William M. Cotter
About William M. Cotter
I am a doctoral candidate in the joint PhD program in Anthropology & Linguistics. Prior to joining the Department of Linguistics and School of Anthropology, I completed a Master’s of Arts in Sociolinguistics of the Arab World at the University of Essex. My Master’s research examined Arabic dialect contact in the Gaza Strip between indigenous Gaza Palestinians and Palestinian refugees originally from the city of Jaffa. More recently, in the summer of 2015 I conducted a three month pilot fieldwork project examining dialect contact in a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Jordan.
I am conducting dissertation fieldwork in Amman, Jordan from August 2018 - September 2019. This work is being supported by external funding from the U.S. Student Fulbright Program, National Science Foundation, and the Bilinski Educational Foundation, as well as internal funding from the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute and Graduate and Professional Student Council at the University of Arizona.
Dissertation Research
My dissertation work situates language use and change within the context of broader social and economic changes taking place in the city of Amman, Jordan. I am examining how individuals use language as part of broader stylistic and semiotic practices in the neighborhood of Jabal al-Lweibdeh in Amman, as well as how these practices in Lweibdeh and other areas of West Amman, including the Abdali development project, influence and are influenced by Jordan's ascension to the free-market and the state's focus on furthering neoliberal development goals in Amman. In this sense, I am interested in grounding disucssions of the relationship between language and neoliberalism in stylistic practice.
Other Research
In addition to my dissertation research, since 2013 I have been conducting variationist sociolinguistic and phonetic analyses of contact between different varieties of Palestinian Arabic. This work stems from fieldwork conducted in the Gaza Strip, as well as more recent fieldwork conducted with Palestinian refugees in Northern Jordan. This work has examined sociolinguistic change in the realization of the Arabic voiceless uvular stop [q], as well as the feminine gender marking morpheme. I am beginning additional phonetic work in this vein to examine the Gazan realization of the voiced post-alveolar affricate /d͡ʒ/, which shows some initial evidence of actually being realized as a palatalized voiced velar stop, [gj]. This realization of /d͡ʒ/ is to my knowledge undocumented in Palestinian Arabic varieties, and is different than the realization noted in all of the previous literature on Gazan Arabic. In addition to its sociolinguistic and phonetic focus, this fieldwork has also contributed to my ongoing attempt to provide an up to date description of Gaza City Arabic, an understudied Arabic variety whose most reliable documentation took place in 1915. Outcomes of this research have been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, Canadian Journal of Linguistics, and the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, with additional work accepted pending revisions to the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.
Beyond my interests in how speakers use Arabic in their day to day lives, I have also investigated the ways in which state apparatuses utilize Arabic in conflict areas. Within this body of work, I have been particularly interested in how state militaries deploy Arabic in leaflets, phone calls, and SMS message as one of component of conducting military conflict. In doing so, this work examines how state uses of language play a role in creating social and political imaginaries of what the state is and does, the relationship between the state and its literal or figurative margins, and the practical role that language plays in shifting responsibility in conflict zones. The outcomes of this work have been published in Sapiens and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
Finally, as a result of my previous experience working in the specialty coffee industry I have conducted work exploring the sensory discourse of coffee in the United States. This interest has resulted in two primary areas of research. The first, conducted with my colleague Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson, investigates the relationship between the language of specialty coffee tasting events, public facing media discourses within specialty coffee, and issues of race and class at a national level in the United States. In this work, we examine how consumer uptake of and interaction with these different forms of language speak to broader class-based anxieties and their connection to consumption practices. Second, beyond consumer interaction with specialty coffee discourses, I have conducted additional work that investigates the narratives of professional barista competitions. This project investigates how voicing is used as a discursive tool by baristas in competition narratives, and its role in validating the authenticity and legitimacy of the product that they serve and their professional identities in a rapidly evolving craft industry. Outcomes of this work have been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, with additional work submitted to Signs and Society.
Outside of academic pursuits, I'm an avid cyclist, runner, coffee drinker, and doting dog dad to my lab mix, Carl.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
- Cotter, William M. (accepted pending revisions). Voicing the supply chain: Moral economies and enduring inequality in the world of professional barista competitions. Signs and Society.
- Cotter, William M. (accepted pending revisions). The Arabic dialect of Gaza City. Journal of the International Phonetic Association.
- Cotter, William M. and Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson. 2018. Bivalent class indexing in the sociolingusitics of specialty coffee talk. Journal of Sociolinguistics 22(5): 489-515.
- Hall-Lew, Lauren, Mirjam Eiswirth, Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson, and William M. Cotter. 2017. Northern Arizona Vowels. American Speech 92, Supplement (102)1: 59-82. (Publication of the American Dialect Society - Speech in the Western States, Volume 2: Inland West).
- Cotter, William M. 2017. Not-so-strange bedfellows: Language documentation and sociolinguistics in Gaza. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 62(4): 596-613.
- Cotter, William M. 2017. Gaza at the margins? Legibility and indeterminacy in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27(1): 54-70.
- Horesh, Uri and Cotter, William M. 2016. Current research on linguistic variation in the Arabic speaking world. Language and Linguistics Compass 10(8): 370-381.
- Cotter, William M. 2016. (q) as a sociolinguistic variable in the Arabic of Gaza City, in Haddad, Youssef and Eric Potsdam (eds.). Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVIII: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Gainesville, Florida, 2014. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 229-246.
- Cotter, William M. 2016. One piece of the puzzle: notes on the historic interdental fricatives /θ/, /ð/, and /ðʕ/ in the Arabic dialect of Gaza City, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 16: 149-162.
- Cotter, William M. and Horesh, Uri. 2015. Social integration and dialect divergence in coastal Palestine, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19(4): 460-483.
Book Chapters & Encyclopedia Entries:
- Cotter, William M. (to appear). Dialect Contact and Phonological Change, in Lucas, Chris and Stefano Manfredi (eds). Arabic and contact-induced change: A handbook. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- Cotter, William M. (to appear). Linguistic diversity and plurality in the Middle East and North Africa. In James Stanlaw (ed). The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
- Cotter, William M. and de Jong, Rudolf. (to appear). Lexical and Regional Variation, in Al-Wer, Enam and Uri Horesh (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.
- Haeri, Niloofar and Cotter, William M. (to appear). Form and Ideology Revisited, in Al-Wer, Enam and Uri Horesh (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.
- Horesh, Uri. and Cotter, William M. 2015. Sociolinguistics of Palestinian Arabic, in Edzard, Lutz and Rudolf de Jong (eds.) Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Lingusitics Online. Leiden: BRILL.
Editor-Reviewed Articles & Proceedings Papers:
- Cotter, William M. (to appear). 56 Seconds. Anthropology & Humanism (Second place in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology's 2018 Ethnographic Poetry Prize Competition).
- Cotter, William M. (to appear). Spring in Gaza. Anthropology & Humanism.
- Cotter, William M. 2017. Burying Tariq Aziz. Arizona Anthropologist 28: 27-36.
- Cotter, William M. 2016. A sociophonetic account of morphophonemic variation. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 26: 060001.
- Cotter, William M. 2016. On depression, anxiety, and looking for the silver lining in short-term fieldwork. Arizona Anthropologist 26: 23-35.
Book Reviews:
- Cotter, William M. 2018. Thank You for Dying for Our Country: Commemorative Texts and Performance in Jerusalem by Chaim Noy. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28(2): 243-244.
- Cotter, William M. 2016. Review of Language and Identity in Modern Egypt by Reem Bassiouney, Al-’Arabiyya 49: 163-166.
- Cotter, William M. 2016. Review of Making Waves: The story of variationist sociolinguistics by Sali Tagliamonte. LinguistList.
- Cotter, William M. 2015a. Review of Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighborhood talk in Indonesia by Zane Goebel. LinguistList.
Public Scholarship, Media, & Engagement:
- Cotter, William M. 2018. Author interview with Alex E. Chávez about Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Durham: Duke University Press. CaMP Anthropology.
- Cotter, William M. 2017. Do Military Leaflets Save Lives or Just Instill Fear? SAPIENS Magazine.
- Cotter, William M. and Valentinsson, Mary-Caitlyn. 2016. A seat at the bar: Issues of race and class in the world of specialty coffee, Article for Anthropologies as part of Anthrodendum (formerly Savage Minds)
- Cotter, William M. 2016. Political conflict as a catalyst for language change: The case of Palestinian Arabic, Babel - The Language Magazine 14: 38-44.
- Cotter, William M. 2014. Navigating the Ph.D. Application Season, GradHacker - Inside Higher Education.
Related News
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William Cotter, joint PhD student in Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Arizona recently contributed a feature article to the February 2016 issue of Babel - The Language Magazine. Babel highlights linguistic research in an accessible... read more
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William Cotter, a joint doctoral student in the Anthropology & Linguistics recently co-authored (with Uri Horesh) a lemma in the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics entitled "Sociolinguistics of Palestinian Arabic". The lemma... read more
Research Interests
Variationist sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, sociophonetics, Arabic dialects, specialty coffee, Palestinian Arabic, the Gaza Strip, structural violence, citizenship, neoliberal economic reform
Contact Information
Degree(s)
2018 - M.A. in Linguistics, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ
2013 - M.A. in Sociolinguistics of the Arab World, University of Essex, Colchester UK
2012 - B.I.S in Middle Eastern Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta GA
Courses Taught
As Instructor of Record:
S' 17, S' 18 : Anth 383 - Varieties of English (Online)
Summer 2018: Anth 150B1 - Many Ways of Being Human
Summer 2017: Anth 150B1 - Many Ways of Being Human (Online)
Summer 2017: Ling 322 - The Structure and Meaning of Words (Online)
Summer' 16: Anth 150B1 - Many Ways of Being Human
F '15: Ling 320 - Language and Social Issues (w/ Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson)
As GTA:
S' 16 / F '17: Anth 150B1 - Many Ways of Being Human
F' 14 / S '15 / F '16: Anth 150A1 - Race, Ethnicity, and the American Dream
F' 15: Anth 303 - Gender and Language
