The project supports a wide range of stakeholders, as an interest in language arises in many sectors of work and cultural activity.

 

Primary school teachers and Special Education Needs Coordinators wish to understand the developing social and linguistic competence and identities of young children, particularly across diverse cultural and social class contexts. We will embed new evidence into our ongoing engagement with primary schools in East London.

 

A-Level English Language teachers and students value cutting-edge curricular input on changing British English as well as links to Psycholinguistics. Our investigators have a long track record of work in this area, collaborating with the AQA English Language board and senior examiners to package new sociolinguistic research for British teachers. (Hellmuth, Kerswill: englishlanguagetoolkit.york.ac.uk; Sharma, teachrealenglish.org)

 

Writers, actors, and journalists are crucial for ensuring accurate understandings of language, social structure, and obstacles to social mobility. New varieties of speech have arisen in many North European cities in recent decades and are often stigmatised in public discourse and the media, requiring direct engagement (Nortier & Svendsen 2015; Cheshire, Adger & Hall 2017). We will work with the British Library to engage with the many lives of London English – past, present, and future – and to recognise the realities of language diversity, moving beyond stereotypes. We will also draw on our public repository of the London English Corpus.

 

Human Resources organisations can use evidence of how accent stereotypes affect recall into best practices for recruiting. Sharma develops training tools for HR teams, employers, and recruiters (accentbiasbritain.org) and the project will expand evidence-based recommendations in this area, particularly in the area of accent expectation and memory in the context of the workplace.