Research Interests                                                                  

My primary research interest is in historical sociolinguistics as it relates to contemporary language variation and change in English. My research has focused on the social and historical contexts that have led to the variety of English that is spoken today in London. Both language and dialect contact frameworks have been of prime importance for this research - what are the long-term linguistic consequences when speakers of different accents, dialects and even different languages come together? Within the Variationist paradigm, I focus on documenting, analysing and accounting for variation in pronunciation as well as discourse and grammatical features among speakers of various social and ethnic backgrounds. I am interested in tracking changes in progress and the social and historical processes that bring about language change, particularly in a multicultural urban environment such as London.

This image comes from Punch magazine 1855. It provides an insight into people's attitudes towards 'h' dropping as a marker of social class and is a feature often considered to be typical of the Cockney dialect.

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