Do you say /kʊd/ and /kʌd/ or do you say /kʊd/ and /kʊd/? Listen to these sound snippets, can you tell the difference in the vowels of the two speakers (look out for the words book, just and mud)? In my BA thesis, I conduct a panel study, looking at the FOOT-STRUT split of one speaker over three time points. Weiterlesen
Dear reader,
Welcome to our blog about lifespan change in Tyneside English! If you’ve read some of our earlier blogposts, welcome back! You might already know about our corpus of Tyneside English and what we are interested in (if not, do check out the other blog posts 😉 ).
My MA thesis, like many of the theses you’ve already read about, centres around variation and change in Tyneside English. I investigate how and how much the vowels in words that sound like FACE and GOAT have changed over the lifespan of individual speakers and in how far these speakers adhere to the trends in their speech community. Weiterlesen
Have you ever heard a voice on air and immediately had a really clear image of the person in your mind, but when you saw a photo, they looked completely different? Maybe the person was actually younger or older than you had expected. This happens to all of us! How we perceive voices and how we connect them to ideas about who we think that person is, is a really complex process. Weiterlesen
Can changes in our lives evoke changes in our language patterns? In my BA thesis, I’m looking at young speakers who – at the time of the sociolinguistic interviews – were students at university. This stage of life is called emergent adulthood and is often associated with instability and changes, for example in an individual’s social environment, in their workplace, or regarding their socioeconomic status. In previous research on language change, emergent adulthood has only been investigated scarcely because it was assumed that speakers stay stable in their linguistic patterns after puberty. However, studies have shown that language change can in fact occur after this assumed stabilisation. Weiterlesen
We can trace how the grammar of a language varies in speakers and across time by looking at changes in sentence and word structure. These (types of) changes sometimes imply that different grammatical constructions can co-exist. Weiterlesen
Does our age influence the way we speak? The short answer is: yes! As we age, we are influenced by certain linguistic pressures which means that we try to avoid forms that people associate with negative stereotypes. Weiterlesen
This year, we are celebrating the first anniversary of our LaVaLi project. The DFG-funded project Tracing Language Variation and Change across the Lifespan is run by principal investigator Prof. Dr. Isabelle Buchstaller and her team consisting of postdocs Dr. Mirjam Eiswirth and Dr. James Grama, as well as PhD student Johanna Mechler.
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