Christine Mallinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 734053 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christine Mallinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christine |
| FAMILY NAME | Mallinson |
| SIGNATURE | MALLINSON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, Baltimore County |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8988-5399 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 138 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Work Continues
Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz respond to the Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics Book Symposium with commentaries by Felix Banda, Rodrigo Borba, Dominique Branson, Erica Britt, Vincent Pak, and Tsung‐Lun Alan Wan. The response describes how the volumes’ co‐editors and contributors have moved the work from the dialogue that began during the height of the COVID‐19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter Movement to the actions t…
To go big, we have to go home
In this article, we discuss various public-facing scholarly activities we have engaged in and how these initiatives have reached large audiences to widely spread messages about language and linguistic equity and inclusion. We provide guidance for how to launch, coordinate, and carry out public outreach initiatives and community-engaged research, how to navigate potential pitfalls and position these efforts for success, and how to demonstrate the …
A place for (socio)linguistics in audio deepfake detection and discernment
Deepfakes, particularly audio deepfakes, have become pervasive and pose unique, ever‐changing threats to society. This paper reviews the current research landscape on audio deepfakes. We assert that limitations of existing approaches to deepfake detection and discernment are areas where (socio)linguists can directly contribute to helping address the societal challenge of audio deepfakes. In particular, incorporating expert knowledge and developin…
Surveying the landscape of college teaching about African American Language
College courses are an important forum for combating the stigmatization of African American Language (AAL). However, there is no comprehensive data regarding where, how, and by whom AAL content is taught. Understanding the landscape of college teaching about AAL could help identify challenges faced by instructors who teach this content, as well as policies or practices that could help support these instructors. We surveyed college instructors (N …
Decolonizing Linguistics
Linguistic Variation and Linguistic Inclusion in the US Educational Context
This article examines linguistic variation in relation to the critical social institution and social domain of education, with an emphasis on linguistic inclusion, focusing on the United States. Education is imbued with power dynamics, and language often serves as a gatekeeping mechanism for students from minoritized backgrounds, which helps create, sustain, and perpetuate educational inequalities. Grounded in this context, the article reviews in…
From theory to action
The conscience of the world has shifted greatly since we started this direct engagement with the linguistics community on issues of race, racism, and social justice. The COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread protests in response to statesanctioned police violence toward Black and African-American people have renewed and intensified conversations about racial justice and equity. Many linguists and linguistics departments are now actively grappling …
Toward racial justice in linguistics
This article builds on the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race to argue that linguistics urgently needs an interdisciplinarily informed theoretical engagement with race and racism. To be adequate, a linguistic theory of race must incorporate the perspectives of linguistic researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds and must also draw on theories of race in neighboring fields, including anthropology, soc…
Dismantling “The Master’s Tools
This article considers how linguists (more specifically, linguists from the U.S. South) view their responsibility to advance educational equality and justice. Drawing upon insights learned from working with inclusive groups of Southern K–12 educators, the authors call upon linguists to broaden their focus and extend their engagement efforts from K–12 to the sphere of higher education. African American, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American …
Balancing the communication equation
To mitigate systemic culturally and linguistically rooted barriers to STEM achievement, particularly for African-American students, implementing linguistically and culturally sustaining approaches to STEM education is critically relevant. This article presents an engagement model for using sociolinguistics to enhance K–12 STEM education, drawing upon research carried out with K–12 STEM educators who attended workshops on language variation and su…
Turning the lens onto our own language
The question is a fair one. The concept of teacher resistance is now common lore among sociolinguists, who have heard about or who have experienced the rejection of well-intended efforts to bring linguistic knowledge to classrooms and schools. When we explain that we have had hardly any 'resistant' teachers-only two we can recall, over the course of working with thousands of teachers for the past decade-we are generally met with incredulity, quic…
Partnering Through Science
Linguists must build and strengthen research partnerships with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educators to further investigate linguistic and cultural diversity and academic inequality in STEM education in the U.S. We review key issues and themes from literature on the role of language in U.S. STEM education and the linguistic and ideological roots of barriers to STEM achievement for culturally and linguistically diverse…
It’s a Language Variation, and It Has Its Own Structure
As sociolinguistic research has revealed, language variation can have concrete implications in the classroom. Students who speak nonstandardized varieties of a given language may face linguistic hurdles at school, and neither students nor teachers leave their language patterns at the door when they enter their classrooms. Accordingly, there is a need for scholars to work closely with educators to explore the real-world educational implications of…
Katrina That Bitch!” Hegemonic Representations of Women's Sexuality on Hurricane Katrina Souvenir T-Shirts
A Conceptual Framework for Promoting Linguistic and Educational Change
We provide a conceptual framework for promoting linguistic and educational change by describing partnerships that bring together linguists' and educators' views on language and school success. From fall 2008 through fall 2010, we held workshops based on the professional development principles of co-constructed knowledge, experiential learning, and collaboration with approximately 200 educators. These workshops integrated sociolinguistic informati…
Revisiting the Need for New Approaches to Social Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics
To better account for patterns in language variation by social class and to conceptualise and analyse social class in new and refined ways, many sociolinguists have recommended looking to theoretical and methodological advancements in sociology and anthropology. We review a contemporary sociological approach to social class, formulated by Joan Acker (2000, 2006), and apply it to the study of linguistic variation in two U.S. communities. While Ack…
Communicating about Communication
The quest to educate non‐standardized English‐speaking students has been a primary driving force behind developments in many fields represented by Compass journals, including sociology, geography, linguistics, psychology, history, literature, and education. Academics engaged in these multiple perspectives must join together, both to communicate knowledge about language variation to educators and to learn from educators’ experiences with teaching …
Vowel Phonology and Ethnicity in North Carolina
Research Article| December 01 2009 VOWEL PHONOLOGY AND ETHNICITY IN NORTH CAROLINA BECKY CHILDS; BECKY CHILDS Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CHRISTINE MALLINSON; CHRISTINE MALLINSON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google JEANNINE CARPENTER JEANNINE CARPENTER Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Publication of the American Dialect Society (2009) 94 (1): 23–47. https://doi.org/10…
Language, Interaction, and Inequality
an original active learning exercise that in corporates both referential and constructiv ist perspectives on the role of language in the social world. The exercise encourages students to view language as both a vehicle for transmitting sociologically-relevant con tent (e.g., attitudes, perspectives, justifica tions) as well as a vehicle through which actors construct social relations and social locations in ways that reflect and maintain social i…
Sociolinguistics and Sociology
In this article, I discuss the past, present, and future of interdisciplinary scholarship between sociolinguists and sociologists. After detailing some of the broader history of collaboration between sociolinguists and sociologists, I examine two sub-areas of scholarship: the variationist tradition from sociolinguistics and the social stratification tradition from sociology. I contend that, given their complementary research questions and analyti…
Communities of Practice in Sociolinguistic Description
In this paper, we examine the identities of eight women who share similar demographic profiles but exhibit different language practices. These middle-aged and older women belong to two social groups, which, we argue, constitute two communities of practice within a small black Appalachian community in the Southern United States. From interview data, we analyze six diagnostic sociolinguistic variables (third singular -s absence, copula absence, rho…
Practical Realities and Emotions in Field Research
Accounts of how seasoned researchers negotiate the relationship between emotions and fieldwork are becoming more prevalent in the qualitative literature but those by novices are rare. We describe the experiences of four sociology graduate students newly enrolled in a qualitative field methods course at a public research university. Using data from post hoc personal reflections, we analyze how fieldwork raises emotions that affect site selection a…
A Broad Overview of Chicano English
Review Article| May 01 2006 A BROAD OVERVIEW OF CHICANO ENGLISH Chicano English in Context By Carmen Fought New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. xi + 253. CHRISTINE MALLINSON CHRISTINE MALLINSON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2006) 81 (2): 213–217. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2006-014 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation CHRISTINE MAL…
The Significance of Lexical Items in the Construction of Ethnolinguistic Identity
Sociolinguistic studies of ethnically contrastive communities have typically focused on the analysis of phonological and morphosyntactic processes as a basis for delimiting the linguistic boundaries speakers mark between themselves and other groups. However, regionally influenced ethnic varieties may not always manifest differences in traditional variationist-based studies of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables. This study exami…
Blacks and bubbas’
Individuals employ general, cognitively grounded categorization processes to form expectations for interactions with members of other social groups. Such categorizations sometimes surface in the form of racial, ethnic, or other stereotypes. But although much literature describes and/or tests the cognitive nature of stereotyping and categorization, less investigates how stereotypes and categories are formed in casual interaction, through casual di…
Toward racial justice in linguistics
This article builds on the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race to argue that linguistics urgently needs an interdisciplinarily informed theoretical engagement with race and racism. To be adequate, a linguistic theory of race must incorporate the perspectives of linguistic researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds and must also draw on theories of race in neighboring fields, including anthropology, soc…
Communities of Practice in Sociolinguistic Description
In this paper, we examine the identities of eight women who share similar demographic profiles but exhibit different language practices. These middle-aged and older women belong to two social groups, which, we argue, constitute two communities of practice within a small black Appalachian community in the Southern United States. From interview data, we analyze six diagnostic sociolinguistic variables (third singular -s absence, copula absence, rho…
African American English in Appalachia
Recent studies of bi-ethnic enclave dialect communities in the American South suggest that earlier versions of African American speech both accommodated local dialect norms and exhibited a persistent substratal effect from the early African-European contact situation. We examine this hypothesis by considering the sociolinguistic situation in Texana, North Carolina, a small African American community in the Smoky Mountain region of Appalachia. Tho…
Dialect accommodation in a bi-ethnic mountain enclave community
The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in reformulating the historical reconstruction of earlier African American English and the current trajectory of language change in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This case study examines a unique enclave sociolinguistic situation - a small, long-term, isolated bi-ethnic enclave community in the mountains of western North Carolina - to further un…
Blacks and bubbas’
Individuals employ general, cognitively grounded categorization processes to form expectations for interactions with members of other social groups. Such categorizations sometimes surface in the form of racial, ethnic, or other stereotypes. But although much literature describes and/or tests the cognitive nature of stereotyping and categorization, less investigates how stereotypes and categories are formed in casual interaction, through casual di…
The Significance of Lexical Items in the Construction of Ethnolinguistic Identity
Sociolinguistic studies of ethnically contrastive communities have typically focused on the analysis of phonological and morphosyntactic processes as a basis for delimiting the linguistic boundaries speakers mark between themselves and other groups. However, regionally influenced ethnic varieties may not always manifest differences in traditional variationist-based studies of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables. This study exami…
A Conceptual Framework for Promoting Linguistic and Educational Change
We provide a conceptual framework for promoting linguistic and educational change by describing partnerships that bring together linguists' and educators' views on language and school success. From fall 2008 through fall 2010, we held workshops based on the professional development principles of co-constructed knowledge, experiential learning, and collaboration with approximately 200 educators. These workshops integrated sociolinguistic informati…
Communicating about Communication
The quest to educate non‐standardized English‐speaking students has been a primary driving force behind developments in many fields represented by Compass journals, including sociology, geography, linguistics, psychology, history, literature, and education. Academics engaged in these multiple perspectives must join together, both to communicate knowledge about language variation to educators and to learn from educators’ experiences with teaching …
Sociolinguistics and Sociology
In this article, I discuss the past, present, and future of interdisciplinary scholarship between sociolinguists and sociologists. After detailing some of the broader history of collaboration between sociolinguists and sociologists, I examine two sub-areas of scholarship: the variationist tradition from sociolinguistics and the social stratification tradition from sociology. I contend that, given their complementary research questions and analyti…
Dismantling “The Master’s Tools
This article considers how linguists (more specifically, linguists from the U.S. South) view their responsibility to advance educational equality and justice. Drawing upon insights learned from working with inclusive groups of Southern K–12 educators, the authors call upon linguists to broaden their focus and extend their engagement efforts from K–12 to the sphere of higher education. African American, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American …
From theory to action
The conscience of the world has shifted greatly since we started this direct engagement with the linguistics community on issues of race, racism, and social justice. The COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread protests in response to statesanctioned police violence toward Black and African-American people have renewed and intensified conversations about racial justice and equity. Many linguists and linguistics departments are now actively grappling …
Language, Interaction, and Inequality
an original active learning exercise that in corporates both referential and constructiv ist perspectives on the role of language in the social world. The exercise encourages students to view language as both a vehicle for transmitting sociologically-relevant con tent (e.g., attitudes, perspectives, justifica tions) as well as a vehicle through which actors construct social relations and social locations in ways that reflect and maintain social i…
Balancing the communication equation
To mitigate systemic culturally and linguistically rooted barriers to STEM achievement, particularly for African-American students, implementing linguistically and culturally sustaining approaches to STEM education is critically relevant. This article presents an engagement model for using sociolinguistics to enhance K–12 STEM education, drawing upon research carried out with K–12 STEM educators who attended workshops on language variation and su…
Turning the lens onto our own language
The question is a fair one. The concept of teacher resistance is now common lore among sociolinguists, who have heard about or who have experienced the rejection of well-intended efforts to bring linguistic knowledge to classrooms and schools. When we explain that we have had hardly any 'resistant' teachers-only two we can recall, over the course of working with thousands of teachers for the past decade-we are generally met with incredulity, quic…
Katrina That Bitch!” Hegemonic Representations of Women's Sexuality on Hurricane Katrina Souvenir T-Shirts
Partnering Through Science
Linguists must build and strengthen research partnerships with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educators to further investigate linguistic and cultural diversity and academic inequality in STEM education in the U.S. We review key issues and themes from literature on the role of language in U.S. STEM education and the linguistic and ideological roots of barriers to STEM achievement for culturally and linguistically diverse…
Dialect accommodation in a bi-ethnic mountain enclave community
The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in reformulating the historical reconstruction of earlier African American English and the current trajectory of language change in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This case study examines a unique enclave sociolinguistic situation - a small, long-term, isolated bi-ethnic enclave community in the mountains of western North Carolina - to further un…
African American English in Appalachia
Recent studies of bi-ethnic enclave dialect communities in the American South suggest that earlier versions of African American speech both accommodated local dialect norms and exhibited a persistent substratal effect from the early African-European contact situation. We examine this hypothesis by considering the sociolinguistic situation in Texana, North Carolina, a small African American community in the Smoky Mountain region of Appalachia. Tho…
The Deconstruction of Identity in Everyday Talk
Review Article| August 01 2004 THE DECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN EVERYDAY TALK: Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities By Karen TracyNew York: Guilford, 2002. Pp. x + 230. CHRISTINE MALLINSON CHRISTINE MALLINSON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2004) 79 (3): 323–328. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-79-3-323 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Si…
A Good Guide to African American English
Review Article| May 01 2004 A GOOD GUIDE TO AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH: African American English: A Linguistic Introduction By Lisa J. Green New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii +285. CHRISTINE MALLINSON CHRISTINE MALLINSON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2004) 79 (2): 219–223. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-79-2-219 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation…
Blacks and bubbas’
Individuals employ general, cognitively grounded categorization processes to form expectations for interactions with members of other social groups. Such categorizations sometimes surface in the form of racial, ethnic, or other stereotypes. But although much literature describes and/or tests the cognitive nature of stereotyping and categorization, less investigates how stereotypes and categories are formed in casual interaction, through casual di…
Practical Realities and Emotions in Field Research
Accounts of how seasoned researchers negotiate the relationship between emotions and fieldwork are becoming more prevalent in the qualitative literature but those by novices are rare. We describe the experiences of four sociology graduate students newly enrolled in a qualitative field methods course at a public research university. Using data from post hoc personal reflections, we analyze how fieldwork raises emotions that affect site selection a…
A Broad Overview of Chicano English
Review Article| May 01 2006 A BROAD OVERVIEW OF CHICANO ENGLISH Chicano English in Context By Carmen Fought New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. xi + 253. CHRISTINE MALLINSON CHRISTINE MALLINSON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2006) 81 (2): 213–217. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2006-014 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation CHRISTINE MAL…
The Significance of Lexical Items in the Construction of Ethnolinguistic Identity
Sociolinguistic studies of ethnically contrastive communities have typically focused on the analysis of phonological and morphosyntactic processes as a basis for delimiting the linguistic boundaries speakers mark between themselves and other groups. However, regionally influenced ethnic varieties may not always manifest differences in traditional variationist-based studies of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables. This study exami…
Communities of Practice in Sociolinguistic Description
In this paper, we examine the identities of eight women who share similar demographic profiles but exhibit different language practices. These middle-aged and older women belong to two social groups, which, we argue, constitute two communities of practice within a small black Appalachian community in the Southern United States. From interview data, we analyze six diagnostic sociolinguistic variables (third singular -s absence, copula absence, rho…
Vowel Phonology and Ethnicity in North Carolina
Research Article| December 01 2009 VOWEL PHONOLOGY AND ETHNICITY IN NORTH CAROLINA BECKY CHILDS; BECKY CHILDS Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CHRISTINE MALLINSON; CHRISTINE MALLINSON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google JEANNINE CARPENTER JEANNINE CARPENTER Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Publication of the American Dialect Society (2009) 94 (1): 23–47. https://doi.org/10…
Language, Interaction, and Inequality
an original active learning exercise that in corporates both referential and constructiv ist perspectives on the role of language in the social world. The exercise encourages students to view language as both a vehicle for transmitting sociologically-relevant con tent (e.g., attitudes, perspectives, justifica tions) as well as a vehicle through which actors construct social relations and social locations in ways that reflect and maintain social i…
Sociolinguistics and Sociology
In this article, I discuss the past, present, and future of interdisciplinary scholarship between sociolinguists and sociologists. After detailing some of the broader history of collaboration between sociolinguists and sociologists, I examine two sub-areas of scholarship: the variationist tradition from sociolinguistics and the social stratification tradition from sociology. I contend that, given their complementary research questions and analyti…
Revisiting the Need for New Approaches to Social Class in Variationist Sociolinguistics
To better account for patterns in language variation by social class and to conceptualise and analyse social class in new and refined ways, many sociolinguists have recommended looking to theoretical and methodological advancements in sociology and anthropology. We review a contemporary sociological approach to social class, formulated by Joan Acker (2000, 2006), and apply it to the study of linguistic variation in two U.S. communities. While Ack…
Communicating about Communication
The quest to educate non‐standardized English‐speaking students has been a primary driving force behind developments in many fields represented by Compass journals, including sociology, geography, linguistics, psychology, history, literature, and education. Academics engaged in these multiple perspectives must join together, both to communicate knowledge about language variation to educators and to learn from educators’ experiences with teaching …
Katrina That Bitch!” Hegemonic Representations of Women's Sexuality on Hurricane Katrina Souvenir T-Shirts
A Conceptual Framework for Promoting Linguistic and Educational Change
We provide a conceptual framework for promoting linguistic and educational change by describing partnerships that bring together linguists' and educators' views on language and school success. From fall 2008 through fall 2010, we held workshops based on the professional development principles of co-constructed knowledge, experiential learning, and collaboration with approximately 200 educators. These workshops integrated sociolinguistic informati…
It’s a Language Variation, and It Has Its Own Structure
As sociolinguistic research has revealed, language variation can have concrete implications in the classroom. Students who speak nonstandardized varieties of a given language may face linguistic hurdles at school, and neither students nor teachers leave their language patterns at the door when they enter their classrooms. Accordingly, there is a need for scholars to work closely with educators to explore the real-world educational implications of…
Partnering Through Science
Linguists must build and strengthen research partnerships with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educators to further investigate linguistic and cultural diversity and academic inequality in STEM education in the U.S. We review key issues and themes from literature on the role of language in U.S. STEM education and the linguistic and ideological roots of barriers to STEM achievement for culturally and linguistically diverse…
Dismantling “The Master’s Tools
This article considers how linguists (more specifically, linguists from the U.S. South) view their responsibility to advance educational equality and justice. Drawing upon insights learned from working with inclusive groups of Southern K–12 educators, the authors call upon linguists to broaden their focus and extend their engagement efforts from K–12 to the sphere of higher education. African American, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American …
Balancing the communication equation
To mitigate systemic culturally and linguistically rooted barriers to STEM achievement, particularly for African-American students, implementing linguistically and culturally sustaining approaches to STEM education is critically relevant. This article presents an engagement model for using sociolinguistics to enhance K–12 STEM education, drawing upon research carried out with K–12 STEM educators who attended workshops on language variation and su…
Turning the lens onto our own language
The question is a fair one. The concept of teacher resistance is now common lore among sociolinguists, who have heard about or who have experienced the rejection of well-intended efforts to bring linguistic knowledge to classrooms and schools. When we explain that we have had hardly any 'resistant' teachers-only two we can recall, over the course of working with thousands of teachers for the past decade-we are generally met with incredulity, quic…
From theory to action
The conscience of the world has shifted greatly since we started this direct engagement with the linguistics community on issues of race, racism, and social justice. The COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread protests in response to statesanctioned police violence toward Black and African-American people have renewed and intensified conversations about racial justice and equity. Many linguists and linguistics departments are now actively grappling …
Toward racial justice in linguistics
This article builds on the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race to argue that linguistics urgently needs an interdisciplinarily informed theoretical engagement with race and racism. To be adequate, a linguistic theory of race must incorporate the perspectives of linguistic researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds and must also draw on theories of race in neighboring fields, including anthropology, soc…
Surveying the landscape of college teaching about African American Language
College courses are an important forum for combating the stigmatization of African American Language (AAL). However, there is no comprehensive data regarding where, how, and by whom AAL content is taught. Understanding the landscape of college teaching about AAL could help identify challenges faced by instructors who teach this content, as well as policies or practices that could help support these instructors. We surveyed college instructors (N …
Decolonizing Linguistics
Multilingual Education and Policy (24 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Linguistics (19 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Pedagogy (10 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · History (7 works)