Guest speaker Dr. Jonathan Henner (UNC Greensboro) will give a talk titled "Are there broken languages for broken people?"

ASL interpreters and CART captioning will be available.

ABSTRACT
Variationist sociolinguistics has examined linguistic variation based on geography, age, gender, and more recently race. The goal behind this field of linguistics is to support the notion that language variation is natural and good. Yet, even within variationist studies, there is still limited discussion on disability as a category for variation. The impact of disability on languaging is still often framed as atypical and deviant, with research focused either on identifying the deviancy (e.g. is it an SLI), or repairing it. From this perspective, that means not all variation is good. The purpose of this colloquium is to discuss the role of disability in language variation and to examine if variation caused by disability should be an acceptable facet of languaging.

About Jonathan Henner: My work thus far has taken three strands: a) I examine how different factors impact the development of language and cognitive skills in deaf and hard of hearing, b) I look at how to best assess and measure the language skills of deaf and hard of hearing populations, and c) I examine how frameworks that linguists and other scientists use contribute to ableist perspectives on language use