Shana Poplack facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Shana Poplack
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| Nationality | Canadian |
| Occupation | Linguist, University Professor |
Shana Poplack is a very important professor at the University of Ottawa. She works in the linguistics department. Linguistics is the study of language. She has been a Canada Research Chair three times. This is a special award for top researchers.
Professor Poplack is a leader in something called variation theory. This idea helps us understand how language changes. It was started by a famous linguist named William Labov. Shana Poplack has used this theory to study many things. She looks at how people who speak two languages mix them. She also studies how standard languages and everyday speech change over time. Her work even helps us understand older forms of languages. She started and leads the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa.
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About Shana Poplack
Shana Poplack was born in Detroit, Michigan, USA. She grew up in New York City. She went to college at Queens College and New York University. Later, she lived in Paris for several years. There, she studied at the Sorbonne. She then moved to the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her PhD in 1979. Her teacher there was William Labov. In 1981, she started working at the University of Ottawa.
What Shana Poplack Studies
Professor Poplack's work uses large collections of everyday speech. These are called databases. She uses special math tools to study them. Much of her research tests common ideas about language. She often looks at beliefs about how "good" or "pure" a language is.
How Languages Meet and Mix
Shana Poplack has done many studies on how languages meet. This is called language contact. She has looked at many different language pairs. Her studies show that when one language borrows words from another, it usually does not change the basic rules of the language. Many changes people think come from language contact can actually be explained by how a language changes on its own.
She spent three years researching in New York City. She studied how Puerto Ricans there would switch between languages in the middle of sentences. She showed that mixing languages well is a skill. It is not a mistake or a sign of not knowing a language. For over 30 years, she has helped us understand how bilingual people use language. She has studied languages that are very different from each other. More recently, she has looked at how English changes when it is a minority language. An example is English spoken by people in Quebec.
French Language Rules
Much of Professor Poplack's recent work looks at Standard French. She asks if the grammar rules for Standard French are always the same. She also checks if they are always followed.
Language Collections (Corpora)
When she moved to the University of Ottawa in 1981, she built a huge collection of French conversations. These were informal talks among people in Canada's capital city. This collection is called a mega-corpus. It has been a great resource for her and other researchers. It helps them study how everyday French is spoken today.
Looking at Language History
Professor Poplack also studies how languages change over time. She has looked at Spanish in the Americas. She has also studied Canadian French and English. She also looked at Brazilian Portuguese. She often questions common ideas about why languages change. People sometimes think languages get simpler or change because of outside influences. Instead, she often finds that changes happen from inside the language itself.
African American Vernacular English
Shana Poplack has studied where African American vernacular English came from. She found evidence from older people. These people were descendants of American slaves. They lived in isolated communities. Some were in the Samaná Peninsula, Dominican Republic (Samana English). Others were in Nova Scotia. Her research showed that many features of their language came from older British and colonial English. This included how they used verbs to show time. This was different from earlier ideas. Those ideas suggested that these features came from a widespread early American creole.
She has also looked at how English changes when it is a minority language. She studies how schools might stop language changes.
Awards and Honors
Shana Poplack has received many awards for her work.
- She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998.
- She won the Pierre Chauveau Medal in 2005.
- At the University of Ottawa, she was voted professor of the year in 1999.
- She was named a Distinguished University Professor in 2002.
- She was voted Researcher of the Year in 2003.
- She received a Killam Research Fellowship in 2001.
- She won the Killam Prize in 2007.
- She was awarded a Canada Research Chair in 2001. This was renewed in 2007 and again in 2014.
- She won a Fulbright visiting scholar award in 1990.
- She received a Trudeau Foundation fellowship in 2007.
- She won the Ontario Premier's Discovery award in 2008.
- She became a Fellow with the Linguistic Society of America in 2011.
- She received the Gold Medal for Achievement in Research in 2012. This was from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
- She won the André-Laurendeau Acfas prize in 2019.
- She was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2014.
- In 2017, she received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from University College Dublin.
