What is it about?
We'd already found that Mormons and non-Mormons in Utah have pronunciation systems that are mostly the same, but have some significant differences. We looked more closely and found that Mormons who attend religious services at least weekly have different pronunciations than Mormons who don't. Both of those groups, though, have different pronunciations than the non-Mormons.
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Why is it important?
People are able to show fine-grained but locally important social differences by making unconscious changes in their use of language. In addition, religious identity has historically been dismissed as unimportant by sociolinguistic researchers, but this is part of a growing body of research that shows that it really is meaningful.
Perspectives
This feels like the culmination of the years-long research project I've conducted with Wendy Baker-Smemoe, but I want to keep working on this. The next big step: People produce these differences, and so they presumably are socially important, but which ones are people actually perceiving as important?
David Bowie
University of Alaska Statewide System
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Linguistic behavior and religious activity, Language & Communication, May 2015, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2014.12.004.
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