On Melville’s Linguistics

We can’t know how Herman Melville sounded or hear his characters’ voices…or can we? In linguistics, the study of language, we can study how English has changed since Melville’s time and why languages are always changing. Join us as we welcome linguist Wren Wood to Arrowhead for a lecture demonstrating how we can hear Melville’s dialect in samples of his work, even without audio recording. 

Wren Wood is a linguist and webmaster for the Chicopee Historical Society. They use maps, statistics and linguistics to encourage discussions around local history and historic preservation, which can be found on Instagram @FollowingMassHistories. Prior to moving to Western Massachusetts, they used GIS to study bilingualism and threatened languages in the U.S. They earned a bachelor’s in English from Bridgewater State University and a master’s in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of New Mexico.

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