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Dr. Daria Bahtina is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, multilingualism, language and identity, perception and expression of social categories, meta-communicative strategies, common ground, experimental linguistics, and research design.

Most blog posts are the product of collaborative work by the undergraduate students at UCLA, many of them majoring in disciplines other than linguistics. This blog is a platform to share their hands-on experience of studying sociolinguistic phenomena in vivo. 

For questions, contact us at languagedlifeuclaATgmailDOTcom

Why do we speak the way we do? How do we use language to project our identity or to perceive the identity of others? Which linguistic resources do we draw on to mark and defend social group boundaries, or negotiate or question them? What is the range of social actions that we can accomplish through language in our daily interactions?

Languaged Life seeks to answer these and other questions at the intersection of language and society, putting language center stage.

This blog is intended as a repository of student research projects completed as part of UCLA Linguistics classes “Introduction to Sociolinguistics”, “Bilingualism”, “Language and Gender”, and some others taught by Dr. Daria Bahtina. These projects are a product of students’ ten-week journey through different approaches, methods, and forms of evidence found in the study of language and society. Key topics range from gender to power dynamics, from individual multilingualism to language ideologies in the media, from the micro-analysis of ordinary interactions to the performative nature of social identity. A common thread running through these explorations is the aim to identify social processes that shape and are shaped by distinctive ways of using language.