<p> Citizenship is not a neutral word; it evokes numerous interpretations and connotations in various policies, discourse, and practices. Its significance is motivated by current narratives of rights and responsibilities of a citizenry, (illegal) immigration, and English-only ideologies. The basis for this investigation is the perception that the U.S. has traditionally been a country of immigrants as well as the role that English plays in a nation without an official language. </p><p> This dissertation is situated in the research domains of language policy (Shohamy, 2006; Spolsky, 2004), globalization (Blommaert, 2003; Bruthiaux, 2005), language assessment (McNamara, 2000; Shohamy, 2001), and language ideologies (Ricento, 2003; Wiley &amp; Wright, 2004). Understanding that meanings are transmitted both from the top-down and the bottom-up (McCarty, 2011; Ramanathan, 2005), citizenship is investigated in naturalization policy and the citizenship test, swearing-in ceremonies for new citizens, interactions at a local U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field office, citizenship preparation classes, and the media, uncovering discrepancies between what citizenship means and how it is ascertained. Data from these sites is analyzed using qualitative methods such as grounded theory, ethnography, interviews, social semiotics, linguistic landscape research, and corpus-based critical discourse analysis. </p><p> This dissertation asserts that discursive and semiotic ideals of citizenship affect the status of English in the U.S., societal ideologies of immigration, language assessment practices, and teaching pedagogy. How naturalization applicants conceive of citizenship is not always in accord with the U.S. government's representations of citizenship, but it is the government's definitions of citizenship that affect applicants' future access and opportunities. The dissertation concludes with suggestions for citizenship reform at the level of classroom pedagogy and test design, and ways that critical and active citizenship can be practiced in everyday life.</p>

<p> From <i>silva dimes</i> to <i>po-boys</i>, r-lessness has long been a conspicuous feature of all dialects of New Orleans English. This dissertation presents a quantitative and qualitative description of current rates of r-lessness in the city. 71 speakers from 21 neighborhoods were interviewed. Rpronunciation was elicited in four contexts: interview chat, Katrina narratives, a reading passage and a word list. R-lessness was found in 39% of possible instances. Older speakers pronounce /-r/ less than younger speakers, and those with a high school education or less pronounce /-r/ far less than those with post-secondary education. Race and gender did not prove to be significant predictors of r-pronunciation. In contrast to past studies, many speakers in the current study discuss their metalinguistic awareness of /-r/ and their partial control of /-r/ variation, discussing switching between r-fulness and r-lessness in different contexts. </p><p> In New Orleans, this metalinguistic awareness is attributable in part to the devastation following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the near-disappearance of the city intensified an already extant nostalgia for local culture, including ways of speaking. Nostalgia and amplification by advertisers and popular media have helped recontextualize r-lessness as a variable associated with a number of social meanings, including localness and authenticity. These processes help transform r-lessness, for many speakers, from a routine feature of talk to a floating cultural variable, serving as a semiotic resource on which speakers can draw on to perform localness. </p><p> This dissertation both closes a gap in research on New Orleans speech and uses New Orleans as a case study to suggest that the social meanings of linguistic features are created and maintained in part by a constellation of interrelated social processes of late modernity. Further, I argue that individual speakers are increasingly agentively engaged with these larger processes, as part of a global transformation from more traditional, place-bound populations to more deracinated individuals who choose to align themselves with particular communities and local cultural forms, particularly those that have been commodified.</p>