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Congratulations Dr. Phil Tice!

June 29, 2021

Congratulations Dr. Phil Tice!

Phi Tice

Please join me in congratulating Phil Tice for a successful defense of his doctoral dissertation, Language and Performance in Post-revolution Tunisia.

Phil, a Major in the U.S. Air Force, has been a valuable member of the NELC Graduate Student community for the past 3 years. He will be reporting to Hurlburt Field in Florida where he will be the course director of the Building Partner Aviation Capacity Seminar for the Middle East region. It is expected that after three years in that assignment he will then join the Foreign Language Department Faculty at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO.

Dr. Tice provided this short description of his dissertation topic:

My dissertation, Language and Performance in Post-revolution Tunisia, is an ethnographic study of Tunisian YouTube and Instagram content. Using a sociolinguistic approach to evaluate how language use and performance has changed since the 2011 Tunisian revolution, I studied videos for spoken language samples and comments sections for written samples. I examine diglossia as an ideology and prestige as a sociolinguistic variable that drives linguistic decisions. My findings demonstrate that the democratization process that has occurred over the last ten years has allowed new conversation spaces to develop and grow, thus introducing colloquial Arabic and its speakers into discussions that were historically unavailable to them. These findings also challenge traditionally held views about the rigidity of Arabic diglossic categories and situates prestige as a variable that is dependent on each unique performance rather than on notions of educated or proper.