Thomas Leddy-Cecere
How do social factors shape our use of language, and how does language use in turn impact our construction and perception of society? A sociolinguist, Thomas Leddy-Cecere addresses these questions through his research in Arabic and contemporary American English.
Biography
Leddy-Cecere is a scholar of language variation and language change. His research addresses the ways language reflects and reveals social relationships, both past and present, and utilizes a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to search for evidence of these relationships in variable linguistic behavior. His recent work has focused on interaction between speakers of related language varieties, and involves ongoing studies of New England English and multiple dialects of modern Arabic. These projects have included extensive fieldwork in Egypt and with speakers of both Arabic and English across the United States, and inhabit the intersections of sociolinguistics with other subfields including contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language documentation. Leddy-Cecere's work has appeared in the journals American Speech and Al-‘Arabiyya, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation. BA, Dartmouth College; PhD & MA, University of Texas at Austin. Leddy-Cecere previously instructed at the University of Texas at Austin. He joined the Bennington faculty in Fall 2018 and has been serving as the Associate Dean of Studies since August 2022.