James N. Stanford

|Professor

Academic Appointments

Professor of Linguistics
Chair of Linguistics

Jim Stanford is a sociolinguist who focuses on dialects and quantitative analyses of language variation and change, including collaborative research with underrepresented Indigenous language communities, such as Sui, Hmong, Na, and other languages of China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. He also conducts fieldwork on English dialects of New England and other topics in North American English. These various research projects involve acoustic sociophonetics, sociotonetics, tone languages, urban dialectology, rural dialectology, child dialect acquisition, dialect geography, endangered languages, dialect contact, gender, exogamy, kinship, social identity, and computational sociolinguistics. He is co-editor of the journal Language Variation and Change (Cambridge University Press). He serves on the international steering committee of the NWAV-Asia/Pacific conference series, and he co-founded the journal Asia-Pacific Language Variation. He co-edited the collected volume Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages (2009, with Dennis Preston) and Language Regard: Methods, Variation and Change (2018, Cambridge University Press), and he wrote the book New England English: Large-Scale Acoustic Sociophonetics and Dialectology (2019, Oxford University Press). With Sravana Reddy, he is co-founder of the DARLA system for online vowel data analysis (Dartmouth Linguistic Automation).

Contact

James.N.Stanford@dartmouth.edu

(603)646-0099

Anonymous, Room 218

HB 6220

Department(s)

Linguistics

Education

B.Sc. Physics - Calvin College
Ph.D. Linguistics - Michigan State University

Selected Publications

With Wei Shuqi. "Multiple levels of linguistic contact in small Indigenous language communities in China." In Language Contact: An International Handbook, vol 2, Eds. Darquennes, Salmons and Vandenbussche. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton (HSK Series), (2025). 143-58. link
With Marcus Ma and Lelia Glass. "Introducing Bed Word: a new automated speech recognition tool for sociolinguistic interview transcription," Linguistics Vanguard (2024) link
With Naomi Nagy and Holman Tse. "Have Cantonese tones merged in spontaneous speech?" Chapter in Rajiv Rao (ed) Studies on the Phonetics and Phonology of Heritage Languages. Cambridge University Press. (2024) 320-20.
"Let's make some noise! Using large-scale data sources for North American dialect research," with Jack Grieve. Invited chapter in Benson & Bayley (eds), Needed Research in North American Dialects. Publications of the American Dialect Society (PADS Number 108). (2023) 147-170.

"Sociophonetics and tone: The world of sociotonetics," with Cathryn Yang. Invited chapter for Routledge Handbook of Sociophonetics, Christopher Strelluf (ed). Routledge Press (2023) 76-92.
"Variationist quantitative methods in Indigenous language communities: Invited commentary on 'The Dynamics of Bilingualism in Language Shift Ecologies' by Lenore Grenoble and Boris Osipov" (2023), Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.
"Generational sound change in the low tones of Black Lahu," with Cathryn Yang, Naluo Zhang, Chunxia Luo (2022), Linguistics Vanguard 8(s5):759-770. Special issue on sound change in endangered or small speech communities, Eds. Zellou, DiCanio, Pycha, and Yu. link
"Structure, chronology, and local social meaning of a supra-local vowel shift: Emergence of the Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS) in New England," with Monica Nesbitt (2021), Language Variation and Change 33(3):269-95. link
"Advances in completely automated vowel analysis for sociophonetics: Using end-to-end speech recognition systems with DARLA," with Rolando Coto-Solano and Sravana Reddy (2021), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: Computational Sociolinguistics Vol. 4, Article 662097. link
"A modern update on New England dialectology: Introducing the Dartmouth New England English Database" (DNEED) (2020), American Speech. Advance Publication: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8662137
New England English: Large-Scale Acoustic Sociophonetics and Dialectology (2019), Oxford University Press. link
"Environmental change and sustainability of indigenous languages of northern Alaska," with Nicholas Reo, Sigvanna Meghan Topkok, Nicole Kanayurak, David Peterson, Lindsay Whaley (2019), Arctic 73(2):216-28. link
"Bring on the crowd! Using online audio crowdsourcing for large-scale New England dialectology and acoustic sociophonetics," with Chaeyoon Kim, Sravana Reddy, Ezra Wyschogrod & Jack Grieve (2019), American Speech 94(2):151-94. link
"Variation and change in the tonal space of Yangliu Lalo, an endangered language of Yunnan, China," with Cathryn Yang, Yang Liu, Jingjin Jiang & Luifang Tang (2019), Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 42(1):2-37. link
"A long way from New York City: Socially stratified contact-induced phonological convergence in Ganluo Ersu (Sichuan, China)," with Katia Chirkova and Dehe Wang (2018), Language Variation and Change 30(1):109-45. link
Language Regard: Methods, Variation, and Change, Betsy Evans, Erica Benson & James Stanford (eds) (2018), Cambridge University Press. link
"Language regard in liminal Hmong American speech communities," with Rika Ito & Faith Nibbs (2018), in Betsy Evans, Erica Benson & James Stanford (eds), Language Regard: Methods, Variation, and Change, Cambridge University Press. 197-217.
"Documenting sociolinguistic variation in indigenous communities," with John Mansfield (2017), Language Documentation and Conservation, Special Publication No. 13, pp. 116-36 (Hildebrandt, Jany, Silva eds).
"A call for more diverse sources of data: Variationist approaches in non-English contexts." Journal of Sociolinguistics (2016) 20:4, 525-41, special issue commemorating 50 years since Labov (1966). link
"What is linguistics?" (2017) In Daniel Rockmore (ed), What are the Arts and Sciences? Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England. 204-19.
With Kalina Newmark and Nacole Walker. "The rez accent knows no borders": Native American ethnic identity expressed through English prosody. Language in Society (2016) 45(5):633-664. link
"Sociotonetics using connected speech: A study of Sui tone variation in free-speech style," Asia-Pacific Language Variation 2:1 (2016) 48-81. link
With Miriam Meyerhoff, "The changing face of sociolinguistics with a global perspective." Invited introduction chapter in Globalising sociolinguistics, Dick Smakman & Patrick Heinrich (eds). Routledge Press, (2015) 1-15.
"Toward completely automated vowel extraction: Introducing DARLA," Linguistics Vanguard, DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2015-0002, with Sravana Reddy, (2015).
See also our website for DARLA (Dartmouth Linguistic Automation).
"A sociotonetic study of Lalo tone split in progress," Asia-Pacific Language Variation 1:1, with Cathryn Yang and Zhengyu Yang, (2015) 52-77. link
"A Web application for automated dialect analysis." Proceedings of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics 2015 Conference (NAACL-HLT 2015), with Sravana Reddy, 71-75.
"Language acquisition and language change," in Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Routledge Press, (2014) 466-83.
"Multiple vectors of unidirectional dialect change in Eastern New England," Language Variation and Change 26:1, with Nathan Severance and Kenneth Baclawski, Jr. (2014) 103-140. link
"The sociolinguistics of exogamy: Dialect acquisition in a Zhuang village," Journal of Sociolinguistics 17:5, with Yanhong Pan (2013) 573-607. link
"Revisiting transmission and diffusion: An agent-based model of vowel chain shifts across large communities," Language Variation and Change 25(2), with Laurence A. Kenny, (2013) 119-153. link
"One size fits all? Dialectometry in a small clan-based indigenous society," Language Variation and Change 24:2 (2012) 247-78. link
"Farewell to the founders: Major dialect changes along the East-West New England border," American Speech 87(2), with Thomas Leddy-Cecere and Kenneth Baclawski, (2012) 126-69. link
"The influence of Mandarin Chinese on minority languages in rural southwest China: A sociolinguistic study of tones in contact," International Journal of the Sociology of Language 215, with Jonathan P. Evans, (2012) 79-100. link
"A 50-year comparison of regional dialect variation in the Sui language," Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 4:2 (2011) 120-43. link
"Gender, generations, and nations: An experiment in Hmong American discourse and sociophonetics," Language and Communication 30:4 (2010) 285-96. link
"The role of marriage in linguistic contact and variation: Two Hmong dialects in Texas," Journal of Sociolinguistics 14:1 (2010) 89-115. link
"The sustainability of languages," International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability 6(3), with Lindsay Whaley, (2010) 87-101. link
"'Eating the food of our place': Sociolinguistic loyalties in multidialectal Sui villages," Language in Society 38:3 (2009) 287-309. link
Variation in indigenous minority languages, with Dennis R. Preston (eds) (2009). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. link
"A sociotonetic analysis of Sui dialect contact," Language Variation and Change 20:3 (2008) 409-450. link
"Child dialect acquisition: New perspectives on parent/peer influence," Journal of Sociolinguistics 12:5 (2008) 567-596. link
"Sui adjective reduplication as poetic morpho-phonology," Journal of East Asian Linguistics 16:2 (2007) 87-111. link
"Lexicon and description of Sui adjective intensifiers," Linguistic Discovery 5:1 (2007) 1-27. link

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Works In Progress

Ongoing research:

Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages, Sociophonetics, Tone, Dialectology, Minority Languages of China, New England English dialects, Computational Sociolinguistics

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