Our team
The project team brings together expertise and experience for the analysis of all elements of language: accent, grammar, intonation, and discourse. Our investigators are based at Queen Mary University of London and at the University of York. Our additional fieldworkers are from London communities, bringing an insider’s perspective to recordings.
Investigators
Devyani Sharma
Devyani is Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research is on new English dialects, inter-ethnic contact, bilingualism, accent variation, and language change. She leads public engagement for Accent Bias Britain and directs the online public resources Teach Real English! and Multilingual Capital. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and Principal Investigator on this project.
Paul Kerswill
Paul is Emeritus Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of York, from where he retired in 2021. Much of his research is on accent variation in Great Britain, especially in migration contexts, such as in the New Town of Milton Keynes and in East London, where he led research (with Jenny Cheshire) on Multicultural London English. He also has an interest in language in development contexts in West Africa, on which he has published. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Kathleen McCarthy
Kathleen is Reader in Child Language Acquisition at Queen Mary University of London. Her research is on child language acquisition, multilingualism, accent perception and understudied heritage languages. She is the director of the QMUL Language Acquisition Lab and a trained speech and language therapist. She collaborates with London primary schools, SENDCOs, SLTs, and local government. She co-leads multiple community-based projects, including Stories from Home.
Sam Hellmuth
Sam is Professor of Linguistics at the University of York. Her research focusses on stress, rhythm and intonation, and how these vary and change under language contact and over time. Sam is co-creator (with Rana Almbark) of the Intonational Variation in Arabic corpus. She leads the team behind the York English Language Toolkit for teachers of English Language A level.
Postdoctoral Research Associates
Andy Gibson
Andy is a sociophonetician whose research has explored the use, and perception, of American-influenced accents in popular music, and the mannered portrayal of accents in television comedies. He has also studied the effect of community diversity on changes to children’s accents as they transition from preschool to primary school.
Elisa Passoni
Elisa is an experimental (socio)phonetician whose research examines factors (linguistic, physiological, socio-cultural and cognitive) which influence speech production and perception in those who speak more than one language (or dialect) in their daily lives. She is also interested in how bilingual and bidialectal accents are perceived, and the effect of diachronic language contact.
Joe Pearce
Joe is a Research Associate at the University of York and the University of Glasgow. Their research spans gender and age variation in accent, corpus phonetics, trans linguistics, and incorporating qualitative methods into sociophonetic research. On Generations of London English, they managed transcription and forced alignment of data for the London English Corpus using automated methods.
Field researchers
Denise Amankwah
Denise is a PhD student studying Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex. Her research interests are in accent bias, bilingualism, colonial language ideologies and heritage language maintenance.
Becky Howard
Becky is a PhD student at QMUL. Her interests are in accents, media, gender, class and language ideology. She was a journalist and editor on national UK print titles for over a decade and currently works in brand editorial and as a bestselling ghostwriter.
Ortega Sinclair
Ortega is a PhD student at QMUL. His interests are in London dialect variation and change and child language acquisition. He is conducting research in East London with children and teenagers.
Dr Johanna Gerwin
Johanna is a postdoctoral fellow at Kiel University, Germany. For her current project ‘The Historical Enregisterment of London English’, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork at QMUL (2021-2023, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)). Johanna generously contributed data to the London English Corpus from her ‘London Talks’ interviews.