Dr. Abby Walker will be giving a Linguistics colloquium on Friday, April 24 at 11am in TFS 121.
Tuning in by tuning out(wards): ideologies around and findings in cross-dialectal listening
Sometimes we listen to speakers who have different accents than us. I begin this talk by discussing the ideologies around cross-dialectal listening that we observed by looking at commentary around intralingual subtitling in reality cooking shows (Yu et al. 2022). One repeated idea in the data was that only lazy and ignorant listeners would need subtitles for less familiar accents, since it’s easy to “tune in” to another accent. I then share findings from a series of projects (e.g., Clopper & Walker 2017, Walker et al. 2020, Zaharchuk et al. 2026) suggesting that successful cross-dialectal listening may not be coming from tuning *in* to specific accents so much as broadening expectations, or tuning outwards. I discuss these and other findings in the context of a sociolinguistics of listening