Language variation and change

Our research interests cover many areas of linguistics, including phonetics, historical phonology, historical syntax, syntactic variation, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics.

The group is inherently interdisciplinary and invites membership from any interested researchers in or around the University of Edinburgh community. Our members are interested in patterns of variability at all levels of linguistic structure. We share an interest in both synchronic and diachronic variation, with the goal of developing empirical models of variation and change.

People

Staff who work in this area include:

Image	Research interests
Claire Cowie	World Englishes; language contact; morphological productivity; pragmatics
Lauren Hall-Lew	Sociolinguistics; sociophonetics; phonetic methods; English variation and change; language and ethnicity; language and tourism
Caroline Heycock	Syntactic variation and change
Gabrielle Hodge	Research relating to deaf people, deaf communities, sign languages and communication
Willem Hollmann	Cognitive-typological linguistics; cognitive sociolinguistics; language change; history of English; dialect grammar; forensic linguistics
Patrick Honeybone	Historical phonology; phonological theory; northern Englishes
Christian Ilbury	Youth language; language, gender and sexuality; ethnography; digital communication
Pavel Iosad	Theoretical phonology; phonological interfaces; historical phonology; Celtic languages; Germanic languages
Warren Maguire	Dialectology; varieties of English and Scots; phonetic and phonological variation and change
Mits Ota	First and second language acquisition; phonology
Antonella Sorace	Language development in bilinguals; bilingualism and general cognition; gradience at the lexicon-syntax interface
Graeme Trousdale	Historical linguistics; language variation and change
Alice Turk	Speech production, speech perception, prosodic structure, timing

Postgraduate study

PhD and MSc by Research programmes

For more information about postgraduate study in language variation and change, contact Dr Lauren Hall-Lew.

Lauren Hall-Lew

Language variation and change seminars