Samantha
Jackson

Linguist

I’m a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. My current research is in the field of sociolinguistics. Specifically, I investigate how immigrants to Canada (like me) who speak with a non-Canadian accent might be perceived as less (or more) employable when prospective employers hear them. I’m currently writing up my findings and I’m excited to share what I’ve found! Beyond this, I want to look at strategies we can implement to reduce accent/language discrimination in the workplace.

I like to conduct Linguistics research that directly addresses societal problems. My doctoral work aimed at establishing phonological acquisition norms for Trinidadian preschoolers, since we currently lack such descriptions. This work took me to all corners of the island over three months to gather data from 147 children. I am still working with this data to describe morphosyntactic norms. Currently, I am part of a cross-disciplinary team looking into how competent large language models are at communicating in written Trinidadian English Creole.

On a recreational level, I enjoy conlanging. My final year undergraduate project was an invented Spanish-based Creole in Cuba called Ecaboro and since then, I’ve been interested in doing more projects like that. My dream job might be inventing languages for TV/film, à la Na’vi, Dothraki or Belter Creole. More recently, I’ve really gotten into doing 1000-piece puzzles. My favourite brands are Ravensburger and eeBoo.

You can read more about my current research here.

Key interests: sociolinguistics, raciolinguistics, language acquisition, Creole contexts, conlanging