past quarter. For our final, we had to write a report on a topic of our own choosing and conduct our own research. I was trying to decide what linguistic variable I wanted to investigate, and I did feel I preferred a lexical variable (in simper words, word variation). Then it came to me: boba. You know how some people call it Bubble Tea? And that’s the inspiration for the report. Below is the Introduction, and the full report can be downloaded at the bottom.
Introduction
New terms are constantly being innovated in a language. These may be introduced into a language through loanwords, borrowings, literal translations of the original term, or semantic descriptions of the new term. Sometimes, multiple labels are used to refer to the same item. Major influences on which label a person uses are their ethnicity and the region they spent their adolescence in, as migration and settlement patterns of various ethnic groups can impact the language of an individual. The goal of this report is to identify differences in the label used for boiled balls made from tapioca starch, and the label used for the recently popular drink originally from Taiwan they are found in, usually a mixture of tea and milk. These differences will be investigated by comparing the terms used by Northern Californian and Southern Californian English speakers of various ethnicities. By becoming more aware of differences between the use of terminology among ethnicities, we can examine potential in-group versus out-group differences due to the place of origin of what the new term refers to. Comparing dialectal differences can also allow us to predict more accurately where a speaker identifies as their home. Thus, this report can contribute to the study of lexical sociolinguistic variability by ethnicity and region.
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