Language Variation and Change
Our research group explores language variation and change through qualitative and quantitative analyses.
The Language Variation and Change research group brings together researchers with expertise in:
- dialectology
- sociolinguistics
- the sociology of language
- english historical linguistics
- corpus creation (e.g. the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English)
We focus on qualitative and quantitative analyses of synchronic and diachronic variation. We use a range of methodological tools from ethnographic fieldwork to comparative methods for reconstructing historical language states. Our aim is to uncover patterns of variability in the grammatical, discourse-pragmatic, and sound systems of human language to enhance our understanding of how language variation and change should be modelled theoretically.
