Some recent research projects:
- "Language variation and change in the Falkland Islands" (co-researchers Dr Hannah Hedegard and Dr Andrea Sudbury). This research examines phonological and morpho-syntactic variation and change in the English of the Falkland Islands, and considers how this variety emerged, given its roots in the British settler dialects of the 19th century. Andrea's corpus from the late 1990s has now been supplemented by a new corpus of Falkland Island English collected by Hannah in early 2020, and supported with funding from the Berner Forschungsstiftung. We are now examining the structure of contemporary Falkland Island English - phonetics, morphosyntax and lexis - as well as conducting a combined panel and trend study analysis of change over real time, which includes investigations of over 20 speakers recorded both in 1997 and in 2020.
- "Dialect at the fairground: mobility and language variation among a nomadic British community". November 2018 - October 2022. Swiss National Science Foundation (CHF266,509) - co-researcher Sarah Grossenbacher. This project aims to investigate the previously undescribed English variety spoken by Travelling Showpeople in England. English dialectology has tended to shun nomadic speakers since they are often not deemed to represent 'authentic' speakers of a place. Despite the existence of various nomadic groups in England, there has always been a strong focus in dialectology on geographical continuity and local embeddedness, although studies of non-local mobile members of communities have highlighted their importance in influencing and understanding language change. The Travelling Showpeople are a relatively isolated community with a distinctive lifestyle. Analysing their dialect will enable us to theorise to what extent such speakers are able to acquire sedentary dialect norms and how language change enters such communities and is transmitted from one generation to the next.
- "Are physically attractive people leaders of linguistic change?" [with Prof Adrian Leemann] (March 2020-February 2021). Swiss National Science Foundation (CHF100,000) - co-researcher Dr Nate Young. This research project will investigate the influence of conventional beauty on the transmission of linguistic innovations in a community. When linguistic innovations spread throughout a community, the conduits are the momentary interactions between two speakers. In these situations, interlocutors will typically align (or disalign) with one another’s speech. This process is referred to as accommodation (Giles & Ogay 2007). The accumulation of speech-accommodation events facilitates the cognitive embedding of certain innovations, which solidifies their (re)production among speakers in a community. Research has shown that social factors can influence whether two interlocutors accommodate each other’s speech including nationality, race, social status, dialect attitude, and relationship strength. However, no study has examined the effects of physical attractiveness, despite the fact that research has shown it to be influential in many other domains (e.g., purchasing decisions or teacher assessments of students). In this project we will use experimental approaches using innovative technologies to address this question.
- "English in paradise?: emergent varieties in Micronesia". January 2015 - December 2017. Swiss National Science Foundation (CHF615,799) - co-researchers Dominique Bürki, Sara Lynch and Tobias Leonhardt. This project investigates the emergent structures of and the similarities and differences between the new Englishes developing in three Micronesian territories: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and Kiribati. Eva Kuske and Laura Mettler are, in addition, working alongside the project team to examine the Englishes of Guam and Nauru respectively. See http://english-in-micronesia.weebly.com/ for more information. Some of my other PhD students are working on further 'lesser known' varieties of English, namely on the Cocos Keeling Islands (Hannah Hedegard) and Tonga (Danielle Tod).
- "Language contact in the Republic of Palau, Micronesia" - co-researcher Prof. Kazuko Matsumoto (University of Tokyo). In this project, we investigate the consequences of Palau's colonial contact with both Japanese and English, examining koineisation, borrowing and language obsolescence in the case of Palauan Japanese, and nativisation and the emergence of a new postcolonial variety in the case of Palauan English.
- "Crowdsourcing dialect data: the English Dialect App" (co-researchers Dr. Adrian Leemann, Marie-Jose Kolly, Daniel Wanitsch, Tam Blaxter, Sarah Grossenbacher, Melanie Calame). This research is developing an interactive app which engages users to think and learn about their own language variation, and collects dialect data from recordings and a questionnaire. You can find out more about this project, by watching this presentation I gave in Gent in Belgium in March 2018: http://www.dlld.ugent.be/19-mar-2018-david-britain-bern-discovering-dialect-with-mobile-phone-apps/
- "Morphosyntactic variation in East Anglian English" (co-researcher Dr Laura Rupp, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). Having together published Linguistic perspectives on a variable English morpheme: let’s talk about –s (London: Palgrave, 2019), Laura and I are now conducting empirical analyses of verbal morphology in East Anglia, examining the effects of, for example, subject type and subject animacy on verbal marking.
- "The linguistic consequences of counterurbanisation". This project examines the consequences for East Anglian dialects of English of decades of demographic in-migration from London and the South-East of England. Examining both phonological and morphological variables, the project highlights not only the dramatic scale of traditional dialect levelling, but also, because levelling was found to be most extreme in the more rural areas of the region, questions existing models of linguistic innovation diffusion. This research has also enabled me to work with a large number of colleagues (including Prof. Peter Trudgill, Dr Laura Rupp, Dr Jenny Amos, Dr Sue Baker, Dr Wyn Johnson, Rob Potter and Michelle Bray) on individual features of East Anglian English.
- “Contact, mobility and authenticity: language ideologies in koineisation and creolisation”. August 2013 - July 2016. Swiss National Science Foundation (CHF348,000) - co-researchers Christoph Neuenschwander and Laura Tresch. This project examines how the process by which new language varieties, such as pidgins, creoles and koines, with roots in acts of mobility, become, in public and media discourses, legitimised and authenticised. The project is examining two creoles (Tok Pisin and Hawai'ian Creole English) and two koines (New Zealand English and Estuary English).
- "Where North meets South: Dialect boundaries in the Fens". For over two decades now, I have been investigating the nature of the dialect transition zone that straddles the Fens in Eastern England. This is the site of a number of major dialect boundaries, including for features that are said to divide the linguistic 'north' and 'south' of England, such as the realisation of the STRUT and BATH vowels. I have been exploring not only the linguistic manifestations of the transition by considering a number of grammatical and phonological features, but also how the border originally emerged and why it remains to this day.