Our research
Asking fundamental questions about language change
Our research on this project uses the unique profile of London, and the unique moment of current social change in the city, to ask more fundamental questions. Language is like a barometer of social change, fluctuating in sync with it and serving as an audible record of it.
We also look at the internal dynamics of language itself, and how it continually reorganises and re-optimises. The project allows us to look at such fluctuations over generations and also over the individual lifespan, and at the smallest level, within the mind of speakers and listeners.
We will share project results for child, teenage, and adult language use in London when corpus creation and data analyses are completed.
Our key questions
1
Societal change
- Are new vernacular forms diffusing into mainstream London speech?
- Which features are being used by younger generations, higher social classes, different ethnic groups?
- Are ethnic speech differences in London reducing or increasing?
2
Language change
- How and why have phonology, morphosyntax, and discourse changed over two generations?
- Do speakers of different ethnicities, ages, and social classes have different types of prosody (the ‘tune’ of the language)?
3
Lifespan change
- How do teenagers change their speech repertoires as they enter middle age (workforce, parenthood)?
- What forms are the new generation of young children picking up, with what social meanings?
4
Cognition and control
- How much do individuals control the features of their accent repertoires over their lifespan?
- Are some features more amenable to controlled variation than others?
5
New stereotypes
- Do accent features trigger class or racial bias differently across speaker and listener ages?
- How do such stereotypes affect our memory and recall about a person?