Week 0: Introductions

Hello world! My name is Maxwell Hyun and I’ve been at Basis Independent Brooklyn since 2nd grade. For my Senior Project, I will be studying phonetic variation within the New York accent. With this project, I hope to supplement the lack of existing research on the topic, particularly across NYC as a whole as opposed to within each individual borough. Additionally, this research will help document the traditional New York accent, which is becoming less and less common over time. 

I’ve been into linguistics for years, watching videos on YouTube or reading Speculative Grammarian (the foremost publisher of scholarly research in the lesser known and in my opinion severely neglected field of satirical linguistics), and finishing an introductory Coursera course. I enjoy learning other languages, including quite a bit of Chinese, a good amount of Japanese, some Korean, and a little ASL. I also like to learn about conlangs, short for “constructed languages”, which are languages made by people rather than naturally arising. They’re very interesting to me because each conlang can display interesting new ideas about language, like one in which you have to express everything as combinations of relatively few simple words (jan pi toki pona li lon ala lon?). I think this project will be a fun opportunity to learn more about linguistics. I also enjoy coding, and have incorporated that into my project as well. 

Specifically, I’ll be measuring the New York accent through coda rhoticity, or the presence of the “r” sound at the ends of syllables, such as in the words “store” or “part”. I’m going to work with my on-site advisor Dr. Michael Newman, the Chair of the Department of Linguistics and Communication Disorders at Queens College. He will help me write programs to analyze data from the CUNY CoNYCE (Corpus of New York City English), a corpus with recordings from 200+ interviews with different people across NYC. Then, we’ll analyze this data to see if/how it correlates with people’s demographics, including age, ethnicity, and gender. For my final product, I will be writing a research paper on my findings. 

If you’re curious and/or daring enough, read more about my project in my proposal.