Summary
Valerie Fridland is a professor of linguistics in the English department at University of Nevada, Reno.
As a sociolinguist, her main focus is on varieties of American English. Most of her research investigates variation in vowel production and vowel perception across the northern, southern and western regions of the U.S. This work explores links between social factors and speech processing.
Her teaching areas include general linguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax, and language and gender. She also has a video lecture series entitled "Language and Society" released by The Great Courses.
Research interests
- American dialectology and regional vowel variation
- How gender and ethnicity are enmeshed with linguistic variation
Courses taught
- ENGL 412A/612A - Linguistics
- ENGL 413A/613A - Sociolinguistics
- ENGL 411B/611B - Principles of Modern Grammar
- 416A/616A Language and Gender
Publications
- Fridland, Valerie and Tyler Kendall. 2016. English in the Western States. In Raymond Hickley (ed.), Listening to the Past. Cambridge University Press.
- Kendall, Tyler and Valerie Fridland. 2015. Mapping the perception of linguistic form: Dialectometry with perception data. In John Nerbonne, Marie-Hélène Côté and Remco Knooihuizen (eds.), The Future of Dialects. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- Fridland, Valerie and Tyler Kendall. 2014. Durational and spectral differences in American English vowels: dialect variation within and across regions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 136.1: 341-349.
- Fridland, V. M., Kendall, T., Farrington, C. 2013. The role of duration in regional U.S. vowel shifts. Proceedings on Meetings on Acoustics (POMA).
- Fridland, V. M. 2012. Rebel vowels: Southern vowel shift and the N/S speech divide. Language and Linguistic Compass.
- Fridland, V. M., Kendall, T. 2012. The effect of regional vowel differences on vowel perception and production: Evidence from U.S. vowel shifts. Lingua.
- Kendall, T., Fridland, V. M. 2012. Variation in the production and perception of mid front vowels in the U.S. Southern Vowel Shift. Journal of Phonetics.
Education
- Ph.D., Sociolinguistics, Michigan State University, 1998
- B.S., Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University, 1990