Subproject 1: Accents and Autism

Our first subproject, focused on accents and autism, explores the experiences of autistic individuals who have adopted ways of speaking counter to normative expectations, including the agentive, self-aware uptake of non-local or “foreign” accents—for example, people from the southern United States who speak with a posh “King’s English.” Our research questions are as follows: What patterns emerge across everyday social media language use, existing linguistic interview data, and popular culture with respect to nonlocal accent adoption among autistic people? How do autistic people understand their own accent use as meeting neurodivergent needs? What complex (and thus far overlooked) social functions are served by nonlocal accent adoption?

We hypothesize, building on previous work by Hall & Parish (2024, forthcoming), that the adoption of non-local accents may be understood as a form of imitation that is both socially strategic and agentic (per Parish & Hall 2021: concerning “the capacity for socially meaningful action”)—that is, autistic individuals may draw from non-local spacetimes and associated language ideologies in order to access forms of social meaning and connection otherwise unavailable to them due to their communicative differences.

The ALL Team presented initial findings at CU Boulder's 2026 Annual Studio Lab Poster Session. The poster, titled "Autistic Accent Adoption as Reflexive and Agentive Practice," is coauthored by Emmalyn Nono, Vivaan Kalura, Landry Saul, Adilana Anderson, Molly Mathews, Kaitlyn McGurran, Kinely Opennheimer, Lina Cahill, and Kira Hall. Great work, ALL Team!

References cited

Parish, Ayden, and Kira Hall (2021). Agency. In J. M. Stanlaw (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell. 16-23.

Hall, Kira, and Ayden Parish (2024). Autistic Indexicality: Masking as a Higher Order Interaction Order. Paper presented at the Signification, Circulation, and Emanations Conference, University of Chicago, April 2024.

Hall, Kira, and Ayden Parish (forthcoming). Autistic Indexicality through Accents: Masking as a Higher Order Interaction Order. In Luke Fleming, Nicholas Harkness, and Constantine Nakassis (eds.), The Total Linguistic Fact: Linguistic Anthropology in the Wake of Michael Silverstein. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.