David Durian

I am currently an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State, where I teach English 100: English Language Analysis--Linguistic Variation in the USA; English 202A: Writing in the Social Sciences; English 202C: Technical Writing; and English 15: Rhetoric and Composition. I have been teaching college level courses since 2005, and before I came to Penn State, I taught at a variety of other colleges and universities located in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. These include Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, The Ohio State University, Northern Illinois University, College of DuPage, and Rice University, among others. Before that, I also spent nearly 5 years working as a technical editor and writer in the educational technology research field. In 2010, I won an Undergraduate Teaching Award in Linguistics at OSU, based on my teaching of Linguistics and writing intensive courses.

I originally hail from the Chicagoland area, where I was raised and lived until I was 27 years old. Following that, I lived in Columbus, OH for almost 8 years while working on my PhD, before moving back to Chicagoland for another 6. My living in both of these areas, and now in central PA since 2018, has had a significant impact on my research in Linguistics.

Linguistics Research
In my research, I study accent variation in American English based on social factors such as socio-economic class, age, sex, and race among English-speaking working and middle class European and African Americans living in the United States. In doing so, I look at both current language use and also historical language use in American English during the late 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries. In addition, I focus on the interface of regional and social dialectology and urban geography in an attempt to explore further the social motivations for language variation and change in my data.

In my current research, I study present-day pronunciation variation in the vowel systems of middle and working class European and African American Americans living in three areas of the country: Columbus, OH, Chicago, IL, and Central Pennsylvania. I also study historical changes in pronunciation in each of these areas across the mid-19th Century, the entire 20th Century, and the beginning of the 21st Century, as reflected in the vowel systems of Columbusites, Chicagoans, and Central Pennsylvanians born throughout much of this time period. This work involves the instrumental, acoustic analysis of data, and draws on the theories from the fields of phonology, phonetics, and sociolinguistics to explain how and why the vowel variation and sound change occurs.

Rhetoric and Genres of Writing Research
I also conduct research on the genre of scientific writing as it occurs in linguistic research, as well as how various rhetorical strategies are carried out in scientific writing. My MA Thesis, entitled "The Genre of the Linguistics Article within Studies of Language Variation and Change: A Diachronic Perspective, 1891-2015" looks at how the genre conventions of the research article have changed across time within the linguistic subfield of dialectology. In doing so, this research provides an intersection between my background in linguistics and my background in rhetoric and professional writing.

Areas of Specialization

Vowel variation and language change in 19th, 20th, and 21st Century American English

Language variation in African-American Vernacular English

Dialects of American English

Social science research writing

Technical editing and writing

Publications

Durian, David, Melissa Reynard & Jennifer Schumacher. (2022). Apart, and yet a part: Social class, convergence, and the vowel systems of Columbus African American English and European American English. In Bettina Migge & Shelome Gooden (eds.), Social and structural aspects of language contact and change. Berlin: Language Science Press. p. 233–262.

Durian, David & Richard Cameron. (2020). A new perspective on the development of the Northern Cities Shift in Chicago. Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society; 2019, 55:115-128.

Johnson, Daniel Ezra & David Durian. (2017). New England. In Raymond Hickey (Ed.), Listening to the past: Audio records of accents of English. Oxford:  Cambridge University Press. p. 257-297.

Durian, David. (2016). Review: New York City English. By Michael Newman. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 2014. Journal of English Linguistics 44.1:84-90.

Durian, David. (2011). Review: Mesthrie, Rajend, Joan Swann, Ana Deumert & William Leap. 2009. Introducing sociolinguistics (2nd ed.). Language in Society, 40.3:373-377.

Durian, David, Robin Dodsworth & Jennifer Schumacher. (2010). Convergence in blue collar Columbus, OH African American and White vowel systems? In Malcah Yeager-Dror and Erik R. Thomas (Eds.). African American English speakers and their participation in local sound changes: A comparative study. Publication of the American Dialect Society, 94. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 161-190.

Durian, David, Julia Porter Papke & Salena Sampson. (2009). Exploring social, regional, and ethnic variation in the undergraduate classroom. American Speech 84.2:227-238.

Durian, David. (2008). The vocalization of /l/ in urban blue collar Columbus, OH African American Vernacular English: A quantitative sociophonetic analysis. The Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics, 58:30-51.

Durian, David. (2007b). Getting [S]tronger every day? Urbanization and the socio-geographic diffusion of (str) in Columbus, OH. NWAV 35 Conference Proceedings. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 13.2:65-79.

Durian, David. (2007a). File 10.3: Regional variation (Content expansion and revision). In Anouschka Bergmann, Kathleen Hall and Sharon Ross (Eds.), Language files (10th ed.). Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. p. 418-426.

Durian, David. (2006). NWAV at 35: A look at the history, directions, and development of NWAV(E), 1972-2006—Conversations with Jack Chambers, Ralph Fasold, William Labov, Dennis Preston, John Rickford, Gillian Sankoff, Roger Shuy, Peter Trudgill, and Walt Wolfram. NWAV 35 Conference Program. Columbus, OH: Zip Publishing.