An interview by G Sorensen, Language Sciences undergraduate student multimedia intern
Language Sciences is excited to welcome our newest faculty member, Assistant Professor Kelly Wright! Dr. Wright is an Experimental Sociolinguist and Lexicographer. She got her two-year associate’s degree at Pellissippi State Community College before swiftly moving on to get her Bachelor’s Degree from Maryville College as an English Literature student, where she first discovered the field of linguistics. From there, Dr. Wright studied at the University of Kentucky for her Master’s and the University of Michigan for her PhD before advancing to a Postdoctoral Research Fellow position at Virginia Polytechnic University and then finally joining us here at UW!
Wright has worked and collaborated with numerous UW staff members over the years, and is excited to continue working with a team focused on a broad intersection of interests and community-driven work. Her initial interest in language stemmed from an early education in singing and poetry, two key ways of expressing both oneself and language through voice. Wright is excited to be teaching a class on profanity in the Spring of 2025, “it’s this part of language that we all know about, that somehow we acquire the rules that govern what we can’t say, what is not appropriate.” The class is called “Things You Can’t Say,” which will be 14 weeks of getting neck deep into why bad words are so bad; Wright looks forward to discussing these topics with peers and students alike.
What are your plans that you’re going to bring to the Linguistics program here?
Well, my main goal is to do community-driven and policy-driven work. So a lot of that is getting to know Madison, getting to know Wisconsin and Wisconsinites as an interdisciplinary researcher. I have a ton of different types of training and lots of research interests, so there are questions around of what I want to do. But I really want to serve, which sounds so cliche; but I know that linguistic justice issues exist in every conversation, even without conversation. They exist in our own minds, and so, a lot of that intersects to create real social problems. These social problems can’t be addressed unless we start looking at them at the local and individual levels. There are a lot of communities that need aid; so part of my initial goal is just to listen and learn about Madison and this region and figure out ways I can contribute as an expert. This is really going to inform how I teach and what types of research I do. I think a lot of people frame linguistic justice as like, ‘don’t say these words,’ or ‘this language is harmful.’ I’m really trying to reframe that as celebration of variation, it exists and it is here, we all have it. Let’s get to know our own linguistic styles and those of others, create spaces where we can just materialize thoughts and create spaces where it’s okay to write a paper in vernacular or in Chinese, because that is what is most accessible to you; let’s celebrate that. That linguistic celebration is a lot of what I’m hoping to bring.
What is your emotional connection to your research?
I think a lot of the questions I have about how language ideology works really stem from how I have in the past, and continue today, to struggle constructing myself in the world, of how it’s very difficult for me to be white and black at the same time, how its really difficult to move in straight and queer communities at the same time. A lot of the time, as an academic, one of those identities is forward, it floats to the surface. I think, in a lot of ways, these questions that I ask are me trying to understand myself, trying to answer these deep seated struggles with being in the moment. I think mine are punctuated by really recognizable marginalization, but I think the able-bodied, straight, cisgender white men among us have these questions too.
What would you say is the common thread for your research?
I would say it’s similar in the way that language change is continuous, ongoing and that it’s motivated by individual action. So a lot of the policy-driven work I’ve done feels very disparate, because it’s housing over here, automatic speech recognition here, and corpus research on sports journalism; they’re all different methods. So it’s hard to see the thread. I feel like I am most interested in my work in understanding language ideologies; the creation and maintenance of language ideology is what ties them together. And so, underlying all these things I’ve worked on, there is this thread of standardization and the ways in which that really simple thing of saying ‘everyone, speak English, or use it in this very particular way,’ plays out again and again, in every interaction, on a national scale and individual scale. Looking at housing, this bias keeps people from ever getting appointments based on their accents, it works the same way that racial profiling works in other places. My historical work is on the creation side, how are biases and systems built over time? How do the ways we think about ourselves maintain standard language ideologies over time and through institutions? Well, we have this knowledge in our minds that tells us ‘different things are different.’ We do all of this because we have to.