From the Archives: Voices of California

We want to belatedly recognize that September 2020 was the tenth anniversary of the first Voices of California trip: a 2010 trip to Merced.

Today, the Voices of California Project continues to visit distinctive communities in California and document their use of language. You can learn more about the Project on its webpage.

We've included the original Sesquip entry on the first Voices of California trip:

Return from Merced!

Twelve Stanford linguists have returned from Merced, where they carried out the first stage of the Voices of California project documenting language and life across California. An exhausting but wonderful time was had by all, and they've returned with upwards of 80 1-2 hour-long interviews with Merced County residents from various ethnic and age groups and all walks of life. The interviews are currently being transcribed, and the transcriptions and sound files will be part of a corpus available to Stanford researchers, with a subset eventually available to researchers outside of Stanford. Participants in this year's field trip: Eric Acton, H. Samy Alim, Annette D'Onofrio, Penny Eckert, Roey Gafter, Kate Geenberg, Jason Grafmiller, Kyuwon Moon, John Rickford, Ivan Sag, Tyler Schnoebelen, and Middy Tice. Others are encouraged to join them for the next phase, September 2011.