About

Nancy Niedzielski is an Associate Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Linguistics at Rice University, where she joined the faculty in 1999. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics and sociophonetics, particularly as they relate to speech perception, language variation, and their applications in speech science, speech remediation, artificial intelligence, and education. She also explores linguistic theory and language variation in the context of language and the law, as well as folk linguistics, language attitudes, and language regard. Niedzielski holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, earned in 1997, along with a Master's degree from Eastern Michigan University in 1989 and a Bachelor's degree from the same institution in 1987. Her professional background includes affiliations with the University of Edinburgh, the University of Vienna, and the University of Flensburg. She has worked as a consultant on the Robonaut Project for NASA, served as a forensic linguist for various jurisdictions in the US, and directed a training program on language varieties for KIPP Academy in Houston. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a speech scientist at Panasonic Technologies, Inc., contributing to projects involving automated speech recognition and speech synthesis, during which she received three US Patents. She has served on the Executive Council for the American Dialect Society and on the Committee on Social and Political Concerns for the Linguistics Society of America.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Language and Legal Practices

  2025-05-29

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• Folk pragmatics

  Handbook of pragmatics online/Handbook of pragmatics · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Philosophy
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• Pholk Phonetics and Phonology

  2019-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  What real people believe about language clearly extends to areas of interest to phoneticians and phonologists. This chapter examines what the major topics of folk discussions of such matters are and, by reviewing a number of experimental studies, how they relate to central issues of language variation and change.

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• Interview with Dennis Preston

  Journal of English Linguistics · 2017-10-12 · 4 citations

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• Folk Pragmatics

  2017-01-20 · 5 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  This chapter provides data that fits their definition of Folk Pragmatics (FP) from five areas: indirectness, implicature, indexicality, appropriateness, and politeness. The use of linguistic expressions to index or point to social groups is one of the major interests of sociolinguistics and is the one that perhaps overlaps most with pragmatic concerns. And the extended notion of indexicality that involves the transfer of person characteristics to linguistic expression is frequently touched on in folk accounts. Folk comments on pragmatic topics may be gleaned from any media or popular culture source, and one may search as well the growing electronic corpora now available, although, as with free conversational data, the incidence of folk pragmatic commentary may be sparse. Folk linguistics (FL) and therefore FP data are widely available; sit around and listen to conversations in public, and the chances of language arising as a topic are very good.

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• Family values: The evidence from folk linguistics

  2011-06-14

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• Introduction: Sociophonetics Studies of Language Variety Production and Perception

  2010-06-15

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• A Reader in Sociophonetics

  2010-06-15 · 16 citations

  bookSenior author

  Sociophonetics is a sub-branch of phonetics that has attracted a great deal of attention recently. Advances in speech science and technological simulations allow increasingly sophisticated studies of language contact and change. Particularly at the level of pronunciation, these studies show that language variety is robust and socially embedded. Although the book assumes some knowledge of basic acoustics and variationist studies, the general introduction provides a review of practices in the field, including those of collection, analysis, and interpretation.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 11. Linguistic Security, Ideology, and Vowel Perception

  2010-06-15 · 16 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• A Sociolinguistic View of Speech Sciences

  Channel View Publications eBooks · 2009-06-18

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Frequent coauthors

• Dennis R. Preston

  12 shared

• Roland Kühn

  Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

  4 shared

• Patrick Nguyen

  Google (United States)

  3 shared

• P. Nguyen

  3 shared

• Hector Javkin

  San Jose State University

  3 shared

• Jean-Claude Junqua

  Panasonic (Japan)

  2 shared

• M. Contolini

  University of Padua

  2 shared

• Miriam Meyerhoff

  2 shared