News Event: S-Backing

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What better payoff can there be then seeing your work cited in another article?  Today, we are happy to announce that our new linguistics professor, Dr. Durian, found his work cited in "Shtraight Talk on S-Backing," an article published on The Chronicle of Higher Education website this past August.  The article as a whole discusses the linguistic phenomenon where the pronunciation of [s] becomes "sh" in some dialects of American English.  If you pronounce grocery as groshery, you are s-backing - and quite a few Americans do this.  The author, Ben Yagoda, recalls several contemporary figures (including Michelle Obama) who do this and concludes (with citation from Dr. Durian's article) that it is a linguistic feature with strong correlation to urban identity.

Give the entire article a read here!