University of Ottawa linguistics professor Shana Poplack is among five prominent researchers from across Canada who were honoured with a 2007 Killam Prize, Canada’s most distinguished annual award for outstanding career achievements in engineering, natural sciences, humanities, social sciences and health sciences. The $100,000 award was presented on April 23 by the Canada Council for the Arts, which administers the Killam program.
“The Killam Prize is not only a signal honour to me and to the University, it means wider recognition of and exposure to linguistics, a field surprisingly few people are familiar with,” said world-renowned sociolinguist Shana Poplack, who is holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics.
Prof. Poplack studies language as it is actually spoken, rather than the way people think it should be spoken. Her research on French in Ottawa-Gatineau and African-Canadian English in Nova Scotia has been featured in interviews with journalists and broadcasters across Canada. “People are particularly taken by the fact that the most vital data for understanding language structure comes from ordinary, everyday conversations,” she explained.
“Everyday speech, regardless of language, dialect or speaker, has a complex structure of its own, which can be accessed only through the scientific tools of linguistic analysis,” continued Poplack. Her work is characterized by the collection and scientific analysis of large bodies of natural speech data housed at one of the most dynamic and productive sociolinguistic laboratories in the world, which she founded and has directed since 1982.
In addition to international recognition for her work in the fields of New World Romance languages, Creole studies and minority dialects, her work has had a profound effect in the field of bilingualism.
“When bilinguals switch from one language to another, they do so only at grammatical boundaries that both languages share,” explained Poplack. Her innovative methods have demonstrated that bilingual language switching is a skill, not a defect, and that borrowed vocabulary does not disrupt the recipient-language grammar. She has proved that Black English originated not in Creole, but as a resistant offshoot of Early Modern English.
She also noted that many of the characteristics people say are typical of Canadian French are either direct inheritances from European French, or were internal developments independent of any influence from English.
“All languages change gradually but inexorably, and the efforts of schools, grammars, academies and other proponents of the ‘legitimized language’ have not yet succeeded in curbing or reversing these developments,” she concluded.
