Inspired by ongoing work at North Carolina State University, Dr. Katya Pertsova and I work alongside other members of the UNC Linguistics Department to highlight the value of linguistic diversity on UNC’s campus.

With funding provided by the Thrive@Carolina student retention initiative, we conducted a campus-wide educational initiative to increase awareness about linguistic biases and the value of dialect diversity on UNC’s campus. Nearly 3,500 students completed our survey on a range of issues related to dialect diversity. With these results in mind, we organized 10 educational workshops for the university community—including faculty, staff and students—throughout Spring 2017. A post-workshop assessment showed that 82% of participants believed the events they attended equipped them to better advocate for themselves and/or others who speak non-standard dialects, and 43% of participants found the events informative, useful and relevant and were inspired to see the issue of dialects differently and/or were led to concrete changes in their lives.


Thanks, Process Pictures!