Partnerships for International
Research and Education
Partnerships for International
Research and Education

Naomi Nagy

Naomi Nagy
Professor of Linguistics, University of Toronto
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Biography:

Research Focus:

Sociolinguistics, language variation and change, Heritage Languages in Toronto, New England dialects, Montreal Anglophones and French, Faetar

  • PI, Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto. 2009-present. SSHRC-funded research to document and analyze language change in Toronto’s Heritage Language communities and develop a corpus of transcribed (time-aligned) recordings (40 speakers x 8 languages). >50 students involved in all stages of research.
  • Documentation of Faetar, an unwritten and endangered Francoprovençal language. My dissertation was the first study of Faetar based on naturally occurring speech and the first in a variationist framework. Nagy (2000) was the first complete grammar of the language. Working with Faeto’s school, I developed online teaching materials. I continue this documentation project with heritage speakers in Toronto.
  • Co-developer, with S. Tagliamonte, of Corpora in the Classroom, a website for sharing linguistic corpora for student research. 2009-present.

Selected Papers:

Kang, Y.-J. & N. Nagy. 2016. VOT merger in Heritage Korean in Toronto. Language Variation and Change 28.2:249-272. dx.doi.org/10.1017/S095439451600003X.

Nagy, N. 2016. Heritage languages as new dialects. The Future of Dialects: Selected papers from Methods in Dialectology XV. Marie-Hélène Côté, Remco Knooihuizen & John Nerbonne (eds.). Berlin: Language Science. 15-34. DOI:10.17169/langsci.b81.81.

Nagy, N. 2015. A sociolinguistic view of null subjects and VOT in Toronto heritage languages. Lingua 164B:309-327. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.Lingua.2014.04.012.