Language Sciences
Education
Ph.D. University of Michigan
M.A. University of Kentucky
Research Interests
Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright (She/Her) is an experimental sociolinguist, lexicographer, and scholar-activist working for linguistic justice outside the academy, and interdisciplinarity inside the academy. She identifies as a working class Black Biracial cis Queer woman, an Afrolachian raised in Knoxville, Tennessee. Dr. Wright conducts policy-driven research which directly combats linguistic barriers to access and more covert constraints on an individual’s realization of their self-expression. Her research demonstrates through metalinguistic interviews and sociophonetic experimentation that Black professionals are monitored by the public and colleagues for Standardized language use; through machine learning that a century of sports journalism maintains social stereotypes; and through an audit study of the Knoxville housing market that non-Standard speakers experience linguistic profiling and are prevented from living where they choose simply because of their phone voice. Dr. Wright is also an accomplished lexicographer, working to bring words like menty b and GYAT into the dictionary alongside terminology from language communities traditionally underrepresented in reference works.
Dr. Wright’s professional affiliations include:
- Lead Editor – American Speech Among the New Words quarterly dictionary
- Co-host – Niteshift: Where Life is Like Science Fiction on WBAI.org
- Incoming Convenor – North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics
- Data Czar – American Dialect Society New Words Committee
- Reframing Our Language Experience (ROLE) Collective
- Oxford English Dictionary Researchers Advisory Group
- Media Liaison – Linguistic Society of America
Teaching
Ling 213: Topics in Sociolinguistics – Things You Can’t Say
Ling 373: Topics in Linguistics – Sociophonetics
Ling 690: Capstone in Linguistics – Metalinguistics
Ling 977: Seminar – Stylistic Variation
Selected Publications
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- Kelly E. Wright, Emily Brewster, Charles E. Carson, Brianne Hughes, Jaidan McLean, Lynn Zhang, Benjamin Zimmer; Among the New Words. American Speech 1 August 2024; 99 (3): 364–382. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-11417490
- Wright, Kelly Elizabeth. (2023) “Housing policy and linguistic profiling: An audit study of three American dialects.” Language, Vol 99.2: e58-e85. Project MUSE: doi:10.1353/lan.2023.a900094 (this is the Best Paper in Language 2024)
- Martin, J., K. E. Wright. (2022) “Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition: The Case of African American English”. Applied Linguistics, 44(4), 613-630. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amac066
- Hughes, B., Calhoun, K., Fawcett, A., Wright, K.E., Zimmer, B.G., E. Brewster, C. Carson, J. McLean, & L. Zhang (2024) “Among the New Words” American Speech 99 (1): 78-90 (this is the algospeak special edition)
- Zimmer, B.G., K.E. Wright, B. Hughes, L. Zhang, J. McLean, & C. Carson (2023) “Among the New Words” American Speech 98(1): 104-119 (this is the Gender & Sexuality special edition)