Elizabeth Nakashima completes her Honor's Thesis

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah wants to congratulate Elizabeth on successfully completing her Honor’s Thesis!

The title of her thesis is "Reclamation of Negative Speech in the LGBTQ+ Community." She explains that her focus is, "on a specific pejorative "fag" or "faggot" that targets the LGBTQ+ community, and whether or not it is in the process of being reclaimed by the targeted speech community."

"In order to test that, I had members of the speech community take an anonymous survey that asked about both perception and reported use of the pejorative by the respondent."

She concluded that "based off of the data from the survey, the pejorative is in a stage of linguistic reclamation, but certainly not fully reclaimed as it can still certainly be used as a pejorative against the community."

The Department of Linguistics is proud to have her part of our program!