PhD supervision
I currently supervise 7 PhD students:
Andrin BÜCHLER: Second dialect acquisition among Buendner migrants to Bern [with Prof Peter Maitz]
Sarah GROSSENBACHER: Dialect acquisition, transmission and maintenance of the East Anglian Travelling Showpeople community (SNF-Funded)
Elisa MARENZI: Becoming Australian: Italian and Lebanese Englishes in Melbourne
Rosario SIVIANES: Urban-Rural variation in the hinterland of Sevilla, Spain
Phillip TIPTON: The psycholinguistics of sociophonological variation and change in St Helens English (UK-ESRC-funded)
Franziska WAHL: Variation and change in the future tense in Southern England
Craig WELKER: The effect of moment-by-moment ideological positioning on Spanish-language variation in Juchitán, México [with Prof Yvette Buerki]
Supervision topics:
Below is a list of themes that I feel I can supervise at (MA and) PhD dissertation level. You will get better and more constructive feedback if you are working on something I am also working on or am interested in. In addition to my research interests, I list some explanation of what I mean by those interests, in some cases some specific ideas for projects, as well as specific cases of topics in those fields that I have supervised in the past or papers that I have written that exemplify the kind of work I could supervise.
1. Variation and change in contemporary English, especially the Englishes of East Anglia, the South of England, the Southern Hemisphere (esp. New Zealand, Australia and the Falkland Islands) and Micronesia, as well as lesser-known varieties of English.
I am open to proposals which wish to conduct empirical analyses of appropriate corpora of spoken (or, in some cases, written) language, investigating, for example, phonological, morphological or grammatical variation and change. Given current research interests in the Department on the Englishes of the Pacific and of ‘lesser-known varieties of English’, you could collect and analyse a corpus from a different previously unexamined island or community (some examples of un(der)researched Englishes are Tuvalu, Niue, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Sapwuahfik and Tokelau in the Pacific, there is also very little on some of the individual islands of the Caribbean), or, for example, compile and analyse an appropriate written corpus from such an island (e.g. locally produced English-language newspapers). In the context of looking at language variation and change, then, I am very open to supervise work on different communities, or groups, or networks, different sites, different levels of linguistic analysis. There are many sites within relatively well studied Englishes about which we know little, or have no recent account (Southampton, Portsmouth, Exeter, Worcester, Gloucester, Wolverhampton, Leicester, Northampton, Peterborough, for example, in the UK, there are many such unresearched sites in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). I am also prepared to supervise research on second language variation, using variationist techniques to examine data from speakers’ second languages in naturalistic or immersion contexts (but not in educational contexts). I am especially interested in the deployment of non-standard accents and dialects to sell – in other words the commodification of accent and dialect, and how accent and dialect are handled in public life – in the workplace, on TV, in film (including animated movies), in legal settings, in school, in institutions, in shops, bakeries, restaurants, etc.
In the past I have supervised projects (BA, MA, PhD, SNF-funded, etc) on variation and change in the Englishes of, for example: the Falkland Islands, Nauru, Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Kosrae in the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, the Cocos Keeling Islands, Guam, Tonga, Mauritius, New Zealand, Australia, the Costa del Sol, African American Vernacular English, New York State, and, in the UK: Dorset, Essex, Kent, London, Bedford, Liverpool, Scotland, Ireland, Cheshire, Suffolk, Bristol, etc, as well as variation and change in Greek, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Yoruba, Japanese, German, Swiss German, Thai, Arabic….
2. The dialectological consequences of geographical mobility, especially dialect contact, dialect accommodation, diffusion, supralocalisation, second dialect acquisition, koineisation and new dialect formation
Within the context of 1. above, I have long been researching what happens when different dialects come into contact as a result of mobility, both short-term (linguistic accommodation), and longer term (as a result of colonialism, migration, New Town formation, or just simply individuals moving around and being faced with new dialects to acquire or to form). Think about such contexts that you know well yourself, particular mobile communities, communities that have undergone especially dramatic instances of mobility, etc.
I have supervised projects on, for example: postcolonial new dialect formation (Falklands, Micronesia, New Zealand, Palau); the acquisition of Kuwaiti Arabic by Egyptian migrants; the acquisition of British English by the children of American Air Force personnel based in the UK; the acquisition of Northern British English by American migrants; the acquisition of British English as a second foreign dialect by American English-speaking Taiwanese; contact resulting from migration in a rural Greek town; how Taiwanese Mandarin emerged from migration from the mainland; the effects of migration into East Anglia in England; the New Town of Telford in the English Midlands; the New Town of Ban Khlong Sathon in Thailand; the contact of ethnic dialects in London; the new dialect of English resulting from lifestyle migration to Spain, the dialect of migrants within Switzerland, the dialect of travelling showpeople, etc…
A good ‘introduction’ to this topic can be read in the following paper:
Britain, D (2018) Dialect contact and new dialect formation. In Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne and Dominic Watt, (eds.), Handbook of Dialectology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. 143-158.
3. The dialectology – human geography interface, especially with respect to mobility, isolation and the urban-rural dichotomy
Given topic 2, I am interested more generally in the insights human geography can bring to sociolinguistics. After all, mobility, isolation, ‘urban’, ‘rural’ are all geographical domains, so we can learn from the geographers. So I have worked on bringing geographers’ critical perspectives on concepts like mobility and urban-rural to dialectology.
See the following papers:
Britain, D. (2016). Sedentarism, nomadism and the sociolinguistics of dialect. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 217-241.
Britain, D. (2013). Space, diffusion and mobility. In Jack Chambers and Natalie Schilling (eds.), Handbook of Language Variation and Change (second edition). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 471-500.
Britain, D. (2013). The role of mundane mobility and contact in dialect death and dialect birth. In D Schreier and M Hundt (eds.), English as a contact language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 165-181.
Britain, D. (2016). Which way to look?: Perspectives on “Urban” and “Rural” in dialectology. In Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery (eds.) A Sense of Place: Studies in Language and Region. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Language variation 'on the move': mobile methods in variationist sociolinguistics and the effects of walking, driving, travelling on variation
Most data that have been examined for the investigation of language variation and change come from ‘sociolinguistic interviews’ – ‘conversations’ between a speaker and an interviewer, usually in a calm quiet room, face to face, still. But often we talk in very different contexts to this, when we are not in perfect recording conditions, and when we are not face to face in the same way. Does your best friend speak to you in *exactly* the same way on the phone as when you are both sitting together? What about if you are talking while driving a car (where you hopefully don’t have face to face conversation with the person in the back!), or walking along the street? How would we collect suitable data while driving a car or walking along the street? Surprisingly, there is very little empirical research on this.
5. Language ideologies as they relate to non-standard dialects
People often share stereotypical views about language and about dialect. They often associate people who speak certain dialects with certain personality traits, and when these views become disseminated and popular, they can form very strong ideological stances. Much research has found, for example, that people think speakers with rural accents of the South of England are essentially friendly, nice people, but rather simple, uneducated, naïve and backward. People also have quite a strong sense of what these dialects sound like, and so in TV performances, comedies, dramas, etc, rural characters are often ‘given’ these character traits and the stereotypical accents that go with them. Ideologies are thus packaged and diffused and internalised by those watching or hearing. People come to learn, then, about the rural, not by actual experience with rural people, but by the stereotyped performances of rural people shown in these programmes. I’m especially interested in work which looks at dialect and non-standardness in mediated performances, and what this tells us about our ideologies. This is a rather underresearched topic generally, but there is some work now, for example, on the deployment of different accents for characters in animated movies. If all the characters in the movie are, for example, animals, or cars, or fish, why are they given different accents, and what character traits are assigned to the characters with those different accents? What does this tell us about ideologies attached to accents?
I recently supervised a large project looking at developing language ideologies about new dialects and new languages – koines and creoles – which focussed on New Zealand English, ‘Estuary English’ in England, Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Hawai’i Creole English. I’ve supervised a number of BA and MA dissertations on dialect ideologies in animated movies.
6. Other:
I would also consider the supervision of theses that have well-prepared and well-motivated proposals on language contact (except code-switching), including structural borrowing, structural obsolescence, creolisation, interference etc.;
7. It only seems fair to include a list of topics that I won't/don’t/can’t supervise:
David Britain, July 2023
Below is a list of themes that I feel I can supervise at (MA and) PhD dissertation level. You will get better and more constructive feedback if you are working on something I am also working on or am interested in. In addition to my research interests, I list some explanation of what I mean by those interests, in some cases some specific ideas for projects, as well as specific cases of topics in those fields that I have supervised in the past or papers that I have written that exemplify the kind of work I could supervise.
1. Variation and change in contemporary English, especially the Englishes of East Anglia, the South of England, the Southern Hemisphere (esp. New Zealand, Australia and the Falkland Islands) and Micronesia, as well as lesser-known varieties of English.
I am open to proposals which wish to conduct empirical analyses of appropriate corpora of spoken (or, in some cases, written) language, investigating, for example, phonological, morphological or grammatical variation and change. Given current research interests in the Department on the Englishes of the Pacific and of ‘lesser-known varieties of English’, you could collect and analyse a corpus from a different previously unexamined island or community (some examples of un(der)researched Englishes are Tuvalu, Niue, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Sapwuahfik and Tokelau in the Pacific, there is also very little on some of the individual islands of the Caribbean), or, for example, compile and analyse an appropriate written corpus from such an island (e.g. locally produced English-language newspapers). In the context of looking at language variation and change, then, I am very open to supervise work on different communities, or groups, or networks, different sites, different levels of linguistic analysis. There are many sites within relatively well studied Englishes about which we know little, or have no recent account (Southampton, Portsmouth, Exeter, Worcester, Gloucester, Wolverhampton, Leicester, Northampton, Peterborough, for example, in the UK, there are many such unresearched sites in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). I am also prepared to supervise research on second language variation, using variationist techniques to examine data from speakers’ second languages in naturalistic or immersion contexts (but not in educational contexts). I am especially interested in the deployment of non-standard accents and dialects to sell – in other words the commodification of accent and dialect, and how accent and dialect are handled in public life – in the workplace, on TV, in film (including animated movies), in legal settings, in school, in institutions, in shops, bakeries, restaurants, etc.
In the past I have supervised projects (BA, MA, PhD, SNF-funded, etc) on variation and change in the Englishes of, for example: the Falkland Islands, Nauru, Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Kosrae in the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, the Cocos Keeling Islands, Guam, Tonga, Mauritius, New Zealand, Australia, the Costa del Sol, African American Vernacular English, New York State, and, in the UK: Dorset, Essex, Kent, London, Bedford, Liverpool, Scotland, Ireland, Cheshire, Suffolk, Bristol, etc, as well as variation and change in Greek, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Yoruba, Japanese, German, Swiss German, Thai, Arabic….
2. The dialectological consequences of geographical mobility, especially dialect contact, dialect accommodation, diffusion, supralocalisation, second dialect acquisition, koineisation and new dialect formation
Within the context of 1. above, I have long been researching what happens when different dialects come into contact as a result of mobility, both short-term (linguistic accommodation), and longer term (as a result of colonialism, migration, New Town formation, or just simply individuals moving around and being faced with new dialects to acquire or to form). Think about such contexts that you know well yourself, particular mobile communities, communities that have undergone especially dramatic instances of mobility, etc.
I have supervised projects on, for example: postcolonial new dialect formation (Falklands, Micronesia, New Zealand, Palau); the acquisition of Kuwaiti Arabic by Egyptian migrants; the acquisition of British English by the children of American Air Force personnel based in the UK; the acquisition of Northern British English by American migrants; the acquisition of British English as a second foreign dialect by American English-speaking Taiwanese; contact resulting from migration in a rural Greek town; how Taiwanese Mandarin emerged from migration from the mainland; the effects of migration into East Anglia in England; the New Town of Telford in the English Midlands; the New Town of Ban Khlong Sathon in Thailand; the contact of ethnic dialects in London; the new dialect of English resulting from lifestyle migration to Spain, the dialect of migrants within Switzerland, the dialect of travelling showpeople, etc…
A good ‘introduction’ to this topic can be read in the following paper:
Britain, D (2018) Dialect contact and new dialect formation. In Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne and Dominic Watt, (eds.), Handbook of Dialectology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. 143-158.
3. The dialectology – human geography interface, especially with respect to mobility, isolation and the urban-rural dichotomy
Given topic 2, I am interested more generally in the insights human geography can bring to sociolinguistics. After all, mobility, isolation, ‘urban’, ‘rural’ are all geographical domains, so we can learn from the geographers. So I have worked on bringing geographers’ critical perspectives on concepts like mobility and urban-rural to dialectology.
See the following papers:
Britain, D. (2016). Sedentarism, nomadism and the sociolinguistics of dialect. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 217-241.
Britain, D. (2013). Space, diffusion and mobility. In Jack Chambers and Natalie Schilling (eds.), Handbook of Language Variation and Change (second edition). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 471-500.
Britain, D. (2013). The role of mundane mobility and contact in dialect death and dialect birth. In D Schreier and M Hundt (eds.), English as a contact language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 165-181.
Britain, D. (2016). Which way to look?: Perspectives on “Urban” and “Rural” in dialectology. In Emma Moore and Chris Montgomery (eds.) A Sense of Place: Studies in Language and Region. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Language variation 'on the move': mobile methods in variationist sociolinguistics and the effects of walking, driving, travelling on variation
Most data that have been examined for the investigation of language variation and change come from ‘sociolinguistic interviews’ – ‘conversations’ between a speaker and an interviewer, usually in a calm quiet room, face to face, still. But often we talk in very different contexts to this, when we are not in perfect recording conditions, and when we are not face to face in the same way. Does your best friend speak to you in *exactly* the same way on the phone as when you are both sitting together? What about if you are talking while driving a car (where you hopefully don’t have face to face conversation with the person in the back!), or walking along the street? How would we collect suitable data while driving a car or walking along the street? Surprisingly, there is very little empirical research on this.
5. Language ideologies as they relate to non-standard dialects
People often share stereotypical views about language and about dialect. They often associate people who speak certain dialects with certain personality traits, and when these views become disseminated and popular, they can form very strong ideological stances. Much research has found, for example, that people think speakers with rural accents of the South of England are essentially friendly, nice people, but rather simple, uneducated, naïve and backward. People also have quite a strong sense of what these dialects sound like, and so in TV performances, comedies, dramas, etc, rural characters are often ‘given’ these character traits and the stereotypical accents that go with them. Ideologies are thus packaged and diffused and internalised by those watching or hearing. People come to learn, then, about the rural, not by actual experience with rural people, but by the stereotyped performances of rural people shown in these programmes. I’m especially interested in work which looks at dialect and non-standardness in mediated performances, and what this tells us about our ideologies. This is a rather underresearched topic generally, but there is some work now, for example, on the deployment of different accents for characters in animated movies. If all the characters in the movie are, for example, animals, or cars, or fish, why are they given different accents, and what character traits are assigned to the characters with those different accents? What does this tell us about ideologies attached to accents?
I recently supervised a large project looking at developing language ideologies about new dialects and new languages – koines and creoles – which focussed on New Zealand English, ‘Estuary English’ in England, Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Hawai’i Creole English. I’ve supervised a number of BA and MA dissertations on dialect ideologies in animated movies.
6. Other:
I would also consider the supervision of theses that have well-prepared and well-motivated proposals on language contact (except code-switching), including structural borrowing, structural obsolescence, creolisation, interference etc.;
7. It only seems fair to include a list of topics that I won't/don’t/can’t supervise:
- Teaching of English as a Second or Foreign Language; teaching methods, etc.
- Second or bilingual language acquisition (I do supervise work on second dialect acquisition, however)
- First language acquisition (except, possibly, child language variation, using variationist techniques)
- Formal theoretical phonology, morphology or syntax or semantics
- Discourse analysis
- Psycholinguistics
- Language attitudes
- Language maintenance and shift (except its linguistic repercussions, e.g. structural obsolescence)
- Code-switching
David Britain, July 2023