Profile

At the moment, when I do my research, I’m working on a few projects. I have a big one about accents in France–there aren’t as many accents to do with places in France as there are in the UK, but there are still some, and we don’t know as much about them as we could. I’m also looking at the way that politicians used language in the UK and French elections in 2017, because what you’re allowed to say into a microphone in the UK is very different to what you’re allowed to say in France. No French politician would ever call themselves ‘bloody difficult’ (which Theresa May said she was). The colleague I’m working with and I want to know more about why that is–what are the different attitudes that make our politicians talk differently?

I also teach French, so I’m interested in what happens when people learn a foreign language. What sort of mistakes do they make? How can we help them not make those mistakes? This is the kind of thing that Sascha (who’s also in this group) is interested in as well.

What I do is called sociolinguistics: it’s about what you can tell about a person when they speak (and sometimes what you can tell about the community they live in, as well). I got into it because I was really interested in why people talk the way they do – and I learned that it was a lot to do with the kind of society they lived in, and the social life they had. What I love about it is that everyone can relate to it, because everyone uses language in some way – sociolinguistics can be done on sign language and writing as well. A lot of what I do is looking into things that we all instinctively know are true, but we didn’t know before why they were true.

More precisely, a lot of what I do is called sociophonetics: phonetics is the science of studying speech sounds – how they are made and what they sound like. This often means using a computer to see what the sound waves look like: when someone speaks with a Geordie accent, you can sometimes see on the screen that it’s different from a London accent, just because of the way it looks.  That part of it looks very like what you see sometimes on CSI. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that what they do on CSI with sounds is possible!  You can’t usually get a really bad recording and play it through some fancy machinery, then hear a voice coming out crystal-clear and go and arrest someone.   Sometimes you can, but it’s mostly much more complicated than that – but that doesn’t make good telly …
If you’re interested in knowing more about that, I’ve got a PowerPoint that I could send you – let me know.

The best bits of my work are when I have to actually go and get the data that I then come back into the office and analyse.  That means going out to people’s houses and putting a microphone on them and recording them.  You usually have to record some boring stuff, like a word-list, but my favourite part is when you’re just talking to them and they get so caught up in a story that they forget that they’re wearing a mike.  I’ve heard some really good stories, and made some good friends, like that.

A lot of people think that, to do linguistics, you have to speak lots of languages. You don’t! It certainly doesn’t hurt if you speak more than one language – and of course it can be helpful – but what makes you a linguist is just that you know things about how languages in general work, and you can do that without speaking lots of them.

The project I am working on at the moment is about different accents in French, but in the past I’ve also worked on more than one big project about different accents in English.

My favourite days are when I have an interview booked, and I go and talk to the person and they tell really good stories.  That happens sometimes!  Most often, I’m in my office, either working on analysing the interviews I have done, or doing some research which will help me understand what I’m finding out.

In the project I’m working on at the moment, I’m making something called a dialect atlas of the Northern part of France – that’s like a normal atlas but, instead of roads, cities, rivers and things, the things on the maps are the types of accent that people have, and the areas where the accents are different.  So, when my work is done, you’ll be able to look at my maps and see where there are different accents in the North of France.  To make this atlas, though, I have to know all about how to make the maps, and how to analyse the linguistic data – so a lot of my day is spent learning all that background kind of stuff, as well.

When I’m not working on the French accents project, my research involves reading quite a lot of newspaper articles about politicians and their language!