research
I am a sociolinguist and creolist whose research examines language change as it relates to geographic mobility, diaspora, and race.
My work is broadly interested in understanding how the political and racial pressures that some immigrants and their descendants face can influence the ways that they use their heritage languages and how those languages change over time in diaspora. This work describes how the sociohistoric footprint of mobility is reflected in sociolinguistic variation.
Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) is the primary language that I study. I have conducted extensive fieldwork with Kreyòl-speaking populations in Haiti’s two neighboring Spanish-official nations: Cuba and the Dominican Republic.
My writings examine how attitudes and stigmas towards Haitians in diasporic contexts have become co-naturalized with the Kreyòl language as expressions of anti-Blackness. They show that Kreyòl is viewed as a racialized threat language in postcolonial spaces, particularly in the Dominican Republic where Haitian identity has been historically viewed as a direct threat to national sovereignty.
On a typological level, I am most interested in examining the contact between creole languages and non-lexifying languages, and the questions this can raise about the creole continuum and so-called creole exceptionalism.
My dissertation — De los dos lados: Haitian migration and Creole language maintenance in the Dominican Republic — offers the first large scale sociolinguistic documentation of Kreyòl in the Dominican Republic, a country where nearly a quarter of the total population is of Haitian descent. The dissertation employs both qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistic methods to understand how Kreyòl heritage speakers use the language to sustain cultural bonds with Haiti across generations, despite dehumanizing histories of violence and exclusion.
Kendall Medford, PhD 