“Why your slang move like Mississippi done migrated into your saliva?” ~ Malcolm London – “Why You Talk Like That?” – GCHS Writers Week 2014.
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Hi y’all, I’m Tamaya [təmaɪjə livi] (she/her) and I am a second-year Ph.D student at the University of Oregon in the Linguistics Department. I’m from Chicago, raised in the Austin neighborhood on the city’s west side, now adjusting to small town living in Eugene, Oregon. Chicago is where I received both my BA in Political Science, minor in Linguistics (University of Illinois at Chicago) and MA in Linguistics (Northeastern Illinois University).
My MA thesis title “Phonetics of Prejudice” explored racial and emotional classifications of auditory stimuli of both African American English and what we refer to as “Standardized” American English. This work led me to pursuing a Ph.D at the University of Oregon, working with Assistant Professor, Dr. Rachel E. Weissler.
My work is at the intersections of sociophonetics, raciolinguistics and speech production/perception specifically focusing on African American Language, Black women, and emotional prosody, while also integrating methodologies from psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and ethnic studies into my work.