Cluster Historical, Sociolinguistics and Multilingualism

The historical, sociolinguistics and multilingualism research cluster focuses on the relationship between linguistic features and associated links to social meaning, social values and identity in socio-cultural contexts across time and place.

Identity is of central significance to the cluster’s scope and particularly the ways in which gender, ethnic, migrant and regional identities, to name a few, are constructed in relation to socio-ideological and other wider discourses in social circulation. Additionally, the complex interplay between language and power and the ways in which language shapes and is shaped by the political and economic conditions of, among others, globalisation is of central concern

Our focus is both at the level of whole languages like English, Greek, German, and Chinese, and at the local level levels (e.g. dialects like Liverpool English (a.k.a. ‘Scouse’), Yorkshire English). We also study stylistic variation in varieties spoken in Yangshuo (China) or in conceptualisations of ‘foreignness’ in Early Modern England.

Our research is conducted within the ‘third wave’ tradition whereby language is a resource for stylistic practice and a way of constructing identity (Eckert, 2012). Thematic areas of study include indexicality and enregisterment, narrative analysis, translation studies, language and gender, language and identity (both contemporary and in historical contexts), language and ethnicity, language in educational contexts, language and tourism, and globalisation. Various methodological approaches are employed by cluster members including corpus linguistics, critical discourse studies, linguistic anthropology and ethnography, participant observation, sociolinguistic interviews and focus groups, as well as more experimental approaches such as ‘draw a map’ tasks and neural net approaches to AI machine learning of languages in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems.

We are currently conducting research in collaboration with local primary and secondary schools in the Merseyside area to co-create teaching materials and design CPD provision with a view to developing pedagogical approaches to teaching spoken and written English. To this end, we are also delivering teaching and policy recommendations to English Language syllabus providers.

Members

We welcome enquiries about any aspect of our research, and we are happy to supervise PhD students in any of these areas.