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Dr. Tran Truong (Penn State, Linguistics)
January 31, 2025
9:00 am
Foster Auditorium, Pattee and Paterno Library

Dr. Tran Truong (Penn State, Linguistics)

Morpholexical Variation in Conservative Quaker English

The Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, form a historically Protestant (but in the contemporary context theologically diverse) set of denominations. Friends practice a non-doctrinal, non-creedal form of worship centered around important principles called testimonies. Of these, the testimony of simplicity is most relevant to the concerns of linguistic inquiry, as it is the core of the Quaker value of plain speech, which is associated with a number of lexical (e.g., First Day instead of Sunday) and morphological differences (e.g., the use of nominative thee) from Mainstream US English (MUSE). Linguistic research on Friends is extremely limited, and what little exists focuses almost exclusively on Liberal Friends. This talk introduces the Friends as a collection of communities of practice (Wenger 1991, Eckert 2006, inter alia) before discussing salient morpholexical characteristics of contemporary Conservative Quaker English as used in Ohio. (Note that Liberal and Conservative have special meanings to Friends that are unrelated to the conventional political meanings in MUSE.)